The Sniper

What’s worse than finding a welfare cheat? Finding a welfare cheat that is a millionaire who is using food stamps after he was TOLD to continue using them by the welfare office!

AUBURN (AP) – A man who won $2 million on a Michigan lottery show has told a TV station that he still uses food stamps.

Leroy Fick of Bay County admitted he still swipes the electronic card at stores, nearly a year after winning a jackpot on “Make Me Rich!” He told WNEM-TV in Saginaw that more than half the prize went to taxes.

Fick says the Department of Human Services told him he could continue to use the card, which is paid with tax dollars. He told WNEM: “If you’re going to … try to make me feel bad, you aren’t going to do it.”

Of course we aren’t going to make Fick feel bad: he’s a scumbag. But the bigger problem here isn’t that Fick is a scumbag; it’s that the Department of Human Services knew full well that the guy had two million dollars and told him to continue using food stamps. You know, those same food stamps that are paid for by tax payers, the vast majority of which are NOT millionaires and who cannot really afford to be shelling out money out of their pockets to pay for a millionaire to eat for free? Those same food stamps that could be used by lower income families to feed their kids? Yeah, those food stamps. Oh, by the way: Fick means “fuck” in German. Just sayin’. Oh, and Fick is driving around in a new Audi convertible. Have fun digesting that one.

Speaking of welfare and/or the lack thereof, how about cheating a charity show because you’re a child-abusing grifter?

“Extreme Makeover” recipients Chuck and Terri Cerda are the parents of Molly and Maggie, 10 and 8 respectively. Terri, in her appeal to the show, said she suffers from combined immunodeficiency disease, as do her daughters, who had to wear masks to guard against the toxins coursing through the air of their rundown, mold-filled Las Vegas house. You can watch a video of Terri and the two girls posted by the Immune Deficiency Foundation above.

That was before “Extreme Makeover” transformed their abode in March 2009 into “an opulent new home that included high-quality air filtration systems, an elevator, solar-heated swimming pool, gourmet kitchen and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace,” as The Oregonian’s Steve Mays writes. But it turned out the Cerdas “couldn’t afford the increased cost of operating the larger home. By fall 2009, the house was for sale and the family moved to Oregon.”

Now this in and of itself wouldn’t be too bad because it would just be a case of a family trying to be fiscally responsible by moving to a more affordable house, but there’s a catch:

Several doctors and a hospital social worker began to question Terri Cerda’s insistence that her daughters had chronic health problems when tests and examinations indicated otherwise. In January, Dr. Thomas Valvano, an OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital pediatrician who specializes in suspected child abuse and neglect, reported the Cerdas to state child-welfare authorities, and in February, the state took temporary custody of the two girls.

Six doctors testified that Molly, 10, and Maggie, 8, did not live in constant medical peril, as Terri Cerda claimed.

Valvano went further. The Cerda children, he told the judge, were victims of medical child abuse.

And this is why I prefer to pick and choose what, if any, charities get my money. The people that really need the money and really deserve the money rarely actually ask for it and when they do, it is usually pretty easy to see that they are in dire straits. This woman used her kids and the charitable nature of people to turn a profit. If I were running the show, I would have her hanged in the town square. This is probably why they don’t allow me to run things.

Worse than using children to make money is acting like one to make money:

A key senator has asked the Social Security Administration to investigate how people who live their lives role-playing as “adult babies” are able to get taxpayer-funded disability payments – after one of them was featured on a recent reality TV episode wearing diapers, feeding from a bottle and using an adult-sized crib he built.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican and the Senate’s top waste-watcher, asked the agency’s inspector general to look into 30-year-old Stanley Thornton Jr. and his roommate, Sandra Dias, who acts as his “mother,” saying it’s not clear why they are collecting Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits instead of working.

“Given that Mr. Thornton is able to determine what is appropriate attire and actions in public, drive himself to complete errands, design and custom-make baby furniture to support a 350-pound adult and run an Internet support group, it is possible that he has been improperly collecting disability benefits for a period of time,” Mr. Coburn wrote in a letter Monday to Inspector General Patrick P. O’Carroll Jr.

Thornton sent an e-mail to the Social Security office threatening to kill himself if his checks stopped coming. I don’t see a problem with this. In fact, I think that is the best possible outcome for the situation.

And finally, what kind of “the people get screwed over because of corruption, greed, and graft” post would this be if we didn’t include Obamacare?

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

That’s right: Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional District, which covers .003% of the total area of the United States and serves .2% of the US population got almost 20% of the waivers for Obamacare. Yeah, I’m sure that’s fair. Oh, and the big recipients of those waivers were luxury eateries, night clubs, and hotels. You know, the same kinds of establishments (minus the “luxury” moniker) owned by small businessmen and women that will be getting fiscally butt-raped all across the US because of the same Obamacare policies that will deny them those same waivers?