December 8, 2025 • 37 mins
Hour 4 of A&G features...
- Biden is back & how he ignored the signs on immigration
- College football
- Ilhan Omar & COVID welfare funds stolen
- Fraud in Minnesota
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty arm Strong
and Jetty and he Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Shum and Hope get back up and remember who in
the hell we are? We're the Nined States of America.
Got it.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
That's who we are. Well, good to have them back
some more time, Michael.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hope, get back up and remember who in the hell
we are. We're the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Got it. That's who we are.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
That's how it was always the best when he'd wind up,
because I'm gonna nail it here. Oh my god, people
are gonna come to their feet and carry me around
this room. Here's that big applause, lying very nice States
of America.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Got it?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
And Hope get back up. Remember who in the hell
we are? Where the United States of America? Got it.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
So here's a warm scannering of applause.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Some sort of prize for being the most trans friendly
president in US grade keep mutilating those children from the
LGBTQ plus community, even though, as it pointed out in
The New York Times over the weekend, most of the
country was not near as far down the road as
he was, and it heard him more than helped him
in the entire party. Well, and then something leaked out
the other day. I've got it around here somewhere where the.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
High placed official in his administration realized the activist group
duped us and they had way weaker evidence than they
told us. But we'd already committed to including gender appearance
or whatever as a protected trait, and we couldn't go back,
So we were kind of stuck. One more from the
(01:51):
c now old man praising his utterly incompetent press secretary.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, when I took office, I promised to have an
administration and look like America.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
My promise.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Where you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
And not just for the commanding my press sectary.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Kareem, God, it sounds like you, said, Kareem abdul Japard. Perhaps, yeah,
she was perhaps the worst most incompetent press secretary in
the history of our country, laboring under Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
And once again you got to wonder why his wife
is trotting him out there to be that way in
front of crowds. Then who are you diehards in politics
who are willing to just you know, stand with somebody
or a party or whatever, no matter what's happening, they
just don't get it. Similar vain New York Times, very long,
(02:55):
detailed story about the immigration aspect of the Biden presidency.
And this will be the rough draft of history for
some book that nobody will.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Read someday about how they do this.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
The headline being how Biden ignored warnings and lost America's faith.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
In immigration, and that is exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
This paragraph sums it all up, and then I'll get
into some of the details. I think we all remember
how this played out. First, they underestimated the scale of
migration that was coming. Second, they failed this is the
New York Times, by the way. Second, they failed to
appreciate the political reaction to that migration, believing that stronger
enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters and also that
(03:34):
a border surge would not be an important issue to voters.
Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters,
including Latinos, citing immigration is a reason for supporting mister Trump.
In twenty twenty four, they were zero for three on
that it was a giant scale of people coming through,
people cared a lot. It was like the number one
(03:55):
issue until inflation hit. Then it became the number two issue.
And Latino's vote with Trump because they hated it as
much as everybody else did. How could you be so wrong?
It's because you were led by the Twitter crowd. The
Democratic Party will not be a successful party until they
finally learn that Twitter isn't real life. And I don't
(04:15):
know if there.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yet or the only thing that saves them is the
incompetence of the Republican Party. It's the middle one that's
the most astounding swing and miss.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
They didn't think.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Voters would react badly to a giant influx of illegal immigration.
They must be convinced of their own by their own
rhetoric that only right wing, racist xenophobes want coherent immigration policy.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What are you kidding? How could you miss that?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And The New York Times goes through his chief of staff,
all his top advisors, everybody were telling him over and over, look,
this is a giant issue for people, and this is
a disaster, and he just wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Budge for whatever reason.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So first we'll relive stuff, you know, and then get
to something I didn't know. It's worth knowing in case
you ever end up in an argument with somebody about this.
June fourth, twenty twenty four, so this is toward the
end of his presidency during the election. The damage had
already been done at that point. Joe Biden. Finally, five
(05:09):
months before election day, Biden reversed course on everything he'd
done so far and issued an order all but closing
the border to asylum applications, a move that was far
tougher than the proposals that he had rejected during the
first year of his office, and border encounters quickly fell,
of course they did. And we remember the commentary at
(05:29):
the time. You could have done this on day one
if you'd wanted, and you claimed you couldn't. You claimed
that only Congress could do it, and then look, all
of a sudden, you've done it yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
But so it was such a disaster.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
In the middle of the election, looking like he might
lose to Trump, he finally closes the border. Why mister
Biden waited so long to effectively seal the borders become
one of the defining questions of his presidency.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Three weeks after.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Closing the border, the president had his famous debate with
Donald Trump that was three weeks later, ask why voters
should trust him to solve the crisis, Mister Biden flubbed it.
According to The New York Times, I'll reread this answer
what I've done since I've changed the law. What's happened,
said mister Biden, who had not changed the law. I've
(06:13):
changed it in a way that he claimed he changed
the law. The law was already there. They just enforced
the law that was already there. The New York Times
pointing that I've changed it in a way that now
you're in a situation where there are forty fewer people
coming across the border illegally. I'm going to continue to
move until we get the total ban on the total
initiative relative to what we're going to more with the
(06:34):
border patrol and more asylum officers. And that's when Boss
Trump unleashed his famous I really don't know what he
said at the end of that sentence. I don't think
he knows what he said either, Yeah, because it.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Was completely incomprehensible. That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
I always go back to the crazy uh abortion illegal
immigration rate own sisters nonsense.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
I forgot about that one, just the rambling nonsense. I
won't read this again, but it made no sense. Trump
said that whole thing. He doesn't even know what he said, and,
as The New York Times says in a very good sentence.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Within a month, mister Biden left the.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Race after that, making their point. But here's the part
that I didn't know, because you often hear this. The
pushback has been the Congress had a plan to deal
with the immigration thing. Trump intervened, told Republicans not to
vote for it, which torpedoed it, and that putting Biden
(07:37):
in a situation where he had no choice. Okay, Democrats
blamed mister Trump for sinking the deal, but Senator Langford, Republican,
pointed to another culprit, the Biden administration's own foot dragging.
When negotiations had gained momentum the previous fall, because the
American people were all worked up about this and wanted
something done, the White House had refused to get involve
(08:00):
the Senate negotiations, according to Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat, and
Langford the Republican, both of them saying that Biden wouldn't
get involved. We don't want our fingerprints on these negotiations.
The White House had told Murphy and Langford. Only as
border crossings continued Despike did the administration relent.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Looking back, Langford said he believed the delay was critical.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
If Biden had signed on sooner and the White House
got involved at that point before Trump did, it probably
could have had the momentum to pass and they could
have taken this off their plate as an issue.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
But it got kicked down the.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Road to the point where mister Trump was the de
facto nominee at the beginning, when Biden was saying, we
don't want our fingerprints on this if you do it,
because they were so scared of the Wolkes and the
Latino community blowback at that site, believed that narrative.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeh.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
At that point Trump had just announced and desantists looked
like a real threat, and it was isn't clear that
Trump had the nomination. He didn't have the power to
tell Republicans at that point. So is the Biden's fault
that that legislation never happened. They were too scared to
put their name on it and fight for it. Why
about that an interesting piece of history that I'd even
get involved in the conversation, right, I mean, that's a
(09:16):
level of paranoia right there.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
God, i'd say so weak, so incredibly weak. Man.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
It's the opposite of Donald Trump, who, as we all know,
as a bull in a china shop. Donald Trump was
a mouse, and I mean Joe Biden was a mouse
in a china shop. So worried about ruffling any feathers whatsoever. Yeah, yeah,
what a miserable, incompetent president. Quick word from our friends
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(10:40):
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Speaker 3 (10:43):
So don't need to relive that, I suppose anymore. The
whole immigration thing, we all know what it was. That
was new news to me though that the Biden administration's
great pushback has always been looked. Donald Trump torpedo the legislation.
You didn't push it at all. You told your own
(11:05):
Democratic Senate leadership, we don't want our.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Fingerprints on this. Wow, that is so weak.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Well, they deserve to lose the election to a very
unpopular Donald Trump. Uh yeah, yeah, craziness. That is wild
political malpractice.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
How do more.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
People not understand that the successful presidents get stuff done
their way? Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George Bush. They do
what they want to do out loud and fight.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
For it hard.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They're not super scared of what people in their own party,
and so they don't say anything.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
But what was Biden's reputation is entire career. He was
a very glib, backslapping guy who would hold his finger
up in the air figure out which way the wind blows.
And he had no beliefs or character other than this
is what's popular right now. As president, he just continued
that groove. It's not that shocking.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Remember when I won that ten pound box of toffee
the other night, Oh yeah, Christmas concert homemade coffee, best
toffee ever read, were about five pounds through me and
the boys.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Pretty good effort over the weekend.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Eating five pounds of toffee between three three dudes.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That is impressive.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
My sweet bride doesn't love to cook, but she loves
to bake. And back in the day, she loved to
make candy, and she would make peanut brittle that would
make you weep with joy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I mean it was unpainted believably good.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Oh my god, and with joy and toffee and all
sorts of stuff like that. And it was a few
years into our marriage we came to a mutual agreement,
this has gotta stop.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
That's the problem you get. We're gonna be toothless, and
eight hundred.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Pounds of Disney toothless. Please too much sugar.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Well, actually, you're actually gonna eat the teeth out of
your head. Quite a thing as a man rot him
right out of there in a first world country. Oh Joe,
no teeth, He just won't stop eating toffee and whatnot.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Does Joe have a meth problem. He's only got like
three teeth. No, it's peanut brittle. Actually, he's got a
peanut brittle problem.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
But you know, thought he'd stopped after he lost the
first one to ten teeth.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Now his fingers are constantly sticky. He's always got a
big slab of it his hands. It's completely toothless at
this point. Now, I kind of has to match it
up with a spoon sweeking gum it coming up.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Ilhan Omar attempting to answer for the rampant theft of
the funds there in Minneapolis, plus America's welfare state just
gush his money. This is not an outlier. There is
a lesson to be learned here. I hope you can
stay with us.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
We're the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That's who we are.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
We want to give all the glory to God. We're
never supposed to be his decision before the glory of God.
The great coach is great teams we have around us.
We were able to pull this dog. Whoever thought the
who's would be here? But now the Hoosiers are flipping champs.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Let's go woy I got's excited? Cheer up, would you?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
That's Fernando Mendoza of the Indiana Hoosiers, are the number
one seed in the college football playoffs, as they named
the twelve teams after a whole bunch of big games
this weekend.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
He goes on, you guys call.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
Yourself a bunch of misfits who found.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The right home at Indiana? Why was this the right
place for this crew?
Speaker 5 (14:38):
Is the right place for process orange? And we're going
day by days off at the line, the defense, the coaches,
special teams. We're all processes oranges to one goal. That's
our thing is we're brothers. We can track teams to
the defense because we know that we're gonna stick together and.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
We're the strongest glue ever.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
All right, can I earn a little of number one again?
The first clip again? That guy is he is a fighter.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
You want to give all the glory to God. We're
never supposed to be the decision before the glory God,
the great coaches, great teams. I'm around us school. We
were able to pull this off. Whoever thought that it
would be here? But not the loss or flipping champs
let go.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
That's after Indiana upset Ohio State.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Although it was an upset and they were number one
ranked team I think when they won, so that's a
weird upset.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
I just love Indiana. I think Ohio State was number one?
Was it okay?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, that guy was excited, though he is I wonder
if he always always that way.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Good for him, good for the very exciting. I've never
won a giant football championship, but I'd imagine it's quite
quite cheery.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Crazy thing about college football is, if you're old enough,
you remember this way back in the day, they didn't play,
They didn't have any games. I mean, they just the
writers would vote on who they thought they call it.
The champion was at the end of the season, right
after all the games. Just I think that was the
best team.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
What and then there would be bitter disagreement from coast
to coast. Now we have a big playoff system, and
there's bitter disagreement from coast to coast.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah yeah, yess yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
So Notre Dame didn't make the twelve and so they've
refused to play in any bowl game. They've just said
that we deserve to be But so whoever gets left out,
it's always going.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
But at least if you have twelve teams, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
The top half dozen that absolutely deserved to be there
are going to make it. When you had people just
voting on who the best team was, that was crazy.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I can't believe that lasted as many years as it did.
Uh yeah, I agree. It was kind of silly and ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Sothough, college football has now changed in so many different ways.
What it looks like in five years nobody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But now have you heard that crowd there?
Speaker 3 (16:37):
It sounded like there's plenty of people still showing up
the games and really enjoying it.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Oh heck yeah, absolutely, yeah. I watched some great college
football over the weekend. It's it's triple a NFL. The
college football is they happen to affiliate themselves with universities
for some reason, which is odd. It could be, you know,
auto manufacturing plants, or they might as well associate themselves
with the local meatpacking plant or something like that is
(17:03):
a university.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
It's kind of quaint.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
That's that's always been the whole college sports saying. I
like following college sports, but it being part of the
whole college thing, with the like intending pretending they're regular students,
and that hasn't been true for many, many many years.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Big matchup this weekend. The Microsoft Spartans are against the
you know, the Google Nitney Allons or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Why not if you're not in the premier sports, it's
you're just a student athlete.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
No.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
I mean, I had a bunch of babysitters when my
kids were little that were Division one swimmers at the
local college. And you know, you're not making any money
off of that, with any future being pro or anything.
You're just competing in a sport.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
And going to school.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Made the point briefly last week want to hammer at home.
The takeaway from the giant Samali theft ring thing is
not an immigration conclusion.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Although that's part of it.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
What we really need to capitalize on is people's awareness
that our welfare state just gush his money. Nobody even
cares more on that to come. Joe doesn't care about
the hungry. That's my takeaway.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Good takeaway, yep, Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
So a number of publications are making a really big
deal out of this Netflix, HBO, Warner Brothers thing and
how it's going to affect all of entertainment, and I
don't quite understand it, but we'll delve into that a
little bit later.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
It will end movies and storytelling as we know them.
Jack also the stage, there will be no TV. Storytelling
will come to an end. Yes, something weird happens to
you at the grocery. Story will be unable to spin
that yarn. I'm afraid with this new merger anyway, this
is funny. Nelly Bowles in The New York Times, leading
us brilliantly into the I'm sorry she's in the free
(18:57):
press talking about the New York Times, leading us brilliantly
and the topic of ilhan Omar and rampant welfare fraud
and the rest of it. Nelly writes, the perfect New
York Times headline does exist.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
We found it. This is a story from.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
The end of November about a man who's a blue
collar worker in Minnesota. The other is an illegal immigrant
who stole his identity. Here's your headline. Two men, one identity.
They both paid the price. Oh wow, the blue collar
worker had to pay thousands of dollars to the IRS
tanks to the theft. The guy who stole his identity then
got in trouble for stealing his identity. I just love
(19:31):
that the framing is like two equally guilty men, you
decide who got it worse. Oh wow, they have the
same identity, But what is identity really? You're supposed to
read this and think, can't they just share? Who am
I to need my own Social Security number? Rude and selfish?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Well, that doesn't even sound like there's anybody did anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It's just like an asteroid fell on two guys heads.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
I mean, if something bad happened to two people just
out of nowhere, what an interesting story.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
We'll get back to Nelly Bowles and theft from the
welfare state in general, after tipping our cap to America
hating Somali immigrant to ilhan Omar, who was making the
rounds trying to spin the Somali community. Not the entire community, certainly,
but the enormous theft of taxpayer funds within the Somali
(20:21):
community there in beautiful of Minneapolis St.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Paul. Here she is with Margaret Brennan.
Speaker 7 (20:27):
The Binary Justice Department called it the largest COVID fraud
scheme in the country, and this was pocketing COVID era
welfare funds. More than a billion dollars in taxpayer money
that was stolen. It was pretty pretty shocking. All the
eighty seven people charged, all but eight are of Somali descent,
and that has added to the spotlight being put specifically
(20:50):
on your community. Why do you think this fraud was
allowed to get so widespread?
Speaker 8 (20:58):
I want to say, you know, this so has an
impact on Somali's because we are also taxpayers in Minnesota.
We also could have benefited from the program and the
money that was stolen, and so it's been really frustrating
(21:19):
for people to not acknowledge the fact that we're you know,
we're also as as Minnesota as as taxpayers, really upset
and angry about the fraud that has occurred.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Good kay Margaret Brennan to ask the question, She asked,
I think I'm surprised she went that far toward pointing
out the Somali angle. Well, and I love ilhan Omar saying, hey,
we're the victims of this, right, We're the victims of
our theft. And of course again it's not the entire
and not everybody participated.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
It was a number of people. But uh, and then
they get into a little more and see see how
you like.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Ilhan Omar's response is to the various questions ninety two.
Speaker 7 (22:01):
Michael, one of the initial defenses by the organization at
the heart of the fraud Feeding our Future was to
claim the probe was due to racism. Do you think
that this was all about negligence or that it was
like political fear of alienating the Somali community.
Speaker 8 (22:16):
So you have to remember that the women who let
the program is a Caucasian woman, and that was her
way of making sure that this would continue to happen
by using whatever rhetoric that was available to her. We
do know that when the money was stopped, they did
(22:38):
sue the age. Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the department
in that lawsuit. It was a judge that said it
should continue, that money should continue to go out. And
so this wasn't something that people were not looking at.
There was always those those alarms and we will continue
(23:00):
to understand where things might have gone wrong. As these
investigations continue, and as these fosters are prosecuted and sent
to jail.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
Yeah, the alarms went off, and you and your people
silenced them over and over again by threatening, you know,
they would lose the Somali voter, you would call them
racists or what have you. It was a woman, Caucasian
woman running the scam, she points out. Okay, yeah, put
her in jail for a very very long time. And
then you got Tim Walls, who famously was on Meet
(23:30):
the Press last week and said this ninety three Michael,
we'll take it on.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
We'll put folks in jail.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
I don't care what your nationality is. I don't care
who your religion is, your color, if you're committing crimes.
These are programs that were meant to serve students with autism,
to housing, and to making sure people had enough to eat.
There's a reason Minnesota ranks as the top lowest childhood poverty,
best place for children to live. People are taking advantage
that they're going to prison, all.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Right, tamp on Tim.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
So he also was asked, well, you take responsibility for
the rampant theft, and he said I'll take responsibility for
putting people in jail.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Here's the reporter following up with the governor. Tim, you said.
Speaker 6 (24:10):
That you take responsibility for putting people in jail, but
all the fronts of arts in federal prostitutions. Why did
you say the prosecut I didn't erroneously say that we're
the ones that our agencies are bringing it up. We're
referring them over. This is how this works. We were
through it through the BCA. This is Drew Evans and
the superintendent BCA. These are Minnesota folks who work in
state government, who are the ones that are helping build
(24:33):
the case turn it over to.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
The federal authorities. So that is totally false. That is
totally wrong.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
It is Minnesota's It is Minnesota's investigators. It is the
igs that are over there, Investigator Clark, that are doing
the things of putting people in jails, the federal laws
that they're they're choosing to do federal prosecutions. We will
prosecute on every single thing we can. In many cases
we get longer ones. Is your assertion is that we
don't have anything to do with the investigations. That is
(25:01):
totally false. We're the ones who brought it to them.
We're the ones who alerted the FBI. We're the ones
we turn these cases over every day, drug cases, human
trafficking cases.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
We would prosecute them.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
That's kind of interesting. Actually it didn't come off as
the LAMO I expected to. I hadn't heard that clip.
So getting back to Nelly Bowles, she mentions, the volume
of scams going on at any given time is truly staggering.
Houseways and Means Committee summary of a Government Accountability Office
investigation that came out last week. In twenty twenty three,
one single social security number was used on applications for
(25:35):
over one hundred and twenty five insurance policies.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Wow, and there's no computer that can catch that.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Totaled over twenty six thousand days of coverage, the equivalent
of seventy one years.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
So not only does a computer.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Not catch wait a second, we've got a duplicate of
somebody having the same social Security number.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
You can do it dozens and dozens and dozens of times,
right right.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
And we saw the report last week that the GAO
was trying to get fake Obamacare, well fake humans approved
for Obamacare and whatever. It was twenty one out of
the twenty two were approved even though they submitted none
of the proof that was required for income. The fact
that they existed the rest of it, it's unbelievable. Kim
Strassel in The Journal wrote a great editorial about how
(26:22):
the Somali thing, the Minneapolis thing, is about immigration and
failure to assimilate and importing lots and lots of people
from an incredibly corrupt country. But it's more than that,
a story about the broken welfare system, she points out.
It's a story of a federal government that shovels more
(26:44):
than a trillion dollars annually into more than eighty major
anti poverty and countless minor programs, a system too complex
to ensure even basic integrity, and of a state that
preen does a model of social welfare its own lavish benefits,
drawing many immigrants and inviting plunder. I would agree the
(27:08):
US welfare debate is long centered on the failed outcomes
of overly generous government programs, the long term dependency, the
loss of dignity, the discouragement of work, the damage to
family structure. Rounds and rounds of these destructions, and she
brings up several historically and according to the Center for
Immigration Studies, the share of US born working men not
(27:28):
in the labor force was eleven percent in nineteen sixty.
It's now twenty two percent. Twenty two percent of working
age men are not in.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
The labor force.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
That's incredible, and she points out the Minnesota raises to
alarm level a separate need for a reset. The system itself,
the government machine is broken. It's heaving duplicative federal state programs,
a wash informs and bureaucracies in ancient mainframes.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Has already suffered Soviet stuff collapse.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals
than as a safety net for the needy. I thought
that was a great, great sentence. How do you separate
the wheat from the slime? And millions of overlapping self
attested applications for snap Wick unemployment insurance eitc all these acronyms.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I don't even know what half of them are.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I wish you could get lefties to care about this
sort of stuff, with the idea that, look, you're the
one that want to help the downtrodden.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
There'd be a lot more money for the downtrodden.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
If it wasn't being stolen from people who don't need it.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
So true, they ought to be leading the hue and
cry for investigations and reform.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
We are absolutely a wealthy enough country to take care
of every single person who's incapable of taking care of
themselves very easily, right, with housing and healthcare and food
and everything you need. If for whatever reason, you're born
this way or something happened to you, we can't support yourself.
We got plenty of money if we didn't, if we
(29:00):
stopped giving it to people that are perfectly able bodied.
Starve the lazy, Buy the T shirt at the Armstrong
and you get a store. Starve the lazy. More on this.
I want to hammer it a little bit more. Excuse
me after a word from our friends at Prize Picks.
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(29:21):
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How about the new early payouts thing.
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If your lineup gets off to a hot start, you
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Speaker 4 (29:51):
Download the Prize Picks app today. Use that code armstrong
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want to double and triple up on one player, different.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Stats, Prize picks. It's good to be right.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I would never actually do this, but I like playing
out the fantasy in my head. Of like, instead of
my kids going to college, just coach them up on
how to take advantage of various government programs.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Right, do that your whole life?
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Lots of people, do you know I want to get
I don't want to rush through this because there's a
lot more really really good stuff. Why don't we take
a break and we'll come back and continue the discussion,
because Kim makes some absolute blockbuster home run ball points.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
You know, do the reason you remembered you start out
as a nineteen year old instead of going to college.
Will your income is basically nothing. Maybe you're working at
a fast food joint. And then figure out all the
programs that you qualify for and that overlap, and see
how much you can get.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Well and fake it up too.
Speaker 4 (30:58):
Invent identities and social security number of steel, people's identities,
medicale children, medical problems. Yeah, at place place, the money
truck will back up to your door every single week,
us suckers who.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Are paying for it all. Okay, more on the way, yo,
yo yo. How you doing? You got your Christmas shopping done?
No me neither.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
No good Lord, has pointed out last segment by that
horrific New York Times headline. The left just seems to
think any seriousness about welfare reform is evil, or even
stopping fraud is somehow work in the wrong side of
the street, or they think.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
It's a slippery slope that if you try to stop
fraud then you'll take the program away or something. I
don't children real starve.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
Yeah, Kim Strassel makes the point in the journal that
how do you separate the wheat from the slime with
these zillions of overlapping programs. You don't, You're right checks
and the crooks know it is. Joe Thompson, lead prosecutor
in the big Minnesota cases, is said, quote, this isn't
just a few criminals exploiting the system. This is a
system that's begging to be exploited. As one of the
(32:07):
people involved in it said, yeah, we had our hands
in the cookie jar, and they just kept refilling the
cookie jar. And then she points out that even the
government auditors are numb to fraud and bug eyed at
the scams that sucked through Joe Biden's COVID dollars, your
COVID dollars. And she goes into a list of just
(32:27):
the rampant theft and people getting rich, and man, Democrat,
It's Minnesota is the new outrage, partly because it's Democrat.
Democrats have long pitched the state as a model of
a successful, generous Swedish style social welfare state financed by
high taxes, much as California pitched itself is the future
of green energy.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
How's that going? But then she gets to a point.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
This is a moment Republicans might be shouting from the
rooftops that Minnesota proves how right they were to have
included in the tax reform bill a slate of anti
fraud reforms to medicate and food stamps. But they also
might seize on this scandal to take the government fraud
argument much further, to explain that this no longer is
a situation that can be corrected with more due diligence.
It is the size and scope of the morass that
(33:10):
is enabling fraud. The argument we need to move many
people off government dependency, not just for moral and societal reasons,
but because government has an obligation to taxpayers and the
truly needy. Your point, Jack, to right size and return
to a system that can function, one that is lean
efficient and able to focus its dollars on the actual
(33:30):
mission temporary assistance in most cases. In a perfect world,
we tear down the maze we've added to for a
century and replace it with a central clearinghouse for short
term government support, able to interact efficiently with states.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Dennis, why not reimagine the government?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Dennis Miller's old line was always I'm all for helping
the helpless, not the clueless.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Right.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
Her final point, all around us is evidence that the
current structure is failing and pass the date of fixing.
You know, it's funny there is an utter lack of
courage or like ambition in Congress. And it's ironic because
the government is super gigantic and there are trillions of
dollars washing around, But the great.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Taste is for the status quo.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
How eft up would a system have to be that
Congress would say we got to step in and do it.
Kim Trossel is suggesting, we've got to totally tear this
thing down to the studs.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
And rebuild it.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
I mean, if it's not eft up enough now for that,
will it ever be? Probably not.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I guess apparently it's easy enough to demagogue that they're
trying to, you know, take the food out of hungry kids'
mouths to help billionaires, that it stops anything from getting
What I don't understand is why the left fights raining
in the fraud like they do.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Like I said, I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
I don't think you'd want the extra money for other things.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
Yeah, well, you've got two groups on the left. You
have sincere lefty voters who I think would be with
you completely. But then you've got the professional leftists. Yeah,
the money goes somewhere, The money goes to someone right,
and they are never going to allow reform of the
welfare state because they're profiting so mightily from it. Well,
(35:15):
that's why you wish the Republicans would get the balls
to just lay this out and explain it. And much
like the Biden administration, I think it was our two
we were talking about this missed by one thousand miles
what the public's real attitude was about immigration. If you
had an eloquent, powerful Republican person or party explaining how
(35:38):
screwed up the system was and how we can feed
it and clothe and take care of everybody who really
deserves it.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
In fact, we'll do it better.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Than we're doing it right now. But we need to
reform the system completely.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
You think that would get.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Pretty good support on the right end the left. Also,
there's so much money slashing around. That gets to one
of my pet arguments that I don't know if people
are aware of when the whole argument around income inequality,
that they never count how many benefits the lower end gets, right,
if you have somebody that makes two hundred thousand dollars
a year, maybe they get to keep I don't know,
(36:12):
one hundred and ten of it after taxes.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
If you have somebody that makes fifty.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
Thousand dollars a year, they get to another fifty or
more of government money. So they've got around one hundred
thousand dollars to live with. But if you look at
the original numbers, that person makes four times as much
money as that person. Why would somebody be that dishonest
or make a mistake that enormous because they're.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Profiting from it. Yeah, because you can keep it going.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
It's like the homeless industrial complex in California is a
great example that we've had the displeasure to witness up
close and personal. The money just pours into various coffers
and organizations and individuals and all, and they will always, always, always,
always vote for the person, you know, spraying hosing them
down with the money. Saying I have the giant welfare
(36:57):
industrial complex.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
I have zero, I mean zero, not even one percent,
zero percent belief that in my lifetime will ever really
tackle this whole waste, fraud and abuse in our social
net problem.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Well, speaking of Caldy Unicorney a good Armstrong in geddy
dot com. He hit the superstore, get your ruin, the
entire country, Newsome twenty twenty eight t.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Shirt, and starve the lazy.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
More on the way if you miss a segment of
the podcast, Armstrong and Getty on demand Armstrong and Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty arm Strong
and Jetty and he Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Shum and Hope get back up and remember who in
the hell we are? We're the Nined States of America.
Got it.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
That's who we are. Well, good to have them back
some more time, Michael.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hope, get back up and remember who in the hell
we are. We're the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Got it. That's who we are.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
That's how it was always the best when he'd wind up,
because I'm gonna nail it here. Oh my god, people
are gonna come to their feet and carry me around
this room. Here's that big applause, lying very nice States
of America.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Got it?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
And Hope get back up. Remember who in the hell
we are? Where the United States of America? Got it.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
So here's a warm scannering of applause.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Some sort of prize for being the most trans friendly
president in US grade keep mutilating those children from the
LGBTQ plus community, even though, as it pointed out in
The New York Times over the weekend, most of the
country was not near as far down the road as
he was, and it heard him more than helped him
in the entire party. Well, and then something leaked out
the other day. I've got it around here somewhere where the.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
High placed official in his administration realized the activist group
duped us and they had way weaker evidence than they
told us. But we'd already committed to including gender appearance
or whatever as a protected trait, and we couldn't go back,
So we were kind of stuck. One more from the
(01:51):
c now old man praising his utterly incompetent press secretary.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Well, when I took office, I promised to have an
administration and look like America.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
My promise.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Where you.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
And not just for the commanding my press sectary.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Kareem, God, it sounds like you, said, Kareem abdul Japard. Perhaps, yeah,
she was perhaps the worst most incompetent press secretary in
the history of our country, laboring under Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
And once again you got to wonder why his wife
is trotting him out there to be that way in
front of crowds. Then who are you diehards in politics
who are willing to just you know, stand with somebody
or a party or whatever, no matter what's happening, they
just don't get it. Similar vain New York Times, very long,
(02:55):
detailed story about the immigration aspect of the Biden presidency.
And this will be the rough draft of history for
some book that nobody will.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Read someday about how they do this.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
The headline being how Biden ignored warnings and lost America's faith.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
In immigration, and that is exactly what happened.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
This paragraph sums it all up, and then I'll get
into some of the details. I think we all remember
how this played out. First, they underestimated the scale of
migration that was coming. Second, they failed this is the
New York Times, by the way. Second, they failed to
appreciate the political reaction to that migration, believing that stronger
enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters and also that
(03:34):
a border surge would not be an important issue to voters.
Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters,
including Latinos, citing immigration is a reason for supporting mister Trump.
In twenty twenty four, they were zero for three on
that it was a giant scale of people coming through,
people cared a lot. It was like the number one
(03:55):
issue until inflation hit. Then it became the number two issue.
And Latino's vote with Trump because they hated it as
much as everybody else did. How could you be so wrong?
It's because you were led by the Twitter crowd. The
Democratic Party will not be a successful party until they
finally learn that Twitter isn't real life. And I don't
(04:15):
know if there.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
Yet or the only thing that saves them is the
incompetence of the Republican Party. It's the middle one that's
the most astounding swing and miss.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
They didn't think.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Voters would react badly to a giant influx of illegal immigration.
They must be convinced of their own by their own
rhetoric that only right wing, racist xenophobes want coherent immigration policy.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
What are you kidding? How could you miss that?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And The New York Times goes through his chief of staff,
all his top advisors, everybody were telling him over and over, look,
this is a giant issue for people, and this is
a disaster, and he just wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Budge for whatever reason.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So first we'll relive stuff, you know, and then get
to something I didn't know. It's worth knowing in case
you ever end up in an argument with somebody about this.
June fourth, twenty twenty four, so this is toward the
end of his presidency during the election. The damage had
already been done at that point. Joe Biden. Finally, five
(05:09):
months before election day, Biden reversed course on everything he'd
done so far and issued an order all but closing
the border to asylum applications, a move that was far
tougher than the proposals that he had rejected during the
first year of his office, and border encounters quickly fell,
of course they did. And we remember the commentary at
(05:29):
the time. You could have done this on day one
if you'd wanted, and you claimed you couldn't. You claimed
that only Congress could do it, and then look, all
of a sudden, you've done it yourself.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
But so it was such a disaster.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
In the middle of the election, looking like he might
lose to Trump, he finally closes the border. Why mister
Biden waited so long to effectively seal the borders become
one of the defining questions of his presidency.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Three weeks after.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Closing the border, the president had his famous debate with
Donald Trump that was three weeks later, ask why voters
should trust him to solve the crisis, Mister Biden flubbed it.
According to The New York Times, I'll reread this answer
what I've done since I've changed the law. What's happened,
said mister Biden, who had not changed the law. I've
(06:13):
changed it in a way that he claimed he changed
the law. The law was already there. They just enforced
the law that was already there. The New York Times
pointing that I've changed it in a way that now
you're in a situation where there are forty fewer people
coming across the border illegally. I'm going to continue to
move until we get the total ban on the total
initiative relative to what we're going to more with the
(06:34):
border patrol and more asylum officers. And that's when Boss
Trump unleashed his famous I really don't know what he
said at the end of that sentence. I don't think
he knows what he said either, Yeah, because it.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Was completely incomprehensible. That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
I always go back to the crazy uh abortion illegal
immigration rate own sisters nonsense.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
I forgot about that one, just the rambling nonsense. I
won't read this again, but it made no sense. Trump
said that whole thing. He doesn't even know what he said, and,
as The New York Times says in a very good sentence.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Within a month, mister Biden left the.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Race after that, making their point. But here's the part
that I didn't know, because you often hear this. The
pushback has been the Congress had a plan to deal
with the immigration thing. Trump intervened, told Republicans not to
vote for it, which torpedoed it, and that putting Biden
(07:37):
in a situation where he had no choice. Okay, Democrats
blamed mister Trump for sinking the deal, but Senator Langford, Republican,
pointed to another culprit, the Biden administration's own foot dragging.
When negotiations had gained momentum the previous fall, because the
American people were all worked up about this and wanted
something done, the White House had refused to get involve
(08:00):
the Senate negotiations, according to Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat, and
Langford the Republican, both of them saying that Biden wouldn't
get involved. We don't want our fingerprints on these negotiations.
The White House had told Murphy and Langford. Only as
border crossings continued Despike did the administration relent.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Looking back, Langford said he believed the delay was critical.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
If Biden had signed on sooner and the White House
got involved at that point before Trump did, it probably
could have had the momentum to pass and they could
have taken this off their plate as an issue.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
But it got kicked down the.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Road to the point where mister Trump was the de
facto nominee at the beginning, when Biden was saying, we
don't want our fingerprints on this if you do it,
because they were so scared of the Wolkes and the
Latino community blowback at that site, believed that narrative.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeh.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
At that point Trump had just announced and desantists looked
like a real threat, and it was isn't clear that
Trump had the nomination. He didn't have the power to
tell Republicans at that point. So is the Biden's fault
that that legislation never happened. They were too scared to
put their name on it and fight for it. Why
about that an interesting piece of history that I'd even
get involved in the conversation, right, I mean, that's a
(09:16):
level of paranoia right there.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
God, i'd say so weak, so incredibly weak. Man.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
It's the opposite of Donald Trump, who, as we all know,
as a bull in a china shop. Donald Trump was
a mouse, and I mean Joe Biden was a mouse
in a china shop. So worried about ruffling any feathers whatsoever. Yeah, yeah,
what a miserable, incompetent president. Quick word from our friends
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Speaker 3 (10:43):
So don't need to relive that, I suppose anymore. The
whole immigration thing, we all know what it was. That
was new news to me though that the Biden administration's
great pushback has always been looked. Donald Trump torpedo the legislation.
You didn't push it at all. You told your own
(11:05):
Democratic Senate leadership, we don't want our.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Fingerprints on this. Wow, that is so weak.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Well, they deserve to lose the election to a very
unpopular Donald Trump. Uh yeah, yeah, craziness. That is wild
political malpractice.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
How do more.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
People not understand that the successful presidents get stuff done
their way? Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George Bush. They do
what they want to do out loud and fight.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
For it hard.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
They're not super scared of what people in their own party,
and so they don't say anything.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
But what was Biden's reputation is entire career. He was
a very glib, backslapping guy who would hold his finger
up in the air figure out which way the wind blows.
And he had no beliefs or character other than this
is what's popular right now. As president, he just continued
that groove. It's not that shocking.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Remember when I won that ten pound box of toffee
the other night, Oh yeah, Christmas concert homemade coffee, best
toffee ever read, were about five pounds through me and
the boys.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Pretty good effort over the weekend.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Eating five pounds of toffee between three three dudes.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That is impressive.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
My sweet bride doesn't love to cook, but she loves
to bake. And back in the day, she loved to
make candy, and she would make peanut brittle that would
make you weep with joy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I mean it was unpainted believably good.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Oh my god, and with joy and toffee and all
sorts of stuff like that. And it was a few
years into our marriage we came to a mutual agreement,
this has gotta stop.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
That's the problem you get. We're gonna be toothless, and
eight hundred.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Pounds of Disney toothless. Please too much sugar.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Well, actually, you're actually gonna eat the teeth out of
your head. Quite a thing as a man rot him
right out of there in a first world country. Oh Joe,
no teeth, He just won't stop eating toffee and whatnot.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Does Joe have a meth problem. He's only got like
three teeth. No, it's peanut brittle. Actually, he's got a
peanut brittle problem.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
But you know, thought he'd stopped after he lost the
first one to ten teeth.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Now his fingers are constantly sticky. He's always got a
big slab of it his hands. It's completely toothless at
this point. Now, I kind of has to match it
up with a spoon sweeking gum it coming up.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Ilhan Omar attempting to answer for the rampant theft of
the funds there in Minneapolis, plus America's welfare state just
gush his money. This is not an outlier. There is
a lesson to be learned here. I hope you can
stay with us.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
We're the United States of America.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
That's who we are.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
We want to give all the glory to God. We're
never supposed to be his decision before the glory of God.
The great coach is great teams we have around us.
We were able to pull this dog. Whoever thought the
who's would be here? But now the Hoosiers are flipping champs.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Let's go woy I got's excited? Cheer up, would you?
Speaker 3 (14:17):
That's Fernando Mendoza of the Indiana Hoosiers, are the number
one seed in the college football playoffs, as they named
the twelve teams after a whole bunch of big games
this weekend.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
He goes on, you guys call.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
Yourself a bunch of misfits who found.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The right home at Indiana? Why was this the right
place for this crew?
Speaker 5 (14:38):
Is the right place for process orange? And we're going
day by days off at the line, the defense, the coaches,
special teams. We're all processes oranges to one goal. That's
our thing is we're brothers. We can track teams to
the defense because we know that we're gonna stick together and.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
We're the strongest glue ever.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
All right, can I earn a little of number one again?
The first clip again? That guy is he is a fighter.
Speaker 5 (15:00):
You want to give all the glory to God. We're
never supposed to be the decision before the glory God,
the great coaches, great teams. I'm around us school. We
were able to pull this off. Whoever thought that it
would be here? But not the loss or flipping champs
let go.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
That's after Indiana upset Ohio State.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Although it was an upset and they were number one
ranked team I think when they won, so that's a
weird upset.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
I just love Indiana. I think Ohio State was number one?
Was it okay?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
Yeah, that guy was excited, though he is I wonder
if he always always that way.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
Good for him, good for the very exciting. I've never
won a giant football championship, but I'd imagine it's quite
quite cheery.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Crazy thing about college football is, if you're old enough,
you remember this way back in the day, they didn't play,
They didn't have any games. I mean, they just the
writers would vote on who they thought they call it.
The champion was at the end of the season, right
after all the games. Just I think that was the
best team.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
What and then there would be bitter disagreement from coast
to coast. Now we have a big playoff system, and
there's bitter disagreement from coast to coast.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah yeah, yess yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
So Notre Dame didn't make the twelve and so they've
refused to play in any bowl game. They've just said
that we deserve to be But so whoever gets left out,
it's always going.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
But at least if you have twelve teams, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
The top half dozen that absolutely deserved to be there
are going to make it. When you had people just
voting on who the best team was, that was crazy.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
I can't believe that lasted as many years as it did.
Uh yeah, I agree. It was kind of silly and ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Sothough, college football has now changed in so many different ways.
What it looks like in five years nobody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
But now have you heard that crowd there?
Speaker 3 (16:37):
It sounded like there's plenty of people still showing up
the games and really enjoying it.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Oh heck yeah, absolutely, yeah. I watched some great college
football over the weekend. It's it's triple a NFL. The
college football is they happen to affiliate themselves with universities
for some reason, which is odd. It could be, you know,
auto manufacturing plants, or they might as well associate themselves
with the local meatpacking plant or something like that is
(17:03):
a university.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
It's kind of quaint.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
That's that's always been the whole college sports saying. I
like following college sports, but it being part of the
whole college thing, with the like intending pretending they're regular students,
and that hasn't been true for many, many many years.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Big matchup this weekend. The Microsoft Spartans are against the
you know, the Google Nitney Allons or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Why not if you're not in the premier sports, it's
you're just a student athlete.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
No.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
I mean, I had a bunch of babysitters when my
kids were little that were Division one swimmers at the
local college. And you know, you're not making any money
off of that, with any future being pro or anything.
You're just competing in a sport.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
And going to school.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
Made the point briefly last week want to hammer at home.
The takeaway from the giant Samali theft ring thing is
not an immigration conclusion.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Although that's part of it.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
What we really need to capitalize on is people's awareness
that our welfare state just gush his money. Nobody even
cares more on that to come. Joe doesn't care about
the hungry. That's my takeaway.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Good takeaway, yep, Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
So a number of publications are making a really big
deal out of this Netflix, HBO, Warner Brothers thing and
how it's going to affect all of entertainment, and I
don't quite understand it, but we'll delve into that a
little bit later.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
It will end movies and storytelling as we know them.
Jack also the stage, there will be no TV. Storytelling
will come to an end. Yes, something weird happens to
you at the grocery. Story will be unable to spin
that yarn. I'm afraid with this new merger anyway, this
is funny. Nelly Bowles in The New York Times, leading
us brilliantly into the I'm sorry she's in the free
(18:57):
press talking about the New York Times, leading us brilliantly
and the topic of ilhan Omar and rampant welfare fraud
and the rest of it. Nelly writes, the perfect New
York Times headline does exist.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
We found it. This is a story from.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
The end of November about a man who's a blue
collar worker in Minnesota. The other is an illegal immigrant
who stole his identity. Here's your headline. Two men, one identity.
They both paid the price. Oh wow, the blue collar
worker had to pay thousands of dollars to the IRS
tanks to the theft. The guy who stole his identity then
got in trouble for stealing his identity. I just love
(19:31):
that the framing is like two equally guilty men, you
decide who got it worse. Oh wow, they have the
same identity, But what is identity really? You're supposed to
read this and think, can't they just share? Who am
I to need my own Social Security number? Rude and selfish?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Well, that doesn't even sound like there's anybody did anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
It's just like an asteroid fell on two guys heads.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
I mean, if something bad happened to two people just
out of nowhere, what an interesting story.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
We'll get back to Nelly Bowles and theft from the
welfare state in general, after tipping our cap to America
hating Somali immigrant to ilhan Omar, who was making the
rounds trying to spin the Somali community. Not the entire community, certainly,
but the enormous theft of taxpayer funds within the Somali
(20:21):
community there in beautiful of Minneapolis St.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Paul. Here she is with Margaret Brennan.
Speaker 7 (20:27):
The Binary Justice Department called it the largest COVID fraud
scheme in the country, and this was pocketing COVID era
welfare funds. More than a billion dollars in taxpayer money
that was stolen. It was pretty pretty shocking. All the
eighty seven people charged, all but eight are of Somali descent,
and that has added to the spotlight being put specifically
(20:50):
on your community. Why do you think this fraud was
allowed to get so widespread?
Speaker 8 (20:58):
I want to say, you know, this so has an
impact on Somali's because we are also taxpayers in Minnesota.
We also could have benefited from the program and the
money that was stolen, and so it's been really frustrating
(21:19):
for people to not acknowledge the fact that we're you know,
we're also as as Minnesota as as taxpayers, really upset
and angry about the fraud that has occurred.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Good kay Margaret Brennan to ask the question, She asked,
I think I'm surprised she went that far toward pointing
out the Somali angle. Well, and I love ilhan Omar saying, hey,
we're the victims of this, right, We're the victims of
our theft. And of course again it's not the entire
and not everybody participated.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
It was a number of people. But uh, and then
they get into a little more and see see how
you like.
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Ilhan Omar's response is to the various questions ninety two.
Speaker 7 (22:01):
Michael, one of the initial defenses by the organization at
the heart of the fraud Feeding our Future was to
claim the probe was due to racism. Do you think
that this was all about negligence or that it was
like political fear of alienating the Somali community.
Speaker 8 (22:16):
So you have to remember that the women who let
the program is a Caucasian woman, and that was her
way of making sure that this would continue to happen
by using whatever rhetoric that was available to her. We
do know that when the money was stopped, they did
(22:38):
sue the age. Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the department
in that lawsuit. It was a judge that said it
should continue, that money should continue to go out. And
so this wasn't something that people were not looking at.
There was always those those alarms and we will continue
(23:00):
to understand where things might have gone wrong. As these
investigations continue, and as these fosters are prosecuted and sent
to jail.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
Yeah, the alarms went off, and you and your people
silenced them over and over again by threatening, you know,
they would lose the Somali voter, you would call them
racists or what have you. It was a woman, Caucasian
woman running the scam, she points out. Okay, yeah, put
her in jail for a very very long time. And
then you got Tim Walls, who famously was on Meet
(23:30):
the Press last week and said this ninety three Michael,
we'll take it on.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
We'll put folks in jail.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
I don't care what your nationality is. I don't care
who your religion is, your color, if you're committing crimes.
These are programs that were meant to serve students with autism,
to housing, and to making sure people had enough to eat.
There's a reason Minnesota ranks as the top lowest childhood poverty,
best place for children to live. People are taking advantage
that they're going to prison, all.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Right, tamp on Tim.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
So he also was asked, well, you take responsibility for
the rampant theft, and he said I'll take responsibility for
putting people in jail.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Here's the reporter following up with the governor. Tim, you said.
Speaker 6 (24:10):
That you take responsibility for putting people in jail, but
all the fronts of arts in federal prostitutions. Why did
you say the prosecut I didn't erroneously say that we're
the ones that our agencies are bringing it up. We're
referring them over. This is how this works. We were
through it through the BCA. This is Drew Evans and
the superintendent BCA. These are Minnesota folks who work in
state government, who are the ones that are helping build
(24:33):
the case turn it over to.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
The federal authorities. So that is totally false. That is
totally wrong.
Speaker 6 (24:38):
It is Minnesota's It is Minnesota's investigators. It is the
igs that are over there, Investigator Clark, that are doing
the things of putting people in jails, the federal laws
that they're they're choosing to do federal prosecutions. We will
prosecute on every single thing we can. In many cases
we get longer ones. Is your assertion is that we
don't have anything to do with the investigations. That is
(25:01):
totally false. We're the ones who brought it to them.
We're the ones who alerted the FBI. We're the ones
we turn these cases over every day, drug cases, human
trafficking cases.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
We would prosecute them.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
That's kind of interesting. Actually it didn't come off as
the LAMO I expected to. I hadn't heard that clip.
So getting back to Nelly Bowles, she mentions, the volume
of scams going on at any given time is truly staggering.
Houseways and Means Committee summary of a Government Accountability Office
investigation that came out last week. In twenty twenty three,
one single social security number was used on applications for
(25:35):
over one hundred and twenty five insurance policies.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Wow, and there's no computer that can catch that.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Totaled over twenty six thousand days of coverage, the equivalent
of seventy one years.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
So not only does a computer.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Not catch wait a second, we've got a duplicate of
somebody having the same social Security number.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
You can do it dozens and dozens and dozens of times,
right right.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
And we saw the report last week that the GAO
was trying to get fake Obamacare, well fake humans approved
for Obamacare and whatever. It was twenty one out of
the twenty two were approved even though they submitted none
of the proof that was required for income. The fact
that they existed the rest of it, it's unbelievable. Kim
Strassel in The Journal wrote a great editorial about how
(26:22):
the Somali thing, the Minneapolis thing, is about immigration and
failure to assimilate and importing lots and lots of people
from an incredibly corrupt country. But it's more than that,
a story about the broken welfare system, she points out.
It's a story of a federal government that shovels more
(26:44):
than a trillion dollars annually into more than eighty major
anti poverty and countless minor programs, a system too complex
to ensure even basic integrity, and of a state that
preen does a model of social welfare its own lavish benefits,
drawing many immigrants and inviting plunder. I would agree the
(27:08):
US welfare debate is long centered on the failed outcomes
of overly generous government programs, the long term dependency, the
loss of dignity, the discouragement of work, the damage to
family structure. Rounds and rounds of these destructions, and she
brings up several historically and according to the Center for
Immigration Studies, the share of US born working men not
(27:28):
in the labor force was eleven percent in nineteen sixty.
It's now twenty two percent. Twenty two percent of working
age men are not in.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
The labor force.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
That's incredible, and she points out the Minnesota raises to
alarm level a separate need for a reset. The system itself,
the government machine is broken. It's heaving duplicative federal state programs,
a wash informs and bureaucracies in ancient mainframes.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Has already suffered Soviet stuff collapse.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals
than as a safety net for the needy. I thought
that was a great, great sentence. How do you separate
the wheat from the slime? And millions of overlapping self
attested applications for snap Wick unemployment insurance eitc all these acronyms.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I don't even know what half of them are.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I wish you could get lefties to care about this
sort of stuff, with the idea that, look, you're the
one that want to help the downtrodden.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
There'd be a lot more money for the downtrodden.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
If it wasn't being stolen from people who don't need it.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
So true, they ought to be leading the hue and
cry for investigations and reform.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
We are absolutely a wealthy enough country to take care
of every single person who's incapable of taking care of
themselves very easily, right, with housing and healthcare and food
and everything you need. If for whatever reason, you're born
this way or something happened to you, we can't support yourself.
We got plenty of money if we didn't, if we
(29:00):
stopped giving it to people that are perfectly able bodied.
Starve the lazy, Buy the T shirt at the Armstrong
and you get a store. Starve the lazy. More on this.
I want to hammer it a little bit more. Excuse
me after a word from our friends at Prize Picks.
Holy cow, the NFL season is getting exciting. You got
all sorts of NBA action. It's starting to matter a
(29:21):
little bit. It's all happening at once.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
It's the easiest, most fun way to get involved in
fantasy sports. The part I love about Prize Picks is
you don't like have a team, then your team sucks
and you have to wait till next season to play
more fantasy sports. You pick a lineup every week. Let
you play fantasy football every week, pick your favorite players
and win when they hit their projections every week, no
draft required.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
How about the new early payouts thing.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
If your lineup gets off to a hot start, you
got the option to cash out those winnings before the
game's even over.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
Download the Prize Picks app today. Use that code armstrong
to get fifty dollars in lineups. After you play your
first five dollars lineup. That's the code armstrong. You get
fifty bucks in lineups to play around with and have
fun after you play just a five dollars lineup, and
again you combine, combine players from different sports if you
want to double and triple up on one player, different.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
Stats, Prize picks. It's good to be right.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I would never actually do this, but I like playing
out the fantasy in my head. Of like, instead of
my kids going to college, just coach them up on
how to take advantage of various government programs.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Right, do that your whole life?
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Lots of people, do you know I want to get
I don't want to rush through this because there's a
lot more really really good stuff. Why don't we take
a break and we'll come back and continue the discussion,
because Kim makes some absolute blockbuster home run ball points.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
You know, do the reason you remembered you start out
as a nineteen year old instead of going to college.
Will your income is basically nothing. Maybe you're working at
a fast food joint. And then figure out all the
programs that you qualify for and that overlap, and see
how much you can get.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Well and fake it up too.
Speaker 4 (30:58):
Invent identities and social security number of steel, people's identities,
medicale children, medical problems. Yeah, at place place, the money
truck will back up to your door every single week,
us suckers who.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Are paying for it all. Okay, more on the way, yo,
yo yo. How you doing? You got your Christmas shopping done?
No me neither.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
No good Lord, has pointed out last segment by that
horrific New York Times headline. The left just seems to
think any seriousness about welfare reform is evil, or even
stopping fraud is somehow work in the wrong side of
the street, or they think.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
It's a slippery slope that if you try to stop
fraud then you'll take the program away or something. I
don't children real starve.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
Yeah, Kim Strassel makes the point in the journal that
how do you separate the wheat from the slime with
these zillions of overlapping programs. You don't, You're right checks
and the crooks know it is. Joe Thompson, lead prosecutor
in the big Minnesota cases, is said, quote, this isn't
just a few criminals exploiting the system. This is a
system that's begging to be exploited. As one of the
(32:07):
people involved in it said, yeah, we had our hands
in the cookie jar, and they just kept refilling the
cookie jar. And then she points out that even the
government auditors are numb to fraud and bug eyed at
the scams that sucked through Joe Biden's COVID dollars, your
COVID dollars. And she goes into a list of just
(32:27):
the rampant theft and people getting rich, and man, Democrat,
It's Minnesota is the new outrage, partly because it's Democrat.
Democrats have long pitched the state as a model of
a successful, generous Swedish style social welfare state financed by
high taxes, much as California pitched itself is the future
of green energy.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
How's that going? But then she gets to a point.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
This is a moment Republicans might be shouting from the
rooftops that Minnesota proves how right they were to have
included in the tax reform bill a slate of anti
fraud reforms to medicate and food stamps. But they also
might seize on this scandal to take the government fraud
argument much further, to explain that this no longer is
a situation that can be corrected with more due diligence.
It is the size and scope of the morass that
(33:10):
is enabling fraud. The argument we need to move many
people off government dependency, not just for moral and societal reasons,
but because government has an obligation to taxpayers and the
truly needy. Your point, Jack, to right size and return
to a system that can function, one that is lean
efficient and able to focus its dollars on the actual
(33:30):
mission temporary assistance in most cases. In a perfect world,
we tear down the maze we've added to for a
century and replace it with a central clearinghouse for short
term government support, able to interact efficiently with states.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Dennis, why not reimagine the government?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Dennis Miller's old line was always I'm all for helping
the helpless, not the clueless.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Right.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
Her final point, all around us is evidence that the
current structure is failing and pass the date of fixing.
You know, it's funny there is an utter lack of
courage or like ambition in Congress. And it's ironic because
the government is super gigantic and there are trillions of
dollars washing around, But the great.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Taste is for the status quo.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
How eft up would a system have to be that
Congress would say we got to step in and do it.
Kim Trossel is suggesting, we've got to totally tear this
thing down to the studs.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
And rebuild it.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
I mean, if it's not eft up enough now for that,
will it ever be? Probably not.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I guess apparently it's easy enough to demagogue that they're
trying to, you know, take the food out of hungry kids'
mouths to help billionaires, that it stops anything from getting
What I don't understand is why the left fights raining
in the fraud like they do.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Like I said, I don't get it.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
I don't think you'd want the extra money for other things.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
Yeah, well, you've got two groups on the left. You
have sincere lefty voters who I think would be with
you completely. But then you've got the professional leftists. Yeah,
the money goes somewhere, The money goes to someone right,
and they are never going to allow reform of the
welfare state because they're profiting so mightily from it. Well,
(35:15):
that's why you wish the Republicans would get the balls
to just lay this out and explain it. And much
like the Biden administration, I think it was our two
we were talking about this missed by one thousand miles
what the public's real attitude was about immigration. If you
had an eloquent, powerful Republican person or party explaining how
(35:38):
screwed up the system was and how we can feed
it and clothe and take care of everybody who really
deserves it.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
In fact, we'll do it better.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Than we're doing it right now. But we need to
reform the system completely.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
You think that would get.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Pretty good support on the right end the left. Also,
there's so much money slashing around. That gets to one
of my pet arguments that I don't know if people
are aware of when the whole argument around income inequality,
that they never count how many benefits the lower end gets, right,
if you have somebody that makes two hundred thousand dollars
a year, maybe they get to keep I don't know,
(36:12):
one hundred and ten of it after taxes.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
If you have somebody that makes fifty.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
Thousand dollars a year, they get to another fifty or
more of government money. So they've got around one hundred
thousand dollars to live with. But if you look at
the original numbers, that person makes four times as much
money as that person. Why would somebody be that dishonest
or make a mistake that enormous because they're.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Profiting from it. Yeah, because you can keep it going.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
It's like the homeless industrial complex in California is a
great example that we've had the displeasure to witness up
close and personal. The money just pours into various coffers
and organizations and individuals and all, and they will always, always, always,
always vote for the person, you know, spraying hosing them
down with the money. Saying I have the giant welfare
(36:57):
industrial complex.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
I have zero, I mean zero, not even one percent,
zero percent belief that in my lifetime will ever really
tackle this whole waste, fraud and abuse in our social
net problem.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Well, speaking of Caldy Unicorney a good Armstrong in geddy
dot com. He hit the superstore, get your ruin, the
entire country, Newsome twenty twenty eight t.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Shirt, and starve the lazy.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
More on the way if you miss a segment of
the podcast, Armstrong and Getty on demand Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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