Nothing but pork. It almost makes you wonder if they know something we don’t - that is, do we still have to worry about terrorist attacks? Because they certainly aren’t distributing the money to the likely targets:
The two cities attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, will receive far less antiterrorism money under plans unveiled today by the Department of Homeland Security, which has designated more money for many smaller cities throughout the country.
Washington and New York will receive 40 percent less in urban grant money compared to last year, with Washington dropping from $77 million to $46 million and New York falling from $207 million to $124 million, DHS officials said. The combined total means that the two areas bear almost the entire brunt of a $120 million cut in the overall budget for the program, the statistics show.
The announcement sparked another round of heated complaints from many lawmakers and local officials about the DHS grant process, which has weathered criticism from cities large and small for an allegedly haphazard and unfair distribution plan.
Hawai’i’s DHS funds were cut 38%, my local TV newspeople told me.
Oink! Oink! Oink!
If The Big (rotton) Apple needs more cash, maybe they can start by cleaning up their own mess… here’s an extract from the NYT dealing with how New Yorkers are robbing the medicare system…
“It was created 40 years ago to provide health care for the poorest New Yorkers, offering a lifeline to those who could not afford to have a baby or a heart attack. But in the decades since, New York State’s Medicaid program has also become a $44.5 billion target for the unscrupulous and the opportunistic.
This is the first of a series of articles that will examine the security, the effectiveness and the cost of New York’s Medicaid program, the largest of its kind in the nation and the state’s biggest expense.
Though intended for patients who need help walking, M. J. Trans Corporation’s medical vans regularly transported people who required no assistance.
It has drawn dentists like Dr. Dolly Rosen, who within 12 months somehow built the state’s biggest Medicaid dental practice out of a Brooklyn storefront, where she claimed to have performed as many as 991 procedures a day in 2003. After The New York Times discovered her extraordinary billings through a computer analysis and questioned the state about them, Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted on charges of stealing more than $1 million from the program.
It has drawn van services, intended as medical transportation for patients who cannot walk unaided, that regularly picked up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby. In cooperation with medical offices that order these services, the ambulettes typically cost the taxpayers more than $50 a round trip, adding up to $200 million a year. In some cases, the rides that the state paid for may never have taken place.