(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) released the following statement regarding a new report from the Social Security Administration (SSA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that found that SSA failed to properly record the deaths of 1.2 million deceased beneficiaries on the Death Master File, which is exclusively maintained by the agency.[1]

“It is inexcusable the federal government can’t determine whether a recipient of federal taxpayer money is alive or dead.  The importance of the Death Master File cannot be overstated.  

Failing to maintain this file costs taxpayers at least $120 million
every year.  Those are dollars we borrow here and overseas to pay dead
people.  That is embarrassing, especially when SSA is overseeing
retirement and disability programs that are going bankrupt.  Congress needs to hold SSA accountable for their breathtaking incompetence,” Dr. Coburn said. 

The impact of SSA’s failure to properly record these deaths is widespread and results in millions of American tax dollars paid to dead people each year.  All federal agencies are currently required to check the DMF to ensure the individuals receiving benefits are alive.  In June 2010, President Obama directed that before the release of any federal funds all agencies were required to check the DMF.[2]  SSA’s failure to maintain an accurate DMF also creates difficulties for the administration’s current effort to develop a “Do Not Pay solution” in response to the President’s directive, which includes all agencies checking a database of information from the DMF before a payment is made to an individual.[3]

The OIG report identified the following specific agencies that provide benefits directly to individuals by relying on the DMF:  Railroad Retirement Board; Department of Defense; Office of Personal Management; Department of Veterans Affairs; and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Therefore, SSA’s failure to properly maintain information on whether an individual is alive or dead touches every payment made by the government.  Past examples of government payments made to dead people include:

•    The Department of Agriculture sent $1.1 billion in farming subsidies to deceased farmers;

•    Medicare paid $92 million in claims for medical supplies prescribed by dead doctors and $8.2 million for medical supplies prescribed for dead patients; and

•    The Department of Health and Human Services sent 11,000 dead people $3.9 million in assistance to pay heating and cooling costs
.[4]

Further exacerbating the problem, SSA allows the Department of Commerce to sell the DMF not only to public entities, but also private companies.  Private entities, such as banks, hospitals, universities, and insurance companies, use the DMF to verify the identity of individuals and prevent fraud.  The same SSA OIG report determined that since 2001, 1,556 dead people earned wages totaling about $158 million.  While some of these could be errors, others potentially involved fraudsters using Social Security numbers of individuals that died up to 31 years ago.[5]

SSA OIG also found the failure to maintain the DMF produced inaccuracies in the E-verify program, which is used by employers to determine if a potential employee is authorized to work.  The audit determined that when an individual’s death is not recorded by SSA in the DMF, E-verify indicated the individual claiming the Social Security number is legally able to work.  As such, individuals who would otherwise be illegal to work can use Social Security numbers of dead people to appear to be legal to work.

In response to the report, Sen. Tom Coburn stated “The importance of the Death Master File cannot be overstated, especially in these bleak economic times with limited tax dollars to go around.  At the bare minimum, the federal government needs to stop sending payments to dead people.  If SSA cannot be trusted to properly and accurately maintain this important information, then Congress should determine if another agency can perform this basic function.”

Sen. Coburn previously called for SSA to improve its management of data on the deceased in October 2010, following the Internal Revenue Service sending $18 million in stimulus checks to 71,688 deceased individuals based on information in the DMF.[6]  In response, Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue responded:  “Absent a report of death, it is extremely expensive and may even be impossible to determine if a person is alive or dead particularly if the person died many years ago.”[7]

[1]   Social Security Administration, Office of Inspector General, Title II Deceased Beneficiaries Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident, Report A-09-11-21171 (July 9, 2012).
[2]   The White House, Office of the Secretary, Presidential Memorandum – Enhancing Payment Accuracy Through a “Do Not Pay List” (June 18, 2010),http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memorandum-enhancing-payment-accuracy-through-a-do-not-pay-list.
[3]   Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies (April 12, 2012), http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2012/m-12-11.pdf.
[4]   Sen. Coburn previously reported that government agencies paid over $1 billion paid to dead people over a ten year period.  See Sen. Tom Coburn, Federal Programs to Die For:  American Tax Dollars Sent Six Feet Under (October 31, 2010), http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=406062be-b959-4798-b55e-39029197a9fc.
[5]   Social Security Administration, Office of Inspector General, Title II Deceased Beneficiaries Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident, Report A-09-11-21171 (July 9, 2012).
[6]   Sen. Tom Coburn, Federal Programs to Die For:  American Tax Dollars Sent Six Feet Under (October 31, 2010), http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=406062be-b959-4798-b55e-39029197a9fc.
[7]   August 14, 2009 Letter from Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue to Senator Tom Coburn.

WesternJournalism.com has published an article by Doug Brook, that information provided to congressional committees by ATF whistle-blowers and leaks within the Department of Justice prove Eric Holder to be either criminally complicit in the Fast and Furious scheme and cover-up, or the most incompetent, congenitally comatose Attorney General in the nation’s history. 

He asserts that though Holder is many things, he is not incompetent, at least not in the willful “execution-upon-command” of illegal and despicable enterprises; especially when those enterprises involve an Administration-generated murder in Oklahoma City of Kenneth Michael Trentadue while in custody of the FBI. 

“You need to know that Eric Holder…played a key role in covering up the torture-murder death of my brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue.”

This is what Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue wrote in December of 2008 to prospective incoming chairman of the Senate Justice Committee, Patrick Leahy. The newly-elected Barack Obama had made Holder his choice for Attorney General, and Trentadue was going to do everything in his power to stop this shameful appointment going forward.

Kenneth Trentadue was killed in Oklahoma City on August 21st of 1995, four months after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. He had been taken into custody by the FBI and placed in an isolation cell at a federal facility in El Reno, Oklahoma.
 
The official government report on the cause of death presented to Trentadue’s family stated that Kenneth hanged himself in his cell. But massive bruises and lacerations from head to toe compelled even the Oklahoma City medical examiner to state “very likely he was murdered.”
 
Using emails and handwritten notes acquired in a 1997 wrongful death lawsuit against the DOJ, Trentadue demonstrated quite conclusively in his correspondence to Patrick Leahy that then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had engineered a scheme to sidetrack any investigation into his brother’s death in order to “…deflect congressional oversight and media attention…”

A fifteen-year investigation by Jesse Trentadue revealed that Eric Holder had covered up the murder of his brother in order to prevent congressional investigators linking the death, and eventually the Clinton Administration itself, to the Oklahoma City bombing. And Holder’s efforts to derail the Fast and Furious probe have made it clear that 20 years have not changed the Attorney General’s propensity for corruption and deceit. For from the aftermath of Oklahoma City to the smuggling of guns across the Mexican border, Eric Holder has callously concealed murders for which two administrations have been responsible.

It’s hardly surprising that Holder’s DOJ minions have decided to not prosecute the Attorney General for the comparatively minor offense of refusing to provide Congress with subpoenaed documents. After all, Eric Holder has gotten away with murder—or at least with being an accessory after the fact—for nearly 2 decades.
 
Of course, Republicans MIGHT decide to charge Eric Holder with his many crimes when the November victory of Mitt Romney places the Department of Justice in GOP hands.  The Party might also bring Barack Obama to justice, both for participation in Fast and Furious and his willful, duplicitous role as Manchurian Candidate.
 
Yes, they might. But then, Holder and Obama might CONFESS too! The one is just as likely as the other.    Click here for the posting on Western Journalism.

Egypt’s "first sex-slave marriage" took place mere days after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi was made president.

On the Egyptian TV show Al Haqiqa ("the Truth"), journalist Wael
al-Ibrashi showed a video-clip of a man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, "marrying" his
slave.  Before making the woman, who has a non-Egyptian accent, repeat
after him the Koran’s Surat al-Ikhlas, instead of saying the usual "I
marry myself to you," the woman said, "I enslave myself to you" kissing him in front of an applauding audience.

Then, even though she was wearing a hijab, her owner-husband declared that she is forbidden from such trappings and commanded her to be stripped of them, so as "not to break Allah’s laws." She took her veil and abaya off, revealing, by Muslim standards, a seductive red dress (all the other women present were veiled). The man claps for her and the video-clip ends.
 
The man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, who identified himself as an Islamic scholar who studied at Al Azhar and an expert at Islamic jurisprudence, then appeared on the show, giving several Islamic explanations to justify his marriage, from Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s "sunna," or practice, of "marrying" enslaved captive women, to Koran 4:3, which declares: "Marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four… or what your right hands possess."
 
Though the term malk al-yamin literally means "that which is owned by your right hand," for all practical purposes, and to avoid euphemisms, according to Islamic doctrine and history, she is simply a sex-slave. Linguistic evidence even suggests that she is seen not as a human but as a possession.
 
Even stripping the sex-slave of her hijab, the way Awn did, has precedent. According to Islamic jurisprudence, whereas the free (Muslim) woman is mandated to wear a hijab, sex-slaves are mandated only to be covered from the navel to the knees—with everything else exposed. Awn even explained how Caliph Omar, one of the first "righteous caliphs," would strip sex-slaves of their garments, whenever he saw them overly dressed in the marketplace.
 
Awn further went on to declare that he believes the idea of sex slave marriage is ideal for today’s Egyptian society.  He would re-institute sex-slavery—allowing men to marry and copulate much earlier in life, and women who want to dress freely to do so, as technically they are sex-slaves and mandated to go about loosely attired.
 
The other guest on the show, Dr. Abdullah al-Naggar, a professor in Islamic jurisprudence at Al Azhar, fiercely attacked Awn for reviving this practice, calling on him and his slave-wife to "repent," to stop dishonoring Islam, and arguing that "there is no longer sex-slavery"—to which Awn responded by sarcastically asking, "Who said sex-slavery is over? What—because the UN said so?"
 
In many ways, this exchange between Awn, who advocates sex-slave marriage, and the Al Azhar professor symbolizes the clash between today’s "Islamists" and "moderate Muslims." For a long time, Al Azhar has been engaged in the delicate balancing act of affirming Islam while still advocating modernity according to Western standards, whereas the Islamists—from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Salafis—bred with contempt and disrespect for the West, are only too eager to revive Islamic practices that defy Western standards.
 
While this may be the first sex slave marriage to take place in Egypt’s recent history, it is certainly not the first call to revive the practice. Earlier, Egyptian Sheikh Huwaini, lamenting that the "good old days" of Islam were over, declared that, in an ideal Muslim society, "when I want a sex-slave," he should be able to go "to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her."
 
Click here for the full report from Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

In an earlier additional report on the same subject, a Muslim woman, Salwa al-Mutairi, a political activist and former parliamentary candidate for Kuwait’s government said she seeks to "revive the institution of sex-slavery."  A brief English report appeared in the Kuwait Times, but has since been removed but not before a copy was captured by bloggers.  If you read and understand Arabic, the news website, Al Arabiya, has the sordid details, including a video of Mutairi addressing the topic.

In short, Mutairi begins by insisting that "it’s of course true" that "the prophet of Islam legitimized sex-slavery." She recounts how when she was in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, she asked various sheikhs and muftis (learned, authoritative Muslims) about the legality of sex-slavery according to Sharia: they all confirmed it to be perfectly legal; Kuwaiti ulema further pointed out that extra "virile" men—Western synonymous include "sex-crazed," "lecherous," "perverted"—would do well to purchase sex-slaves to sate their appetites without sinning.
 
Mutairi said, "A Muslim state must [first] attack a Christian state—sorry, I mean any non-Muslim state—and they [the women, the future sex-slaves] must be captives of the raid. Is this forbidden? Not at all; according to Islam, sex slaves are not at all forbidden. Quite the contrary, the rules regulating sex-slaves differ from those for free women [i.e., Muslim women]: the latter’s body must be covered entirely, except for her face and hands, whereas the sex-slave is kept naked from the bellybutton on up—she is different from the free woman; the free woman has to be married properly to her husband, but the sex-slave—he just buys her and that’s that.

She offers concrete suggestions: "For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives. So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait; better that than have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations. I don’t see any problem in this, no problem at all."

Mutairi suggests the enslaved girls be at least 15 years-old and further justified the institution of sex-slavery by evoking 8th century caliph, Harun Rashid—a name some may recall from Arabian Nights bedtime stories; a name some may be surprised to discover politically active Muslims modeling their lives after:  "And the greatest example we have is Harun al-Rashid: when he died, he had 2,000 sex slaves—so it’s okay, nothing wrong with it."

And thus the Arab Spring continues.

The rubber may be meeting the road in the relationship Barack Obama has with African-Americans who are believing Christians.

The Coalition of African American Pastors, fed up with Obama’s
anti-Biblical stance on gay marriage, is demanding a meeting with Obama
— and so far, they’re getting nowhere. 

The Reverend Bill Owens, spokesman for the group, said:

“We have requested a meeting with President Obama and until he meets with us, we are going to ask black Christians to withhold their support until he personally hears our concerns. More than anything, this is an issue of biblical principles and President Obama is carrying our nation down a dangerous road. Many African-Americans were once proud of our president but now many are ashamed of his actions. We can’t compete with the Hollywood folks who are raising the big bucks for the president. But it was black folks who rallied around him in 2008 and for him to ignore our request with a group of clergy who represents tens of thousands of black Christians of many denominations is an insult. Let me be clear about this; our group does not speak for any denomination – not the AME (African Methodist Episcopal Church) nor COGIC (Church of God In Christ) or anyone else. But many of our pastors represent a number of African-American Christians who are tired of being taken for granted. One foolish move could ruin the president’s chances for a second term and I believe he is dangerously close to making such a mistake by ignoring us. You have to stand on the Word of God regardless of your race or political affiliation. If the president is serious about his faith then why would he not meet with men of faith of his own race?"

Click here for more from www.BreitBart.com.
 

The Jerusalem Post is reporting this morning that hackers from WikiLeaks will begin releasing what it calls "The Syria Files." 

Speaking at a press conference today a WikiLeaks spokeswoman said the
material would "shed light on inner workings of Syrian government and on
the hypocrisy of the West and Western companies."  Apparently,
there are no Eastern companies or improper government influence from
Russia, China or Iran which have long supported a genocidal approach to
internal dissent and freedom in Syria.  

WikiLeaks said Thursday it had begun publishing more than 2 million emails from Syrian government officials that would embarrass not only Damascus, which is trying to crush a 16-month rebellion, but also its opponents.

Sarcasm: Russia and Iran must be blameless of all violence with no documented shipments of arms, military trainers, or internal security forces into Syria discovered by WikiLeaks … evidence elsewhere notwithstanding.

Speaking at a press conference in London, a Wikileaks spokeswoman said the emails were from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was quoted in a statement saying: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents."

Question: Who are Syria’s "opponents" when the government is killing its own people?

Click here for more from The Jerusalem Post.