Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 10/12

[SVPete]

So the FBI Did Another Big Raid You Might Have Missed...

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/10/12/so-the-fbi-just-did-another-big-raid-you-might-have-missed-n4958226

Did you hear the one about the FBI investigation in the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners that caught one of them with his hand in the cookie jar of his own nonprofit?
...
Three years ago, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott appointed longtime social worker and behavioral-health entrepreneur Mujahid Muhammad to the city's Board of School Commissioners. His primary organization, KEYS — Keep Encouraging Youth to Succeed — since 2009 purportedly was involved it counseling, youth recreation, senior services, workforce training, and “culinary therapy”—using grocery deliveries and cooking lessons with families needing mental-health support.
...
Project Baltimore reported last week that it "has been digging into KEYS Empowers financials and found that in federal filings, KEYS reports paying out over $400,000 in salaries to zero employees."

Then there's this from the Baltimore Banner: "A nonprofit called KEYS Empowers Inc. that lists the same address as its headquarters and Muhammad as the executive director reported receiving more than $4.7 million in government funds for the 2023 and 2024 tax years, tax filings show. That money made up the entirety of KEYS Empowers revenue for those years."

The raid was part of the Trump administration's "coordinated crackdown on Medicaid fraud across the country," as Fox45 put it.

Fox45 News also reported that City Schools is “in the process of terminating its contractual agreement with KEYS Development," and that while the "FBI has not disclosed the focus of its investigation into Keys Empowers or Muhammad... the nonprofit’s most recent IRS filings do raise some red flags."

A separate Fox45 report found that an "analysis of Medicaid spending data from 2018 to 2024 published by the federal government revealed that KEYS received $32.3 million taxpayer dollars through the program."

That's a lot of cooking lessons for an organization with reportedly zero employees.

[SVPete]

NYC loses more than half of pied-a-terre tax appeals, threatening projected revenue pot: ‘Out the window’

https://nypost.com/2026/10/11/us-news/nyc-loses-more-than-half-of-pied-a-terre-tax-appeals/

More than half of the thousands of homeowners who have already appealed the city’s new pied-à-terre tax have won their cases, threatening the levy’s much ballyhooed revenue potential.

When Big Apple Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the controversial tax on luxury second homes — or co-ops worth more than $1 million and houses over $5 million — in the city, they claimed the policy would generate $500 million-plus in revenue.

But the city Department of Finance told The Post that as of Friday morning, exemption applications had hit 10,000, with a whopping 5,700 approved — and the lawsuits and exemption requests are still coming in fast and furiously.

At best, Mandani's projected revenue claims were sourced from someone's rectum and founded on hopes that many/most property owners would be intimidated into paying instead of going through an onerous appeal process.