The Conservative Cave

Claims from current and former Minnesota state employees that have been vetted by state lawmakers allege their bosses ignored and rebuked fraud warnings for years, retaliated against the employees who raised the alarms and protected leaders who oversaw the fraud-laden programs, according to a whistleblowers' letter obtained by The Center Square.

The claims are made in an unsigned letter to Congress as it investigates fraud schemes that bilked government assistance programs for hundreds of millions of dollars in the state.

Some employees claimed they were accused of racism, in part because the money was flowing to "diverse communities," the letter said. Most of those who have been federally indicted for the fraud schemes are of Somali descent.

Minnesota state Rep. Kristin Robbins – a Republican who leads a state investigation into the fraud and has communicated with the letter's authors –submitted the letter as part of her testimony to federal lawmakers this month. Its contents have not been previously reported.

After my Wall Street Journal opinion piece, "Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ Real?" was published, the response was immediate and intense. Some readers thanked me. Many were furious. I was accused of excusing Donald Trump, minimizing harm and betraying my profession. Some messages were hostile. A few crossed into threats.

What struck me wasn’t the disagreement itself, but how quickly disagreement turned into fury. Simply questioning the idea was enough to set people off. That reaction stayed with me, because it reflected something I had already been seeing in my clinical work.

Over the past decade, one psychological pattern has quietly become dominant in American life. It cuts across education, geography and socioeconomic status. I would even go so far as to call it the defining pathology of our political era: a state of chronic political anxiety in which outrage becomes habitual and threat becomes the default lens.

A Detroit judge, her attorney father, and two other individuals were charged by federal prosecutors in an alleged "years-long scheme" to embezzle nearly $300,000 from individuals deemed incapacitated or otherwise vulnerable.

Judge Andrea Bradley-Baskin, 46, is alleged - among other things, "to have used $70,000 in a ward’s funds to purchase an ownership stake in a local bar," and "money embezzled from the estate of a ward to pay a two-year lease on a new Ford Expedition for herself."

In addition to Bradley-Baskin, her father, Avery Bradly, 72, Nancy Williams, 59, and Dwight Rashad, 69, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and several counts of money laundering. The judge was also hit with a single count for making a false statement to a federal law enforcement agent.

Bradley-Baskin and her father Avery represented a firm that was appointed to manage the estates of incapacitated wards of over 1,000 cases, the DOJ claims. The firm, Guardian & Associates, was run by indicted co-conspirator Nancy Williams, and would siphon funds from the estates of vulnerable individuals to the judge and her father - along with to a group home operator, Dwight Rashad, officials allege.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Planned Parenthood has moved to drop its legal challenge against the Trump administration for cutting off Medicaid funding to its abortion providers across the U.S.

Since July, Planned Parenthood’s attorneys have been fighting to block part of President Donald Trump’s tax bill that they argued unfairly targeted their clinics and would leave vulnerable patients with even fewer health care options.

However, in December, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration could continue to withhold Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood and other health centers. Meanwhile, a separate lawsuit filed by a coalition of mostly Democratic states also challenging the cuts, was given a similar blow in January — though that legal challenge remains ongoing.

A third lawsuit, also over the funding cuts, filed in Maine by a network of medical clinics that was also impacted by the Trump tax bill, was voluntarily dismissed in October.

Planned Parenthood moved to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit late Friday. An email seeking comment from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, was sent Monday.

“The goal of this lawsuit has always been to help Planned Parenthood patients get the care they deserve from their trusted provider. Based on the 1st Circuit’s decision, it is clear that this lawsuit is no longer the best way to accomplish that goal,” the organization said in a statement.