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TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

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Shocker: Census filled with corruption, waste

June 02, 2010
 Radio Clips

The Glenn Beck Program




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GLENN: Andrew Breitbart is here. We were talking off the air about a couple of things. There are just so many things that just don't make sense, but the world is moving so fast that we don't have time to cover all of them, and one of the things that has bothered from the beginning, one of the first moves the president did was on the census, and he started screwing with the census from day one.

BREITBART: We have in studio with us the person who's responsible for delinking the census from ACORN and that's James O'Keefe who took down ACORN. I think he's an American hero. He would have been on the cover of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair.

GLENN: Sure.

BREITBART: He would have had a reality show in which his — James O'Keefe is inspired not to just do James O'Keefe undercover videos. It's to inspire other young people, old people, too, why not, to go undercover and to report the things that the mainstream media won't report and he has done it. While he was in peril in Louisiana for basically doing what Borad does, wearing an outfit or going there in order to get the story. That's what he pleaded guilty to that misdemeanor for doing what he blatantly and admittedly does.

GLENN: Right.

BREITBART: Trying to point out that Mary Landrieu was not answering her phones and lying about it. Anyway, while he was in his legal peril, he took a job at the census with another friend, a guy by the name of Shawn who's joined us here, and I just want to hand it over to them to talk about what they did, and I think it's hysterically funny in a very, very sad way because this is our country, this is our government, and there is no oversight within our government over how our money is spent and the mainstream media laughs and mocks us for pointing this out.

GLENN: What happened, James?

JAMES: I got a job with the census bureau while I was on pretrial release in New Jersey and I found that the census supervisors were systematically encouraging me to falsify information on my timesheets and typically what happens is you are given four to five days of training. Over the course of these four to five days we left at 3:00, 3:30 p.m. They told us with he needed an hour to travel to and from work, they gave us 70 minute lunch breaks. So as much as 20 to 30% of my time I didn't even work. And the same thing happened to before my colleagues. He also got a job at the census bureau. His name is Shawn. And they were just paying us for work we didn't do.

GLENN: One was in — James was in New Jersey and Shawn was down in Louisiana. So those are many states away and they found the exact same thing. We're talking about 600 —

GLENN: Shawn on the phone?

BREITBART: 600,000 temporary jobs.

GLENN: Hey, Shawn, how are you?

CALLER: How's it going, Glenn, glad to be on your show.

GLENN: Thank you. What happened in Louisiana?

CALLER: Pretty much the same thing as with James. I found out that there was a corrosive really element to the government when it comes to the taxpayers' money, that they are just willing to be frivolous with it, you know, being given — being paid for hours that I did not work and being given mileage that I did not drive and told not to worry about it. And just how systemic the problem is. And this is the taxpayer money that they are continually messing with in a time where people are being asked to tighten their belts, here they are, you know, wasting our money and we are sick and tired of it.

GLENN: How much money — because it was 600,000 jobs. We can just take these two experiences. Have you done this yet, Andrew?

BREITBART: I —

GLENN: How much money are we talking about?



Related Video

JAMES: I did do that. If one hour is wasted at let's say $18.25 an hour which is sort of a standard rate give or take, you are talking about $10,950,000 a day. That's just one hour wasted. And they account for automatically in the policy half an hour to get to Bork. And all census employees live within five minutes of the census because it's regional. It's per town. So why would they give an hour to travel to and from work when you live five minutes away? And that's $10 million a day. That's a lot of money.

GLENN: Go ahead, Andrew.

BREITBART: Well, the interesting thing about this and I think it's a different story line than ACORN and everybody is saying, what do you expect, to take ACORN, the census down with these two videos? No, this is the beginning of the investigation into the census. This video is going to open people's eyes up and people are sending in thousands of e mails to us saying this is what we're experiencing with the census. I'm sure you are getting the same e mails. We have two cases of people who came to me proactively even before James did this who have shown me some evidence that census workers, one at a McDonald's and another at a Dunkin' Donuts, were just off in a corner, the enumerators were, actually filling out arbitrarily census forms. And so there is so —

GLENN: And why not? We've hired, we've hired criminals in some cases to do this.

BREITBART: Well, Shawn can talk to you about what one of the supervisors said regarding the type of people that they are hiring and —

GLENN: Shawn, what do they say?

CALLER: Well, I did talk to, during the fingerprinting portion of the training, one of the supervisors. I brought what I thought seen might have been a discrepancy to him and he said, you know what, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal. There's so many people going through the system that, you know, unless you have a felony or major felony or unless you come back as Jack the Ripper, you'll be fine. And I find that ironic being that there are actual rapists out there that are, you know, taking advantage of people under the guise of census workers and people being detected as predators, you know, when they go to the door of the people that are being — that are trusting the government to allow these people to come and do the work that is mandated by the Constitution. I just find that really, really appalling.

GLENN: Did you see, Andrew — maybe you can comment on this story — that there was — and I didn't have a chance to really even read the whole thing. There was an argument that census workers could enter your empty apartment if you weren't there, with your landlord? Did you see that story?

BREITBART: No.

GLENN: Yeah. I mean, the things that are — you saw it, Pat?

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: Do you remember? What was the story?

PAT: Yeah, it was just that. If you're not there at your apartment, the census workers can get your landlord to let them in. And it doesn't matter whether you are there or not. They are coming in.

GLENN: Just let you into the house.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: James —

PAT: Just look around, search your house.

GLENN: Did you hear anything like that while you were there? Was there anything else besides the money? Were there things that you sought, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not right?

JAMES: Yeah. I mean, I wanted to be very careful. The census did take privacy in terms of sharing information on the forms with other people very seriously. I resigned prior to doing any data collection because I did not want to not even go close to breaking any laws doing this investigation but mostly what I found was just waste, frivolousness, you know, whatever, signing timesheets at 9:00 in the morning. But I didn't get to that point, no.

GLENN: Andrew, where do you go next?

BREITBART: Well, James has another major investigation that he's done that goes — it's a much bigger story than the census story. What we're trying to do is to inspire the nation to become investigative journalists. If George Stephanopoulos —

GLENN: We're on the same page, Andrew.

BREITBART: If George Stephanopoulos sandbagged us yesterday, they were — they set up, ABC News flew us in to launch the census stories, and George Stephanopoulos said, hey, I want to interview these guys. And the entire thing became about James O'Keefe racist, James O'Keefe racist, James O'Keefe criminal, James O'Keefe criminal and all these things have been debunked, the racism stuff debunked. He just went straight from the Media Matters/Huffington Post narrative. He's probably getting paid by the SEIU.

GLENN: You know better than I do. Give me Stephanopoulos' connections to the White House. Give me his —

BREITBART: More than that, here's — if you want to talk about how stinking the press is, this is a guy who when Gary Aldrich was put on this week, the number one New York Times best seller for Unlimited Access in 1994, who is the one that strong armed ABC, "If you put this guy on, we will remove access to the White House." George Stephanopoulos. That's not the only thing. This guy used his influence to intimidate people when he was in the political process. How does ABC reward him? By giving him the anchor seat.

GLENN: I mean, to me it's not surprising. This is the way it works and people like Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe can't get a fair shake. The news is splitting, and Andrew is on the right path here. You as an American citizen, you must be the one that does your own homework and watch for these things and get them to get these stories and these tips to people like me and Andrew Breitbart because we will expose it while we have the opportunity. Andrew, James, best of luck. Thanks.

JAMES: Thank you.

A contested Democratic convention could lead to the ONE candidate who could beat Trump, says Michael Medved

Paul Morigi / Stringer/ Getty

On Wednesday's TV show, Glenn Beck sat down with radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic, Michael Medved.

Michael had an interesting prediction for the 2020 election outcome: a brokered convention by the DNC will usher in former First Lady Michelle Obama to run against President Donald Trump.

Watch the video below to hear why he's making this surprising forecast:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

FLASHPOINT? Virginia Gov. Northam declares state of emergency to ban firearms ahead of gun-rights rally


Zach Gibson / Stringer

On Thursday's "Glenn Beck Radio Program," BlazeTV's White House correspondent Jon Miller described the current situation in Virginia after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a state of emergency and banned people carrying guns at Capitol Square just days before a pro-Second-Amendment rally scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Jon told Glenn that Gov. Northam and the Virginia Legislature are "trying to deprive the people of their Second Amendment rights" but the citizens of Virginia are "rising up" to defend their constitutional rights.

"I do think this is the flashpoint," Jon said. "They [Virginia lawmakers] are saying, 'You cannot exercise your rights ... and instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, we are putting pressure. We're trying to escalate it and we're trying to enrage the citizenry even more'."

Glenn noted how Gov. Northam initially blamed the threat of violence from Antifa for his decision to ban weapons but quickly changed his narrative to blame "white supremacists" to vilify the people who are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution.

"What he's doing is, he's making all all the law-abiding citizens of Virginia into white supremacists," Glenn said.

"Sadly, that's exactly right," Jon replied. "And I think he knows exactly what he's doing."

Watch the video to catch more of the conversation below:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Ryan: Trump Louisiana Finale

Photo by Jim Dale

Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

At the end of Trump rallies, I would throw on my Carhartt jacket, sneak out of the press area, then blend in with everyone as they left, filing out through swinging doors.

Often, someone held the door open for me. Just 30 minutes earlier, the same person had most likely had most likely hissed at me for being a journalist. And now they were Sunday smiles and "Oh, yes, thank you, sir" like some redneck concierge.

People flooded out of the arena with the stupidity of a fire drill mishap, desperate to survive.

The air smacked you as soon as you crossed the threshold, back into Louisiana. And the lawn was a wasteland of camping chairs and coolers and shopping bags and to-go containers and soda cans and articles of clothing and even a few tents.

In Monroe, in the dark, the Trump supporters bobbled over mounds of waste like elephants trying to tiptoe. And the trash was as neutral to them as concrete or grass. They plodded over it because it, an object, had somehow gotten in their way.

It did not matter that they were responsible for this wreckage.Out in the sharp-edged moonlight, rally-goers hooted and yapped and boogied and danced, and the bbq food truck was all smoke and paper plates.

They were even more pumped than they had been before the rally, like 6,000 eight year olds who'd been chugging Mountain Dew for hours. Which made Donald Trump the father, the trooper, God of the Underworld, Mr. Elite, Sheriff on high horse, the AR-15 sticker of the family.

Ritualistic mayhem, all at once. And, there in Louisiana, Trump's supporters had gotten a taste of it. They were all so happy. It bordered on rage.

Still, I could not imagine their view of America. Worse, after a day of strange hostilities, I did not care.

My highest priority, my job as a reporter, was to care. To understand them and the world that they inhabit. But I did not give a damn and I never wanted to come back.

Worst of all, I would be back. In less than a week.

Was this how dogs felt on the 4th of July? Hunched in a corner while everyone else gets drunk and launches wailing light into the sky? configurations of blue and red and white.

It was 10:00 p.m. and we'd been traveling since 11:00 a.m., and we still had 5 hours to go and all I wanted was a home, my home, any home, just not here, in the cold sweat of this nowhere. Grey-mangled sky. No evidence of planes or satellites or any proof of modern-day. Just century-old bridges that trains shuffled over one clack at a time.

And casinos, all spangles and neon like the 1960s in Las Vegas. Kitchy and dumb, too tacky for lighthearted gambling. And only in the nicer cities, like Shreveport, which is not nice at all.

And swamp. Black water that rarely shimmered. Inhabited by gadflies and leeches and not one single fish that was pretty.

Full of alligators, and other killing types. The storks gnawing on frogs, the vultures never hungry. The coyotes with nobody to stop them and so much land to themselves. The roaches in the wild, like tiny wildebeests.

Then, the occasional deer carcass on the side of the road, eyes splayed as if distracted, tongue out, relaxed but empty. The diseased willows like skeletons in hairnets. The owls that never quit staring. A million facets of wilderness that would outlive us all.

Because Nature has poise. It thrives and is original.

Because silence is impossible. Even in an anechoic chamber, perfectly soundproofed, you can hear your own heartbeat, steady as a drum. A never-ending war.

I put "Headache" by Grouper on repeat as we glided west. We were deadlocked to asphalt, rubber over tarface.

And I thought about lines from a Rita Dove poem titled "I have been a stranger in a strange land"

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

Wasn't that exactly what I was doing? Looking for an impossible answer, examining every single accident, eager for meaning? telling myself, "If it happens and matters the next year, in America, I want to be there, or to know what it means. I owe it to whoever cares to listen."

Humans are collectors and I had gone overboard.

Because maybe this wasn't even my home. These landmarks, what did they mean? Was I obvious here? When I smiled, did I trick them into believing that I felt some vague sense of approval? Or did my expressions betray me?

Out in all that garbage-streaked emptiness — despite the occasional burst of passing halogen — I couldn't tell if everything we encountered was haunted or just old, derelict, broken, useless. One never-ending landfill.

Around those parts, they'd made everything into junk. Homes. Roads. Glass. Nature. Life itself, they made into junk.

I cringed as we passed yet another deer carcass mounded on the side of the road.

As written in Job 35:11,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds in the sky?

Nobody. Look at nature and you feel something powerful. Look at an animal, in all of its untamable majesty, and you capture a deep love, all swept up in the power of creation. But, here, all I saw were poor creatures who people had slammed into and kept driving. Driving to where? For what reason? What exactly was so important that they left a trail of dead animals behind them?

So I crossed myself dolorously and said an "Our Father" and recited a stanza from Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

Out here, nothing but darkness. Needing some light, by God. Give me something better than a Moon that hides like an underfed coward.

Jade told me about some of the more traumatic things she'd seen while working at the State Fair.

"Bro, they pull roaches out of the iced lemonade jugs and act like nothing happened."

"All right but what about the corn dogs?"

"You do not want to know, little bro."

She looked around in the quiet. "Back in the day, the Louisiana Congress refused to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21," she said. "They didn't want to lose all that drunk gambler money. So the federal government cut off funding to highways."

We glided through moon-pale landscape for an hour before I realized what she had meant. That there weren't any light poles or billboards along the road. Nothing to guide us or distract us. Just us, alone. And it felt like outer space had collapsed, swallowed us like jellybeans.

Like two teenagers playing a prank on the universe.

In the cozy Subaru Crosstrek, in the old wild night, brimming with the uncertainty of life and the nonchalance of failure, we paraded ourselves back to Dallas. Alive in the river silence that follows us everywhere.

New installments come Mondays and Thursdays. Next, the Iowa caucuses. Check out my Twitter. Email me at kryan@blazemedia.com

Amid election security concerns, states should look to blockchain

Wikimedia Commons

The Iowa primary is just around the corner, and concerns of election interference from the last presidential election still loom. Back in 2016, The Associated Press found that a majority of U.S. elections systems still use Windows 7 as an operating system, making them highly susceptible to bugs and errors. And last year, a Mississippi voter tried multiple times to vote for the candidate of his choice, but the system continuously switched his vote to the other candidate. It's pretty clear: America's voting systems desperately need an update.

That's where blockchain voting comes in.

Blockchain voting is a record-keeping system that's 100% verifiable and nearly impossible to hack. Blockchain, the newest innovation in cybersecurity, is set to grow into a $20 billion industry by 2025. Its genius is in its decentralized nature, distributing information throughout a network of computers, requiring would-be hackers to infiltrate a much larger system. Infiltrating multiple access points spread across many computers requires a significant amount of computing power, which often costs more than hackers expect to get in return.

Blockchain voting wouldn't allow for many weak spots. For instance, Voatz, arguably the leading mobile voting platform, requires a person to take a picture of their government-issued ID and a picture of themselves before voting (a feature, of course, not present in vote-by-mail, where the only form of identity verification is a handwritten signature, which is easily forgeable). Voters select their choices and hit submit. They then receive an immediate receipt of their choices via email, another security feature not present in vote-by-mail, or even in-person voting. And because the system operates on blockchain technology, it's nearly impossible to tamper with.

Votes are then tabulated, and the election results are published, providing a paper trail, which is a top priority for elections security experts.

The benefits of blockchain voting can't be dismissed. Folks can cast their vote from the comfort of their homes, offices, etc., vastly increasing the number of people who can participate in the electoral process. Two to three-hour lines at polling places, which often deter voters, would become significantly diminished.

Even outside of the voting increase, the upsides are manifold. Thanks to the photo identification requirements, voter fraud—whether real or merely suspected—would be eliminated. The environment would win, too, since we'd no longer be wasting paper on mail-in ballots. Moreover, the financial burden on election offices would be alleviated, because there's decreased staff time spent on the election, saving the taxpayer money.

From Oregon to West Virginia, elections offices have already implemented blockchain voting, and the results have been highly positive. For example, the city of Denver utilized mobile voting for overseas voters in their 2019 municipal elections. The system was secure and free of technical errors, and participants reported that it was very user-friendly. Utah County used the same system for their 2019 primary and general elections. An independent audit revealed that every vote that was cast on the app was counted and counted correctly. These successful test cases are laying the groundwork for even larger expansions of the program in 2020.

With this vital switch, our elections become significantly more secure, accurate, and efficient. But right now, our election infrastructure is a sitting duck for manipulation. Our current lack of election integrity undermines the results of both local and national elections, fans the flames of partisanship, and zaps voter confidence in the democratic system. While there's never a silver bullet or quick fix to those kinds of things, blockchain voting would push us much closer to a solution than anything else.

Chris Harelson is the Executive Director at Prosperity Council and a Young Voices contributor.