☕️ FRAUD AND OUTREACH ☙ Wednesday, March 4, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Dr. Oz launches $124B NY Medicaid fraud probe; insane NY fraud stats; Walz to testify; Three power shifts redrawing politics; Iran phones the CIA on Day Two for terms; Croquet loses everything; more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! What a morning! My hard drive filled up creating technical problems and a late-breaking Times story dragged me back into research mode. Today’s post is a dot-connecting beast with stats that will blow your socks off. Your jam-packed roundup includes: Dr. Oz drops a 50-question interrogation on New York’s $124 BILLION Medicaid fraud machine — where the #1 job is now billing the government for imaginary grandma visits; Governor Walz and AG Ellison face sworn testimony in Part II of the Minnesota fraud hearing; three tectonic political power shifts are redrawing the American map — and corporate media hasn’t connected a single dot; Iran’s intelligence service called the CIA on Day Two begging for terms, proving the Venezuela model is working exactly as planned; and Jasmine ‘Croquet’ Crockett loses her primary AND her House seat in one spectacular evening.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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While Middle East missiles obliterate the headlines, on the domestic front, the fraud train continues chugging down the tracks toward potentially becoming the biggest story of 2026. There are so many dots to connect now that it’s starting to look like the Blue States have chickenpox. Early this morning, CBS ran a story headlined, “Minnesota Gov. Walz, AG Ellison to testify Wednesday at House Oversight Committee hearing on fraud.” Meanwhile, the New York Post ran its own exclusive, headlined, “Dr. Oz launches fraud probe of New York’s $124B Medicaid program.”

Let’s start with New York. The news —completely ignored by corporate media, hence NY Post’s “exclusive” label— was that CMS Administrator Dr. Oz fired off a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul containing fifty pointed questions demanding answers about cost controls, fraud prevention, and oversight of provider enrollment. Fifty questions. That’s not a letter; it’s practically an entire deposition.

Dr. Oz has good reason to be suspicious. New York’s average Medicaid spending per beneficiary is $12,528. For context, that’s 36% higher than the national average for state spending— and nearly 80% higher per resident than anywhere else in the country. Either New Yorkers are sicker than stray dogs, somebody is getting creative with the paperwork, or there’s a new diagnosis code called “Sucker Syndrome.” None of the possible explanations is any good.

The stats are mind-blowing. 6.8 million New Yorkers are now on Medicaid. That’s 34% of the state’s population. One in three! New York spent $72.7 billion on personal care and ‘home aide services’ between 2018-2024. That comes to —get this— roughly half of all NY Medicaid spending. Just for personal care/home aides.

That wasn’t even the most shocking fact.

At $124 billion, New York’s Medicaid budget alone is larger than the GDP of most countries. It’s bigger than the entire federal budget of some NATO allies. All for one state’s medical welfare program. (And needless to say, New York’s health statistics are in the toilet. It ain’t helping.)

🏴‍☠️ In his letter, Dr. Oz helpfully provided Governor Hochul with more specific examples. One of the bigger ones was where New York providers billed Medicaid for both adult day care and transportation services, a cozy arrangement he warned could invite “coordinated fraud” via “recruitment schemes, phantom rides, inflated mileage claims” and transportation to adult day care sessions “that never occurred.”

He’s not just speculating wildly. Recently, two scammers pleaded guilty to a $68 million adult day care fraud, for kickbacks for services they never provided. Ten more defendants were arrested in a scheme to bill Medicaid for millions in home health services that never happened. The allegations are shocking. It wasn’t just paperwork fraud. In one case, this one reaching an eye-popping $120 million in fraud, the fraudsters threatened frail seniors into cooperating and turning over their Medicaid numbers.

Easy, big money attracts the worst elements of society. The worst elements come with violence and coercion. Violence and coercion targeting our most vulnerable citizens. It is a system designed for abuse and exploitation.

🏴‍☠️ One major problem fueling all this fraud is New York’s “Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program,” which lets Medicaid patients hire their own home aides, including family members. No licenses, background checks, bonds, or clearances are required. It’s the honor system. (The honor system, in a place whose state bird is a pigeon being eaten by a giant rat.) You can imagine all the different ways fraudsters can abuse that.

As bad as all those statistics are, there’s one more that almost breaks the fabric of space-time. It shreds the historic fraud map and throws this 2026 fraud scandal into totally new territory. Maybe outer space. You might want to sit down for this.

“In New York,” Dr. Oz reported, “the single most prominent job is a personal care service. Retail is not the top job in New York anymore.” Think of that. The number one job category in New York State isn’t retail, finance, or tech. It’s Medicaid-funded home aides. Fraud has literally become the state’s primary employment sector. New York doesn’t have a healthcare system with a fraud problem. No. It has a fraud program with a healthcare label.

New York used to be famous for Wall Street traders and Broadway actors. Now its signature profession is getting paid by the government to visit grandma. Or just to say you visited Grandma. Either way, it pays the same, and Grandma lacks capacity to testify.

New York is now home to 623,000 “home aides,” outnumbering retail workers almost three-to-one. The ranks of home aides swelled 10% last year alone. They produce no revenue. They are almost entirely funded by Medicaid. Locusts. Hey, you can’t blame them. Sitting at home while making fake visits to grandma is a lot easier than selling knockoff iPhones to Chinese tourists in Times Square.

The state’s biggest industry is now billing the federal government for home care. That is a fact.

In other words, New York is rapidly reaching the socialist tipping point, where transfer payments exceed the productive sector’s ability to generate revenue. Sooner or later, Margaret Thatcher famously said, you start running out of other people’s money. Right after the last retail worker switches the lights off.

New York Democrats are not failing to catch the fraud— they’ve designed a patronage machine that incentivizes and rewards fraud. The tiny fraction getting caught, I would bet, are the ones failing to feed their cut back into the political system. That explains everything: why Governor Hochul fights to protect it, why the state’s spending is 80% higher than the national average, and why the whistleblowers got fired instead of the fraudsters getting prosecuted.

🏴‍☠️ Dr. Oz is also targeting Minnesota and California. He noted that, “there are more hospices in Los Angeles County alone than in the rest of the country.” These are the three deep-blue states with the loosest oversight and, unsurprisingly, the most apparent fraud.

The new probe is framed as part of President Trump’s “war on fraud” initiative. It’s not going away. Last week, Dr. Oz and JD Vance gave a joint announcement about the broader crackdown, including a new 6-month moratorium on any new enrollments in medical equipment, after finding over $1 billion in that area (durable medical equipment, or DME).

It’s early, but it feels as though the Administration is expanding the fraud investigations, rather than letting the issue drift away on Lake Minnesota. Speaking of Minnesota, that’s the second part of today’s puzzle assembly session.

🔥 At 10 AM Eastern Standard Time this morning, Minnesota Governor Tim “Code Talker” Walz and Attorney General Keith “Money is Power” Ellison are both scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in Part II of the Committee’s investigation into what might be the biggest social services fraud in American history— at least $9 billion looted from programs meant to feed children, support autistic kids, house the disabled, and provide Medicaid to the most vulnerable Minnesotans.

In other words, the fraudsters were not just stealing taxpayer money. Like in New York, they were stealing from children, autistic kids, the disabled, the elderly, and the sick. They are indeed the lowest of the low. Even below pond scum. They are the icky residue that pond scum leaves behind. The Residuans.

Even more despicable are the people who looked the other way, helped the scummy Residuans, covered up for them, and all the while failed to protect our most vulnerable citizens.

In Part I of the Oversight hearing, held back in January, state lawmakers told Congressmen that, at minimum, Governor Walz and AG Ellison failed to stop the fraud. According to whistleblowers who’d tried to expose the massive scheme, Walz and Ellison listened carefully to their alarmed reports, focused intently on the problem, and then squashed the whistleblowers into jelly. Minnesota’s Legislative Auditor piled on, reporting that the state’s Behavioral Health Administration failed to comply with most requirements, lacked basic internal controls to prevent waste and abuse, and essentially held the bag while Somali pirates scooped in billions.

Adding insult to injury, the pirates turned around and exported the money —money provided by generous Americans to care for sick children and disabled seniors— to foreign countries and terrorists. It’s hard to imagine a more horrifying scenario.

Making things even more awkward for Attorney General Ellison, there’s an inconvenient 2021 audio recording of his call with members of the Somali community— some of whom were later convicted of defrauding millions in taxpayer money by the DOJ after donating to Ellison’s campaign. Ellison’s office points to its record of prosecuting over 300 other Medicaid fraud cases as some kind of defense.

But there’s a weird problem. If he was so diligently prosecuting fraud, then how did the biggest fraud scheme in US history happen anyway? Hmmm? We’re waiting.

Corrupt drug prosecutors have been known to aggressively prosecute their patrons’ rivals, which both helps their friends and provides cover against future corruption allegations. An experienced RICO lawyer might guess that Ellison’s ‘300 fraud prosecutions’ —which all appeared after the fraud story hove into view— were of his Somali donors’ competitors, and were just meant to create an illusion of justice. I’m just spitballing. It’s only a theory. Don’t sue me.

During the Hearing Part I, Ellison regurgitated a series of defiant, Hillary-esque non-answers. Expect more of the same today. Walz, on the other hand, will experience his first sworn Congressional testimony, and we will learn how he handles the pressure. “Coach” Walz has only previously faced fawning media who tossed softballs and whispered the answers to him between cuts. It should be fun. Stand by for updates.

We don’t yet know how big and invasive the fraud investigation could get. So we can only wonder about several potentially massive possibilities. How might the scandal affect the presidential prospects of oleaginous Governor Newsom? Governor Walz already announced he won’t run for re-election. Who else might have to resign in disgrace? Will any public officials be arrested?

Then I wondered: How will funding freezes and fraud crackdowns affect Democrat fundraising before the midterms? And then I tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. C’mon down here with me.

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As you well know, the November midterms are time-traveling towards us at warp speed. As Ferris Bueller sagely noted, Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. We have a bunch of dots to connect.

Something unprecedented is happening in American politics, and it’s not getting nearly enough attention, probably because it’s terrible news for corporate media. Three tectonic shifts are happening simultaneously —all pulling in the same direction— and together they’re redrawing the entire political power map.

Shift One: The Money Gap.

For the first time in modern political history, Democrats are sounding alarms about fundraising. The Republican National Committee started 2026 with nearly $100 million more cash on hand than the Democratic National Committee. Republican party committees and super PACs ended 2025 with $320 million in cash— nearly double the Democrats’ $167 million. The world’s richest man has pledged to support Republicans during the midterms. The Hill, last month:

But that’s just the appetizer. Trump’s allied PACs —led by MAGA Inc.— have stockpiled somewhere between $400 and $500 million in dry powder, sitting in the vault, waiting to deploy for the midterms. The Democrats have nothing remotely comparable.

Even the New York Times —not exactly the GOP’s cheerleading squad— ran a piece headlined “Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats.” Democratic donor network co-founder Bradley Beychok admitted, “Any Democrat who isn’t concerned isn’t serious.”

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: where is all that money coming from? You would think Democrats would be crying about how unfair all this “dark money” is. But they aren’t. Why not?

Shift Two: The Institutional Realignment.

One huge reason is that the traditional Democratic power institutions are dying, retreating, or switching sides. The old coalition —Hollywood, Silicon Valley, mainstream media, and unions— is fracturing in real time.

Hollywood still writes checks, just fewer of them. And nobody cares what actors think anymore. So stars have quietly started doing what the News Record called “audience sorting”— leaning conservative because that’s where the viewers went. “In a pre-2024 world, shifting right might have been a career-ender, but in 2026, it is seen as audience sorting,” the Record explained. That, combined with cultural pushback, and with one disastrous debut following another catastrophic box-office blunder, Hollywood is shrinking. The Wrap, January:

Honey, I shrunk the Oscars! Actually, the rotten Oscars can’t even draw flies, much less well-heeled progressive donors.

🔥 But perhaps Silicon Valley is the biggest shift. The SF Standard reported that, “Silicon Valley billionaires who brought Democrats to historic fundraising highs in 2024 have officially stepped off their white horses.” Tech’s Democratic donors have gone dormant. Meanwhile, the tech bros who did defect to Trump —Musk, the crypto crowd, the AI founders— are writing enormous checks. Just the crypto bros’ super PAC Fairshake is sitting on $193 million for 2026, after spending a staggering $290 million in 2024.

That’s just one tech PAC. The tech bros aren’t Republicans who discovered Bitcoin. Shockingly, they’re former Democrats who discovered Bidenic regulation.

🔥 Unions are also in freefall. The Teamsters’ president spoke at the RNC. New workers organized via NLRB elections dropped 40% year-over-year in 2025. Red states like Florida are filing bills to prune teachers’ unions. When unions do still exist, they’re mostly government workers (meaning taxpayers are subsidizing the Democrats’ own donor base). But the Supreme Court just handed President Trump a big stick against federal unions. He can end them. They’d better be careful…

Just the short list:

For its part, mainstream media has lost the narrative war to podcasts and independent media. The news podcast audience is now 39% Republican, 32% Democrat— an inversion from five years ago. CBS and CNN are panicking over hostile conservative takeovers. The Washington Post fired its entire climate reporting staff.

Meanwhile, over on the conservative side, it’s a completely different story. Our sectors are booming. Defense spending just hit $1 trillion and is climbing, with an extra $150 billion stuffed into the Big Beautiful Bill. The military-industrial sector is swimming in cash, and its political alignment isn’t ambiguous. Manufacturing is booming— the carmakers are reshoring factories as fast as they can. Add the crypto billionaires, the AI founders, the Substack exodus of independent journalists, and the industrial reshoring crowd, and you have an emerging conservative institutional base that’s richer, younger, and more energized than what it’s replacing.

Shift Three: The Great Wealth Migration.

And the people with the money aren’t just moving ideologically— they are physically moving. California loses a taxpayer every minute and 44 seconds. New York loses one every 2 minutes and 23 seconds. At the same time, welfare people are moving in. Over the past decade, New York shed $111 billion in adjusted gross income to other states. California lost $102 billion. Illinois lost $63 billion. The Daily Economy, late last year:

Where did it all go? Red states. Florida gained $196 billion. Texas gained $54 billion. Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia are hoovering up the rest.

This isn’t retirees chasing sunshine. These are high-net-worth individuals, the people who fund political campaigns, host fundraisers, and anchor donor networks. NYC, LA, and Chicago used to be the Democrat Party’s fundraising capitals. Now they’re withering on the vine. Meanwhile, Miami, Austin, Nashville, and Palm Beach are rapidly becoming the fundraising capitals for the Republican Party.

The Democrats’ donor class is literally relocating to red states and, increasingly, writing checks to red candidates. Or at least, not writing checks to blue ones. Having made their moves, they have every incentive to preserve their position. Meaning, not let Democrats make America California.

🔥 Combine the three shifts, and the picture is stark. The money is moving right. The institutions are moving right. The people with money are moving right. Democrats still retain certain structural advantages— individual Senate candidates like Jon Ossoff can post monster fundraising numbers, for instance. The party’s $64 million internal civil war over House primaries shows grassroots energy hasn’t disappeared, but it also shows they’re frittering away millions fighting with each other. Axios, yesterday:

“That these primaries are happening at all is a sign that the progressive establishment —such as it still exists— has lost control,” said Amanda Litman, founder of Run for Something. “The old guard simply doesn’t have the juice anymore.” Ouch.

Guess who’s the top fundraiser in California’s gubernatorial election right now? A Republican. In California. CalMatters, last month:

Energy without money is a protest. But energy with money is a movement. And right now, Republicans have roughly twice the institutional war chest, are gaining the allegiance of the fastest-growing economic sectors (crypto, AI, defense, energy), and are physically absorbing the wealth fleeing blue-state tax regimes. All while the blue institutions are shrinking. (Don’t get me started about the academics.)

The as-yet unanswered question is: when will all the conservative dry powder fire? The $400-500 million in Trump-allied PAC money hasn’t even been deployed yet. It’s just sitting there. When it moves — probably late summer — it could swamp the midterm battlefield in ways we haven’t seen since Citizens United.

Democrats aren’t just losing an election cycle. They’re losing the infrastructure of political power. The trendlines all point in the same direction. And it ain’t a good direction for Democrats.

Useless corporate media hasn’t connected any of these dots. But, to be fair, it’s hard to connect dots when you’re busy laying off the people who used to hold the crayons.

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The most succinct status of the five-day-old war in Iran appeared in a New York Times story this morning. It confirmed what we’d already concluded yesterday: “Now, Israel and the United States own the skies over Iran and are steadily blowing up its ballistic missile infrastructure and arsenal.” Four days in. That is promising for prospects of a reasonably quick war. But the biggest and most promising development popped up in the New York Times this morning as I was writing the post.

First, to get this unpleasantness out of the way: I told you so!

New York Times headline, breaking news, this morning: “Iran Made Secret Outreach After Strikes, Highlighting Trump’s Challenge.” Some secret. The ‘secret outreach’ is right in the headline. But never mind. According to the story, just one day after the bombs started falling, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence secretly reached out to the CIA through a third country’s spy agency, offering to discuss terms:

According to the story (but how would they know this?), Israeli officials have “urged the United States to ignore the approach.” I doubt it makes any difference, even if it is true. I suspect President Trump already knows what he’s going to do.

The Times framed this terrific outreach news as a “challenge,” as though it somehow stumped President Trump. Stumped? Corporate media seems to have thought the President had no plan. The Washington Post ran with “Trump pursues Iran decapitation without plan for what comes next.” Robert Reich at the Guardian called the Iran operation “a war without a plan, without a strategy.” CNN declared, “Trump launches the regime-change effort he pledged to avoid.”

They’re all making the same mistake: they’re looking at George W. Bush’s Iraq playbook: Strikes → invasion → occupation → nation-building → twenty years of quagmire. And since they don’t see any invasion plans, they assume it just … drops off after strikes. That there’s no plan at all. Just strikes. That’s it.

But of course there is a plan, Times. We’ve already seen it, you morons. It’s the Venezuela model. It’s even right in the Times’s story, just before the reporter waved it away as unrealistic:

As a refresher (and for people who live near the CHAZ/CHOP occupation zone), the Venezuelan model works like this:

1. Decapitate the leadership. Not with a ground invasion, but from the air. Kill or isolate the top guys.

2. Destroy the regime’s ability to project force. Sink their navy, crater their missile sites, bomb their command structure. Don’t fight the army; make the army irrelevant.

3. Squeeze economically — in Venezuela, it was sanctions and oil tanker seizures. In Iran, the Strait of Hormuz shutdown is doing it for free. Iran is sanctioning itself by turning its own waterway into a war zone.

4. Let internal pressure do the rest. Trump told Iranian protesters on January 13th to “keep protesting” and “take over your country.” He’s not invading. This morning, stories reported the CIA began arming the Kurds up to a year ago. The President is creating the conditions for the regime to collapse from within.

5. Wait for the phone call. And, like clockwork, it came. On Day Two. That beats a return call from the cable company. Iran’s intelligence service is already calling the CIA through back channels, asking for terms.

6. Negotiate from maximum strength. You don’t negotiate before you’ve destroyed their leverage and created your own. You negotiate after. When they’re calling you.

Notice what’s not in the Venezuela model: No ground troops. No occupation. No governing council. No Paul Bremer in a suit handing out contracts. No twenty-year commitments. No nation-building slide decks with eagle clipart.

The entire establishment media is screaming like banshees: where’s the plan?? They’re baffled because the plan looks nothing like Iraq. It has no occupation phase because there was never supposed to be one at all. Which the Administration has patiently tried to explain about a billion times.

Even more encouragingly, the Times added that Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, is also pursuing separate outreach through Omani mediators to resume nuclear talks. That’s two separate Iranian back-channel approaches in five days— the intelligence service through the CIA, and the security council through Oman. They are looking for the exit.

The Brookings Institution’s analysis of the Venezuela operation was instructive. Secretary of State Marco Rubio explicitly said the US would have “no direct governing role” in Iran. Instead, Brookings concluded, the operation would maintain pressure, to stop complicity and indifference of officials, “with the hope that this further immiseration... will finally spur a popular uprising.” More leverage.

Sound familiar? (Hint: it rhymes with venzess-whale-a.)

The media keeps asking “what comes next?” as though the answer should be an invasion plan. The real answer is: nothing comes next. Strikes → negotiate → done. That’s the point. Break the regime’s capacity to function, let the internal opposition do the rest, and then negotiate the terms of surrender with whoever’s left standing.

Iran’s intelligence service called the CIA on Day Two. That’s not a sign of no plan. It’s the exact opposite. It’s the sign the plan is working.

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Finally, because I can’t help but mention this wonderful development, race-baiting, foul-mouthed Jasmine “Croquet” Crockett lost her primary in the Senate race to a Christian, moderate, Democrat Wonderbread white guy. Fox ran the story headlined, “Rising star Talarico topples progressive firebrand Crockett in high-stakes Texas Senate Democratic primary.”

The best part was that Crockett has also lost her seat as a U.S. representative after this term. In order to file to run in the 2026 U.S. Senate race, Crockett had to forgo running for reelection to her House seat (TX‑30), which means her current House term ends in January 2027— and the seat is already being contested by other Democrats, including her endorsed successor, Rev. Frederick Haynes III.

Insiders smell a rat at the DNC— they suspect a purge is quietly underway. In race after race, the Democrats have been running young, moderate white guys. I guess diversity wasn’t their strength after all. Womp womp. Displaying the keen intelligence that propelled her political career, and the same razor-sharp political instincts that led her to abandon a safe House seat for this adventure, Ms. Croquet blamed Republicans. For her loss in a Democrat primary. I know.

Buh-bye, Jasmine! We won’t miss you. And watch the door on your way … ouch! That looked like it hurt.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get back here tomorrow morning and don’t be late— we have much essential news and commentary to cover.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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