Wacko Anti-Semitic Politician Scams Voters Who Hate Anti-Semites

Thomas Lopez-Pierre, a whack job running for New York
City Council, set up a fraudulent GoFundMe page
to raise money for his campaign

I have to agree with the New York Post: For an anti-Semite, Thomas Lopez-Pierre has a ton of chutzpah.

This idiot is running for New York City council. He doesn't have the slightest chance of winning, given he's running on a platform that calls for stopping "greedy Jewish landlord" from committing "ethnic cleansing" against blacks. 
 
Told you Lopez-Pierre is a whack job.

This guy is a Democrat. To nobody's surprise, Jewish groups and others are working to get Lopez-Pierre kicked out of the party.

A GoFundMe page called "Stop Thomas Lopez-Pierre Hate Campaign" popped up. According to the New York Post said the GoFundMe page raised $5,781.

Here's the chutzpah part. Says the New York Post:

"But anyone who donated hoping to actually stop Lopez-Pierre is going to be sorely disappointed. - because the page was created by the candidate himself to scam money from his foes.

'I call it bait and switch,' Lopez-Pierre actually bragged to The Post."

Yes, he's right. It's bait and switch all right. I wonder if he can also be brought up on fraud charges

On his campaign page, the candidate says he's a Christian "saved by God's grace."

Asked by CBS New York whether "grace should keep you from lying in such a flagrant way," he responded, "I'm a sinner."

He's right on that count, too.
 
Lopez-Pierre said he's going to use the money he fraudulently raised via GoFundMe for marketing expenses in his campaign.

Maybe not so fast. GoFundMe says it's frozen the account while it investigates, so this dude might not ever get the money.

As if anyone is going to vote for him.

Lopez-Pierre is trying to win a primary election for a seat in upper Manhattan.  An incumbent named Mark Levine, who happens to be Jewish, is extremely likely to win the seat.

Iowa Lawmaker Files Dumb Legislation; Proof Emerges The Guy Is Dumb

This Iowa State Senator's "business
degree" is really just a management
certificate from a Sizzler Steakhouse.

Iowa State Senator Mark Chelgren recently filed legislation that would limit the number of Democrats the state university can hire.   

He figured too many liberals were indoctrinating our poor innocent college kids or something.

Figuring Chlegren was so into education standards, reporters started poking around the lawmaker's educational background.

After all, Chelgren said  he had a business degree from something called Forbco Management.

It turns out "Forbco Management" is a company that once operated a Sizzler steak house franchise in Torrance, California.

Yep, he got a certificate for being a fairly competent manager at a Sizzler. "Kind of like Hamburger University at McDonald's," NBC News reports.

Which means this certificate isn't quite as prestigious as say, an MBA from Harvard, but I guess we all do what we can.

For the record, the certificate Chelgren got from Sizzler is not a college degree, but you knew that.

Interestingly, soon after NBC and other news outlets started getting intensily curious about Chalgren's "degree" from Sizzler, it disappeared from the Iowa State Republicans web site.

The response from Chelgren to NBC News to this issue seems dicey to me:

"'This was not an attempt to inflate anything,' he said, adding he was not aware of the error on the web site until a reporter asked about it. 'I didn't concern myself about this, honesty.'

In a telephone interview last week, Chelgren was vague about Forbco. He said was located outside of Los Angeles and that he got his business degree 'around '88 or '89. It's going a ways back so I don't remember.'

"I don't know if they are still in business or not.....The school was created by Forbco Management, and I got a degree in hotel restaurant management."

Or not.

Especially since Chelgren did not respond to NBC News' request for a copy of his diploma or degree.

We did find out Chelgren was in college for a year in the early 1990s at the University of California Riverside majoring in physics, but he only lasted one year

Of course, we knew Chelgren is not an expert in education to begin with. As noted, he filed his Senate File 228 bill to impose a hiring freeze in the Iowa university system until registered Republicans are nearly on par with Democrats on faculties.

Chelgren's reasoning for the bill is rich. He says he had a lot of negative experiences with "liberal professors" while in college.

Yeah, I'm sure those physics professors for that one unsuccessful year in school really tried to indoctrinate Chelgren with radical left wing socialism. You know, the kind of leftist propaganda like E=MC squared.

In other words, Chelgren is like a lot of (but not all!)  extreme right wingers: They're not that bright, and want to ensure the rest of the world is as dumb as them.

At least Chelgren has additonal things in his resume, like these fun fact about him from Slate:

"Before entering politics, Chelgren was best known as 'Chickenman,' a fun-loving character who wore a chicken hat, wielded a supersoaker full of beer and biked naked in Iowa's famous RAGBRA! bike race."

Well, that's something to put on your resume!

Quote, Unquote "Religious" Shyster Bilks People Out Of Millions, Must Repay

Benjamin Rogovy is the latest shyster to prey on
people's religious beliefs to bilk them.  

Benjamin Rogovy didn't have a prayer defending his fraudulent prayer business.

And thus falls another crook using religion to rip off gullible believers.

Rogovy bilked about 125,000 people across the nation out of more than $7 million, says Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

According to Raw Story:

"Rogovy's  websites, christianprayercenter.com and oracioncristiana.org offered to pray for desperate English and Spanish speakers if they paid between $9 and $35 for the service.

The testimonials were glowing. Pastor John Carlson prayed for them and God delivered on their prayers. A healthy baby. A negative HIV test. A winning lottery ticket. The senior pastor at the Christian Prayer Center (CPC) saved homes from foreclosure and put cancer into remission.

Except of course they didn't."

Well, duh!

"I believe in the power of prayer........What I do not believe in and what I will not tolerate is unlawful businesses that prey upon people - taking advantage of their faith or their need for help - in order to make a quick buck," said Ferguson, the state's attorney, according to Raw Story.

It's good that Rogovy is getting the book thrown at him. He's been ordered to repay his victims, and attorney costs and $1 million in civil penalties if he doesn't comply with the order to pay up.

I doubt anyone will see the money. My guess is Rogovy spent the cash. But at least he's been exposed, at least for now.

The track record of other "religious" scammers, though, is he'll be back to bilk the gullible and the desperate.

After all, we have these so-called prosperty pastors who get people to believe that they should give these pastors lots of money, and in turn God will rain cash down on these scam victims. People fall for this, and these scammers know it.

The prosperity pastors get in trouble some time, but they always eventually come back for more. 

In Rogovy's case, he set up a couple of websites in which people paid repeatedly to have fake pastors say prayers for them. Because I'm sure God will bestow blessings on suffering people if only they pay for them through the web site. (Order today!!)

Rogovy, along with the rest of the religion scammers, will get a special place in hell for their misdeeds.   They just don't know it yet.











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A Televangelist Fraudster Dance Mix For Your Sunday Spirituality

This Sunday, do the Hoo Ba Ba Kanda with
televangelist/scammer Robert Tilton!  

It's Sunday!

Time to get some gospel, some spiritual nourishment, and get closer to God.

For most Christians, that means going to church, hearing from a kindly and holy priest or preacher and learning ways to live the good life and be a good person.

For an unlucky few, there's televangelist scammers like Robert Tilton, a so-called "prosperity preacher" who convinces the gullible to send him lots of money and that will in turn make them rich because God will smile on them and shower them with money.

Yeah, I know, I don't get that either, but what do I know?

Of course Tilton has been in trouble repeatedly for his scams, but he always seems to manage to rebuild his scamming operations and rake in more dough from true believers who really ought to be believing through perhaps a more traditional church.

One that gives them spiritual guidance, not one that rakes them over the financial coals.

But if you can't stop Tilton, at least you can ridicule him.

That happened over the summer, when John Oliver hilariously skewered him on HBO's "Last Week Tonight"  in which Oliver set up a new church, Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, to "test the legal and financial limits ofwhat religious entities are able to do."

Now we have some a new video which is awesome. Somebody named Pogo who is really music producer and remix artist Nick Bertke, tortured himsef with clips of Tilton for hours and came up with this hilarious dance track of Tilton and his antics.

Hat tip to Boingboing for giving this to us this for our Sunday supplication. Soon, everyone will be doing the Hoo Ba Ba Kanda!

Now We Know Playbook: How Alabama Republicans Ensuring Minorities Don't Vote

Alabama is making it harder for residents to get
driver's licenses. Is it budget cuts or is it
an effort to prevent the poor and minorities from voting?  

So a bunch of states in recent years  have passed voter ID laws, in which voters have to have official photo IDs, usually a driver's license to vote.

This is to combat the imaginary epidemic of voter fraud going on across the country.

Since most of these voter ID laws were passed by Republican legislators or championed by Republican governors, the fraud might be efforts to make it more difficult for poorer people and minorites to vote.

The proof of this idea came from Alabama this week. Citing "budget cuts" Alabama plans to close 45 of its 49 Department of Motor Vehicles offices, says the Daily Kos.

Of course, nobody is blatantly saying that this is really an effort to prevent people from voting, but it has to be.

People can get voter photo IDs from county registrar offices in Alabama, too, but that also sometimes involves traveling pretty far distances. Which is hard if you don't have a car and driver's license, and there's not much in the way of public transportation.

Sure, Alabama has budget problems. A lot of states do.

But closing so many DMV offices in Alabama would force people to take an entire day, possibly two days off from work to travel long distances, wait in long lines, and then hopefully obtain a driver's license.

As Daily Kos points out, this will also encourage people to drive without a license. Which means people who really don't know how to drive will drive unsafe cars around Alabama. What could go wrong?

Sure, some people can renew drivers' licenses on line. But if there's a problem that has to be resolved, then it's an arduous day at the Alabama DMV.

Are Republican lawmakers in Alabama more concerned with balancing the budget? Or are they more concerned too many Democratic or Independent voters could force them out of office?

Hmmmm.

Repeated Hell: Debtors Keep Demanding Money From Wrong Man

To be clear, a guy named Matthew Hartigan of Clearwater, Florida, does not owe $7,323 in city and school taxes to the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Matthew Hartigan, with his wife in Clearwater, Florida,
keeps being hounded for thousands of dollars in
debt that he doesn't owe.  

Hartigan does not owe $31,783 in attorney fees, costs and fines to a Philadelphia law firm

And he does not owe $98,293 because of a property foreclosure in Philadelphia.

This guy's case - I'm going to call him Clearwater Hartigan - illustrates when one dope hits a wrong key on some computer somewhere.

People keep going after Clearwater Hartigan for debts some other Matthew Hartigan incurred long ago, says the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

The foreclosure couldn't have been Clearwater Hartigan's doing, since he was 12 years old when some other Matthew Hartigan bought the property that went into foreclosure and tax debt.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer notes, twelve year old boys don't buy houses.

So-called "skip tracing" companies hone in on debtors, and some of these companies aren't as careful as they should be about getting the right person.

That leaves people like Clearwater Hartigan fighting for years to not pay debts that aren't theirs. Clearwater Hartigan has been fighting this for 17 years and it's still going on.

It seems once people like Clearwater Hartigan get in these computer files, he doesn't come out, despite the loads of evidence that they got the wrong guy.

This is not even close to the first time I've seen something like this happen to a person.

I don't know why it's such a problem. I think it's laziness. After all, it's a little work to prove that somebody has been misidentified and then to scrub the wrong information from computer systems.

Besides, that costs money. And I'm sure some Or debt collectors and such business just pick anybody with that name and hope they pay debts they don't owe just to make the debt collectors go away.  It's easy money.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer points out, it often takes a lawsuit to untangle these messes. And lots of people don't have the finances to hire a lawyer to sue over such tangled financial bungling.

TV Reporter Exacts Revenge On Credit Card Thief

Accuased credit card thief Farah Parks being
confronted in a Texas hotel by a TV reporter
whose credit card information she allegedly stole.  

It's so infuriating!

Someone gets your credit card number, or buys it on the black market and has a field day.

Even if you don't lose money, it's a pain in the neck to freeze your account, get a new card, etc. etc.

This very thing happened to Steve Noviello, the consumer reporter for Fox 4 television news in Dallas-Fort Worth.

He discovered the problem pretty quickly, notified the police and placed a fraud alert on his card. The alert, well, alerted him that his credit card info was being used at a Dallas area hotel.

So, Noviello decided to go there for a look see.

There, he found Farah Parks being arrested by police for using Noviello's credit card and being led by authorities out of Room 239 of the local Hilton.

With that, he had the what had to be extreme satisfaction of getting Parks on camera, pretty much refusing to be interviewed, and Noviello intrepidly asking questions of her anyway.

At first, she denied using Noviello's credit card number, then said she got it from someone else.

Then, police, Parks and Noviello all managed to crowd into an elevator down to the first floor.

Here's how the interview went:
Noviello: I'd love for you to be able to help me, Farah. Where are you from? Are you local?
Parks: I've just made some bad choices in my life. I'm aware of that and I apologize.
Novello: OK, I appreciate your apology and I"m just hoping  you might be able to help me.. I'm gonna come and make a request to come visit you after you get arrested and we can talk, OK?

It was not OK. Surprise! Parks did not agree to an interview.

That, probably, was a disappointment for Noviello. But at least he got his revenge, on air, for the credit card info theft.

I still have mixed opinions of public shamings like this, but my base instinct in this case is go for it.

Here's the whole video of what happened with the attempted interview with Farah Parks:

World's Most Obnoxious Person Occupies Intersection of Celebrity and Web Hits.

Unlike in many media outlets, I'm not going to name the person I'm about to describe. I know you will be able to find his name in the links, go ahead and click on them, but don't follow any links to any web site associated with this moron.

Here's why: The idiot, described very generously as a "Ukranian journalist" but is really just a loser, makes a game of going to all these Red Carpet Events world wide to be obnoxious with famous people.

He does it for attention and possibly lucrative web hits. And that's why I dislike him so much. It just doensn't seem like an honest day of work to me, and he literally molests people to "earn" his fame and fortune.

The idiot who is the subject of this post
is dragged away after harassing America Ferrera
at Cannes last week.  

The latest bit was when he crawled up into the long flowing dress worn by America Ferrera last week at the Cannes Film Festival. Just a total pervert move.

He's stormed the stage when Adele was winning a Grammy a couple years back, and has tried to grab and kiss the likes of Will Smith, Bradley Cooper and Leonard DeCaprio over the years.

Gawd knows how he gets into these venues all the time. They keep giving him press credentials, but oh well.

Yes, I know celebrities put themselves out to the public, so they should expect a certain loss of privacy and should realized they'll get more scrutiny than the average person.

And yes, it's good to have a sense of humor, a sense of mocking around celebrities. It's fun to pop a few ego bubbles from time to time.

But that doesn't give anybody the license to be a pervert, for fun or profit or any other reason.

They call this guy a prankster. That implies merry. He needs another, negative word to describe him. Obnoxious doesn't do it justice.

And somebody should find a "prank' that teaches him a real lesson.

I'm being a scold and I know it. But this guy is a prime example of the level of commerce in many corners of the Internet.

I'm not sure I like a world where obnoxiousness is a valuable commodity.

Clever Scammers Are Making This Year's Tax Season Even Worse

Just in time for tax season, we have one of the biggest tax scams yet, and this time the criminals are so sophisticated they figure out things like the last four digits of your Social Security number, where you live, where you work, what your telephone number is, and all that stuff.  

Information is power, after all. If the scammers know a lot about you, you might be led into falling for the scam.

According to Politico, the scammers play hardball, calling people up, armed with the information and telling them if they don't send money -- lots of it -- you will be arrested, freeze your accounts and have your paycheck docked to pay them.

Halah Touryalai, A Forbes staff writer, got a call from somebody she thought was an Internal Revenue Service agent telling her to pay up $5,000 now if not sooner, or else, says Politico.

The financially sophisticated Touryalai caught on to the scam quickly enough and didn't part with any of her money. But many other people have fallen victim to this, losing a total of perhaps $1 million to the crooks, according to IRS investigators.

There've been at least 20,000 instances of this kind of fraud, according to Politico.

In addition to the last four digits of Social Security numbers and other hints at targets' identities, the scammers are able to spoof call ID systems so it looks like it's really the IRS calling. They use fake names and fake IRS badge numbers.

They even know what kind of car the victims drive and the color of their houses, details that trick victims into thinking it's really the IRS calling them. But the information probably came from Google Earth.

The IRS says that if were really in trouble with them, they'd send you letters and documents by snail mail, and not call or email you or anything like that. And there's a legal process involved if they think you're involved in tax fraud. They don't just take your paycheck away from you without a bit of a heads up.

Still, the whole scam, and the details the crooks know about their targets, is just more evidence that everyone can come up with a dossier about you, and use it for no good.

The scary thing is, we're powerless to stop it. Yes, they give us tips on how to protect our identities and all that, but that seems so stopgap. The crooks, the marketers, the governments all seem to find pretty easy ways around the roadblocks we throw up.

It's enough to make you just want to hide for the rest of our lives in a cave.

Update: Now It's KlearGear's Turn To Get Screwed

Back on November 17, I wrote here in this blog about the scummy outfit called KlearGear, an online purveyer of gizmos, gadgets and bad gifts.

Public Citizen to the rescue of a couple
victimized by an online company.  

The controvery of the day was about a couple who did not get what they ordered from KlearGear, so they published a negative review of the company on an online site.

KlearGear responded by demanding $3,500 saying the terms of service of purchases means they were not allowed to criticize the company. Never mind the terms of service didn't exist when the couple bought the items that led to the problems. And never mind that such a terms of service demand is probably illegal.

But KlearGear pursued, notifying credit reporting agencies to ding their credit so they couldn't get a loan. The couple said they'd sue, but didn't have the money to do so.

I was hoping some lawyer would come forward and help the couple.

Ask and you shall receive.

Enter the legal and public policy advocacy group Public Citizen, which is threatening to sue KlearGear unless certain demands are met. And they are great demands, I must say. KlearGear must report to the credit agencies to make the couple's credit rating stellar again, fork over $75,000 to the couple for the trouble KlearGear has caused, and never implement the "do not disparage" terms of service clause ever again.

No word yet on now KlearGear will respond.

But thanks to traditional media, (television station KUTV in Salt Lake City) which first reported this story, and social media, which spread it like crazy, KlearGear now looks like it might not get away with its shenanigans.

We can only hope.

Meanwhile, KlearGear is basically in hiding, not publicly commenting and shutting down its social media sites. It's target audience is basically social media sites, so this can't be good for a business that supposedly had $47 million in annual revenue.

I'll just repeat what the blog Popehat has to say about the situation:

"KlearGear deserves to fail as a business based on this conduct, and hopefully will." 

Adjusters Arrive At House Fires Before Firefighters

Well, this seems unsavory.

Reports out of Florida say adjusters, the people who help property owners navigate insurance and recovery after disasters, and repair contractors are showing up at house fires at the same time as firefighters get there, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel

If this were your house, would you want
an adjuster and contractors pestering you
to sign a contract for their services
at this moment?

There, as the house burns and firefighters struggle to contain the flames, the adjusters pressure the distraught homeowner to sign on with them and not talk to any competitors.

As a person who last week had to make major medical decisions about my dog who was critically ill, the midst of a crisis is not the best time to make rational choices.

So if somebody's house is burning, they're probably not thinking clearly about the pro and cons of which adjuster or contractors will do the best job.

Which is probably what some of these crooked adjusters have in mind. Hey, if you can't think it through, you can't ask the hard questions.

The adjusters say they arrive early because the homeowner is still there while the house is burning, but won't be there once it's out, because the house is uninhabitable.

Adjusters can be helpful, The Consumerist notes. After all, they can help people navigate the maze of insurance settlements, hiring contractors, overseeing cleanup and repair, etc.

But still. The fire truck chasers, like ambulance chasers, are kind of gross. How do they sleep at night?

Anything to make money, I guess

Bank Of America Says Dead Woman Must Tell Them She is Dead

I love to hate these stories, but it seems there's so many examples of company's "customer service" that gets so bureaucratic, out of whack, stupid and totally insane that there must be a competition among these companies on who can be most outrageous with customers.

A strong contender is Bank of America. A college kid's mom died, and it was up to him to tell mom's mortgage holder, that she was deceased and thus no longer able to pay the mortgage, and since he couldn't find the mortgage documents could they help?
/>
Could Bank of America help? Oh, that kid's a riot, isn't he?
 
Bank officials kept telling the kid, named Matt, that his dead mom would have to tell the bank she was dead before things could get straightened out, according to Consumerist. 

The kid, Matt was his name, thought sending Bank of America a copy of his mom's death certificate would straighten everything up. Boy is Matt naive! He actually thought doing something that made perfect sense would work! Ha!

Actually, according to Consumerist, he kept sending copies of the death certificate, but Bank of America kept losing them. Or so they said. I think they just threw them out, just to mess with the kid's head.

Even after they acknowledged they got the death certificate, on the fourth try, the bank told Matt his mom would still have to talk to them before the mortgage questions could be sorted out.

They also sent the account to collections to start harassing him to pay up until a sympathetic lawyer got him a ceast and desist order.

Last we heard, this case is still uresolved.

How could a bank, which is supposed to be full of smart people who really know how to manage money, be like this?  Do people just sit around and do nothing? Or do they feel like they have power, and can toy with this kid like a cat who's caught a mouse and is keeping it alive for awhile as a plaything before killing it?

I always hear stories like Matt and the Bank of America. Only bad publicity seems to fix things. I guess institutions play this game because they can.

It's not like everyone is like this. Matt said he had to settle things with his mom's other creditors, who ranged from OK, to, in the case of Chase and Capital One, quite helpful.  So it's not impossible to be, well, not impossible.

If everything the Consumerist said is true, I  hope the people at Bank of America who messed with this kid who was trying to mourn his mother are proud of themselves. Because nobody else is.

This New Car Buyer Was MAD!!!!!

Supposedly, the video in this post is from a car show room in Moscow, where a guy bought a car. It broke down a couple days later and the dealer wouldn't fix it under warranty.

This, of course, would get anybody mad. I'd be LIVID. But I would just go on Yelp or Angie's List or something and tell people not to go there. Maybe call the consumer protection office too, if I was ambitious.

But this guy took a different tack. Stay with the video because it keeps getting deliciously worse. Definitely turn down the volume, though, because whoever posted the video to YouTube decided it would be fun to blast AC/DCs "Highway to Hell" throughout. Enjoy! And I hope your car is working fine.