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Jon Stewart Goes Head to Head With Pentagon Official, & Defends Elon’s Audit.
So some months ago, Kathleen Hicks was invited by Jon Stewart to explain how it is that the Defense Department has been in failure mode across the past six budget audits that have taken place. (Kathleen Hicks is
In August of 2024, 64% of the Pentagon’s assets were unaccounted for.
For whatever reason, the woman chosen to defend the Defense Department was shrill, condescending and certainly so beyond being arrogant that she felt chuckling in waves of laughter over Stewart’s “stupidity” would earn her points with Stewart’s audience, as well as with the American people.
C-SPAN still has that interview. It is worth watching even in the pared-down version that is presented.
Elon Musk was so impressed with Stewart’s ability to withstand the brittle condemnation he faced, that today Elon posted a partial video segment of the interview on his “X” feed.
Hicks actually lies when she tries to explain to Stewart that no audit is expected to determine where an accurate inventory of purchased items is.
What a liar she is. From dealing with accountancy and local political matters, I know that the term for that type of an audit is “a physical audit.” It means, for example, that if the local private university orders 600 binders, then those binders should have a purchase invoice, a receipt for delivery, the location where they were stored and the school buildings or department heads where those items were eventually sent off to. It would be left to that university’s auditors to figure out the location of all these things. And then they would figure out all the many other items that were purchased or sold in a similar fashion.
Yet Hicks not only lies, she then goes on to laugh at Stewart for his focusing on “the dollar.” I mean, why should a department of the government that receives trillions of dollars from the US taxpayer in the space of ten years need to ever focus on a dollar? (Or any collection of dollars?) Perhaps if Stewart were a senator or a four-star general, she would not shower him with disrespect. But Stewart is only a comedian/citizen. So like all the rest of us who are only citizens, he is worthy only of her ridicule and contempt.
Here is the 6 minutes of that interview:
BTW, one notable audit that came to my attention when I lived in Marin County was how one of the mayors of the city of Fairfax, population 60K plus, decided to audit the operations of that city.
His decision was met with disbelief by his friends and neighbors: “No. Please don’t do this! Don’t spend valuable time and money on such a project. You know us. You know almost all of Fairfax’s employees. We are honest and we wouldn’t embezzle! Why do you think otherwise?”
This man persisted in his decision regardless of these protests.
And just as the friends and neighbors had explained, it was shown that many of them who worked in the city departments were indeed honest.
The audit was a physical audit. So auditors did inventories and located everything pertinent to purchased items. For instance, the invoice for X number of ping pong tables did exist, and then records showed their delivery date along with proof of which schools and youth centers finally received them.
But the audit also showed that someone somewhere along the way had been sloppy.
Some 9 or 10 years prior to the audit, the then-city manager decided the city’s phone system was outdated. She undertook the activity of getting a different phone company to agree to come in and update the phones, cables, electrical circuits and more. Once both parties agreed, the new phone company was given $100,000 for the first year’s work plus equipment and installation expenses.
Then for reasons having nothing to do with phone systems, that city manager found herself a job that paid more than Fairfax was paying her. Whether she explained the new deal with the new phone firm to one of her colleagues or she did not, I never found out.
But the new phone company failed to show up. Inside the city with all its various departments and department heads, no one knew about this deal so that they could perform oversight and remind the company about its obligation. (Or if they did know of the deal, they had forgotten about the matter.)
The new phone company’s accountants did remember to bill the City of Fairfax for its yearly end of that initial contract. Every year, a bill was sent off asking the city to pay out $90,000, and every year the city paid that bill.
So by the time the new mayor’s audit was concluded, the city of Fairfax was able to go and ask that phone company for restoration of all monies that it had received for doing absolutely nothing. The city then received close to 1 million dollars.
And that is what happens when just one audit for one small city is conducted properly. We taxpayers need to hold tight to the idea that Elon Musk and his team of savvy techies and auditors will do equally well, although on a much, much larger scale. It is so very completely needed.
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That was at a smallish city, where those involved, didn’t have the intent to steal, defraud, embezzle or otherwise self-enrich.
Now scale that up to federal agencies, with hundreds of thousands of unchecked, unaudited employees, with virtually unlimited funds and guess how much can be “accidentally” funneled away.
Let the bright light of transparency shine on them, with the Doggies auditing.
I saw the short video earlier today.
It was pretty impressive to see Jon Stewart hold his position. If not fully red-pilled, he is well on his way.
A shifting culture change is happening. It feels like the pendulum is swinging high and hard the other way. Hopefully it shifts long enough for congress to codify some of the
changesreturn to constitutional basics.My question would be, what did the city then spend the money on? It’s a sure bet that they didn’t return it to the taxpayers. Especially since they probably still needed the improved phone system.
Saw some of that interview as well. In a nice way, Stewart basically tells her she’s out of touch with public perception. She, meanwhile, apparently is practiced at communicating in a patronizing manner.
Here is the entire interview:
Somehow I don’t think that Elon and his team are going to come to the same conclusion that the Pentagon doesn’t have the necessary technology tools to adequately conduct an audit.
It should be noted that Hicks majored in history and politics and immediately became a career bureaucrat for the Pentagon. She doesn’t appear to have run a business of any kind or been in a managerial position in a private sector company ever. Perhaps she had a lemonade stand as a child.
I wouldn’t trust anything she has to say about the Pentagon’s inability to properly conduct an audit and that it’s somehow all just too complex. Not buying it.
Musk and his team were at Treasury and instantly found they had poor bookkeeping practices and billions of dollars were being sent to deceased people or other recipients not entitled to the funds.
When Secretary Hegseth is shown how much Pentagon money has been lost to fraud, kickbacks, and bogus programs, my guess is that he will quickly dismiss those responsible and/or refer some staffers or military personnel to the DOJ and the FBI for further investigation.
Need to run out and get more popcorn.
And it seems he’s not purposefully stupid and has been around smart people a lot. He’s not afraid to say That’s wrong in fear of being bullied. Otherwise he can be pretty obnoxious, though I think.
This is the winter of salvation for our discontent. Also, Redenbacher is making a killing.
I’m finding that so far with many revelations that the excuse is either “Well, that is such a small amount of money in the sceme of things that the program/project/division is really not worth the trouble of bothering about,” or “the department’s budget is so huge that they cannot be expected to look into/track every expenditure.” Nice to have it both ways.
Stewart goes back and forth.
He pointed out on Stephen Colbert in 2023 that the virus had come from a Wuhan lab. It was a very ballsy move.
Colbert had a look of agony plastered across his face. He kept trying to guide Jon away from his assessment and “back to reality.” This “reality” twas one that allowed Colbert to be receiving lots of funding from somewhere. Maybe from Soros? (Who is backed by US AID monies.)
The clip went viral, which is why households like mine saw it. With Colbert being a tool for the whacked out left, since mid-2016 at least, a lot of us former fans couldn’t handle the “new, improved Colbert.” Things need to go viral before we walkaways see them.
Maybe it was Big Pharma that Colbert was thinking of when he tried to knock Stewart off the Wuhan lab platform. Pharma controls the CBS execs who oversee Colbert’s salary through the huge amounts spent on 90 second long pharma ads that have kept that news outlet hostage for a long time.
Many of us on the right thought that maybe after this outbreak of truth, that Stewart would now join us. Or maybe he would become more of an indie? But he felt an immediate backlash from the Hollywood crowd. Due to his depending on such things as the more recent 12 million dollar receipt of monies from Netflix or somewhere like that for his latest comedy show, he often carefully keeps his thoughts to himself.
There still are breakthroughs that come across but I doubt he will stick to them. 12 million is enough to convince most people to stay more or less true to the liars on the progressive side of things.
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The audit and its result allowed that mayor and the ones who followed to keep a spotlight on how the budget in the city was handled.
The approximately one million bucks that the audit discovered helped tide that city over when the 2006 to 2013 housing de-valuation situation became on going. For some time at least, Fairfax could handle the shortage of funds when property taxes became significantly reduced.