You can already hear some liberals and left-leaning libertarians now: "He paid for his crime, right? So what's the problem? What about the politicians mentioned in the Epstein files...?"
But "whataboutism" is not a valid argument for rationalizing societal decay. And if America isn't capable of applying the most basic standards at the lowest levels of government, then America is lost.
Rene Campos, a registered sex offender, is seeking elected office in California - launching a campaign for Fresno City Council amid fierce backlash and renewed questions about whether someone with his record should hold public office.
Campos was arrested in 2018 following a cyber tip to the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. He was found in possession of child sex abuse material, according to court records. In 2021 he entered a no-contest plea to a single misdemeanor charge of possessing and controlling child pornography/child sex abuse material (likely under California Penal Code § 311.11). He served only one month in prison and a two year probation period.
Campos describes himself as a gay man who is running for office on the platform of "reduced crime and rehabilitation."
A network of hundreds of hospices are under investigation for allegedly ripping tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers in Los Angeles Country and across California.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is now actively cutting off payments to suspicious operations across Los Angeles, which is now home to almost half of America’s end-of-life care providersA hospice industry insider provided the California Post with data dealing hundreds of suspicious hospices and home agencies across the state, including addresses where multiple agencies are listed at the same address.
A Post investigation found the addresses include empty storefronts, an auto parts shop and other offices that are unoccupied, some for years. Others don’t appear to exist at all.
The investigation comes as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz confirmed that “every single hospice in California is now under investigation.”
“30 to 40% of all the hospices in America are in Los Angeles, so there’s just no way they are all legitimate,” Dr. Oz said.
Dr. Oz confirmed Medicare payments were actively being ”cut off” from suspicious clinics, forcing them to prove they are legitimate.
“CMS has gone from a ‘pay and chase’ system of dealing with fraud to a ‘stop and clot,’” he said.
Dr. Oz said sophisticated new fraud detection tools, including AI, are helping investigators flag suspicious clinics — often based on their size, patient volume, and scope of operations.
One such center is St. Rita’s Home Health, which is registered to a vacant Van Nuys strip mall.
St. Rita’s Home Health has billed Medicare and Medicaid more than $4 million since 2021, despite the location saying it’s for rent at a strip mall in Van Nuys. Benjamin Brown for CA Post
On the California Department of Public Health database, St. Rita’s Home Health Care is listed as active at the Van Nuys location.
Despite being up for rent, the agency is still listed with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) as active, with data showing it billed Medicare about $4.3 million between 2019 and the first-half of 2025.
The agency has no website, and when the Post called to confirm it was still at 6360 Van Nuys Blvd, we were told the agency moved to Glendale and were provided a Yahoo email address to send questions.
Just about six miles away in North Hollywood, another building is listed as the operating address for 12 hospice and home health agencies — despite a large ”for rent” sign hanging out front.
But in 2023 and 2024, more than $20 million was billed to taxpayers from the building. The Post contacted eight of the providers at the North Hollywood address.
A building in North Hollywood is operating 12 hospice and home health care agencies, but the Post did not see one sign for any health care businesses. Benjamin Brown for CA Post
Pluto Home Health Care hung up when asked to confirm its location, Kaplan Hospice Care Inc, went to voicemail before being answered by ”Alexander from Southern California Auto.”
A representative for Confident Home Health claimed they moved to a different location, despite the North Hollywood address being listed on the CDPH database. When asked if they have a website, the representative replied: “I don’t know — we have an email.”
Queen of The Valley Home Health, which is still listed as active on CDPH’s website, is located in Sun Valley but when the Post went to the address, there was an auto store. The agency billed nearly $600,000 between 2023 and 2024, according to CMS data.
The license is for Queen of the Valley Home Health is listed as active on CDPH’s website, but the address is the location of an auto parts store.
Dr. Oz said while he couldn’t comment on individual clinics, but said what The Post uncovered ‘’is exactly what we are looking at and what we are cracking down on.”
”Why would you have three separate hospices in one building – wouldn’t you have one? If they don’t meet a set of criteria we will cut off the funding; they will have to prove they are legitimate,” he said.
Dr. Ira Byock, one of the leading palliative care physicians in the country, told The Post the level of alleged fraud and the speed in which it had grown has ”completely overwhelmed” state and federal authorities tasked with dealing with it.
Dr. Ira Byock, one of the leading palliative care physicians in the country, told The Post the state is facing a “crisis” in hospice and home health care. Facebook/Craig Dresang
“There are roughly 7,000 hospice programs across the U.S. There are 91 in Florida, 39 in New York – and over 2,800 in California,” Dr. Byock said.
“Many of them have come into existence in California in the last four years,” he said, adding that “clearly some of these programs in southern California are not legitimate at all and seem like vehicles for fraudulent billing Medicare.”
Dr. Byock said the state is facing a “crisis” in home health and hospice care that puts the most vulnerable patients at risk, and urged California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Department of Justice need to crack down.
Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association (CHAPCA), told The Post “it does not make sense” for hospice and home health agencies to be listed at these locations.
Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association (CHAPCA), said she has been sounding the alarm on fraud since 2019. LinkedIn/Sheila Clark CHAPCA
“They do not look like a licensed and certified home health or hospice,” said Clark. “They don’t have the right signage posted, they’re in an odd location inside of a business that doesn’t make sense — an auto body shop.”
Clark said she has been fighting to stop hospice and home health fraud in LA county since 2019.
“I have been living with beneficiaries, with patients, families, senior Medicare patrol,” Clark told The Post. “I have been living this.”
The 2022 California Hospice and Licensure and Oversight report delivered a scathing report on rampant fraud in home health and hospice, saying “weak controls have created the opportunity for large-scale fraud and abuse.”
The Post contacted California Department of Public Health about the hospice and home health agencies in this article, including whether those locations have been inspected or are under review for potential fraud or violations.
The department confirmed all sport identified by the California Post were still licensed.
However, once they are inspected and receive certification, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services takes over inspections, they said.
”The CDPH may only conduct federal onsite investigations with approval by CMS.”
We’re overjoyed to see Scouting America, long known as the Boy Scouts of America, ditch the DEI policies it adopted amid the country’s post-2020 racial fever, as well as unwinding the dubious “pro-trans” approach it also felt obliged to undertake.
Kudos to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon for prompting the review, which we hope settles the matter permanently.
The left painted a bulls-eye on the Scouts years ago, aiming to browbeat a mainstay of wholesome American traditions into culture-war submission.
As at many another institution, the folks in charge tried to compromise, betting that enough goodwill would allow the group to continue its core mission.
They did not give ground on the oath: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
Senate Leader George Mitchell has been stripped from the Maine State House, a move that the state’s top investigative journalist calls possibly Mitchell’s ultimate indignity.
Maine legislative officials have been under pressure to take the Democrat ex-leader’s portrait down from the wall where it has hung for 14 years.
The Maine House GOP shared video showing the portrait being removed Friday afternoon.
The portrait’s removal comes just three weeks after Mitchell resigned as chairman of the Mitchell Institute following the recent unsealing of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex-abuse case.
“This might be the harshest consequence he faces,” Steve Robinson, chief editor of The Maine Wire, said.
Robinson, a Dexter native and Bowdoin College graduate, was among hundreds of high-school seniors who benefited from the institute’s scholarships.
The institute selects recipients for the $10,000 Mitchell Scholarship, which organization officials recently said they would be renaming due to the fallout from the Epstein case.
The institute’s financial assistance targets graduating Maine high-school seniors to support higher education with scholarships, mentoring, and funding.
As of last count, Mitchell’s name had been scrubbed from the institute, from the U.S.-Ireland alliance and from Queen’s University in Belfast, which also removed his bust from campus.
After retiring from the U.S. Senate, Mitchell played a leading role in negotiations for peace in Northern Ireland, leading to the so-called Good Friday Agreement.
Despite his name being mentioned thousands of times in the so-called Epstein files, Mitchell has denied that he had any connection with the convicted sexual trafficker.
To settle a lawsuit alleging it colluded to harm the coal industry, the investment firm Vanguard, while denying any wrongdoing, has agreed to provide communications it had with other parties. Opponents of ESG are eager to find out what is in those communications.
Americans woke up Saturday to something big. The United States and Israel launched a massive joint offensive against Iran’s regime, known as Operation Epic Fury. According to reports, targets included Iran’s supreme leader and president. Major combat operations are now underway, and the implications are global.
Predictably, Democrats in Washington and even some Republicans are questioning the strikes. But let’s be honest — this moment was long overdue. Iran’s reign of terror didn’t start yesterday. In fact, this confrontation is the direct result of the Obama administration’s disastrous decision a decade ago to appease, enrich, and embolden Tehran.
Barack Obama and his administration sold the world a fantasy with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. This treaty was so bad that Obama didn’t even attempt to get the Senate to ratify it. He just pretended it wasn’t a treaty and signed it unilaterally, claiming it as a foreign policy victory for himself.
In fact, Obama was so desperate to make the deal a defining foreign policy achievement of his presidency that the lies about the deal from the left have never stopped. He told us it was a historic diplomatic breakthrough that would block Iran’s path to nuclear weapons. In reality, it handed the mullahs a lifeline and a fortune. Sanctions were lifted. Tehran gained access to roughly $150 billion in frozen assets, and there was that infamous $1.7 billion in cash sent to the regime, much of it delivered on pallets in the middle of the night. Every step of the way, Obama was emboldening Iran, not containing it.
It didn’t take long for Iran to show what a joke the deal really was. Just three months after signing the deal, Tehran test-fired ballistic missiles in open violation of U.N. resolutions. German intelligence later reported that Iran was still seeking technology for a military nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed repeated violations of material limits — all while Obama kept reassuring us that the agreement was “working.” Even he eventually admitted Iran was violating the “spirit” of the deal, and that was as close as he’d ever get to admitting that his deal was a sham.
And while Obama’s State Department was congratulating itself, Iranian leaders were laughing. They bragged that the JCPOA favored Iran. Hassan Rouhani, then Iran’s president, boasted that the regime had used diplomacy to buy time and advance its nuclear program. The Obama administration believed it was outsmarting Tehran, but in reality, it had been duped.
It’s not as if the liberal media didn’t notice this either. The New York Times even reported in 2015 that Iran had breached its enrichment limits before the deal was finalized. Inspectors found that while the Obama White House claimed Iran’s program was “frozen,” the country’s nuclear stockpile actually increased by 20%. Iran was supposed to convert that material for peaceful use. Instead, they let it grow — and Washington looked the other way.
By the time President Donald Trump took office, the JCPOA wasn’t the safeguard Democrats claimed it was; it was just a smokescreen. Obama’s grand achievement hadn’t restrained Iran’s nuclear ambitions one bit. If anything, it emboldened them to pursue nuclear weapons as never before. The regime’s missile program accelerated, its proxies expanded across the region, and its leaders grew richer, bolder, and more violent.
Nevertheless, when Trump took office in 2017, he didn’t immediately pull the plug. He gave the deal every chance to work. But by 2018, the evidence was clear: continued violations, broken promises, and a regime that had learned there were no consequences. So, in May of that year, Trump ended the charade and withdrew from the deal once and for all. Of course, Joe Biden wanted to revive the deal when he took office. While he never succeeded, the message to Iran was clear: the Democratic Party would always be there for the regime. If you want to know why negotiations with Iran always failed, the answer is obvious: they had to do was wait out Trump, and hope Democrats would be in power again.Iran has been daring the world to stop it for years, and now, it is finally getting what it deserves.
Iran’s reign of terror finally faces the hammer of justice with Operation Epic Fury, proving Trump’s strength buries Obama’s shameful appeasement forever. Democrats whine, but real Americans cheer this overdue smackdown on the mullahs. PJ Media stands as a vital conservative voice exposing these truths. Join PJ Media VIP today to fuel our fearless fight and keep us thriving — use promo code FIGHT for 60% off. Don’t let the left silence us now!
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
Posts
