Mark W. Bender

#OpenSource Advocate, @Joomla! #Community Magazine, @Angels Fan, #GameDev, #Airline #SchedulingFan

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

Guaranteed to be a #Great @Angels @MLB Season with @VictorRojas and @Markgubicza calling the games on TV!

[𝙁𝙍𝘼𝙉𝘾𝙊 𝙀𝙇 𝙏𝘼𝙉𝙆𝙊🌐 @FrancoElTanko]

One of the best TV booths in ⚾. I am pretty fired up for a great season for our Halos!

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire.”

As a securities law attorney, please allow me to explain how anyone who says this is basically lying to you:

1. The Securities and Exchange Commission has a myriad of laws that prevent founders and other large stockholders of publicly traded companies from dumping their shares. There are substantial holding period requirements, volume of sales limitations and public reporting obligations for stock sales. Basically, Elon holds largely illiquid shares, he is a “trillionaire” on paper only, and the best analogy is when people peg your net worth based on your home’s market price. That’s not money in your pocket, that’s the house you live in.

2. All that money raised in the IPO? That’s not going into Elon’s pocket like the lying socialist idiots want you to believe. It’s a capital influx that will be used to make more rockets and get more payloads into orbit. It’s a CAPITAL investment—that money is like a business loan, it’s not your money to keep, it’s your money to grow the business.

3. If it WERE legal for Elon to dump his shares, the share price would crash basically instantly and the company could very well fail.

If you bought SpaceX shares in the IPO, congrats. You just bought a lottery ticket, just like Elon. May the odds ever be in your favor.

So the next time someone screeches about how unfair it is that Elon Musk creates wealth that benefits all of humanity, throw the truth back in their faces.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

A welder took a $28 an hour job in 2015 at a company he had never heard of.

On Friday, Juan Hernandez became a millionaire.

He spent ten years building the structures that lifted rockets onto the launch pad. SpaceX paid him partly in stock, the way it paid its cooks, machinists, technicians and cafeteria staff, equity instead of bigger salaries. His $10,000 grant grew into $880,000 at the IPO price. The first day pop carried it past a million. He is 42, an immigrant from Mexico, married, three kids. He says he is keeping the job.

He is not the outlier. He is the pattern.

4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires on Friday. One in five people who ever badged into the company. About 400 of them are walking away with $100 million or more. One employee took every cash bonus in stock instead of money. He is sitting on 50,000 shares, worth more than $8 million at Friday's prices.

And then there is the other side of the cafeteria.

Some employees sold their shares years ago, certain the company would never go public because Musk said he hated public markets. A few traded their stock for restaurant gift cards. The New York Times says they are consumed by regret. Same grant, same building, same years. One group held the claim. The other ate it.

None of the winners can touch the money yet. The first selling window opens after the August earnings report, and the rest unlocks in waves through December.

Underneath all of it sits the only lesson the market ever teaches. The welder and the gift card came from the same place. The difference was never the work. It was the ownership. Salary pays for the month. Equity pays for the era.

A cook in Brownsville just answered the question every buyer of SPCX is asking at $170: what is a claim on this company actually worth?

The piece prices that exact question at $2.2 trillion.

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

#JustDoIt

[Alex Curry @Alex_Curry]

What I heard was Les Snead give us an assignment 😏 let’s get Aaron Donald BACK!

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

@ChuckRichter70 It was like the Angels Pitchers today were "pitching Batting Practice" to the Jays today!

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

@ChuckRichter70 One of my favorite Angels players!

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

@ChuckRichter70

[Rhett Bollinger @RhettBollinger]

Here’s the patch the #Angels will wear the rest of the season to honor Garret Anderson

[MLB @MLB]

Mike Trout is on a HEATER!

Repost and reply for a chance to win this Mike Trout @Topps Refractor card!

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

@andreagk @aakashgupta @innoutburger 2 "Doubles, animal style" are my minimum order. 1st one to "inhale", 2nd one to "enjoy".

I'm fortunate to be able to live or drive near at least a dozen locations every work day.

[DrOzCMS @DrOzCMS]

You’ve probably heard the news by now: Minnesota fraudsters stole over $1 billion from Medicaid. And you deserve an explanation.

Our staff at CMS told me they’ve never seen anything like this in Medicaid — and everyone from Gov. Tim Walz on down needs to be investigated, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel. Based on what we know now, this is a clear dereliction of duty.

First, the facts:

In recent years, Minnesota Medicaid launched several new programs, including Housing Stabilization Services, which helped disabled homeless individuals, and Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention, which reimbursed therapy costs for families with autistic children.

Some bad actors in Minnesota’s Somali community decided to game the system. And when they got away with it, they decided to go bigger.

The housing program was supposed to cost $2.6 million dollars annually. Last year, it paid out over $100 million. The autism program ballooned from $3 million in 2018 to nearly $400 million in 2023.

These scammers used stolen taxpayer money to buy flashy cars, purchase overseas real estate, and offer kickbacks to parents who enrolled their kids at fake autism treatment centers. Some of it may have even made its way to the Somalian terrorist group Al-Shebab.

So why didn’t Walz stop them?

That’s simple: because he went all-in on identity politics.

Somalis are a huge voting bloc, and the state’s leaders were afraid that “forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash.” That’s not me saying that. It’s a Somali-American fraud investigator who talked to The New York Times.

Somali scammers get rich off the programs Gov. Walz was supposed to be managing. Minnesota politicians get elected with Somali votes and keep the money flowing. This isn’t just fraud: it’s political patronage at public expense.

When Minnesota told CMS about the problem last year, they assured us they’d handle it. By summer, it was obvious they couldn’t — or wouldn’t. So, we stepped in and shut down the worst program: housing. We also froze provider enrollment in a few of the most abused programs.

So where do we go from here?

To restore the integrity of the Medicaid program, Minnesota must:

1. Provide CMS with weekly updates on how the state is stopping fraud.
2. Freeze enrollment of all high-risk providers for 6 months.
3. Confirm all providers in place are legitimate or remove them.
4. Send CMS a corrective action plan of how these will prevent this from happening again.

If we’re unsatisfied with the state’s plans or cooperation, we’ll stop paying the federal share of these programs.

The message to Walz is clear: either fix this in 60 days or start looking under your couch for spare change, because we’re done footing the bill for your incompetence.

With CMS on the case, these scammers and their bureaucratic enablers have nowhere left to hide. The vulnerable Americans who depend on these programs — and the taxpayers who fund them — deserve the truth.

[Mark W. Bender @OnTheMarkDesign]

@ChuckRichter70

[SMB Attorney @SMB_Attorney]

Not trying to make a political point here.

I spent years as a mortgage banker at Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage), the number one mortgage lender in the country, before I ever went to law school. So when I see stories like this, I look at them a little differently.

Here’s the deal. How you classify a property as a primary, secondary, or investment home changes everything about the loan. The down payment, the interest rate, the underwriting, all of it.

Primary or secondary homes can get by with as little as 3 to 10 percent down.

Investment properties usually require 25 percent or more.

So if you’re a brand new real estate investor with limited cash, there’s a big incentive to call something a “second home” instead of an “investment property.”

But that’s why lenders make you sign a Second Home Rider, a separate document where you specifically promise you’ll use it as a second residence, not rent it out.

You also assert like NINE times in the application process it will be owner occupied…

Could this kind of thing ever be an honest mistake? I doubt it.

The facts, at least as reported, look pretty bad.

You buy a house, say it’s a second home, immediately rent it out, tell your insurer it’s owner-occupied, and then report rental income on your taxes.

That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a pattern.

By the way guys, taking home owners insurance under the misrepresentation that it’s a primary for better rates is a great way to have a claim denied when your house burns down.

Very shortsighted mistake that many make...

Would a bank ever catch this on their own? Probably not.

Banks rarely dig that deep unless there’s a default or an insurance claim.

They just don’t have the infrastructure or frankly the desire to chase it down.

So yes, it’s definitely selective prosecution.

The amount of money at issue is small, and most people would never be charged for something like this.

But still, if the facts are accurate, it’s just a series of really bad moves.

And the wild part is that she’s a lawyer.

She’s the Attorney General of New York.

She’s prosecuted the former president for similar financial misrepresentations.

You’d think someone with that background would fully understand what those documents say and what it means to misstate intent on a loan.

It’s going to be a tough case for her to defend, unless she’s able to present additional information that clarifies the situation.

It’s possible…

In the meantime, there are lots of financial and life lessons in this story for all of us.

[Brenden Dilley @WarlordDilley]

I understand that Barack Obama's comments on Charlie Kirk and the shooter offended a lot of people yesterday...

But, I actually think it's appropriate that he's speaking out, given his extensive experience as a gay man in a relationship with a transvestite.

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

This was the exact moment that I knew our commander in chief was a sexual predator and I lost the rest of what little respect I had for him.

We were returning late one night from a long trip to Europe on AF-1, landed at Andrews, and helicoptered on Marine One to the White House. We landed on the South Lawn at about midnight and, after ensuring the president was on his way to his residence upstairs, I headed to my bedroom in the East Wing. Shortly thereafter, my phone rang and it was the AF-1 presidential pilot. “Buzz, we have a problem,” he said. Oh shit,” I thought.

Apparently, Clinton had cornered a female AF-1 steward in the galley and molested her. She was young, a staff sergeant, and married with children. I knew her, liked her, and she was super sweet. Now, she was in tears. I asked the pilot what she wanted. He told me that she didn’t want to be another “bimbo,” she wanted to remain in the Air Force and be promotable. All she wanted was an apology. In the world of Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, this wasn’t surprising to me. It was, however terribly disappointing and sad.

So, that morning, as a young major, I had to walk to the Oval Office and tell the commander-in-chief that he needed to apologize to the young lady. I’ve been shot at with hot metal but this was the toughest day in my life. I remember on my way to talk with him thinking “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Two weeks later, we got the two together onboard AF-1 in the president’s office and he offered a very uncontrite “half apology.” He didn’t care.

If anybody in the military had done that it would’ve been jail, expulsion, or both. It would’ve been Fort Leavenworth. But not for this president, not for this man. It was just another day. Yet another in my experiences working for a man with absolutely no integrity and no moral fiber.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 SCOTT BESSENT TO THE FED: "I am calling for an INTERNAL REVIEW."

"The Federal Reserve Board expenses since 2004 are up 4x...they just print money to spend it!"

"The Fed does a regular review of their monetary policy framework. I think that this is a good opportunity for Chair Powell's legacy to do an internal review of all the Fed's operations, away from the monetary policy function."

"Everything else that the Fed has started, has done over the years has just grown and grown and grown and this is what happens when you don't have oversight. They aren't subject to appropriations."

"Monetary policy should run in the background on behalf of the American people."

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Let me get this straight…

Democrats want ICE agents to present ID to "make sure" they are actually federal agents...

BUT they DON'T want voter ID to make sure those voting in our elections are actually American citizens.

Make it make sense.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

CNBC forced to recognize that Trump's tariffs have brought in over $121 BILLION to the US without imposing a burden on the consumers.

It's almost like the "experts" were wrong!

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Here’s what happens when you enter other countries illegally

- Singapore, that's 6 months in prison
- If you enter illegally, Russia, that's 2 years in labor camp
- India, that's 8 years in prison
- Pakistan, 10 years in prison
- North Korea, obviously death penalty

- And if you enter here in Canada or the US and even Europe. And what do you get? Free housing, healthcare, education, food, public transport, cell phones, cash.

“Come on, guys. A country can only be a country if it protects its borders. Immigration is not bad. But illegal immigration should be penalized at the full extent of the law.”

[Clandestine @WarClandestine]

Y’all wanna know how I know Trump is not controlled by the Deep State?

Because the media has been publishing 99% negative Trump coverage since he came down the escalator.

Because they tried to overthrow him, tried to imprison him, then tried to kill him.

If Trump was part of the establishment, the establishment would not have tried so hard to stop him. If Trump was part of the machine, Trump would not have exposed the machine.

Anyone saying Trump is compromised is just admitting they are unserious and unworthy of your attention.

Without Trump, the public wouldn’t even know the Deep State exists.