DL Open Thread: Monday, November 3, 2025
Wilmington Senior Center Cuts Staff Amid Dubious Financial Practices. There are a few questions relating to this:
The Wilmington Senior Center, a longtime gathering space for older residents, will close its doors on Fridays after laying off a third of its staff amid ongoing budget shortfalls. Just how severe the organization’s financial woes are, however, remains unclear.
Executive director Sam Nussbaum said the center, which serves adults over the age of 50, cut five of its 15 employees due to financial strains earlier this month.
It is unclear just how serious the center’s budget problems are, as the organization has not filed its annual tax return forms with the Internal Revenue Service since 2020, according to the IRS’s database.
Nonprofit organizations like the senior center are required to file these tax forms called Form 990s every year in order to keep their tax-exempt status. The forms show how nonprofits are spending public and donor money.
Makes one wonder if Our PAL Val was running the agency. Nope, it’s THIS guy:
Board president Italo Carrieri-Russo did not respond to requests for comment.
Some names just keep popping up in suspicious places. So, where did the money go? Speaking of names popping up in suspicious places:
The center receives a little more than $200,000 from the state annually, Nussbaum said. But its budget sits around $660,000, so the center has to make up more than $400,000 every year.
Mayor John Carney said he was unaware of the center’s budget issues, but noted that senior centers are a “state function.”
“[The state has] a whole budget for senior centers, so we have not been in that business,” Carney told Spotlight Delaware.
Oh. I thought that longtime Wilmington resident Carney was once Governor (aka ‘the state’), not too long ago. Just one more item that never crossed his blinkered mind, I guess.
Time for a shout-out to reporter Brianna Hill. She reports stories that make me angry, merely by comprehensively reporting them. That’s exemplary journalism.
Governor Meyer Calls Special Session To Address Budget Shortfall:
Delaware’s General Assembly is returning for another special session – this time to deal with a potential budget crisis.
Gov. Matt Meyer is calling lawmakers to Dover Thursday, November 13th to address revenue losses connected corporate tax law changes in the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Delaware is projected to lose about $400 million in revenue over the next two years due to those changes.
Some go into effect January 1 and Meyer says that makes taking action urgent.
“The impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Delaware is really an immediate situation that if we don’t address right now, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars that we’ve ot to find awate to cut out of our budget,” said Meyer on the Oct. 23 edition of Delaware Public Media/WHYY’ ‘Ask Gov. Meyer’.
The primary solution lawmakers are expected to take up decoupling state and federal corporate tax laws to stop new federal deductions from hitting state revenues. Meyer supports that plan.
Guess restoring progressivity to our state income tax will have to wait…
‘brazen’.
While I certainly hold open the possibility that dark deeds are being done in secret, one thing that is remarkable is how open and obvious he is with his self-dealing.
He accepted the gift of a plane to serve as a new Air Force One (later to be handed over to the Trump presidential library) from Qatar — a nation that has supported Hamas for years and that is actively working to influence American politics through lavish expenditure — and then provided the country with an American security guarantee by executive order.
Trump pardoned a convicted crypto billionaire, Changpeng Zhao, after Zhao’s company, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, “took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.”
In September, The Times published a report describing in great detail how the United Arab Emirates entered into a multibillion-dollar crypto deal with the Trump family and the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy. “Two weeks later,” my colleagues reported, “the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips.”
Trump’s defenders have a different — and telling — term for his misconduct. He’s not brazen, he’s “transparent.” In a CNN interview about Trump’s message to Pam Bondi directing her to prosecute Trump’s enemies, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “I think what we know is, President Trump is very open and transparent with the American people, and he speaks his mind. And that’s what his supporters love about him, and that’s what America loves about him.”
In May, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, was even more explicit. When questioned about Trump’s crypto dealings during a news conference, Johnson said, “The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the Biden crime family is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains.”
A really good piece by perhaps the Times’ Editorial Board’s most conservative commenter.
“Without Online Trolls, There Would Be No Donald Trump.” I’m far from an expert in online trollery, but I know an important article when I read it:
On July 8, something happened to Donald Trump that I’ve not seen happen in the entire decade he has dominated presidential politics. As his base clamored for more disclosures about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his superpower — his ability to grab and redirect attention — briefly failed him. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he whined when a journalist asked about the Justice Department’s decision to abort any further disclosure of documents related to the case. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”
It took 10 days, threats against right-wing influencers still focused on Epstein, and Gabbard’s conspiracy theory before Trump started to reclaim his ability to redirect the media’s attention.
Two things had disrupted Trump’s superpower. First, after Trump’s top DOJ appointees — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and his deputy Dan Bongino – had fueled, then disappointed, MAGA’s demand for Epstein disclosures, the failure to fulfill their promises fed the conspiracy itself. By thwarting the conspiracists’ demands, Bondi, especially, created rifts and distrust in Trump’s own base.
Conspiracy theories about Epstein were always non-falsifiable; the mob will never be satisfied. But Bondi made that dynamic worse.
More important for understanding what happened in July: the very same online trolls who’ve been critical partners in Trump’s success managing attention were precisely the same people who had spun those conspiracy theories. There is a direct through-line from a relatively small set of social media accounts that helped Trump win the 2016 election to PizzaGate and, after that, QAnon. QAnoners played a key role in Trump’s 2021 insurrection attempt, and its adherents remain a substantial portion of Trump’s base. Since 2016, pro-Trump trolls’ exploitation of social media algorithms to redirect political news coverage — whether from legacy media or newer outlets — has disrupted traditional news cycles.
The rise of a mob-driven distraction machine prevents independent journalists from being able to drive stories like we used to. Persistent true content is no longer enough to attract eyeballs and drive narrative, because people are flooding social media with conspiracies.
And with so many of the stories I have covered, from the Russian investigation to January 6 to the Hunter Biden case, such troll-driven mobs have a demonstrable impact on the outcome. Such mobs were instrumental in discrediting legal outcomes that used to hold sway.
Marcy Wheeler then goes on to document the scope and impact of the Troll Machine. Essential reading.
What do you want to talk about?
The Wilmington Weasel didn’t know about the Senior Center’s Problems? I must say he only focuses on Corporate stuff. Shutting-down the Bus hub in center city so the corporates could feel safe is what he’s all about. Super incompetent is what the Weasel is and now it shows more and more. He needs to give back some of those many pensions he’s accumulated for asleep on the political job.
To be fair, a governor paying attention to the Wilmington Senior Center would be a case of micromanaging to an absurd degree. Even a mayor has much bigger issues to deal with.
To be fair a Governor does in fact have responsibility over where state funds go. He damn sure knew his way there to campaign and I’m guessing the dude who was running the BOD was in place during his administration. I woukd be more inclined to give Carney a little slack if his first go to response wasn’t “This is a state matter”. I mean he blamed himself FFS!
Carney views everything on a monetary basis, first, last and always. “The state” he’s talking about is the state budget. He does not see people, he sees lines on the budget. The budget line of every senior center is too small a detail for him to notice.
I agree he sees things MOSTLY in monetary terms.
But he knew what he was doing when he threw state money at PAL. He knew what he was doing when he threw money at Jobs For Delaware Graduates. He was bribing legislators to support his blinkered agenda.
He repeatedly vouched for BHL’s honesty even as she was funneling opioid funds to supporters of hers, who then used the money for everything BUT addressing the opioid crisis.
If all you see is a budget line, you don’t care what happens to the money after it leaves your ledger. The lies are just mouth noises a politician has to make, and you can tell he hates that part of the jobs.
He pays people to watch that money you know like the genius who is banned from the Hone Depot. His minions failed to catch that the agency wasn’t filing its tax returns and lost its non profit status and tye $$ kept flowing. His biggest skill is in being a heartless bean counter and he can’t even get that right!
Let’s not forget that he demanded that state agencies under his control use ‘budget-smoothing’ in crafting their budgets while privatizing the subsidization of tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to businesses, free from the prying eyes of said taxpayers.
Were he still governor, you can bet that Budget-Smoothing-On-Steroids would be his response to our budget shortfall…not recouping some of the corporations’ ill-gotten gains from the Big Beautiful Bill.
Is Bluedelaware.com dead?
Yes:
https://delawareliberal.net/2025/09/30/whoa-blue-delaware-gets-outed-and-how/
Thanks for reply.
It is hard to say if their stupidity exceeded their laziness or their laziness exceeded their stupidity.
I think the words ‘hubris’ and or ‘chutzpah’ belong in there as well.
I’ll just say we dodged a bullet with the Recent Dem Chair election 😉