By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, MAY 6, 2013) — Gov. Patrick, Come clean. Please answer:

* Why was the family of the Boston Marathon bombings, including the bombers themselves, on welfare?

* Why were Mary Jane and Joan Kapanski supporting these people?

* Why won’t you release the records, so that the taxpaying public may see for themselves the trail of wasted public largess?

Why aren’t you releasing information?

What’s the problem, governor? You won’t be facing re-election. You won’t be impressing us Way Out West with your silence, so why don’t you give us the information.

Yes, friends, the shocking story points out as well as any the complete lack of oversight and accountability that allows public systems such as welfare and public education to run up huge wastes of taxpayer money. To pay for all this, of course, we face another round of tax hikes.

Here’s the complete story, courtesy of our colleagues on The Boston Herald.

MASS WELFARE SYSTEM UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT

By Erin Smith, Hillary Chabot, and John Zaremba

The shocking news that the suspected marathon bombers were on the Bay State dole — even as the late Tamerlan Tsarnaev took a six-month jaunt to hang out with jihadis in Dagestan — has thrown a glaring national spotlight on the troubled Massachusetts welfare system.

“The proper question is: How can somebody afford an expensive, international flight when they’re on public assistance?” said U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “Maybe they had some relative pay for them, but if that’s the case, maybe some relative should be paying for their meal card.”

State lawmakers, led by state Rep. David Linsky (D-Natick), are working their way through more than 500 pages of documents on the benefits that Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and their family received, while federal agents are investigating why Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died April 19 in a firefight with police, traveled to Russia for six months in 2012 — while he was on welfare.

A source told the Herald the Tsarnaevs have taken in more than $100,000. But the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick has refused to make details public.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence committee, told the Herald he’s “scratching his head” as to why the Tsarnaev family was on the dole and why the information isn’t public.

“I think clearly he’s come into the public view and that all should be scrutinized,” Rogers said.

Massachusetts welfare programs were under fire long before the marathon bombings. Prior stunning embarrassments include:

• Herald reports that EBT cards were being used to buy cigarettes, booze and tattoos.

• A Herald report that the state could not locate thousands of welfare recipients.

• The inspector general’s report that $25 million a year had gone to EBT recipients who might not be eligible.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s report that Massachusetts overpaid food-stamp recipients by $27 million.

Critics have said the erroneous taxpayer largesse is the result of poor oversight.

“The Department of Transitional Assistance uses the honor system rather than verifying Social Security numbers, residencies or whether you even have children,” said state Rep. Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton). “It has become a national issue, and people are asking why someone who’s out of the country for six months — someone who is on a terrorist watch list — would be getting benefits. When you’re out of the state for two months, your benefits are supposed to be cut off.”

The Department of Transitional Assistance has about 70 fraud investigators monitoring nearly 500,000 people on public assistance, state welfare officials said. The state has 1,112 welfare caseworkers, but they don’t visit recipients’ homes routinely to verify information.

PAUL SLAMS ‘POLICE STATE TACTICS’

Former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul has slammed US law enforcement for responding to the Boston Marathon bombing with “police state tactics.”

In a post on the website of libertarian activist Lew Rockwell, Mr. Paul said Monday that the governmental reaction to the tragic explosions was worse than the attack itself. The forced lockdown of much of the Boston area, police riding armored vehicles through the streets, and door-to-door searches without warrants were all reminiscent of a military coup or martial law, Paul added.

“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” according to Paul.

RECOMMENDED: Quiz: How much do you know about terrorism?

Furthermore, this response did not result in the capture of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Paul charged. He was discovered hiding in a boat by a private citizen, who called police.

“And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police,” Paul wrote on Lew Rockwell’s site.

Yikes. This isn’t going to go down well in Watertown, is it? Citizens there applauded when police finally carted off Tsarnaev alive. The Boston police commissioner told his troops over the radio that “it’s a proud day to be a Boston police officer.” In the wake of the suspect’s capture the media have generally portrayed law enforcement officers as heroes.

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But Paul’s contrarian take perhaps should not be surprising. After all, he’s a committed libertarian who at one point in the GOP presidential debates said that the border fence with Mexico might at some point be used to keep US citizens penned in.

And while Paul’s position here is, um, not in the majority, there are other public figures who charge that the Boston response was overkill. In some ways this is one of those points in the circle of American politics were conservative libertarianism and liberal progressivism meet.

The generally left-leaning Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, for instance, told PBS host Bill Moyers over the weekend that the public lionization of police in the wake of the Boston bombing isn’t necessarily a good thing.

“The way in which Americans now related to their government, the way in which they get nationalistic pride is through the assertion of this massive military or police force, and very few other things produce that kind of pride,” Greenwald said. “I think [this] shows a lot about our value systems and what the government is failing to do. And that’s the way in which this culture becomes coarsened.”

However, state and local officials have continued to defend their decision to shut down much of Boston for the Tsarnaev manhunt. At the time they did not know whether the suspect had more explosives or fellow conspirators, and they did not want to risk another tragedy.

“I think we did what we should have done and were supposed to do with the always-imperfect information that you have at the time,” Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) said at a news conference last week.

And Paul in particular is now drawing criticism for the company he keeps. Lew Rockwell, Paul’s former congressional chief of staff, now heads the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank with “deep ties to the neo-Confederate movement,” which believes the wrong side won the Civil War, according to theSouthern Poverty Law Center.

As a Paul employee, Rockwell oversaw newsletters published under the former congressman’s name that contained controversial statements about race, homosexuality, and other hot-button topics.

Furthermore, Paul’s own new organization, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, has an advisory board that contains a “bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet,” according to Daily Beast writer James Kirchik.

These include Southwestern Law School professor Butler Shaffer, who has written a post for the Lew Rockwell website titled “9/11 was a conspiracy,” notes the Daily Beast.

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Meanwhile, considering the first story on our welfare system run amok, not a word from any of our fearless state representatives to the General Court.

Worthless. Utterly worthless.

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“The kitchen table exists because I scrub it.” — W.H. Auden

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.