- Let's start with an Associated Press article today from Alexandra Olson. She writes about the following situation in Mexico relative to local politics:
- A local mayoral candidate and his son were gunned down and killed at their family business when the father refused to exit the mayoral race, a refusal that got him killed by the local drug cartel.
- Another mayoral candidate in another town had her home burned down and is now missing. It is unknown if she was killed, kidnapped, or is in hiding from the drug cartel.
- In many towns, no candidates can be found to run for office for fear that they will also become targets of the drug cartels.
At some point, the local Mexican political structure could become so subservient to the Mexican drug cartels, making them that much more powerful, that this type of violence will spill over the border and affect U.S. citizens. What are the Federal government and the Obama administration doing to prevent such an escalation of violence? Apparently not much since the situaiont gets worse every day.
Given that the political class will not solve, or even slow down the drug plague, it is time to execute Step 26 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" and put together a panel of American experts from a diverse set of backgrounds (law enforcement, economics, immigration, the American Medical Association, the Coast Guard and other armed forces, sociologists, etc.) and let them go off and come up with rational, integrated and viable options for dealing with the drug problems. We have lost The War On Drugs, now we need a solution to the drug problem. This approach would be a ground up approach and could include everything from complete legalization to the death penalty for possession and anything in between. The current path with the current politicians is getting us nowhere.
- With regard to the recently passed Obama health care reform legislation, it did not take long for the some people to figure out how to beat the system In a letter to the Money and Ethics column in the June issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, a writer described the health insurance situation of her son. The son was 27 years old and could not stay on the parents' health care plan. He has a full time job and makes $50,000 a year so he could buy health care insurance if he wanted to. He apparently has no ailments or pre-conditions. According to the mother: "My son figures he can always get insurance through one of the new high risk pools if someday he gets really sick and needs it. And he points out that he won't face a personal penalty for not having insurance until 2014, when it will likely be a painless $500 - a lot less than the cost of an individual policy."
Great, the ink is not even dry on the law and already people have figured out how to game the system, much like we pointed out in several blog posts last year. How could the political class be so naive to think that everyone, including young, healthy Americans, would rush out and pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance when the penalty, if they ever got caught, was only $500? Plus, since the law made it illegal for anyone to be denied coverage, why wouldn't a younger person take the risk of not carrying insurance and just sign up for insurance if and when it was needed?
How does this kind of stupid legislating solve the problem of rising health care costs? The answer to this question is actually quite easy since the bill never addressed the root causes of rising health care costs, causes that I will not repeat again today but which have been well documented in previous posts. Thus, the bill never had a chance of solving anything and now has just established an ill-functioning, logic-challenged Federal bureaucracy.
The big concern with this type of reasoning by this young man is when the Federal government and the political class realize how stupid their logic is and no one is buying health care insurance, how will they react? Will they start sending Federal agents out to our homes to check us for our health insurance card? Will they randomly stop us on the street and ask for health care coverage, kind of like health care profiling (e.g. "Papers please?"). Starting to sound like the Arizona immigration law. Thus, one massive screw up by the political class could lead to a massive intrusion into our privacy by the same political class in order to correct their first mistake.
The only solution is to turn to Step 28 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" and put together a health care panel of smart Americans from a diverse set of backgrounds (economists, American Medical Association, American Bar Association, insurance companies, drug companies, consumer advocates, sociologists, etc.) and allow them to hash out a rationale health care reform strategy. This would be done in the absence of lobbyists and the political class, both groups of which crafted the Obama Care disaster.
- I was taken back a little when I came across a political cartoon in the May 21, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. If Elena Kagan makes it onto the court, then the nine justices would include six alumni from Harvard and three alumni from Yale on the bench. Thus, for all of the talk about diversity on the bench (women, Hispanic, African -American), we seem to have ignored a major diversity problem in that all of them come from Ivy League schools. Now, I do not have the numbers handy to prove or disprove thew following statement but I am pretty sure this is true: Ivy League graduates are not a reflective of the backgrounds, education, hardships, etc. of the vast majority of Americans. If I had substituted "Women" or "Hispanics" for Ivy League in the previous sentence I am sure someone would have accused me of being a sexist or a racist. I doubt that anyone will criticize me for using the Ivy League connection.
Don't get me wrong. I want smart people sitting on the bench, it would overcome some of the non-smart people sitting in Congress. However, it has been my experience that Ivy league people are very book smart people, they are not street smart people. Without being street smart, some decisions they make are not in touch with reality and that is my problem. Step 19 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is just one example where the justices may have made the right book smart decision in the Kelo vs. New London Eminent Domain case but they certainly made the wrong street smart decision. [Note: see a previous post to this blog to see how badly this effort went astray in New London, a bad situation that might not have happened if the justices had been more street smart relative to the reality we live in.]
The only hope at getting more diversity in this area is to dump the political incumbents in Congress who keep nominating the same types of Ivy Leaguers and get a different approach going to who sits on the bench, an approach that will still honor the Constitution but be more in touch with the real world.
- According to Gail Collins from the New York Times, and whose article was summarized in the May 21, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, under current law people listed on the FBI's terrorist watch list can stroll into any gun store in the country and buy an assault rifle. It appears that almost 1,200 people, over the past six years, that were on terrorist watch lists have bought such weapons legally. Let's see: a convicted but freed ex-con cannot buy a gun but a potential terrorist can? Makes no sense. If the political class cannot even handle this type of simple, illogical situation, how can we expect the politicians to protect us from terrorism attacks when we allow the terrorists to legally arm themselves inside the United States? That is why Step 39, Term Limits, is so important. We cannot allow these same people to stay in office if they cannot handle a simple situation like this.
- And finally, a third party in the recent British national elections had a tremendous and unexpected showing and will become a very powerful force gong forward since neither of the two traditional parties were about to gain a majority on their own. Seems that people outside of the United States are fed up with their political classes also and are looking for answers from other sources. Hopefully, that sentiment will hold true in November in the America, we certainly need the change.
Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
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