1) According to news reports, New York-based designer Thom Browne designed the dress that Michelle Obama wore during her husband’s second inauguration ceremonies, a dress that was estimated to cost at least $10,000. The average American household would probably have to work 3-4 months to afford such a dress. As we have reported previously, the entire inauguration event likely cost American taxpayers around $150 million. During the Christmas season, the White House was decorated with 54 Christmas trees.
There are tens of millions of Americans that need food stamps to survive. 23 million Americans are unemployed or under employed. Tens of millions of Americans do not have health care insurance.
Does anyone really think that Washington is in tune with the rest of America? Disgraceful
2) A January 21, 2013 article in the New York Post discussed the contents of meeting notes from the Federal Reserve from 2007. The article lays out its case that then Vice Chairman of the Fed, Tim Geithner, who would soon become Secretary of the Treasury, probably provided insider trading information, relative to the Fed’s plans for the economy, to his friends in the major banks.
The article contains the transcript words of a telephone conversation between Geithner and another member of the Fed, Jeffery Lacker, where Lacker discusses the fact that the head of Bank Of America already knew what the Fed intended to do to the Fed’s discount rate before it was made public on August 17, 2007. Suspiciously, the stock values of financial stocks moved substantially higher on August 16, the day before the announcement on the discount rate was to be made.
Let’s review: ordinary American citizen deals insider information, ordinary American goes to jail. Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board deals insider information, Vice Chairman becomes Secretary of the Treasury.
3) Freedom House is a Washington, DC-based think tank that conducts research on democracy, liberty, freedom, and human rights. It recently published its latest report on the state of freedom around the world. The report is entitled, "Freedom in the World 2013," and the seven nations with the lowest possible rankings for both political rights and civil liberties included North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.
And here’s the kicker to this dubious list for freedom anemic countries: the United States provides substantial economic, military and/or diplomatic support to four of them. So much for being a beacon of hope and freedom to the rest of the world. We cannot claim that high ground when we are supporting the corrupt governments in Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, and Turkmenistan.
Freedom atrocities that occur in these four countries, as researched and identified by Freedom House, include torture, denial of legal counsel, non-existent women’s rights, public lashings and death for such offenses as homosexuality, adultery, prostitution, and renouncing Islam, horrific prison conditions, rigged elections or no elections at all, etc.
Why does the U.S. government and political class support such wretched regimes? Could it be that all of them are major sources of oil and natural gas? Could it be that one of the gangs we talked about in early January,
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-selling-and-buying-of-america-part_14.html
Big Oil, and their collusion with the Washington political class, has something to do with our not standing for freedom, liberty, and equality? Insanity.
4) In the February, 2013 issue of Reason magazine we find out that someone in the U.S. Justice Department decided to issue a Federal order/regulation that decided in 2011 the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires hotels, restaurants, and airlines to accommodate “pygmy ponies” as service animals. Really, pygmy ponies? Ask yourself a couple of questions:
- How many people in the world with disabilities do we think that this regulation would effect? Two people, three people?
- How much will this regulation unnecessarily cost American businesses and our economy as they have to educate their employees about pygmy ponies and the ADA?
- Is that the right use of taxpayer money for high priced lawyers, to determine that pygmy ponies is a pressing issue?
- Did these lawyers have nothing better to do in light of a $16.4 TRILLION national debt due to decades of wasteful government spending?
5) Walter Jones used to be a member of the House of Representatives. He had his fifteen minutes of fame when he inanely championed the cause for Congressional cafeterias to rename their French fries to Freedom fries when the French did not support the Bush misadventure into Iraq.
However, ten years later, as quoted in the recent issue of Reason magazine, he has become a big advocate for minimizing foreign military involvement in faraway places such as Iraq. Relative to Afghanistan, he thinks that it has been a mistake, is a mistake, and will continue to be a mistake. It wastes American lives, runs up spending for no conceivable positive end, and worst of all, he observes that we have been funneling money and training resources into the country with little discernible benefit: “No one’s changed Afghanistan [through history] and no one’s going to change it. If you are just waiting to train the Afghans to be policemen and the military, it’s taken 11 years already. You can train a monkey to ride a bicycle in less time.”
And you can train that monkey and have somehting to show for your efforts for probably far less money than what the failure in Afghanistan will end up costing us.
6) Another example that proves when Washington and the politicians that inhabit it try to do the right thing, they still almost always get it wrong. The IRS has spent a lot of time and effort to make it simple for Americans to file their tax returns and efficient for the IRS to process those returns via electronic filing. Simple and efficient, two words that anyone would want their government to be.
However, a Wall Street Journal report, of which a summary appeared in the January 25, 2103 issue of The Week magazine, describes how the Treasury Department has found out that as a result of electronic filing, the government has made identity theft so much easier and lucrative from a crime perspective.
In 2011, IRS had to deal with more than 1.1 million cases of tax return identify theft. In 2008, just three years prior to 2011 and prior to widespread use of electronic filing, there were only 51,700 cases of tax-related identity theft.
Thus, within three short years the Federal government was able to increase the frequency of identify theft crime in this area by 20 fold. And this “efficiency” came at a cost of the government paying out more than $5 billion in bogus tax refunds, money that is likely never to be seen again. It would all be so funny if it was not so tragic.
That should do it for this month. Four posts of Keystone Kop like performances from our elected officials and the bloated and inefficient government it operates.
Our 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.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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