July, 2013 Update On Our Lost War On Drugs

Let’s check in with a major issue that we have not discussed for a while, our lost war on drugs. As the American political class in Washington dithers around with petty issues and self enrichment and self reelection priorities, the country’s lost war on drugs continues to feed violent drug cartels, unnecessarily imprisons non-violent drug offenders, does not do a good job at helping Americans with their addictions, and wastes billions and billions of dollars in the process. Sounds about right for Washington.

1) Many times we have discussed the stupid, failed, and illegal Obama administration gun running operation called Fast and Furious. The alleged purpose of this program was to allow heavy duty guns to cross the border into the hands of drug cartels, track where those guns ended up, and use that tracking to prosecute and understand the flow of guns into cartel hands.

Stupid program with stupid logistics but often with fatal results. According to a Los Angeles Times news report from early July,  a rifle used in the murder of a Mexican police chief and a body guard has been identified as part of the Operation Fast and Furious operation.

Luis Lucio Rosales Astorga, the police chief in the city of Hostotipaquillo, was shot to death Jan. 29, 2013  when gunmen intercepted his patrol car and opened fire. The ambush killed one of his bodyguards and wounded the chief’s wife and a second bodyguard.

Police investigators arrested eight suspects in their 20s and 30s and police also seized a stockpile of their weapons including rifles, grenades, handguns, helmets, bulletproof vests, uniforms and special communications equipment. A semi-automatic rifle, the firearm that killed the chief, was traced back to the Lone Wolf Trading Company, a gun store in Glendale, Arizona. The U.S. Justice Department identified it as a Fast and Furious weapon.

A not so great program that gets law enforcement people killed in another country. Really makes you think: what were these people thinking when they put together such a shabby and idiotic program?

2) In mid-May, 2013, the Justice Department Inspector General issued a report on a facet of the Fast and Furious fiasco that is further evidence that this is not a transparent administration by any stretch of the imagination:

• The report confirms the allegation that the former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, purposely leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.
• The Inspector General report found that: “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.” 
• The report also raised the issue if this conduct was worthy of having Burke’s law license revoked in his home state of Arizona.
• Additionally, the Inspector General also uncovered show senior Justice Department officials discussed smearing Dodson.
• Documents uncovered via a Freedom of Information Act show that Tracy Schmaler worked with the leftwing advocacy group Media Matters for America to smear whistleblowers, members of Congress and the media who sought to investigate DOJ scandals under Attorney General Eric Holder. Ms. Schmaler has resigned her position at the Justice Department.

Hassling whistleblowers, discrediting whistleblowers, public humiliation of whistleblowers who dared to speak the truth. Not quite the transparency one would have hoped for from a President who vowed to be the most transparent Presidency ever. 

3) Staying with the whole whistleblower concept, a May 21, 2013 Politico article reported on how the home and business computers of CBS News correspondent Sheryl Atkisson had been hacked back in February, 2013, at the height of her investigating and reporting on…Fast and Furious. It is unknown who did the hacking and the Justice Department has vehemently denied they had anything to do with the hacking.

But, in light of the NSA, IRS, and numerous other scandals and government over reach that have come to pass in the past few months, that denial probably rings a little hollow with most Americans. This is especially true in light of the Inspector General report that uncovered how the Justice Department was caught trying to discredit at least one Fast and Furious whistleblower.

4) In Mexico, the violence and killing goes on unabated, with or without Fast and Furious weapons. An Associated Press article from mid-March, 2013 reported that seven Mexican men had been executed and then propped up on plastic chairs along the side of the road in the Mexican state of Michoacan to intimidate rival drug dealers, potential spies, and honest  police officials who are not yet corrupted, and who just trying to take down the drug cartels. Elsewhere, the article also reports that seven others, including several Mexican federal agents were killed at the about the same time in the state of Guerrero.

Our war on drugs is fueling this violence and corruption with Fast and Furious being just one sad component of the whole debacle.

5) Houston radio station 1200 WOAI news reported on March 27, 2013 that the Texas Department of Public Safety 2013 annual threat report, which compiled intelligence gathered by dozens of law enforcement and homeland security agencies, found that six of the eight major Mexican drug cartels have so-called  'command and control networks' operating in the state of Texas. These cartel networks are coordinating the movement of drugs and people into Texas, and the movement of cash, weapons, and stolen vehicles back to Mexico.

Thus, as we predicted many times before, the violence and presence of the drug cartels will never be contained over the border only in Mexico. The cartels are in this country today and are using their might and reach to expand and control their drug running operations locally. 

6) But Texas is not the only state to be in the throes of a cartel presence. Consider the details from an Associated Press story from April 1, 2013:

• Cartels have their own personnel running drug operations in at least nine NON-BORDER states, often setting up their presence in quiet suburban areas.
• Law enforcement experts are worried that such a widespread presence could pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping, extortion rackets and money laundering
• "It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office, who is quoted in the article.
• A Townhall article, also from April 1, 2013, reminded readers that a district attorney in Texas, his wife, and a district attorney in Colorado had been gunned down in broad daylight, likely because of their efforts of controlling drug cartel activities.

Thus, it is pretty clear they are here and quite possibly are already operating in your neighborhood.

7) The following article from the Dallas Morning News on July 10, 2013 does an excellent job summarizing the tragedy, deaths, and Obama administration lies and deceptions that have been going on relative to Fast and Furious since day one:

http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20130710-editorial-forget-operation-fast-and-furious-not-with-bodies-still-piling-up.ece

Two points of interest among the other disgraces is the reminder that a U.S. Border patrol agent has actually been killed by a Fast and Furious weapon. U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was ambushed by drug smugglers Dec. 15, 2010, near Nogales, Arizona, with a Fast and Furious gun found nearby the murder scene. Second, according to the article, over 200 Mexicans have been shot to death with guns from the Fast and Furious  operation. 

Thus, not only were international treaties broken, government lies given out, whistleblowers intimated, and a stupid program put into operation, hundreds of people are now dead because of this illegal effort and U.S. taxpayer money.

8) And while all of the above incidents and trends are probably true, given the integrity of the reporting sources, consider what could become the biggest scandal of all of our lost war on drugs, a potential scandal that we have reported on before but needs to be reviewed again in light of the continuing lost war on drugs. 

A Federal court case is underway in Chicago involving a Mexican citizen named Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla. Consider some of the alleged “facts” he and his lawyer are claiming in his court case:

• He says in the logistics coordinator for the Mexican Sinola drug cartel.
• According to him, Fast and Furious was not about illegally selling and transporting guns into Mexico and tracking their itineraries.
• The program was a deal cut between the Obama administration and the Sinoloa cartel
• The cartel was to funnel intelligence and information on rival cartels to U.S. law enforcement authorities who could then take down the assets of these other cartels.
• In return, the Sinola cartel received weapons via Fast and Furious, via Obama’s Justice department and freer reign and less hassle in carrying out their illegal activities in the U.S.

Unbelievable accusations that a Presidential administration would enter into this type of deal with the devil, in this case the Sinola cartel. But ten months ago we never could have imagined that a President would ignore pleas for help from a U.S. consulate under attack, would spy on and gather every electronics communications of every American, would unleash the IRS to harass and intimidate American citizens who dared to disagree with him, and then claim ignorance of all the illegal and immoral activities going on under his administration.

All because the political class refuses to admit that our forty year old war on drugs has been an expensive disaster, a disaster that continues everyday with no victory in sight.
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:

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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:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2013 Obama Care Update, Part 4: Obama Care Strangling Medicare, Ohio Insurance Policies up 88% and More

This is our fourth post in this update series on the failure that is Obama Care. According to experts and the latest news reports, budgets are already falling short for some segments of the legislation, some of the programs are already shut down, and looking forward, plans are grossly inadequate or way behind schedule. And most importantly, the legislation is not reducing costs or providing quality health care.

How much else could go wrong with one piece of legislation? The following points try to answer that question:

1) The Ohio Department of Insurance recently predicted that Ohio residents will see their individual policy health insurance rates increase 88% in 2014 because of Obama Care. Lt. Governor Mary Taylor recently stated in Forbes magazine that, “We have warned of these increases. Consumers will have fewer choices and pay much higher premiums for their health insurance starting in 2014.”

Higher cost, less variety and choices. Does not get much worse than that.

2) A Heritage Foundation analysis that was posted on its website on June 3, 2013 pointed out how Obama Care will decimate Medicare and hurry its demise. First, recall from a previous post that Medicare’s Part A trust fund is expected to be bankrupt  by 2026 and the overall program has a long-term unfunded obligation of more than $35 trillion.

But under Obama Care, Medicare’s budget is going to be slashed by over $700 billion in the next ten years, budget resources that will be redirected to Obama Care’s needs and budget. Thus, Medicare’s financial status gets much worse, not better under Obama Care.

Heritage quotes a study by the Congressional Budget Office which concluded these budget cuts will hit health care  providers such as hospitals, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, and hospices. The Medicare trustees predict that if Congress allows these cuts to go into effect, 15% of Medicare providers would go in the red by 2019, 25% by 2030, and 40% by 2050.

And two things are likely to happen, neither of them good, if this red ink scenarios come to past: “Providers could not sustain continuing negative margins and would have to withdraw from serving Medicare beneficiaries or (if total facility margins remained positive) shift substantial portions of Medicare costs to their non-Medicare, non-Medicaid payers.” In other words, many senior citizens could lose access to their medical care or costs could go up for everyone, the exact opposite  of what Obama Care was supposed to do.

3) A June 2, 2013 article from The Hill reported that there are at least two major sets of lawsuits still pending against Obama Care’s tenets:

1. One set of lawsuits accuses the Internal Revenue Service of illegally implementing new subsidies to help people buy insurance that is in conflict with the actual text of the legislation.
2. Additionally, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging the law’s mandate for health plans to cover birth control.

Dozens of lawsuits still pending and dozens of implementation failures so far, this is one loser piece of legislation.

4) The Wegman’s supermarket chain has historically had a very good health insurance program for its part time workers. It was a voluntary program, offered to any employee who worked at least 20 hours a week. However,  the chain recently announced that it would be discontinuing the program because of the requirements of Obama Care, the additional costs imposed on them would be too much. 

Thus, another group of Americans see that Obama broke his promise when he vowed that if you like your health insurance you can keep it under the Obama Care legislation. Not so much at Wegman’s and hundreds of other companies across the country.

5) One of the attributes of Obama Care is that if an American was not financially well off, they could qualify for Federal tax subsidies to help pay for health care coverage. The process was that IRS tax records would be electronically and automatically correlated with a person’s application for financial help and if they fell below certain income thresholds, they would get government assistance.

There was a major problem with this process when it was formulated. Let’s say that a person made $100,000 a year and correctly filed that amount on their tax return. However, since they filed that return, they lost their job and their income went to zero. The IRS/Obama Care process would have denied them financial assistance despite their zero income level since the benchmark was when they were earning $100,000 a year.

Reverse the process. Let’s assume a person was unemployed and had zero income, an amount they correctly filed with their IRS tax return. However, soon after they filed that return, they got a job paying $100,000 a year. Thus, if they filed for Federal financial assistance, they would qualify because in the eyes of Obama Care, they had zero income.

Insanity. Apparently, tax filing timing, not true need, would drive the eligibility of financial assistance. Additionally, this process insanely only looks at recent income levels, not wealth levels.
Consider this extreme example. Assume that Warren Buffet turned all of his assets into physical cash, stuck in in a giant safety deposit box and decided not to work for a year. Under Obama Care, he would qualify for Federal assistance because he had a zero income level, DESPITE the fact that he had billions of dollars in his possession in a safety deposit box. Idiotic planning and reasoning on the part of Obama Care’s writers.

But the situation is far worse than this lunacy. Why? This week we found out that the Federal government has no idea or data processing infrastructure in place to make this correlation between historical tax records and a person’s Obama Care application for financial assistance.

The Obama administration has finally and openly admitted that the Federal government lacks the ability to verify if people are telling the truth about needing ObamaCare-related tax subsidies. This process was supposed to make the overall Obama Care legislation financially viable since it was supposed to be partially paid for by curtailing widespread waste, fraud and abuse. Now, this failed assumption and process potentially makes waste, fraud and abuse even more prevalent and easier.

And to add insult to injury, the administration plans to still go ahead with the roll out despite absolutely NO income checks to protect taxpayer wealth.

Guess what? Four full days of posts into the Obama Care train wreck and we are still not done documenting all of the bad things that are happening and will happen as a result of this legislation. More to follow tomorrow.

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:

Term Limits Now!:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2013 Obama Care Update, Part 3: Procedures Not Ready, Health Care Costs Going Up, and Health Exchanges Only Imagneary

This is our third in a series of updates we are doing to cover the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first update this month covered the “dirty dozen” major failures of Obama Care to date, as identified by the Heritage Foundation. The second update covered a set of stories on how Obama Care is negatively affecting the working hours, take home pay, and insurance coverage of Americans among other disasters. Those two posts can be accessed starting at:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/07/july-2013-obama-care-update-number-1.html

Let us continue to today with some more horror stores, courtesy of the Federal government and Obama Care:

1) The Washington Free Beacon news organization ran an article on June 18, 2013 that covered a Senate hearing on the impact on health care costs of Obama Care. The bottom line conclusion from those present at the hearing, both those testifying and the Senators on the panel, is that Obama Care will NOT bring down health care costs as promised:

• According to the article, the committee scheduled the hearing to discuss Steven Brill’s 26,000-word article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” which investigated why health care costs continue to skyrocket.
• Brill, who is a writer for Time, testified at the hearing that while Obama Care may end up extending coverage to some uninsured Americans, it does not include steps and processes  to actually curb rising health insurance costs or the cost of providing medical services:
• “Obama Care does not address the fundamental problem, which is the high prices.” 
• Brill testified that health care providers, drug companies, and other health care entities charge widely varying and outrageously high amounts for the same procedure or product, such as one hospital billing a patient $77 for a box of gauze pads. This trend that will not be arrested or corrected by Obama Care.
• Senator Bill Nelson of the Senate panel identified another unintended consequence of Obama Care. It is the consolidation of health care firms, a trend that results in fewer and fewer competitors in the marketplace, hindering the intent to drive down costs: “It’s a way of consolidating power by he who owns all the providers of services. This is contrary to the kind of competition we were trying to create in Obama care.”
• Senate panel Committee Chairman Max Baucus supported Nelson’s conclusion by noting that the unintended consolidation of health care entities appears to result in nicer facilities with higher prices, higher salaries and more buildings but not lower health care costs. 

So, more experts and DEMOCRATIC politicians agree, that one of the major selling points of Obama Care, the reduction of health care costs, is not happening and is unlikely to happen. Surprise, surprise. 

Why will it no reduce costs? Because as we pointed out in the second post listed above, Obama Care never understood the root causes of our rising health care costs and thus, never adequately addressed them.

2) On June 19, 2013, the General Accountability Office of the Federal government published two reports confirming the Obama Administration is ill-equipped and ill-prepared for the implementation of the federally operated health insurance and the Small Business Health Option Program (SHOP) health care exchanges created under Obama Care. The reports state the programs’ implementation delays and missed deadlines show potential for “implementation challenges going forward.”

How bad are the challenges? Consider the words and findings of the GAO reports themselves, as documented by the Minority Report blog on June 19, 2013:

§ States have yet to complete 85 percent of the required program activities. GAO found that, "…states had between 16 and 52 key activities remaining to be completed, or on average, about 85 percent of their total key activities [actions that must be completed before October 1, 2013]. "

• Core functions of both federal and state-based exchanges have yet to be completed. According to GAO, “[The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services] (CMS) has many key activities remaining to be completed across the core exchange functions – eligibility and enrollment, including development and implementation of the data hub; program management; and consumer assistance.”
• With less than four months before open enrollment, any other missed deadlines threaten the timely establishment of exchanges. The GAO reported that “…much remains to be accomplished by CMS and states within a relatively short amount of time.” The reports also noted that missed deadlines closer to the start of enrollment could impact the establishment of exchanges.
• HHS has yet to complete critical steps needed to determine eligibility for credits and cost-sharing subsidies. GAO found that, “CMS … still needed to complete steps to enable FFEs to be ready to test development of key eligibility and enrollment functions, including calculation of advance payments of the premium tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies, verification of consumer income, and verification of citizenship or lawful presence.”
• Key data sharing agreements between the federal exchange and its federal and state partners have yet to be complete. GAO reported that “…several critical tasks remain to be completed before the October 1, 2013, implementation milestone.” These tasks include Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between CMS and state and federal agencies, which are necessary to make eligibility determinations.
• Consumer assistance and outreach activities to individuals and employers has been delayed. GAO found that, “CMS has yet to complete many activities related to consumer assistance and outreach and some initial steps were behind schedule.” Such activities not yet complete include “…the federal call center, healthcare.gov website, media outreach, and consumer complaint tracking systems for the [Federally Facilitated] FF-SHOP and [Federally Facilitated Exchanges] FFEs.”
• The scope of CMS involvement in exchange activities remains unclear.If a state does not “make adequate progress,” CMS is expected to step in. According to the GAO, CMS has yet to grant final approval for any state seeking to operate an exchange. The GAO also notes that “some of these exchanges may be under conditional approval when enrollment begins.”

§ A key SHOP program to provide outreach and assistance to small employers and employees has been delayed. GAO found that “[f]unding awards and development of a training curriculum for a key SHOP program that will provide outreach and enrollment assistance to small employers and employees has been delayed by about 2 months.”

Again, listen to the adjectives used to describe the status of Obama Care’s implementation: delayed, yet to be completed, missed deadlines, unclear. Even if they somehow get this contraption in the air in October, does anyone really think it will fly for very long before it crashes under is own weight and absurdity? Unclear, delayed, yet to be completed gives one no faith that this is going to work. 

The full article can be accessed at:

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2013/06/19/gao-confirms-obamacare-implemantation-behind-schedule-facing-challenges/

Although I have not included any of the Congressional member comments here, they can be accessed at the site listed. However, their comments point out the obvious: this is indeed a train wreck about to happen on so many levels.

Another day and another set of documented Obama Care failures. And the bad news is that we are not yet done, more bad news tomorrow.
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:

Term Limits Now!:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2013 Obama Care Update, Part 2: Unons Jump The Obama Care Ship, Jay Carney Stays On Board, and More

Yesterday, we took a look at the “dirty dozen” major failures of Obama Care. These failures included under enrollment, budget overruns, program cancellations, program failures, program delays, and just plan incompetence. Today, we will look at more failures but at a lower level of detail to see how this horrid piece of legislation is harming Americans and the economy.

1) Union organizations had been one of the strongest advocates for Obama Care when it was being developed. This support quickly changed to hypocrisy soon after the legislation was passed when the union actually found out what the law was going to do to their members’ health insurance plans. Many, many unions immediately asked for waivers to the laws requirements to gain at least a temporary reprieve from its ill effects.

That hypocrisy has now turned into outright hostility against the law. We have previously reported on how some unions have now blatantly come out against the law. The latest to turn against it is the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). This is what they recently said in their official white paper on the legislaiton:

“The ACA threatens the viability of multi-employer health plans in four ways: 1) the high employee threshold of the employer mandate 2) the re-insurance fee, 3) the definition of qualified health plans, and 4) the lack of multi-employer specific administrative guidance. We believe it may be impossible to reverse the damage done to these plans if these issues are not resolved. The IBEW cannot afford to sit on the sidelines at the ACA threatens to harm our members by dismantling multi-employer plans.”

So much for that initial support of Obama’s health care and insurance reform. At least this union is now actively against it, having finally understood what damage it will do to its members.

2) According to a Washington Examiner article from July 10, 2013, White House spokesperson took an uncalled swipe and insult at all those who view Obama Care as an unfolding disaster, based on the reality of what has happened so far. Jay Carney got nasty at a recent press briefing during his defense of the Obama administration’s decision to delay the implementation of the health care law’s employer mandate. He criticized those who question the legality of putting off parts of the law, calling them “willfully ignorant.”

Let’s look at some facts, Mr. Carney, before we decide who is “ignorant:”

The legislation plainly states that this component of the law is to be implemented on January 1, 2014. It does not say January 1, 2015. 
Although many Republicans are pointing out this LEGAL requirement and Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat and leading advocate of Obama Care, is also questioning the legality of delaying the implementation of this program.

Not a good way to win friends and influence people, calling them ignorant when in truth they are speaking the truth and you are taking the discussion down into the mud. Given how poorly the entire Obama Care process is going, insulting anyone is not a good strategy for salvaging any part of this ignorant legislation.

3) We have previously reported on many businesses that are cutting hours and terminating health care insurance for employees because they cannot afford to carry either full time employees or continue health insurance as a result of Obama Care requirements. Thus, many Americans are getting hit with a double whammy of Obama Care insults, fewer working hours resulting in less take home pay and less likely to have health care insurance. Talk about a bad piece of legislation and its unintended consequences.

Many of these cutbacks have been in the restaurant and service industries, industries with very low profit margins which would have been wiped out by the Obama Care mandates unless they cutbacks were implemented. But as a July 19, 2013 article from Investors Business Daily points out, local and state government have been even more aggressive in cutting workers; hours and health care insurance coverage as a result of Obama Care. 

According to the article, the result is that part-time government workers, many of them low-income, face pay cuts that can top $3,000 a year, and yet will still be left without employer-provided benefits. The article provides a small sample of local news reports about what local government officials are saying about ObamaCare, and the steps they have to take to avoid or minimize its costs.

- Phillipsburg, Kansas: "School administrators here say they are alarmed and confounded by the looming new costs they face with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act," according to the Kaiser Health Institute News Service. Chris Hipp, director of a Kansas special education cooperative, warned that Obama Care's costs "could put us all out of business or change significantly how we do business," adding that "we are not built to pay full health benefits for non-certified folks who work a little more than 1,000 hours a year."

- Dearborn, Michigan.: "If we had to provide health care and other benefits to all of our employees, the burden on the city would be tremendous," said Mayor John O'Reilly, explaining why the city is cutting its more than 700 part-time and seasonal workers down to 28 hours a week. "The city is like any private or public employer having to adjust to changes in the law."

- Indiana: "What I'm seeing across the state is school districts, unfortunately, having to reduce the hours that they are having some of their folks work, primarily so they don't have to worry about the (ObamaCare) penalties, or they don't have to provide them health insurance, which would be very, very costly," said Dennis Costerison, executive director of the Indiana Association of School Business Officials. Ft. Wayne Community Schools, for example, are cutting yours for nearly three-quarters of its part-time aides.

- Omaha, Nebraska.: "The biggest problem is everyone said that ObamaCare is only going to help cut costs. Nothing could be further from the truth," said Mike Kennedy , who serves on the board of Millard Public Schools, just outside the city, and figures ObamaCare will raise its costs by $400,000. A neighboring school district is reducing hours for up to 281 part-time employees to avoid $2.5 million in new costs, which will result in pay cuts of up to $3,300.

- Long Beach, California: "We are in the same boat as many employers," said Tom Modica, Long Beach's director of government affairs. "We need to maintain the programs and service levels we have now." So the city is going to cut hours for 200 part-time workers so it doesn't have to pay $2 million to provide health benefits.

- Salt Lake City, Utah: "With new provisions in the Affordable Care Act, there was going to be a significant burden upon Granite School District and our taxpayers to offset the cost of benefits," said spokesman Ben Horsley. He says covering the district's part-time workers would cost about $14 million, and so about 1,000 will have their hours cut to 29 a week.

- Cape May County, Jew Jersey: "A number of people in the nation who read it are recognizing how detrimental (Obama Care is) to government and private employers out there," said Gerald Thornton, the county's finance director who is trying to figure out how to budget for the law.

- Virginia: "The Commonwealth of Virginia is grappling with the same issues that many businesses in the private sector are as they struggle to deal with the costs imposed by the Affordable Care Act," Paul Logan, a spokesman for Gov. McDonnell, said. The state is requiring that about 7,000 part-time government workers put in no more than 29 hours a week.

- Texas: "The Affordable Care Act has added so much complexity and administrative burden that there is nothing affordable about it," said Jared Pope, who is consulting with Texas municipal governments on ObamaCare. Dallas expects its health costs to climb $2.1 million next year. Plano is cutting hours to avoid $1 million in new costs.

- Kern County, California: "It will affect multiple departments, a majority of departments," said the county's deputy administrative officer Eric Nisbett, explaining that unless the county cut worker hours for 800 employees, ObamaCare would cost it up to $8 million a year.

- Allegheny County, Pennsylvania: "There's frustration and anger and sadness and resentment, you know, but you don't have a voice," said adjunct English professor Clint Benjamin in the wake of the Community College of Allegheny County's decision to cut hours for about 400 adjunct faculty and other employees so it wouldn't have to pay $6 million in ObamaCare-related fees next year.

- Medina, Ohio: "We feel bad as a city administration and as a council in having to cut hours from 35 to 29," Medina Mayor Dennis Hanwell said. "We have the budget to pay the people, but we do not have the budget to pay for the health care." If they hadn't made that cut, the city faced up to $1 million in new health costs courtesy of ObamaCare.

- Birmingham, Michigan Commissioner Gordon Rinschler may have summed up best the reaction that countless businesses and governments are having to ObamaCare, saying: "We simply can't afford the Affordable Care Act."

I included all of the examples given in the article to provide a sense of how widespread and devastating this piece of legislation is, especially to part time, lower income workers. These workers and the decisions makers that affect them are not, as Mr. Carney would say, “willfully ignorant” of Obama Care. They are living the horror of it every day.

We keep returning to the bottom line of why Obama Care is an unadulterated failure: the legislation and those who wrote it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high health care costs. If you do not understand the root causes, the odds of writing the right prescription to address and terminate those root causes are likely doomed to failure. 

These root causes are relatively easy to identify:

• Americans smoke too much.
• The Federal government monetarily subsidizes the growth of tobacco.
• Americans eat too much.
• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food.
• The Federal government monetarily subsidizes the low cost of inexpensive corn fructose, a fattening agent that infests much of America’s food chain.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The Federal government wastes over $100 billion a year in its primary health care programs today, Medicare and Medicaid, $100 billion a year that would allow many other Americans to get health care coverage and support if the waste and fraud could be eliminated.
• The health care industry in the country today needs major tort and malpractice reforms, reforms that have proven successful at the state level in reducing health care costs.
• State boundary restrictions regarding cross border health care insurance company competition needs to be eliminated in order for market competition to drive down costs.

None of these root causes are substantially addressed by Obama Care. His legislation is just a reshuffling of taxes and fees without any reduction in the root causes of our high health care costs, a fact the Mr. Carney is willfully ignorant about.

The disaster known as Obama Care will continue unfolding tomorrow.
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:

Term Limits Now!: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2013 Obama Care Update, Number 1: The Complete, "Dirty Dozen" Inventory of Failures To Date

With all of the other political class insanity going on, insanity that required us to use eight consecutive posts to cover it earlier this month, we have been ignoring the biggest insanity of them all, Obama Care. The failures within the overall structure of the Obama Care legislation have been mounting up on almost a daily basis. Thus, we are going to take a few days to cover all of the disasters and hardships that this fatally flawed legislation is dumping on America and Americans.

To set the stage of the next few days, let’s review a list of sub-failures within the overall failure that is Obama Care, as documented by the Heritage Foundation. This will give us a context of how much is falling apart within the law. We will follow up these “dirty dozen” global failures with more detailed news of other failures in subsequent posts.

1. The CLASS Act: ABANDONED, THEN REPEALED

The CLASS component of Obama Care was supposed to provide quality, reasonably priced long term health care to cover the potential costs of nursing home stays. However, it became the first of many failures of Obama Care when Obama’s Health and Human Services (HHS) department admitted early on that the CLASS parameters could never be implemented in a financially sound manner.

Even a Congressional Democrat called the CLASS Act “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.” Congress eventually repealed this component of Obama Care because of its insanity.

The bad news from a financial and taxpayer perspective was that CLASS was supposed to be one of the few positive financial contributors to the overall profitability of Obama Care. Once it was repealed for being idiocy, the overall Obama Care financials went from horrible to worse than horrible.

2. Health Care Exchanges: MISSED DEADLINES

Health care exchanges were an invention of Obama Care and are supposed to be places where Americans without health care insurance could go and purchase low cost health care insurance. Each state was supposed to set up their own state exchanges and allow different insurance companies to present their insurance plans and compete for customers.

Obama Care made the exchanges optional for the states and promised that if the states elected not to operate their own state based exchanges, the Federal government would step in and operate a Federal exchange in that state. As a result of the voluntary aspect of the legislation, the majority of states opted out of setting up their own exchanges to save the expense of operating one and let the Feds operate them in their states, increasing the cost, complexity, and likelihood of failure of the exchange process.

And the likelihood of failure is getting larger as time goes by. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in June found that “critical” activities to create a federal exchange have not been completed, and the missed deadlines “suggest a potential for challenges going forward.” It seems like in this case, “challenges” is a government code word for “failures.”

3. HHS mandate: DELAYED; UNDER LEGAL CHALLENGE

Last year, the Obama administration announced a partial delay for Obama Care’s birth control mandates, mandates that would go against the tenets and beliefs of various religious organizations and business owners. This is a blatant attack on the Constitution’s freedom of religion protection.

However, many employers, e.g. the Hobby Lobby retail chain, have filed legal actions against the mandates, which forces them to fund products they find morally objectionable or pay massive fines. Thus, if the court actions are successful, and chances are some of them might be successful, given how many there are, another component of Obama Care would have gone down in flames.

4. Small business plan choice: DELAYED

The original plan of the health insurance exchanges was that people could go to the Obama Care exchanges to get a choice from a menu of competing health care insurance plans. But the Obama administration basically admitted in April that this choice option will not be ready on time for the small business health exchanges. i.e. there will only be one choice and one choice only.

This breaks another promise of Obama Care. Liberal blogger Joe Klein called “a really bad sign” of “Obama Care incompetence.” “Really bad sign,” I believe is yet another code word for “failure.”

5. Child-only plans: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

According to the Heritage Foundation analysis of the legislation, something they call a “drafting error” in Obama Care has led to less access to health care for children with pre-existing conditions. A 2011 report found that in 17 states, health insurers are no longer selling child-only health insurance plans as a result of Obama Care because they fear that individuals will apply for coverage only AFTER being diagnosed with a costly illness.

6. Basic health plan: DELAYED

This government-run plan for states created as part of Obamacare, has also been delayed. According to Heritage, one Democrat criticized the Administration for failing to “live up” to the law and implementing the plan as it written in the legislation.

7. High-risk pools: UNDERPERFORMING; FUNDING LOW

Like everything else the political class and government do, this program for individuals with pre-existing conditions is mired down and much higher costs and much lower enrollment than originally forecasted. This program was originally expected to cover up to 700,000 Americans.

However, only about 110,000 people have enrolled and the Administration has already had to halt new enrollments into the program since the $5 billion program is already running out of funding. This halt had to occur even though it has attained only about 14% of its expected enrollment. As a former professional forecaster in the corporate world, if my forecasts had been off by such a wide margin I would have been fired for incompetence.

8. Early retiree reinsurance: BROKE

More bad forecasting. The original $5 billion in funding for this program was supposed to last until 2014 but the program’s money ran out in 2011, years ahead of schedule.

9. Waivers: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

After the legislation originally passed, HHS found that some of the law’s mandates would raise costs so much that employers would drop coverage rather than face skyrocketing health insurance premiums. This forced the administration to grant temporary waivers of compliance, which only delayed the pain of Obama Care. More than half of the waivers went to union health insurance plans even thought most unions were supporters of the legislation when it was being debated and written. Talk about hypocrisy.

10. Co-ops: DEFUNDED

In early 2013, Congress blocked additional funding to this Obama Care program, and with good reason: In one case, a new health insurance co-op was called “fatally flawed” by Vermont’s state insurance commissioner.

11. “Employee free choice”: REPEALED

This provision, which would have allowed certain workers to use contributions from their employers to buy exchange health plans, was repealed in April 2011. Apparently, businesses generally considered it too complex and unworkable.

12. Medicaid expansion: REJECTED BY MANY STATES

In its 2013 ruling on Obama Care which found it Constitutional, the Supreme Court also made Obama Care’s Medicaid expansion optional for states. The court ruled that Obama Care, as it written and enacted, engaged in “economic dragooning” that puts “a gun to the head of states.” Many states are rejecting Obama Care’s call to expand Medicaid, knowing that expansion will saddle them with additional, unsustainable costs going forward.

There you have it in a very succinct direct description, the “dirty dozen” major failures of Obama Care. Consider the words used to accurately describe what has happened since the legislation was passed: Abandoned, delayed, repealed, broke, unintended consequences, rejected, defunded, and underperforming. Hardly a robust endorsement of the law.

Has any other piece of legislation in our history been written so poorly, so poorly thought out, and so poorly executed as this piece of garbage? As any piece of legislation ever been so blind to the root causes of an issue, in this case, our high and rising health care costs? Has any piece of legislation ever had such a negative impact on economic growth and unemployment?

The answer to these questions is an easy “no.” No legislation has ever been so horrific as this legislation. And in the next few days we will get under these major disasters to examine some of the other disasters and disgraces that are unfolding underneath these more global issues and failures.

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:

Term Limits Now!: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/    

The Trayvon Martin Situation: Obama's Latest Opportunity To Miss An Opportunity At Leadership

Before I go any further, allow me to send out my sympathies and condolences to the Trayvon Martin family and his parents. As a father, I cannot imagine any horror worse than finding out that your child went out to the store to purchase something and ended up fatally shot before they could return home from the store. The horror, anguish, and sense of loss has to be unbearable. A totally unnecessary and tragic loss of life.

Further, I am trying and working to understand how President Obama identified with Trayvon and his loss of life. I still feel it was totally inappropriate for him to discuss the pending case and court trial prior to it’s conclusion, it was selfish and unprofessional, and his premature discussion of the incident could have endangered the court proceedings.

But I continue to try to understand the President’s anguish. This past weekend he discussed how difficult it sometimes is for African Americans, especially young African American males, to go about their lives in our society. He seemed sincere in his feelings, experiences, and words.

But this is where my sense of understanding stops. Barack Obama is the President of the entire United States, not just the African American community of the United States. I believed he missed an incredible opportunity, a historic opportunity to bring this country and its citizens together. Not because an African American youth was tragically and unnecessarily killed, but because an American youth was tragically and unnecessarily killed.

These deaths happen everyday in American. Senseless violence that do not only affect African American families, but affect every type of American family. By not including these other, non-African American deaths in his discussions, he does nothing to bridge the gap in tolerance and understanding that exists in this country today. By not including the following fatal incidents that occurred to other Americans in his thoughts, prayers, and words, he does an injustice to their deaths and their families.

These exclusions do nothing to heal the country, close the racial divide and other societal divides, and fix what are the root causes of senseless violence in this country. Additionally, by awkwardly trying to insert a political message into the Trayvon Martin situation, i.e. we need more gun control, he belittles his leadership and ignores the lives of those that have recently and unnecessarily perished:

1) Last year, a 27-year-old Georgia woman with a four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Hutchenson, was delivering pizza as part of her job to take care of herself and her daughter. Unfortunately, and unnecessarily, she was stabbed to death while doing her job.

According to the local Georgia newspaper, the Cedartown Standard, she was stabbed about fifty times by Cadedra Cook, 18, and an unnamed 15-year-old male, both of whom were arrested for the murder. Ms. Hutchenson was Caucasian, Cook and the unnamed minor are African Americans. Why was the President silent on this senseless murder if he could be so vocal on Trayvon Martin’s senseless murder?

As a human being and fellow American, shouldn’t Ms. Hutchenson get the same attention and compassion form the President of the WHOLE United States? And while we agree that the sense of loss of Trayvon Martin’s family must be incredible, what about the sense of loss of Ms. Hutchenson’s daughter, whose mother went out to do her job and never returned, just like Trayvon? (http://godfatherpolitics.com/5616/two-black-teenagers-murder-white-woman-race-hustlers-nowhere-to-be-found/)

2) Also, late last year, 12 year old Autumn Pasquale of Clayton, New Jersey was killed, most likely over her bike, by two juvenile brothers. Autumn Pasquale was a young Caucasian girl. She was likely strangled by the two brothers, both of whom are African Americans. According to news reports from last October, both brothers were charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence, improperly disposing of a body and theft. One brother was also was charged with luring.

I imagine that the anguish of Autumn Pasquale’s family was similar to that of Trayvon Martin’s family. One of their kids goes out and about the neighborhood, never to return. Talk about a senseless murder, most likely over a bike.

Where was the President’s outrage when this young American was senselessly murdered? Was it because she was not an African American kid? A President who wants to comment about these types of needless slayings has to comment on all of them if he is to be considered a President of all of us. (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/10/autumn_pasquale_death_2_teen_b.html)

3) Consider the sad and heartbreaking tragedy of Antonio West. Antonio was thirteen MONTHS old when his mother put him in the stroller and took him outside for a walk in their town of Brunswick, Georgia. Antonio was Hispanic.

While on their walk, they were accosted by two African American teenagers who demanded money from Antonio’s mom. When she did not or could not comply with their demands, the African American teens shot and wounded his mother and shot and killed thirteen month old Antonio with a point blank bullet in the face.

How senseless was this tragedy and how silent was the President. Thirteen months old, just sitting in his stroller and his life ended. Imagine the pain and anguish in his family, imagine how his mother felt to see her healthy, infant son butchered in front of her and no comments on the tragedy from the President, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Eric Holder. 13 months old. (http://topconservativenews.com/2013/03/black-teens-murder-white-baby-for-the-fun-of-it/)

4) In April, 2012, a 29 year old man that news reports identified as white Hispanic and mentally challenged, by the name of Danny Adkins, was taking his dog out of a walk towards a Taco Bell in Arizona. There, he got into a heated verbal argument with a 22 year old African American, who was riding in his SUV with his girl friend through the Taco Bell parking lot with the windows up.

News reports state that Adkins threw a couple of air punches towards the SUV, never striking anyone inside the car. However, the driver said he felt he was being threatened, pulled out his handgun, and shot Adkins dead with one bullet through the window. Unlike the Trayvon Martin trial testimony, it does not appear that Adkins was on top of the African American shooter and pounding his head into the pavement.

The NAACP, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson did not show up in Arizona to lead marches against the shooter in a case that was remarkably similar to the Trayvon Martin case, only the racial backgrounds had been switched. President Obama did not check in on how Danny Adkins could have been him walking his dog years ago. The President’s sounds of silence continued even though the Martin and Adkins shootings happened at about the same time. (http://www.chicagonewsreport.com/2012/04/daniel-adkins-killer-claims-self.html). As with the Martin family, the Adkins’ son never came home that night either.

5) According to news reports, African American Roderick Scott left his house one day to confront three teenagers that he thought were breaking into cars in his Greece, New York neighborhood. At his trial for shooting and killing a Caucasian teenager, Christopher Cervini, Scott testified was that he fired two gun shots at one of the three when the young man charged him after being told to freeze and wait for the cops. A jury found him innocent of murder and let him go free.

A complete racially opposite situation of the Zimmerman/Martin case. A local homeowner defending his neighborhood and assets, defending himself in what he thought was a life or death situation when attacked by the youth. Trial held, justice supposedly done, no threats of a Justice Department civil rights follow up, no Presidential intrusive comments, no Caucasians marching and rioting in the streets. Just another tragic act of unnecessary killing because of the society we live in today.

6) In June, 2012 Marley Lion was shot dead in Charleston, South Carolina. Marley Lion and Trayvon Martin were both 17 years old when they were shot to death, both unarmed, and both doing nothing illegal. The difference is that Lion is Caucasian and he was shot not by a lone gunman but by four African Americans who were arrested in connection with the shooting, a shooting that apparently happened for no reasons at all.

The President had no remarks about the senseless murder of this young man.

You get the idea. We could talk about 44 year old African American Mona Yvette Nelson who is the accused murderer in Texas who kidnapped and brutally murdered a 12-year-old Caucasian Houston boy.

We could talk about the organized “beat whitey night” that occurred at a recent Iowa state fair where young African American adults planned and then executed coordinated beat downs on non-African Americans. (http://www.westernjournalism.com/flashback-beat-whitey-night-at-iowa-sate-fair/).

We could talk about how three African American Auburn University players were killed by an African American shooter. (http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/06/former_auburn_players_ed_chris.html)

We could talk about how on July 11, 2013, Chicago police found the decaying body of missing 17 year old African American Darryl Green, who was possibly murdered for his refusal to join a Chicago street gang at his school. Personal Liberty Digest observed the following regarding the senseless killing of Darryl Green:

“The only media outlets that have covered the murder of Darryl Green are The Chicago Sun-Times and ABC 7 Chicago. President Obama has not commented on Green’s death. Neither have any other politicians, including local Congressmen Danny Davis and Bobby Rush, or Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Neither has anyone at MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, The Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, or throughout the Hollywood community.”

We could go on and on. Senseless violence, unnecessary deaths, the vast, vast majority of which President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the main stream media could care less about, their silence in these deaths is deafening.

And the President’s pathetic attempt to inject his control agenda does not make any sense in relationship to most of these cases and thousands like them. Elizabeth Hutchenson was stabbed to death. Autumn Pasquale was likely strangled to death. Mona Yvette Nelson is accused of beating and burning the 12 year old kidnap victim to death. The guns that were used to kill the others mentioned above would still have likely been in place since none of the shooters were likely or would be likely in the future to follow any of the President’s gun control restrictions.

As we said earlier, the President comes up small in this situation. He talks about his own background and his sympathy with Trayvon Martin and his family, which is fine. However, his shunning any discussion on Elizabeth Hutcheson, Autumn Pasquale, Antonio West, Danny Adkins and the others who have died for no reason, is a failure in leadership.

He needed to address all of the families who have senselessly and violently lost loved ones, but he did not.

He needed to step up front and say that unnecessary violence knows no racial, sex, religious, or other boundaries, all violence is unnecessary, but he did not.

He was presented with an opportunity to address the root causes of ALL violence in this country, but he did not:

• He needed to mobilize the country with an apolitical vision that would improve our schools so that our kids had a hopeful future independent of violence, but he did not.
• He needed to mobilize the country with an apolitical vision of a new national economic strategy that provided good jobs for everyone, minimizing the chance that violence becomes the surrogate for a good job, but he did not.
• He needed to mobilize the country with an apolitical vision of how to end our lost war on drugs so that so many of our youth, especially African American youth, do not waste their lives in prison or in death from drug addiction, but he did not.
• He needed to tell his political allies, those that have tossed around the word “racist” so casually over the past five years in using this despicable term to describe any American with a contrary view on an issue, to save the word for real racists and real racism, not to devalue it with political rhetoric, but he did not.
• He could have stepped up like a real leader in this time of crisis and sorrow, not just sorrow for Trayvon but also for Elizabeth, Danny, Antonio, and others, uniting the country, but he did not.

He just worried about his own background and his own private feelings. The loss of this historical opportunity to advance the cause of every American is saddening and his words, actions, and inaction will do nothing to prevent future senseless violence and deaths.

Why he did not grab this issue while it was on the top of everyone’s mind is a mystery to me. But words from the Personal Liberty Digest website on July 16, 2013 probably provide a good set of clues why the President and other’s in our society receded into the background noise instead of preceding into a better future:

The media doesn’t care about the victims of crime. The elected class doesn’t care about the victims of crime. A great many cultural leaders and highly visible famous people don’t care. But they do care about manipulating outrage, because their authoritative voices in times of manufactured hardship help to consolidate their profit, their legal power and their brand recognition.

Contrived, emotionless proxy outrage makes power more powerful and, too often in America, makes profit more profitable. In America, political and cultural leaders don’t need smart followers anymore — in fact, they’re a liability. The leaders are preaching sermons in hoodies and pretending to fantasize on Twitter about violent karmic payback for the exonerated. Turn off your hearing aid.

Too bad that the President did not look beyond just his own experiences, heeding the advice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

He and other so-called leaders in this country certainly did not rise above anything in this matter, leaving the lessons that could be learned from Elizabeth, Antonio, Danny and thousands of others unheard and unheeded.
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.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Part 7, Freedom and LIberty Guest Speaker: Antonio West, Speaking For All Of America's Youth

This is the seventh and final post we will be doing that is dedicated to the decline of freedom and liberty in this country, all presented by guest writers and not myself. Many Americans are starting to wake up to the fact that the Federal government is growing and spending at out of control levels, levels that continually eat away and erode our freedom and the privacy rights.

Whether it is saddling current and future generations of Americans with mountains of debt, invading our privacy with drones and interceptions of all of our electronic communications, using instruments of government, such as the NSA, IRS, EPA, etc., to harass and abuse the rights of private citizens, or the outright designation for assassination of American citizens by the Federal government without due process of the law, the land of the free is quickly becoming the land of the oppressed and fearful. The speakers over the past week or so have eloquently pointed out how and why we have seen this erosion in our rights and liberty.

Today’s approach takes a little different approach. There is no greater loss of freedom than the loss of one’s life. Unfortunately, the unnecessary loss of life happens way too often in the country today. The Trayvon Martin situation is just one example where the failure of the political class has led to the unnecessary death of a young American. We will get into the bigger issue of unnecessary loss of life in this country and the failure of the political class to address the issue tomorrow.

However, in the heat and emotion of the Trayvon Martin incident, I wanted to address the unnecessary loss of freedom of another American. While these words were not actually spoken by today’s guest writer, they could have been. They accurately point out how his loss of freedom has been lost and buried by the political class in America today and the mainstream media, who are also as culpable as the political class in the portrayal of only the side of reality that makes them political points or TV rating points.

Today’s guest speaker/writer is a very young gentleman named Antonio West. Here is a picture of him:

The following is his story and how we as a nation caused him to suffer the greatest loss of freedom possible, his life:

**************************

Who is Antonio West

Hello. Don’t recognize me? That’s OK; I understand.

My name was Antonio West. I was the 13-month old child who was shot in the face at point blank range by two black teens, who were attempting to rob my mother, who was also shot.

I think my murder and my mommy’s wounding made the news for maybe a day, and then disappeared.

A Grand Jury of my mommy's peers from Brunswick , Georgia ruled the black teens who murdered me will not face the death penalty... too bad it was me who got the death sentence from my killers instead, because Mommy didn’t have the money they demanded.

See, my family made the mistake of being white in a 73% non-white neighborhood, but my murder wasn’t ruled a ‘hate crime’.

Oh, and President Obama didn’t take a single moment to acknowledge my murder. He couldn’t have any children who could possibly look like me - so why should he care?

I’m one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation's history, but the media didn’t care to cover the story of my being killed in cold blood.

There isn’t a white equivalent of Al Sharpton, because if there was he would be branded a ‘racist’. So no one’s rushing to Brunswick , Georgia to demonstrate and demand ‘justice’ for me. There’s no ‘White Panther’ party, either, to put a bounty on the lives of the two black teens who murdered me.

I have no voice, I have no representation, and unlike those who shot me in the face while I sat innocently in my stroller - I no longer have my life.

Isn’t this a great country?

So while you’re out seeking ‘justice for Trayvon’, please remember to seek ‘justice’ for me. Tell your friends about me, tell you families, get tee-shirts with my face on them, and make the world pay attention, just like you did for Trayvon.

I won’t hold my breath.

I don’t have to anymore.

**********************************

A truly tragic story on so many levels. How did our political, moral, educational, and human compass get so screwed up that teenagers find it no problem to do such a heinous act? Why have certain politicians and a certain attorney general focused only on the Trayvon Martin tragedy and pay virtually no attention to this tragedy? Trayvon Martin, Antonio West, the annual 400 or so kids killed in the streets in Chicago, the thousands of kids abused physically and sexually every year, why, why, why?

Why have our politicians not provided the necessary leadership, direction, and morality so that these thousands of kids do not suffer the greatest loss of freedom every year, their lives and their chance at a decent childhood? I think we know the answer to these questions. It is the same answer to why the political class has not resolved a major issue in the past fifty years, whether it is a lost war on drugs, our failing pubic schools, a leaky border, etc. They do not want to resolve these issues since they are more concerned with their next reelection fund raiser, their next reelection campaign, and their own self enrichment.

This is why the need for term limits has become so important, because really, how much worse could it get for all Americans, but particularly for people like Antonio West and Trayvon Martin and thousands of others like them. Join our drive for term limits at:

www.howmuchworsecoudlitget.com

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.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/