http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/08/part-1-august-2013-political-class.html
Unfortunately, for us, our freedom, and our nation, the rate of insanity and the depth of its idiocy is accelerating quickly, as the following episodes illustrate:
1) Food stamp usage is at an all time high. The number of Americans requiring government food assistance has increased about 50% since Obama took office. There are over twenty million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed. Times are rough in this country, just feeding the hungry.
Which makes the antics and stupidity from Louisiana state government officials all that more insane. State health inspectors destroyed 1,600 lbs of deer meat donated by hunters to a local homeless shelter. And this was not road kill type quality. The meat had been handled, prepared, and shipped to the shelter by a state accredited slaughterhouse.
Reverend Henry Martin, executive director of the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission, which provides food and shelter for the homeless in Northwest Louisiana, said that his organization had been serving deer meat donated by area hunters for decades without any problems, complaints, sicknesses or deaths from the donated and properly prepared meats. The Louisiana chapter of Hunters for the Hungry, which is also endorsed and approved by the state government via the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry and the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on its website, donated the meat through the area meat processing facility.
Apparently, there is a state law that prohibits the serving of hunted deer meat and apparently some state bureaucrat just realized that what has been going on for decades is against the law and shut down the food source, hungry state residents be damned. The state confiscated the perfectly good meat and saturated it with alcohol to make it inedible to both humans and wildlife.
According to Reverend Martin, his effort serves three meals a day to an average number of 230 people every day. This comes out to over 200,000 meals a year and this deer meat program was a major source of those meals for hungry Americans. Again, remember, no one got sick or died from this program over decades, it died because of stupid government run by stupid bureaucrats and stupid politicians.
Rather than work with all of these parties involved, the rescue mission, the hunters, the slaughterhouse, and public health officials, nearly a ton of meat was simply destroyed and the hungry went hungry. You know we are in a bad place when unnecessary laws trump hungry Americans. Pathetic.
2) On July 22, 2013, press secretary Jay Carney went off on a bragging jag, boasting how the Obama administration had added 7.2 million private sector jobs to the economy since Obama took office. But according to research done by the Daily Caller website, he left out some other, less encouraging statistics:
- Since February of 2009, 9.5 million Americans, 2.3 million more Americans than the Obama administration found jobs for, have actually dropped out of the labor force.
- This equates to 1.3 Americans having dropped out of the labor force for every one private sector job the administration claims to have created.
- There are 15 million more Americans on food stamps today than when Obama assumed office, more than double the number of private sector jobs that Mr. Carney claims to have been created under Obama.
- At the end of January, 2009, 32,204,859 Americans received food help via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program but by April 2013, there were 47,548,694 Americans on food stamps.
- Under Obama, 1.6 million more Americans are collecting disability insurance. In February 2009, 9,334,369 Americans received disability payments. Today, that number is 10,953,733.
3) The FBI recently released their latest crime statistics regarding gang violence and the findings are not good. According to FBI tracking, gang membership has increased since Obama’s election in 2008: “Some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs with about 1.4 million members are criminally active in the U.S. today.”
In 2008, the FBI stated, “Approximately 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia as of September 2008.” This is a 65% increase in the number of gangs and a 40% increase in the number of gang members. The latest report also concluded that gangs are responsible for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions, and up to 90% in others.”
I am not a sociologist so my explanation for this radical increase in lawlessness would be pretty shallow. However, I would bet that our failing public schools, our failing economy, the failing level of integrity, smarts, and morals in our political class, and the inability of the politicians in this country to do anything right and efficient have a lot do to with these alarming gang statistics.
And worse of all, I do not see any positive trends on the horizon that would reverse the trends in schools, jobs, and the competence of the political class.
4) The New York Post reported on gross abuses of the Federal government’s food programs in a July 21, 2013 article. According to the Post, many New Yorkers who are receiving taxpayer funded food assistance via the Federal government are using that assistance to buy and ship food to relatives overseas in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
Welfare recipients buy groceries with their government Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and then pack them in giant barrels for the trip overseas. The Post investigation found that the practice of using U.S. food assistance money to feed relatives and friends overseas is so prevalent and widespread that it is common to find hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels along the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.
A Federal government official quoted in the article stated that this is an illegal practice, the food assistance program is for Americans who need food assistance, not foreigners. However, grocery employees also quote din the article confirm that this practice is well known and widespread.
So, let’s review. One part of the political class steps in to terminate a decades old food program involving healthy deer meat that has not harmed anyone and which has provided millions of meals over time. Another part of the political class is so inept that it results in American taxpayers funding the food needs of people overseas using a food program that is supposed to feed America’s hungry. Maybe, the political class and the governments it operates need to get out of the food business due to incompetence. Insanity.
5) I love this story from the Education Action Group (EAG) website. It beautifully illustrates how out of control the priorities are in this country when it comes to government operations of any kind, in this case, government operations of the public schools in Buffalo, New York.
According to EAG, a recent Open Record request they filed with the Buffalo school district revealed the school district actually increased its spending on cosmetic medical procedures for teacher union members in the past year, to the tune of $2.9 million between June, 2012 and May, 2013. And that is up from $2.7 million during the 2011-12 school year.
That’s right, $2.9 million for skin peels, dental implants, tummy tucks, and any other plastic surgery teacher union members decide they want done, all funded by local taxpayers and the school board. By the way, this $2.9 million for totally non-education related expenses would have paid off almost 6% of the school district’s projected $51 billion deficit for the next school year, what would have been a nice start of getting education expense in line with revenue without impacting classroom resources.
Now, the Buffalo teacher’s union might have a case for such stupid expenses if the Buffalo school district was as shining example of how great public education and teachers unions’ performance can be. However, that is not the case:
- The district’s graduation rate actually went down in 2012 to 47%
- One high school had an astoundingly low 24% graduation rate.
- For the 2011-12 school year, only 25% of 8th graders were rated proficient or better in English Language Arts and only 24% of the same group were proficient in
- Scores for the New York state Regents Test, an assessment required to receive a diploma, showed that only 21% of the students received an 85 or higher in English, only 3% of students scored 85 or higher in Algebra, and only 19% of students scored 85 or higher in U.S. History and Government.
- In the 2009-10 school year, Buffalo reported spending $23,907 per student to obtain these types of results, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Thus, in Buffalo, the student performance is ugly but the teachers look marvelous, certainly not the combination that a taxpayer or citizen wants out of their taxpayer funded schools.
That will do it for today, more disgraces from your politicians tomorrow. Bad use of food assistance dollars, bad news on the gang and crime front, bad economic data on jobs, bad priorities when it comes to feeding the needy in this country, and bad test and education results because of bad priority setting in Buffalo. Will the “badness” continue tomorrow? Tune in and find out if you dare.
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