1) There has been extensive coverage in the news lately on how General Motors has had to recall over 2.5 million vehicles due to a faulty ignition system. Apparently, the ignition cuts out and cuts power to the call in random ways, often simply because the ignition key is attached to a key chain that is too heavy or gets bumped slightly.
The company has linked the ignition design flaw to at least a dozen unnecessary deaths and 31 crashes. The deaths and injuries from this problem are truly tragic but along with this tragedy is the fact that the company knew about this problem, according to internal documents, since 2001.
Which raises another question and serious problem: given that the American taxpayer pays the Washington political class trillions of dollars every year to protect us from harm and danger, why didn’t Federal government agencies, processes, and testing find this problem long, long ago before at least a dozen Americans were killed and others were injured? What are we paying the Washington politicians to do if such a serious problem goes unidentified and unresolved for over a dozen years?
What value and protection are we getting for our tax dollar in this area? Answer: as with the majority of political processes, very little.
2) Eric Holder is the Attorney General of the United States. He is supposed to enforce the laws of the land, no exceptions. Those laws are established and enacted as the will of the people, acting through their representatives in Congress and the White House. That is how a democracy works and how free people protect their liberty.
Nowhere in the Constitution, current laws, or the history of our country does it say that the Attorney General gets to pick and chose what laws to enforce and what laws to ignore. But that is exactly what Holder is doing now. He recently announced that state attorney generals do not have to defend state level same sex marriage bans.
Well….yes they do. That is the law in these states as enacted by representative government. If we are going to let the attorney generals decide what laws to enact, we might as well get rid of the state legislatures and governors and save the taxpayers a lot of money. It is not the function of an attorney general to decide what laws should be enforced, they are strictly supposed to enforce all of the laws.
In my opinion, such recommended actions by a U.S. attorney general is an impeachable offense and that attorney general should be removed from office immediately. A President who refuses to remove that offensive attorney general also needs to be removed from office for dereliction of duty and the undermining of liberty and representative government.
Much like citizens who cannot pick and chose what laws they obey or disobey, attorney generals at the state and Federal levels also do not have the right, ability, or legal standing to do so also. Such dangerous and pathetic behavior undermines the rule of law and our democratic processes.
3) A recent Brookings Institute report showed how the badly economic policies and economic ignorance of the Washington political class have hit younger Americans particularly hard:
- The sharpest decline in labor force participation since 2000 has been among teens and young adults.
- The percentage of teenagers who were employed dropped from 44% to just 24% between 2000 and 2011.
- The employment rates for those aged 20 to 24 fell from 72% to 60% in the same time frame.
- The analysis has taken a preliminary look at extrapolating the data through 2013 and concludes, that on a preliminary basis, nothing has improved since 2011.
Finding and keeping a job is a key step in a young person’s transition to adulthood and economic self-sufficiency. Employment obviously allows young people to cover expenses but it also provides valuable opportunities for teens and young adults to apply academic skills and learn occupation-specific and broader employment skills such as teamwork, time management, and problem solving.
Thus, we have lost half a generation of Americans to the weak and destructive economic policies and actions of the Washington political class. Many of these young Americans have been set back in their quest for a good job and career and good life style. Their skill set development has been short circuited and delayed, possibly forever.
Einstein once said something to the effect: We cannot expect to resolve today’s problems with the same thinking that created these problems in the first place. Until we get a new set of politicians in office with a true understanding of economics and a subsequent set of economic policies and initiatives that provide economic opportunities for our kids, we will continue to stunt the growth of both our kids in the future and the future economic vitality of the country.
4) Diane Feinstein is a U.S. Senator from California. In the past, she has been a big advocate of having the Obama administration and the Federal government snooping and spying on and collecting virtually every electronic communication of ordinary citizens.
She once belittled those of us that think the freedom protections in the Constitution are critical to liberty when she dismissed these concerns in the past as the “yips and yaps of kids who aren’t aware of the brute realities she hears about in classified hearings.“ This support for domestic spying is baffling for a U.S. Senator since such domestic spying on U.S. citizens is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Thus, it was particularly enjoyable to watch her reaction to the recent revelations that the CIA has been spying on members of Congress. In a recent speech she gave on the floor of the Senate, Feinstein railed against the CIA:
- She accused the CIA of spying and trying to sabotage a Senate investigation into the CIA’s use of torture under the Bush administration.
- She accused the CIA of lying to her committee’s investigators.
- She accused the CIA of illegally hacking into her staff’s computers which, in her words, “violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.”
5) One of the worst problems of the American political class is their very, very short attention spans. A crisis arises and for a few days politicians are up in arms about something or some problem they should have recognized before it became a crisis. The Feinstein reaction to the possible CIA spying on Congress is just one example. If she and her Senate peers were actually doing their jobs, the spying should have been uncovered, prevented, or shut down long ago.
I do not know the true cause of their short attention spans but I do have a few theories. First, they are so concerned about their own self enrichment and perpetual reelection campaign that real life crisis are more a distraction than a calling.
Second, we have talked about many examples in the past where many of our current politicians are not just that smart. Thus, they feign outrage when an unforeseen problem or crisis arises but were not smart enough to foresee the crisis ahead of time or solve it ahead of time. In either case, their short attention spans prevent them from staying focused long enough to resolve any problems, major or minor.
Sadly, a short article in the March 21, 2014 issue of The Week magazine proved again how short our politicians’ attention spans are and this prevents them ever resolving any problem. The article pointed out that thousands of children in Syria are dying as a result of preventable diseases because of the ongoing civil war.
According to a recent report from the organization, Save The Children, measles and polio are widespread in many Syrians cities that are in the midst of the heaviest fighting. In Allepo, there used to be about 2,500 doctors before the civil war broke out. Now, there are probably just a few dozen. Since the fighting broke out three years ago, about 140,000 Syrians have died from the fighting and another 200,000 have died from disease.
Syria was very important to the political class late in 2013. The President and members of Congress got very upset because hundreds of Syrians allegedly died from Syrian government poison gas attacks. Obama was so upset that he almost put the U.S. on a war footing, threatening to attack the Syrian government forces. However, that poison gas crisis faded away and the President and the rest of the American political class lost interest.
Eight months later, Syria rarely comes up in any political discussion any more even though thousands and thousands of Syrians, including kids, have died from non-poison gas attacks since late last year. Another example of a short attention span by the President and other politicians. The poison gas angle got their attention for a few days, those dying from non-poison gas angles never got their attention.
Thus, nothing got resolved and they continued to draw their salaries and perks without helping anyone. Pathetic short attention spans, pathetic problem solving capability, just plain pathetic.
Fourth day of political class insanity and we are not even close to getting it all covered. The saga of ineptness continues tomorrow and beyond.
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
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