May, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Unbent Cost Curve, A Democrat Oopsie, and Common Sense Economic Ideas To Fix Obama Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) Obama Care and Obama promised to “bend the cost curve,” i.e. it would finally slowdown the rise in the nation's healthcare costs. In fact, Obama promised many, many times that not only with the growth rate in health care costs be slowed but that American families could see up to a $2,500 a year reduction in their health insurance costs. Wow, what a great piece of legislation this is!

Or is it? Seven years after it has been passed, has the cost curve been bent? If you look at the real world data over the years, this appears to be another broken promise or outright deception of Obama Care. A recent article in the July, 2017 issue of Reason magazine, an article by John V.C. Nye that had nothing to do with health care, gives some insight to this additional failure of Obama Care. 

The name of the article, “Your Neighbor’s Fancy Care Should Make You Feel Better About Income Inequality,” contained a historical line graph that was developed by Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Perry took government Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1996 and tracked how much the cost of 13 family purchases had risen in price over the past twenty years. His findings included the following results:

• Overall inflation had risen 57.1% over the past twenty years according to official government data.
• Of the 13 expenses tracked, seven expenses saw price rises less than the overall increase of 57.1% and two expenses, food and housing, were right around there 57.1%. 
• However, four expenses tracked much higher than the total inflation rate including health care costs which rose at around twice the rate of inflation.

Now one could make the case that healthcare costs were rising much faster prior to Obama Care taking effect and that Obama Care helped keep the rise in health care costs to only about twice the rate of overall inflation. You could say that and you would likely be wrong.

If you look at the rise in health care costs over the past twenty years, it is basically a straight line rise at about a 45 degree angle on the chart in the article, there has been no "bending of the cure” since Obama Care took effect. It is just an almost perfectly straight line increase that started in 1996 and continued through 2016, there is no trace of a “bending of the cost curve.” In other words, based on government data and the chart in the article, health care costs continued their long term, constant year over year increase despite the promises of Obama Care. Nothing got bent.

2) Recently, there was a racist based attack in Portland where a racist individual ended up stabbing three people who were trying to defend some women from the racist. Two of the three defenders unfortunately died and the third was seriously injured. 

A Go Fund Me page was started to help the survivor with what is likely to be extensive health care costs as he tries to recover from his heroics. Which got the attention of a Democrat in Congress, Keith Ellison who issued the following tweet:

“Our healthcare system is so cruel that one of the heroes of the Portland stabbing has to crowdfund his life saving medical care.”

The tweet was quickly removed from the good Congressman's account when he realized that this was certainly an indictment of Obama Care. Remember, Obama Care was supposed to:

• To reduce annual healthcare insurance costs up to $2,500 a year for families, making healthcare insurance cheap and available to anyone.
• Made sure that every American had health insurance coverage, either free via Medicaid or subsidized via an Obama Care policy.
• Bend the cost curve to make medical care and insurance less and less expensive.
• Allow every American to get health care insurance coverage.

Thus, seven years after Obama Care was passed, why does one of its supporters think that today “our healthcare system is so cruel?” Wasn’t Obama Care supposed to fix all that cruelty? You can see why that tweet disappeared almost as quickly as it was posted, this Democrat was actually pointing out the failure of Obama Care.

3) Kevin Williamson, writing for the National Review website on May 5, 2017, talked about the overall concept of economic scarcity and how it applied to healthcare costs in this country. It is an in-depth article with some very interesting economic viewpoints and common sense that I will not go into here.

However, he did have some excellent recommendations on how to fix the problem of ever rising healthcare costs in this country, recommendations that Obama Care scarcely noticed nor incorporated into the legislation:

• Prescription drug costs could be lowered by making the government approval process less expensive and time consuming.
• Drug costs could also be further reduced by “tweaking a few intellectual-property procedures.”
• Unlike Obama Care which made medical devices more expensive and reduced the amount of research money available to develop new devices, making the government approval process for devices less expensive and less cumbersome could also reduce costs.
• Increase the supply of doctors available in this country with the right immigration procedures and incentive plans to encourage doctors from around the world to come to this country to practice medicine, a simple economic concept that if you increase the supply of any economic entity, the price goes down (of course, the AMA lobbyists would fight this tooth and nail in order to protect the current domestic doctor cartel).
• Reduce the government regulation and burdens on insurance companies to make them eager to enter the health insurance market, unlike Obama Care which chased insurance companies out of the market.
• Change the paradigm on simpler, ordinary medical needs by changing it to "how people pay for food, cars, housing, and World of Warcraft expansion packs.”
• This previous change would allow “insurance to be insurance: a financial product that helps to mitigate certain risks related to unexpected health-care costs. This would allow for the emergence of robust, competitive, consumer-oriented markets like we have in cellphones and pornography and other innovative markets where choices abound and prices keep going down because the consumer is king.” 

Rational, sound ideas based on reality, unlike the entire Obama Care legislation which was based on who knows what.

That will do it for today: rational answers from an economic theory perspective, a big “oopsie” by a Congressional Democrat where he proves that Obama Care is a disaster and real world and real data proof that Obama Care never “bent the cost curve.” More disasters to follow.

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

May, 2017, Part 2: Obama Care's Big Lie About Uninsured Americans

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) If you listened to Obama and supporters of Obama Care in the run up to enacting the Obama Care legislation, you would have thought that there were millions and millions of sick and crippled Americans wandering the streets that had pre-existing medical conditions that prevented them from getting health insurance coverage. That these poor souls were at the mercy of heartless insurance companies who did not want to put out the extra money that would be needed to cover the medical costs incurred because of these pre-existing health conditions.

As a result, the Obama Care legislation was set up in a very elaborate and clumsy way to take care of these millions and millions of uninsured people with pre-existing health problems:

• The legislation tried to force tens of millions of younger, healthier Americans to buy insurance, whether they wanted to or not, in order to subsidize the costs of insurance companies coverage of people with pre-existing health conditions.
• The Federal government would collect new fees and taxes and feed billions of dollars to the insurance companies to offset their additional costs of insuring millions of Americans with pre-existing health conditions.
• The legislation changed the so-called community rating rules and processes that raised insurance costs for everyone in the insurance market to subsidize the insurance companies and those with pre-existing conditions.
• In turn, the insurance companies would be forced by the government and Obama administration to take on any customer that walked through the door even if that customer was not profitable, probably the first time in the history of the country that Washington bureaucrats and politicians forced private businesses to take on any customer.

This elaborate scheme was probably one of the reasons while the legislation was thousands of pages long. It certainly had to be in order to set up a massive government bureaucracy to collect and redistribute fees, taxes, and fines, a bureaucracy that turned out to be a massive Rube Goldberg contraption that never worked well from Day One. Millions of younger Americans did not sign up for health insurance, the insurance companies never got the government financial support it was promised, and Obama Care enrollment ended up at only half of what was promised.

But wait? Were there really millions and millions of sick and ailing Americans walking around the country who could not get health insurance coverage because of their conditions? Or was it just hot air, intentional deception, or pure ignorance on Obama and his supporters part when it came to counting how many Americans who actually had pre-existing health conditions? Consider some findings by Jeffrey Singer, writing for U.S. News and World Report, an article that appeared on the Cato website on May 2, 2017:

• Prior to Obama Care, employer sponsored group health insurance plans covered everyone in the group including those that had pre-existing health conditions.
• Prior to Obama Care, Medicaid covered people with pre-existing health conditions.
• Prior to Obama Care, Medicare covered everyone with pre-existing health conditions.
• Insurance policies in the individual health insurance market were “guaranteed renewable” which means that the policy could not be dropped or premiums allowed to skyrocket as long as the policyholder kept up with the regular premium payments even after they developed a “pre-existing condition.”

Given these realities, Mr. Singer identifies sources and research that put the actual number of Americans with pre-existing health conditions, that did not fall into any of the categories above, at less than a million people, far less than the hysterics put out by the Obama administration would lead you to believe.

Thus, rather than take this very, very small subpopulation aside and come up with something simple yet effective for them, the Obama Care legislation set up this elaborate and failure of a bureaucracy that forced Americans to buy insurance against their will, forced companies to accept customers against their will, and forced all Americans to cough up more money and freedom against their will to address this nit of a problem. 

And in reality, even Obama Care did not have to do anything with this nit of a problem:

• Prior to Obama Care, states such as Wisconsin and Maine had set up independent high risk programs for state citizens that had pre-existing health conditions and who could not get affordable regular health insurance and they did it without all of the negative fallout that Obama Care caused for others in the state.
• The free market was also responding with such innovations as the deployment of health status insurance policies that allowed younger people to buy health insurance when they were younger and healthier but guaranteed they would get affordable insurance protection down the road if they should ever get very, very sick and developed a pre-existing health condition.
• In some states, people were allowed to form association health plans that allowed them to get group coverage for those in their associations at a much reduced fee than individual insurance and which covered association members with pre-existing health conditions.

But as Mr. Singer writes, “Obamacare made those solutions irrelevant and unavailable.” Instead, it replaced these efficient, logical, common sense, and workable approaches and solutions with a one size fits all and one size screws all approach as a top down, out of touch Washington approach, an approach that rarely works when it comes to problem solving.

One of the outcomes of Obama Care forcing insurance companies to accept anyone who walks in the door and provide them affordable insurance rates that guarantee that certain customers will be a big drain on profitability is that the insurance companies made sure that Obama Care policies were tailored to doctor and hospital networks that were very narrow in scope. These skinny networks often excluded the medical specialists and particular hospital facilities that would be needed to serve the most common, and expensive, pre-existing conditions.

This gets back to one of the unexpected and sad consequences of Obama Care: the good news is that you have health insurance, the bad news is that you cannot use your health insurance. If you have a certain cancer for example, and your Obama Care carrier does not want any customers that have your type of cancer, then according to Mr. Singer, that insurance carrier would structure the medical network of doctors and hospitals to ensure that the best medical capabilities for treating your cancer were not available to your policy and for your use, making your Obama Care policy useless or forcing you to go elsewhere for insurance.

Another day, another unfolding disaster from Obama Care. We only covered one disaster today but it was a big one: a big lie about how many uninsured Americans were walking around without access to health insurance and a big solution that failed miserably to address this very, very small problem. More disasters to follow.

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.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2017, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Small Businesses Want It Repealed, Competition Continues To Disappear, and Gruber Insanely Blames Trump

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) We have often discussed the reality that many small businesses have been crushed by Obama Care’s requirements and regulations. It has caused their costs to increase, they have had to reduce staff or change staff from permanent to temporary ino order to survive, their taxes have gone up, or they just went out of business because of the regulations. 

Thus, it is not a surprise that in a recent poll, 60% of small business owners said they want Obama Care repealed:

• According to Philip Hodges, writing for the Eagle Rising website, a February survey of 700 small business owners found that 60% of them wanted Obama Care repealed.
• The primary reason given for their position is skyrocketing insurance premiums that was caused by a lack of competition in the Obama Care insurance market as large and smaller insurers fled the Obama Care market, unable to make a profit in that market.
• Quoting a CNBC article: “It is a trend affecting business owners in all states. Ross Coulter, 49, and his wife, who run a two-person public relations firm in Dallas, have been hunting for a new health insurance plan after Humana notified them it was discontinuing their current one. They had no immediate plans to slow their search after the House vote. They are looking for an affordable replacement by July 1 for the high-deductible plan, for which premiums are $900 a month for the couple and their three children. The only plans that are comparable would be a $400- or $500-a-month increase,” says Coulter, who is now considering options like a Medi-Share plan, run by Christian Care Ministry, in conjunction with a cancer-coverage policy.
• CNBC went on to report on a situation that we have covered many times before, namely that Obama Care policies are so expensive that customers buy the high deductible plans to reduce their monthly premium payments but then cannot afford the deductible payments when they need the insurance because the deductibles are so high: “When Paula Muto, a vascular and general surgeon in Lawrence and North Hanover, Massachusetts, looked into unpaid bills in her solo private practice recently, she found that many were for patients who had high-deductible plans. It was the people with insurance, that couldn’t pay the deductibles, that weren’t paying us,” she says.”

The unfolding disaster that is Obama Care continues to unfold disasters.

2) One of the people most associated with the disaster known as Obama Care is one of the so-called architects of the plan, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. Obviously, as an architect of such a disaster, it is not unexpected that he would name others of the failures of this wretched piece of legislation.

But at some point, you can stretch that blame game too far in who you blame for the failures as Gruber recently did when he blamed, of all people, Donald Trump for the failures of the law. Let’s keep in mind that Gruber’s work and the passage of Obama Care was over seven YEARS ago, much before Trump became President less than five MONTHS ago.

Come on Professor Gruber, insurance companies were fleeing the Obama Care policy market long before Trump became President. Enrollment numbers were falling 50% short of your promises long before Trump became President. Premiums and deductibles of Obama Care policies were skyrocketing long before Trump became President. Obama Care state co-ops were failing long before Trump became President. The law was already in place long before Trump became President and he has made no changes to that law since becoming President.

Wow, you know you are desperate to place blame and deflect attacks on your reputation when you are blaming someone retroactively seven years. Pathetic. Not not unexpected when you consider that Gruber considered Americans too stupid to understand the law he helped create: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass,” Gruber stated during one health care conference.

Another time, Gruber self-admitted that the Obama administration pushed through the so-called Cadillac tax, a tax on certain premium health care plans, “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.”

Surprised that he did not blame Trump for the American voter being stupid.

3) According to a recent Associated Press article, the carnage of health insurers leaving the Obama Care market is continuing:

• After pulling out of several states previously, after losing $450 million on Obama Care policies, giant insurer Aetna announced that it will also pull out of Nebraska and Delaware next year after expecting to lose $200 million on Obama Care policies this year.
• This will further increase the number of counties across the country that have only one Obama Care insurer operating in that county in 2018.
• With access to only one Obama Care insurance company available, insurance industry experts expect the costs of those Obama Care policies to increase due to lack of competition.
• Things continue to get bad in Iowa with Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross leaving the state and another Iowa insurer, Medica saying that its "ability to stay in the Iowa insurance market in any capacity is in question at this point."
• When Humana pulled out of Tennessee, it left 16 Tennessee counties with NO Obama Care insurance options, a void that has since been filled by only one other company.
• Blue Cross-Blue Shield is now the only Obama Care insurer in one third of the country’s 3,100 counties.

So much for the Gruber and Obama promise that Obama Care would result in a robust competitive environment that would drive down the cost of insurance for all Americans.

The disasters continue to unfold: lack of competition, disasters for small businesses, and the blaming of Donald Trump for something he had absolutely nothing to do with. More disasters to follow shortly.

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

May, 2017, Part 12, Political Class Insanity: More Sex Perversion In DC, Chelsea Says Something Stupid (Again) And Honoring A Murdering Terrorist In NYC

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy."

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) Earlier in this month’s review of political class insanity we reviewed some sexual perversion insanity of some Washington notables, a former Congressman and former Secret Service agent who had been assigned to White House duty. The former Congressman was Anthony Weiner who will likely spent about two years in jail for sexting with a 15 year old girl. The Secret Service agent will likely see upwards of twenty years in jail for multiple sexting episodes with underage girls while on duty.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to go down this road again since according to reporting by NBC News:

• An NBC News report put forth the accusation that Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, shut down an internal investigation into a pedophile ring operating right inside the State Department.
• This squashing of the investigation was to protect long time State Department higher ups and a sitting U.S. ambassador.
• As a result, Trump has instructed the Justice Department to step up an investigation to the possibility that this disgusting and repulsive behavior had occurred and to determine what should be done about it.
• Specifically, the NBC News broadcast including the following reporting: ““Allegations of prostitution and pedophilia, and allegations that those crimes were somehow covered up or not looked into. So the State Department this morning is having to respond to those claims, and those investigations involve misconduct by State Department officials, including an Ambassador and security agents attached to then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The allegations are that these investigations were whitewashed, quashed altogether, and that those orders came from high up. NBC has obtained documents relating to ongoing investigations into some disturbing allegations involving State Department personnel and at least one ambassador. A State Department memo says, quote, “the Ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children. The memo also says a top State Department official directed State Department investigators to “cease the investigation” into the ambassador’s conduct.” It’s just one of what another document describes as “several examples of undue influence” from top State Department officials.”

Another day, another child related sex scandal in Washington. Pathetic and disgusting.

2) Sometimes it is not just politicians who say and do stupid things, often their children get into the stupidity act also. Such was the case when Chelsea Clinton was speaking as part of a forum and tried to make us believe that climate change and child marriages around the world were interconnected, as if climate change causes more children to be married off while they were kids.

Yes, every ill in the world can be blamed on global warming and climate change. Of course, she provided no hard evidence or science that this was actually true, just a grandiose theory that everything hinges on climate change. Of course, Twitter was quick to respond to such idiocy:

• Harrison Bergeron tweeted: Please. Is there anything that ISN'T caused by climate change?
• Gristle McThornbody tweeted:  Oh FFS, now you're just gluing bumper stickers together
• Road SWVA was more specific: What an idiot.

The actual quote right out of mouth can be seen at:

http://twitchy.com/sd-3133/2017/05/24/how-high-did-chelsea-clinton-have-to-get-to-make-this-logical-leap/?utm_source=twtydaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

I would tend to agree with SWVA.

3) Let’s finish up today with some really gross political class insanity from the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. But first, some background:

• Oscar Lopez Rivera was the leader of a Puerto Rican terrorist gang from the 1970s who advocated for the independence of Puerto Rico.
• His terrorist gang, FALN, carried out over 100 terrorist bombings in this country.
• One of the terrorist attacks hit the famous Manhattan Fraunces Tavern in 1975 that killed four innocent people.
• He was eventually arrested in possession of six pounds of dynamite in his Chicago apartment. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison in 1981 for his terror activities after declaring that “I am an enemy of the United States government.”
• He served about half of his sentence when Obama released him.

You get the idea, this is a very bad, violent and sick individual that was willing to kill innocents to attain his goals.

Which gets us back to de Blasio. Unfortunately, some people think that terrorist Rivera deserves to be featured in the annual Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City on June 11. And Mayor de Blasio is in full support of this atrocity, justifying it as follows: “The organization he was affiliated with did things I don’t agree with, obviously, and they were illegal. I don’t agree with the way he did it. But he did serve his time,” adding that López Rivera “renounced violence.”

Huh? How is this reasoning logical and sane? You disagree with the violence he incited, you disagree with his organization that bombed and killed, you understand that what he did was illegal but you am going to honor him anyway because,hey, he did his time? Insane.

And according to the New York Times which recently conducted an interview of Rivera, he did not actually renounce violence since in that interview he stated that: “We are a colonized people, and according to international law, that says all colonized people have a right to struggle for its independence, using all methods within reach, including force.” Including force, sounds pretty violent to me.

So sad that somehow a politician like de Blasio can get elected to lead a large city like New York and be so insensitive to the family and friends of people that were killed and maimed by this person for a cause that was never an overriding passion of the Puerto Rican community to begin with. And then to think that we are too stupid to see through his faulty logic to justify this atrocity. Insane.

That will do it for this month’s political class insanity, it has been a sad and pathetic look at how poorly our elected officials and government employees conduct themselves and how their interests and greed are only outshined by their idiocy and incompetence. More of the same next month, I am sure of that.

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

May, 2017, Part 11, Political Class Insanity: Congress Gets Hacked, The Rich Get Richer, The IRS as a Political Weapon

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy."

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1)We have often talked about how the Obama administration shredded the First Amendment rights of millions of citizens when it used the IRS as a political weapon to deny non-profit status to Tea Party and other non-liberal organizations. Very serious stuff, the political class turning agencies against the citizens that support both entities because of legitimate free speech.

But it seems that shredding the First Amendment was not where it ended, based on very scary testimony in a court proceeding regarding the political weaponizing of the IRS,. According to a recent USA Today report on May 12, 2017 by Dan Horn:

• IRS officials, testifying in court, claim that their lives are at risk in the Tea Party suit before a judge.
• The judge has already ruled that there was a “strong showing” that the IRS had a systemic bias against Tea Party organizations.
• During the court proceedings, former and current IRS executives, Lois Lerner and Holly Paz, testified that information in recent or future court filings and proceedings should not be made public.
• They feel that the public’s right to understand what the Obama administration did to American citizens should be secondary to the threats to their lives that would exist if the truth was actually made public or they were forced to testify in public.
• According to the article: ‘"This documentation, as the court will see, makes very personal references and contains graphic, profane and disturbing language that would lead to unnecessary intrusion and embarrassment if made public," their attorneys argued in a recent court brief. "Public dissemination of their deposition testimony would put their lives in serious jeopardy."
• Currently, everything and every document associated with the case is under lock and seal per the judge’s order.
• An attorney for the Tea Party claims that: "Generally, our position is that this is a matter of great public interest and there is no legal basis for sealing the depositions or the arguments about whether the depositions should be sealed."
• The attorneys for Lerner and Paz put forth a real weak argument why the truth should be suppressed: "Although there is a compelling need for sealing, there is no countervailing need to make those details public. Allowing public dissemination ... would likely lead to media coverage that may then subject both individuals to the very harms they seek a protective order to avoid."

So sad that we are even discussing any aspect of this conversation on so many levels: the strong likelihood that First Amendment rights were squashed, that the truth has to be suppressed, and that government workers are afraid for their lives because of the truth. Insanity.

2) We have often written about how the Federal government’s desire to hand out farm subsidies usually ends up being subsidies for the rich. According to a recent Heritage Foundation article by Daren Bakst on May 22, 2017, nothing has changed since our last visit with this wasteful practice:

• The Federal government and American taxpayer currently spend about $15 billion a year on different commodity and crop insurance programs.
• Since the recipients of government handouts in these programs usually consists of millionaire farmers or large agriculture companies, less wealthy Americans are subsidizing more wealthy Americans and major corporations.
• For example, according to 2015 data, midsize farm households have a median annual income that is three times higher than the median income of all U.S. households and the median wealth level of midsize farmers is 26 times higher than the median wealth level of all U.S. households.
• Commercial farming operations and corporate agriculture companies represent only 10% of all farms in the U.S. but generally receive over 70% of all government subsidy payments.
• But government handouts are also selective when paying out taxpayer money with 95% of the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage program payments in 2015 going to only five crops (corn, peanuts, rice, soybeans, and wheat), other crops be damned.

The rich get richer, the poor and middle class pay more and more in taxes and the political class lets it happen anyway.

3) Democrats in Congress are obsessed with somehow proving that the Russians have infiltrated the Trump administration, a task that they have failed miserably at achieving. But maybe they need to worry about how their own operations in Congress and their lives have been infiltrated by some shady Middle Eastern types:

• According to an article by Luke Rosiak on May 22, 2017 for the Heritage Foundation, Congressional computer experts believe that a recent computer breech executed by an outside computer technology company, owned and operated by a Pakistani family, working for Congressional members may be using or could use the information that was gathered by the breech to blackmail members of Congress with their own data and information.
• The company employees, all family members, provided IT employees and support to various Democrats in Congress but they have recently been banned from Congressional computer networks after suspicions arose that the family members accessed Congressional computers and files without permission.
• The article claims that: “Congressional technology aides are baffled that data-theft allegations against four former House IT workers—who were banned from the congressional network—have largely been ignored, and they fear the integrity of sensitive high-level information.”
• Furthermore, “Five Capitol Hill technology aides told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group that members of Congress have displayed an inexplicable and intense loyalty toward the suspects who police say victimized them. The baffled aides wonder if the suspects are blackmailing representatives based on the contents of their emails and files, to which they had full access.
• Pat Sowers has managed IT roles for several House of Representative members over the past twelve years and she was even more explicit: “I don’t know what they have, but they have something on someone. It’s been months at this point with no arrests. Something is rotten in Denmark.”
• A local computer technology company had offered their services to Democratic House members at one quarter the price that the brothers were charging but were rebuffed in their bid, further raising suspicions.
• Another computer company also tried for Congressional business but ran into more suspicious behavior: “The Awans’ ban sent 20 members searching for new IT workers, but another contractor claims he’s had difficulty convincing offices to let him fill the void, even when he seemed like a shoo-in. He says he has the sense some members wrongly believed that he blew the whistle on the Awans’ theft and they were angry at him for it.”
• The Heritage article references a similar Politico article that claimed that the family members are “accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.”
• Follow up analysis after the brothers were banned found that Congressional data was sent to an offsite server in violation of policies and procedures.
• Family members have been paid $4 million for their computer services since 2010.
• The family members had access to all emails of dozens of members of Congress and access to any computer files those members and their staffs stored.

Great, Democrats in Congress are worried about Trump while they are possibly being robbed blind of information within their own realms of responsibility, information that is quite possibly being sent overseas or being used for blackmail purposes domestically. Insanity.

Nasty stuff today: Congress gets hacked, the rich get richer, and turning the IRS into a political weapon now makes Americans fear for their lives. More insanity to follow.

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

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http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w