Before we get to today’s insanity, please consider the following proposition: as many of you know, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a historic and fatal endeavor. But the failure did not start just in the past few weeks, it has been a twenty year disaster. It has cost American taxpayers about a trillion dollars, has left thousands of our brave armed forces folks dead, maimed, or wounded and has resulted in an unknown but substantial number of civilian deaths.
Afghanistan has been a collective failure of multiple Presidential administrations and multiple sessions of Congress. Thus, please consider signing the petition below that calls for the immediate resignation of every member of Congress that has at least twenty years of service and the resignation of President Biden, Vice President Harris, and critical, and failed, members of the Biden Administration. They do not deserve to serve any longer given their miserable twenty year track record of death, destruction and waste in Afghanistan.
Also, if you are passionate about this topic and effort, feel free to pass the link along to others who might also feel the same way, i.e. incompetence should not be rewarded:
Biden and others need to resign for dereliction of duty, incompetence and total lack of empathy. Nothing short of resignation is acceptable. Thank you.
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It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.
To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.
1) Whether you are aware or not, the country is facing a massive and first ever major supply chain crisis. Cargo ships by the hundreds are backed up off the west coast and waiting weeks to get their cargo unloaded. There are not enough crane operators or truck drivers to get the ships unloaded and onto trucks for the cargo to get to their required destinations.
According to Breitbart reporting: “On September 22, ports in both Los Angeles and Long Beach reported more than 150 ships docked in port, which included 95 container ships. The number of ships docked Wednesday was more than double that of pre-pandemic averages when the ports typically dealt with 60-70 ships at once.”
This is beginning to result in empty store shelves, manufacturing slowdowns because parts cannot be had, inflation as short supply and high demand drives up prices, etc. It is a mess.
And it is a mess that has been known and has been getting worse for months and the Biden administration has failed to come up with any kind of plan to alleviate the problem. And that failure starts with his Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg:
- Keep in mind that Buttigieg's transportaton experience was as the mayor of a secondary American city, Indianapolis.
- He has absolutely no experience in the transportation and logistics field.
- And yet he was Biden’s top choice to be in charge of the Department of Transportation, the very department that is failing miserably at fixing the supply chain problem,
- And not only is it bad enough that he was not qualified for the job in the first place, we are just finding out that he has been on paid, secret paternity leave for the past few months as the worst crisis in transportation in the country’s history has been unfolding.
- Senator Marsha Blackburn kind of summed up this atrocity quite nicely: "We’re in the middle of a transportation crisis, and Pete Buttigieg is sitting at home. Meanwhile, cargo boats are unable to dock and shelves are sitting empty. Pete needs to either get back to work or leave the Department of Transportation. It’s time to put American families first."
Unbelievable priorities. He is probably making well over $150,000 as Secretary so it is not like he could not afford to pay for some child care resources. He is married so it is not like he is the sole parent. I understand that he has a right to paternity leave.
But as a public servant he also has an obligation to support the daily needs of the American people. And if he thinks that is not a priority then he does need to leave that position and be replaced with someone who first, has transportation skills, something he sorely lacks, and two, has the compassion to see that millions and millions of Americans are suffering and to give up a little of his privilege to do his job and fix what he allowed to break.
2) If Buttigieg is unqualified and uncaring about what the supply chain crisis is doing to Americans, then his boss, Joe Biden is not much better. He really did not care until a week or so ago what the disaster was doing to the country and when he did finally speak out on the crisis, his advice showed that he had no clue how real life works or how stupid his solution was: “That means an increase in the hours for workers to be moving cargo off ships and onto trucks and railcars to get to their destination. And more than that, the night hours are critical for increasing the movement of goods because highways are less crowded in the evening, at night.”
Brilliant! Trucks should drive at night when the roads are less crowded and can make better time, no wonder he is the national leader. But wait, do not truck drivers drive at night now? Is Biden that out of touch that he thinks this is a solution?
But it gets worse. Biden publicly claimed that his administration had negotiated with the port unions to get the ports unloading ships “24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Which sounds great until you read the Long Beach Post News which reported that no terminal at the Port of Long Beach operates around the clock. So, not only does he not have a good solution, he lies about a non-solution that he takes credit for, Unbelievable incompetence.
3) We have often discussed the widespread corruption that pervades the American political class, especially at the Federal government level. So, so many times we have discussed stories where after a secret Congressional hearing, Congress people and staff go out and make stock market moves based on that super secret, insider information. We have discussed how Nancy Pelosi, often in conjunction with her husband, used insider information to delay legislation (e.g. Visa IPO) or get out in front of legislation and make a lot of money in the process. Of course, if any of us did this type of insider trading, ala Martha Stewart, we would all be in jail.
But the following story of potential corruption is a new chapter in Washington self enrichment efforts:
- Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock options just before the stock market went down the drain in 2020.
- Keep in mind that the width of the estimate, $1 million to $5 million, is to make Washington insider trading activity as opaque as possible, with transactions reported only in wide categories and not the actual amount.
- These sales were made in the midst of the Federal government not being able to pass a stimulus package for the pandemic.
- Specifically, Trump was blocking more stimulus at that point in time which may have led Powell to believe that without more stimulus the stock market would take a hit and so would his financial exposure.
- After he made the sales, the Dow market index tanked 6%.
- Another Fed official, Vice Chair Richard Clarida, also made financial moves valued between $1 and $5 million one day before Powell issued a statement that gave hope to government actions to combat the pandemic, moving assets out of a bond fund and into a stock fund.
- A formal statement from the Fed said no big deal, the Vice Chairman was simply rebalancing his portfolio.
- Despite these high ranking Fed members having access to detailed and sensitive economic information, there is no law or rule that says they have to put their assets in a blind trust while serving on the Board, a simple remedy that would certainly help get rid of at least the perception of insider trading.
- According to the Fed’s code of conduct, “personal financial dealings should be above reproach, and information obtained by them as officials of the System should never be used for personal gain.”
- Furthermore, Fed officers “should be careful to avoid any dealings or other conduct that might convey even an appearance of conflict between their personal interests, the interests of the System, and the public interest.”
Look, maybe all of this is not a real conflict of interest, just a couple of coincidences. But it certainly is the appearance of a conflict of interest and that is almost as bad as a real conflict. The solution is simple, blind trusts, but then another group of Washington insiders would be denied their opportunity to get enriched at the expense of the rest of the country.
More corruption and incompetence at the highest levels of the Federal government, just another day in the office.
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