We have spent a lot of time recently talking about which city or state will go bankrupt first. That race to bankruptcy court seems to be accelerating as politicians in these vulnerable cities and states are starting to realize that their policies and ignorance are causing financial crises across the country.
However, we will step back from that theme for a few days since political class insanity in other areas has continued unabated and needs to be discussed and ridiculed.
1)Traveling these days can be a real pain and inconvenience. Long lines to get through TSA checking, pat downs by TSA agents, etc. This is especially true these days as Democrats in Congress refuse to pass common sense legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, causing even more delays in traveling while at the same time endangering the safety of those traveling. Air travel is not nearly as glamorous and easy as it once was.
But apparently those days of easy traveling are still available to the political class in this country:
Apparently, it has been the custom and law that members of Congress do not have to go through TSA screening and long waiting lines like the common folks do when traveling through the nation’s airports.
Yes, as they often do, politicians in Congress voted themselves special privileges unavailable to us.
However, Senator John Cornyn of Texas is proposing the “End Special Treatment for Congress SAirports Act’ that would force Congressional members to suffer TSA screening like the rest of us.
According to the Senator: “Maybe, just maybe, if Congress has to live under the same laws that everybody else does, it will motivate us to get our work done. In other words to fund the [DHS]. So no American, no air traveler will have to suffer the disruption and tribulations that many, many travelers are having to experience now. It’s not too much to expect that Congress will be subject to the rules as everybody else.”
Viral videos have popped on social media showing Congressional members strolling past long TSA lines to get to their gates and flights much sooner and easier than regular flying citizens.
Especially disgusting is that these Congressional members that are getting special access are the same ones preventing the TSA agents serving them from getting paid.
So, politicians in Congress continue to get handsomely paid, they get special and easy access to travel accommodations while stressed out and overworked TSA agents go unpaid and non-members of Congress wait in long lines, some of which reportedly stretch outside of airport terminals in order to get to their flights. Political elitism at its finest.
2)We have often discussed the bad quality of life that residents and businesses must endure in California:
Highest gasoline prices in the country.
Some of the highest utility costs in the country.
The highest tax burden in the country.
The highest business regulation in the country.
The most homeless residents in the country.
Some of the worst education attainment levels in the country.
Some of the highest crime rates in the country.
The highest unfunded future financial liability levels in the country.
Two cities that could possibly go bankrupt quite soon, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Some of the most generous food, shelter, and medical care programs for illegal immigrants in the country.
The place is a mess. And a lot of the mess is the result of the leadership of its current governor, Gavin Newsom. Besides the above sour quality of life issues, he also presided over one of the worst budget nightmares anywhere when he mismanaged the much hyped high speed rail line that is now years over schedule and way over budget.
But his latest failure and inability to manage even a simple project is now coming to light:
U.S. 101 Freeway is a 10 lane highway in Los Angeles.
Four years ago the state government under Newsom hyped the idea of building the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing that would allow animals to safely cross over the 10 lane highway.
The original cost of the project was a whopping $54 million.
Yes, in a state going bankrupt, in a state with major education and homeless problems, in a state with the highest tax burden in the country, Newsom decided to spend $54 million for an animal highway bypass.
But state government bureaucrats misjudged the cost and asked the state government for an additional $10 million to complete the project.
But four years after the beginning of the project, it is now way past due and could end up costing around $114 million, more than double the original estimate.
But this should not surprise us given that the much hyped California high speed rail line is already likely to be three times more expensive than originally estimated and is also many years behind schedule. The incompetence of the state's political class and current governor is quite unbelievable, given the list of ongoing failures above and the failure to build a simple bridge or a complex rail line.
3)Let’s go over to DC, a place and a political class that have made a science out of wasting taxpayer wealth:
The Biden administration gave two different college professors $60,000 each to write books about LGBTQ cartoonists and “multiethnic graphic literature.”
Yes, the country’s homeless population grew by about 25% under Biden to about 770,000 homeless Americans and his administration decided $120,000 should be spent on gay cartoonists.
Another $60,000 went to an English professor at the University of Florida.
Her writing project, “Comics In Movement,” was described as examining “how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in 1970-90s.”
Another $60,000 went to an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at San José State University.
Her wiring project as titled: “Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature, planned to "analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors" to "underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
Now $120,0000 is not even a rounding error in the Federal government budget. But it is a total waste of money when millions of Americans are hungry, homeless, in need of medical attention, and cannot afford health insurance. It shows a complete disrespect of taxpayer wealth and Americans in need and is probably just one of thousands and thousands of other, similar wasteful Washington projects that eventually waste billions of taxpayer dollars.
Note: The Trump administration cancelled these projects before they were paid out.
4)And yes, these two LGBTQ programs were not the only two wasteful spending sprees of the Biden years:
The DOGE effort found other wasteful National Endowment for the ARTs (NEH) besides the two NEH $60,000 projects listed above.
In fact, DOGE found $163 million worth of useless NEH projects funded under Biden by the American taxpayer.
$350,000 was spent for “interactive gay travel guides.”
$247,000 was spent to digitize “stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest.”
$75,000 to study “the relationship between Internet live streaming and LGBTQ+ communities.”
Another 1,435 cancelled NEH projects worth over $427 million have been identified and dealt with.
But it is not just the NEH that wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The National Science Foundation spent $290 million under Biden for DEI grants in just 2024.
In 2021, when Biden took office the annual amount of money spent on this DEI nonsense was just $14 million, which was still too much.
Thus, in three short years Biden exploded this NSF DEI money by twenty fold.
Horrible waste of taxpayer wealth that has absolutely non-sustainable benefit, or any benefit at all, to society and Americans. The above numbers just from these useless NEH and NSf projects total $880,000,000. To give you an idea of what better use could be made of these numbers consider:
That money could have fed almost 390 meals for every homeless American in the country.
That money could have provided about 132,000 Americans without health insurance an average annual Obama Care insurance policy for medical coverage.
It would fund the employment of over 12,000 teachers to help better educate the country’s kids.
You get the idea. The money could have been much better utilized to serve millions of American taxpayers rather than write comic books for the LGBTQ+ community.
Enough political class insanity for today: Biden’s horrible spending priorities, California politicians continue to waste money and fail at just about everything, and politicians continue to treat themselves better than they treat us.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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