December, 2014, Part 1, Politicians Say The Darndest Things: Political Campaign MIsquotes, Democratic Racism Quotes, and Who Needs Statistics

It’s the end of another year so I thought it might be a good idea to go back over the past twelve months and pull out some of the darndest quotes from members of the political class and their supporters. While the myth is that really smart people get involved with government and political office, in reality, based on the quotes of politicians we have brought to light over the past few years, the exact opposite is reality: we are currently served by a set of people that are shallow, selfish, and obviously incapable of having the mentality capacity or will to resolve the major issues facing the country. If they did have those attributes, one would have thought that the major issues facing us all, e.g. poor schools, leaky borders, high health care costs, etc. would have been resolved long ago.

To find previous reference to silly, inane, and stupid political quotes in this blog, just enter the phrase, “politicians say the darndest things,” in the search box above. As you will see, 2014 is not the only year that politicians have been putting their foot in their mouths and showing how incapable they are when it comes to governing and problem resolution.

1) Quote: “…or you might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because if Democrats lose the majority, Chuck Grassley will be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Senate candidate from Iowa, Bruce Braley.

Comments: Bruce Braley ran for Senator from Iowa this past November. You know, Iowa, a big farming state with a lot of farmers and farming interests. Given that reality, one would have thought that a candidate would be a little sensitive to not insult farmers, especially in light of extolling lawyers at farmers’ expense. 

But that is exactly what he did. He told a group of lawyers at an Iowan fundraiser that current Republican Senator Chuck Grassley was just “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” Braley added that, unlike Grassley, he was not a simple farmer and was far more worldly because he “went to law school’ and ‘practiced law.’” Needless to say, Mr. Braley is not going to Washington when the new Congress meets next month.

2) Quote: “I'm very excited to be here to support your next senator from Iowa, our friend Bruce Bailey." Michelle Obama, campaigning for the aforementioned Bruce Braley.

Comments: The obvious flub here is that Ms. Obama was campaigning for a candidate named Bruce Bailey, not the real candidate, Bruce Braley. She compounded the error since after introducing Braley incorrectly, she continued to mispronounce his name seven times in total, according to CNN.

One would have thought that the first Lady could at least get the poor man’s name correct since the whole reason she was in Iowa was to campaign for him.

But for Ms. Obama, that was not the only screw-up in her campaign efforts for Democrats last November. She introduced incumbent Colorado Senator Mark Udall as a “fifth-generation Coloradoan.” Which sounds nice on the surface, but was actually a more accurate distribution and reality of Udall’s opponent, Cory Gardner. Gardner was truly a fifth-generation Coloradoan, while Udall was born in Arizona.

3) Quote: "I'm not going to compromise a Constitutional right provided here in Kentucky in order to curry favor on one or (an)other side or members of the media." Alison Grimes, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, refusing to say who she voted for President in 2008 and 2012.

Comments: During an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board, Grimes “Did you vote for President Obama in 2008 and 2012?” If she had just said yes, assuming that she did not vote for McCain or Romney, the issue would have probably died out in a few days. She is a Democrat, obviously she probably voted for Obama.

Instead, she hedged and she hawed and made an issue out of nothing and eventually lost to the Republican incumbent. Seems idiotic that by not confessing to whom she voted for she would have thought she would have distanced herself from Obama in the November election. 

4) Quote: “I may be a white boy, but I can jump.” Vice President Joe Biden, at an event during Black History Month when Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson challenged him to a basketball game.

Comment: Difficult to take someone seriously, whose boss is trying to smooth racial divisions in this country, when you are dealing in crude stereotypes, “white boy” and “white boys can’t jump.” If a Republican had something like that, he or she would probably have been eviscerated in the press and by Democrats for fomenting racial stereotypes. Biden says it, and nothing happens except for the fact that he continues to speak quotes that have nothing to do with resolving any issue in this country.

5) Quote: "Where are you going to get people to work to clean out hotel rooms or do our landscaping?" Ms. Alex Sink, failed Florida Democratic candidate for Florida governor in 2010.

Comment: Again, if a Republican had something like this the press and Democrats would have killed him or her. But Ms. Sink does show her contempt and low regard for illegal Hispanic immigrants when in her mind they are only good for cleaning up our hotel rooms and watering our shrubs, implying that they would not be able to move into higher paying better jobs and that we needed them in this country to do the jobs Americans would not do. Racist or condescending or both, really bad for any political candidate to be so pompous.

6) Quote: Illegal immigrants “pick our fruit and make our beds.” President Barack Obama

Comment: Maybe Alex Sink got her prejudices from the leader of her party, President Obama. During a speech President Obama gave justifying his right to use Executive Orders to grant amnesty, he actually said illegal immigrants “pick our fruit and make our beds.” As with Ms.Sink, the President asserts these types of people are never going to be anything else than fruit pickers, hotel cleaners, and weed pullers. Talk about elitsit, pompous and condescending.

7) Quote: “Make no mistake, my policies are on the ballot this fall.” President Obama when speaking about the November elections.

Comments: By associating every Democrat running for office in November with the President’s policies, mostly failed policies, he ensured that the Republicans would take control of all of Congress and sweep through state governments across the country. By selfishly making the elections all about him and his failed policies, ranging from Obama Care to anemic economic growth and policies to a bumbling foreign relations performance, his narcissism failed his party dramatically. 

For someone who is supposed to be the consummate political animal, her certainly came up small when insisting it was all about him.

8) Quote: “Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate.” U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill

Comments: A recent study estimated that one in five women attending an American university is likely to be sexually assaulted during her college years. If true, this is a very serious problem since even one unwanted sexual assault is one too many. This study resulted in Senator McCaskill getting involved and trying to do something about his one in five ratio.

However, a subsequent study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one that had a better construct and much larger sample size, estimated that the true ratio was closer to 50 to 1, not 5 to 1. Again, any sexual assault is not to be taken lightly. But there is a big difference if the chance of sexual assault is ten times less likely than originally thought.

The real insanity of McCaskill’s quote is that like most politicians, why should she let reality enter into any political decision or action? Statistics were good and appropriate when it supported her position, 5 to 1, but should be ignored when it does not support her position and actions, 50 to 1. 

That will do it for today but we will continue our 2014 review of stupid political quotes tomorrow. Today we learned that a Senate candidate will lose an election if he insults his core constituency, that Michelle Obama does not really prepare for campaign rallies before going to them, the Vice President, the President, and a Florida politician continue to deal with and believe in racial stereotypes, and a U.S. Senator uses statistics only when it supports her position. 

And these are supposed to be the leaders of this country? Pathetic leadership, pathetic management skills, pathetic view of others.

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:

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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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: A 23 Year Congressional Losing Streak, Stereotyping Hispanics, Still Too Big To Fail and More

Yesterday was the first in this month’s update to our political class insanity series. We do this series at the beginning of every month to catch up on the insanity, lunacy, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Yesterday we focused on a defense budget that is out of control, a government real estate situation that is out of control, and government bureaucrats partying that is out of control. All of this out of control business, of course, comes at the taxpayer expense.

Today’s update includes the following insanity:

1) Remember how the Dodd-Frank financial industry legislation was supposed to be Obama’s second biggest success story behind Obama Care? Well, we know from the numerous posts we do each month that Obama Care has turned into the biggest disaster in the history of Washington.

Well, Dodd-Frank might not be that much of a success either. According to a Moneynews article from February, 19, 2014:

• The 20 largest banks in the country now account for 62% of U.S. deposits.
• This is up from only 46% in 2003, well before the Great Recession and the theory that some banks prior to the recession had become “too big to fail.
• The cited data source for these estimates is Barclays Capital.
• Additionally, the total market cap value of the top 25 banks is 20% larger than it was before the recession.
• Given the huge size of the largest banks and their interconnectivity, the article concludes that the Dodd-Frank legislation would be of little help in avoiding another financial crisis since we still have a too big to fail problem in the U.S. banking industry, despite the legislation.

Thus, we have another piece of legislation that ran for thousands of pages worth of law and regulations that is likely to be useless, much like Obama Care, much like most of what Washington does. Washington suffers from the opposite effect of “too big to fail,” it is “too big to succeed,” in anything it does.

2) In one of the biggest and most ironic screw ups of the political class in the past 20 years, according to a recent article in the Sacramento Bee, was summarized in the January, 21, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• 80% of the world’s heroin is produced in Afghanistan.
• Afghanistan also happens to be where the United States fought the longest war in its history.
• Prior to the U.S. invading Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban prohibited the production and use of such drugs.
• The heroin trade now accounts for 15% of Afghanistan’s GDP.

So not only did we not defeat the Taliban in the country despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of our armed forces lives and limbs, we created the biggest source of illicit drugs in the world, much of which probably ends up in the bodies of Americans. Major, major screw up on all fronts in this political class misadventure.

3) I love this next piece of insanity, probably because it involves a long term politician from my home state of New Jersey. Congressman Robert Andrews has been a New Jersey Congressman for 23 years, according to a Washington Post article that recently appeared in the Tampa Bay Times. In those 23 years, he has written 643 pieces of legislation. Very impressive, that is almost 28 pieces of legislation every year for 23 years.

However, of those 643 pieces of legislation exactly zero of them got passed and enacted into law. That’s right, the Congressman is 0 for 23 years, 0 for 643 attempts. Name another profession where you can go 23 years without getting anything done and still keep your job, earning over $174,000 a year in the process.

As the Post article points out, he could not even get a courthouse or post office name through Congress, never mind anything of any significance. You would have thought the law of averages would have eventually caught up and given him at least one success over 23 years. This type of performance is a prime example of what we have been talking about through the years: the political class has hijacked, rigged, and contaminated our election processes so much that even people with a 23 year losing streak still get elected over and over again. 

The Congressman is finally stepping down and not running for reelection after his current term, taking a position with a law firm. Hopefully, he is more successful in the court room than he was on the floor of Congress.

4) A special Congressional election in the next Congressional district over from me in the Tampa Bay area is soon to be held to fill the vacant seat of Congressman Bill Young who recently passed away. The Democratic candidate for the seat is a Ms. Alex Sink.

Now, I always get a kick of many Democrats and liberals who claim that they are the more compassionate, caring, and tolerant of the two major parties. I never believed it, viewing most politicians, regardless of party, to usually be focused on themselves and not the most compassionate, caring, or tolerant of people.

Which brings us back to candidate Sink, who was recently quoted in the Washington Free Beacon: 

“Immigration reform is important in our country,” she said. “We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping? We don’t need to put those employers in a position of hiring undocumented and illegal workers.”

I wonder if that is the same view as President Obama and why he is so hot on addressing illegal immigration: we need these people to clean up our messes in hotel rooms and to pick the weeds in our garden beds? How much more degrading, stereotyping, and condescending can a politician get to assume that all Hispanic immigrants are good for nothing more than maid and garden service?

Ms. Sink’s own words out of her own mouth can be viewed at:

http://freebeacon.com/florida-democrat-without-immigration-reform-where-will-we-get-our-landscapers-and-maids/

5) The lunacy does not just come from elected politicians, sometimes government employees, such as the members of the Federal Reserve Board, also get into the lunacy and insanity game. 

Before we get into the details of this little bit of Fed insanity, consider the following graph which has the historical average selling price of U.S. homes on both an inflation adjusted basis and raw data basis (double click on graph for larger image):




Up until the 1990s, the average selling price of a house in the U.S., when adjusted for inflation, was relatively flat with possibly a little bit of an upward trend (red line). For the unadjusted data, there was a more pronounced upward trend but nothing radical, just a gentle, slowing increasing upward tendency.

However, beginning around the year 2000, both graphs go crazy as we see a major housing bubble get created which burst in 2008, leaving us with the Great Recession. No one in Congress, no one in the White House, no one in the Treasury Department, and no one in the Federal Reserve took time to look at such a simple graph to see such a pronounced asset bubble in housing. 

Now back to the latest insanity news form the Fed. Yahoo Finance reported recently that the Fed has released the minutes of its meetings from 2008. In a January Fed meeting that year, despite the data in the simple graph above, Fed Board member Dave Reifschneider stated: "We are not forecasting a recession. While the model estimates of the probability of recession have moved up, they are not uniform in their assessment that a recession is at hand." 

“Not forecasting a recession.” Looks like Mr. Reifschneider, and the rest of the Fed, missed this forecast by just a touch since by the time that year was over, the Great Recession resulted in some of Wall Street's oldest and more famous investment houses and banks ending up in the dustbin of history: Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and a host of other financial powerhouses no longer existed. Additionally, the country was facing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It seems no one looked at our graph. “Not forecasting a recession.”

This is why I tend to disbelieve everything Washington tells me, regardless of who tells me. The Fed told the country in early 2008 that there was not a recession forecasted but then the worst recession in just about our whole history crashed down within months.

Nancy Pelosi told me that Obama Care would create millions of jobs, it did not. 

President Obama told me that if you like your current health care plan you could keep it, Americans could not. 

Kathleen Sebelius told me EVERY economist agrees that Obama Care is not hindering job creation, but I checked it out and find that over 400 companies have already publicly acknowledged that they are cutting jobs, cutting hours, of cutting hiring as a direct result of Obama Care. 

The President and his economic advisors told me that if his economic stimulus plan was not passed, the unemployment rate could go as high as 8% but even though it was passed, the unemployment rate set a record for most consecutive months above 8%. 

Former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap could totally melt by the year 2013 but the ice cap has gotten larger and larger over the past few years.

Broken promises, lousy and lazy forecasting, stereotyping Hispanics, a 23 year losing streak, heroin all around, and still too big to fail. Inanity from the political class in so many different ways. More lunacy and idiocy tomorrow.

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