October, 2016, Part 5, Poltiical Class Insanity: No Respect For John Kerry, The Eating Habits Of Drunk College Students And More

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.

The current monthly record for the number of posts that were needed to cover one month's worth of insanity is ten. We equaled that record last month when we needed ten days to cover one month’s worth of political class insanity. There is a very good chance that the ten day record could fall this month since as we get closer and closer to the election, the volume of ineptness grows almost exponentially. 

But today and for all of the 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) Michael Tanner, writing an article for the Cato Institute on September 22, 2016, talked about the latest iteration of the annual analysis, “Index of the Economic Freedom of the World.” The index is compiled every year by a group of 70 think tanks from around the world. It rates every country along a set of measurements that include the size of government, tax burdens, regulatory burdens, property rights, and other measures to come up with a relative measure of how freely a country’s economy functions. History has shown that the freer an economy is allowed to function, the more likely it is to grow rapidly and prosper. 

So how did the U.S. do this year? Let’s look at some history and results over time:

• In the year 2000, the U.S. was ranked as the second freest economy in the world.
• By 2009 we had lost some of our relative freedom but still ranked in the top ten countries of the world.
• In the latest index calculations, we have dropped down to number 16, sandwiched between Lithuania and Malta.
• Recall that Lithuania was once part of the USSR, an economic situation that no one would ever call free by any measurement.
• Canada ranked number five meaning that it was much easier and likely more financially attractive to do business in Canada than in the United States by a very large margin.
• Underneath the total index we see that we ranked a dismal 78th when it comes to the size of our Federal government, not surprising given the huge sizes of our Federal annual budget deficits every year since Obama took over.
• Ranking 78th on size of government now makes us worse in this area than even most of the socialist governments in Europe.
• Even more distressing, the U.S. dollar got us the top ranking in the monetary soundness measurement category as late as 2005 but since then, eleven short years later, our monetary rating has plummeted to 40th.
• When the first index was calculated back in 1980, our legal system and respect for property rights made us number one but the latest report puts our legal system and respect for property rights 27th, right next to Rwanda and Portugal.

It seems that the political class, both Republicans and Democrats, have been busy dismantling the freest economy in the world over the past few decades and making us just another run of the mill economy with higher and higher taxes, a higher and higher regulatory burden, etc. Which is a shame since the end of World War II having the freest and least burdened economy in the world created the highest standard of living in the history of mankind. But leave it to the latest set of politicians to ruin a good thing.

As our economy and economic environment has gotten more and more bogged down, we see that there are now over 40 million Americans receiving food assistance every month, we see a labor participation rate that is lower than it has been since the 1970s, we see soaring national debt, we see stagnant wages and household income levels, we see millions of Americans who have to settle for part time work when they want full time work, we see 30-40% of American households that have none or very little savings. Cause and effect? I think so, courtesy of the worst set of American politicians ever.

2) We recently reviewed the many, many failures of U.S foreign policies and strategies under the Obama administration and the latest Secretary of State of that administration, John Kerry. That post can be accessed at:

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John Kerry often ends up in this blog as a result of his inane quotes and failed policies. Today is no different. The truce/cease fire that Kerry negotiated with Russia to try and settle down the carnage and warfare in Syria, especially around the city of Aleppo, fell apart just days after it was agreed to. A convoy of humanitarian aid was headed to Aleppo when it was attacked and destroyed, killing upwards of two dozen civilians in that convoy. 

Although they denied it, the Russians and their Syrian government allies were likely to blame. As a result, the ceasefire ended almost as soon as it began and Syrian troops are massing outside of Aleppo, making preparations to attack the city, which will no doubt result in even more civilian casualties and deaths. Thus, another failure for the Obama/Kerry diplomatic skills. 

Possibly just as embarrassing, when Kerry went to the Russians to try and fix what went wrong, as reported by the Daily Caller website, “A senior Russian official said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s threat to cease all talks with Russia over Syria, amounts to an ‘emotional breakdown.’” Yes, a total lack of respect for the top international U.S. diplomat, which for this administration, is about par for the course. Pathetic and a measure of how ineffective this Secretary of State is. No one respects him, publicly accusing him of having an emotional breakdown. 

3) Let’s classify this next story as plan “oopsie.” Apparently, the Defense Department has a program that brings young Afghanistan male citizens to this country and gives them military training. The theory is that these newly trained folks will return to their native country and lead the war against the Taliban and terrorists.

That assumes they return to their country. Bill Gertz, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on September 27, 2016, reported that seven Afghan citizens that were receiving military training have disappeared from their assigned U.S. military bases and are now roaming freely within the country or the world: “During the month of September, seven Afghan students were considered absent without leave (AWOL) during international military student programs,” Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Patrick L. Evans said. Yes, seven disappeared just in a single month.

Three of the people could have possibly been involved with the bombing suspect in the recent New Jersey and New York terrorist bombings. Mr. Girtz reports that the authorities are investigating connections to see if these three people, trained militarily by our own armed forces, were somehow involved in the attacks.

The seven Afghan military trainees disappeared from U.S. training facilities around the country. You cannot get much more insane than this: bring foreigners into this country from a hotbed of terrorism, give them military training and then lose them.

4) Sometimes stories we cover are just plain stupid when it comes to government spending priorities and this is one of them. This kind of story, and tens of thousands like them, are the reasons why no American rich or poor, should pay more in taxes to the Federal government until there is some kind of financial discipline installed in the Washington bureaucracy.

Before we review this insanity from the Fix This Nation website, keep in mind that:

• Millions of Americans go hungry every day.
• At any time during the year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are homeless.
• Every day, our veterans are not getting the medical care they were promised and need.
• Every day, likely hundreds of Americans die from drug addiction.

Now, read the following disgraceful use of $50,000 of taxpayer money and decide whether a better use of that money would be for those suffering Americans listed above or simply better not to have spent it at all:

• The National Institutes of Health is going to spend $50,000 to study how much snacking drunk college students do.
• Over a two year period, researchers will track the drinking and eating binges of 175 freshmen at the University of Kansas.
• They want to study the ridiculous hypothesis that drinking alcohol may lead to unhealthy eating.
• They also want to see if heavy drinking leads to the infamous “Freshman 15” weight gain theory.

Seriously, how idiotic is this study? I can answer their research questions right now:

1. Heavy drinking does lead to unhealthy eating. No college student ever said “give me a Budweiser and a side of broccoli.”
2. By definition, alcohol is heavy in calories so drinking a lot as a freshmen adds to one’s body weight.

No need to waste $50,000 anymore, research questions answered.

Now, in a $4 TRILLION Federal budget, $50,000 is a tiny rounding number. However, this type of spending insanity is done hundreds of thousands of times every year by the Federal bureaucracy as the bureaucrats try to justify government jobs that are useless. This type of small insane ways to waste money multiplied over and over eventually leads to a $20 TRILLION national debt.

And while $50,000 may not be a lot to a massive Federal bureaucracy, it is a lot to a few unlucky Americans who need a meal, a roof over their heads, some needed medical care, of some drug treatment if that $50,000 was directed at the truly needy in this country.

Another day of depressing insanity from the American political class. And even more depressing, more insanity 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:


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

April, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Feinstein Gets Spied On, Syria Gets Ignored, Eric Holder Gets Tyrannical, and More

This is our fourth post in this month’s continuing saga of political class insanity, idiocy, ineptness, and wasteful spending. We do this series every month to prove our assertion that we are currently living under the most incompetent set of politicians in the history of our country. If they were not destroying our freedom, our health, and our economic well being their antics would border on the comical and absurd. Unfortunately, their antics cross over into the dangerous, wasteful, and pathetic.

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.

Why are these discouraging figures such a bad trend? According to Brookings:

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.”

So let me get this right. According to Senator Feinstein’s world and interpretation of the Constitution, we are just little yippers and yappers when our Constitutional rights are trampled. However, when her Constitutional rights are trampled it is horrific. Insane and so hypocritical.

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