February, 2015, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: BFDs, Museum Of Government Waste, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again for the our monthly review of political class insanity. We believe that the nation is living through the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in this country, from the President down to the local mayors. Our current politicians never resolve any problems facing Americans, waste untold billions of dollars every year, and operate government programs that never deliver what they promise, always miss their deadlines, always go over budget, and often make the original problem even worse. And these shortcomings do not include outright criminal activity, a topic that will be an integral part of this month’s insanity review.

Over the past week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. So, let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

This is the second post in this month’s insanity series:

1) A wise person once told me that someone swears and uses profane language because at the that moment they are either too ignorant or too lazy not to swear. This adage helped me curb my own cursing and swearing in my life, golf courses excluded. Given this advice, it was quite inappropriate when Vice President Joe Biden told President Obama that passing Obama Care “was a big f*#@ing deal” in front of a live microphone. Not the kind of language I would want or expect from a leader of the free world, pathetic.

Well, apparently this type of profanity is not restricted to the Vice President. The official White House website recently posted a short video with the title, “Things you didn’t know about the State of the Union.” No problem, sounds pretty innocuous. However, the video closes with writing on the screen that says: “It’s a BFD,” the exact same embarrassing words Biden used. 

Now, I am not close to being a prude when it comes to profanity, I have used every known term at some point in my life. But really, you are representing the President of the United States, kids have access to that website and you have to top it off with a vulgarity like BFD. Pathetic leadership and lack of maturity.

2) As we have said many times, pathetic leadership and lack of maturity are confined to Federal politicians. Consider the embarrassment that a state politician in Virginia has brought to that state and it state government:

• Joe Morrissey is an elected politician to the state government in Virginia.
• He had been out of office for a while but apparently just got reelected.
• He was out of office for a number of reasons including the fact he had gotten his teenage receptionist pregnant after previously becoming the father of three daughters by three different women, he was convicted of assault in 1999, and he lost his license to practice law in 2003.
• But he recently got re-elected despite the fact that each night he has to go to the local county jail to sleep because of a six month sex conviction.
• But the travesty continues since it recently became known that Morrissey has been indicted for allegedly submitting a forged document as evidence and lying under oath.

The Richmond Free Press newspaper has made the obviously statement and demand that: "The first bipartisan action of the 2015 General Assembly should be to get rid of Delegate Morrissey.”

This is the type of people that somehow get elected over and over again at every level of government in this country. And while most of them are probably not as big an embarrassment as the Virginia politician, their ineffectiveness and greed render them just as embarrassing and inept.

3) We have often talked about how wasteful and ludicrous Washington politicians are with our money. A small sample of their insanity and disregard for our wealth include the following very small handful of examples:

• Taxpayer money was spent to determine when dogs became man’s best friends.
• Taxpayer money was spent to build a video game the simulated prom week.
• Taxpayer money was spent to assess whether online dating sites’ users were racist.
• Taxpayer money was spent to determine why the same college basketball teams are always the most successful in the March Madness national basketball tournament.

Such wasteful spending and waste. Now, a filmmaker is documenting how pathetically wasteful the Federal government and its bureaucrats can be. A documentary film is being made that covered the five years just about wasteful spending. The filmmakers are following the exploits of regular citizens, Jim and Ellen Hubbard, as the work the halls of government to get taxpayer funding for...wait for it… the bogus Museum of Government waste.

The museum concept is completely bogus but they use the idea to get access to Congressional sources and lobbyists that are willing to help them or give them advice on how to get funding for their project. This is an experiment to find out how exactly the Washington political class has spent us into an $18 TRILLION national debt hole.

The synopsis of their effort is on their website and reprinted below:

They’ll recruit someone to become a part of the process. It’s called “participant observation,” a technique used by researchers to gain knowledge of the inner-workings of a culture by actually taking part in the culture. They tap radio host Greg Knapp, a regular guy with a wife and two kids who lives in the burbs and makes a living asking the tough questions. The Hubbards give Greg a task: try to get an earmark* for a ridiculous project: the Museum of Government Waste—an actual building that would be dedicated to the American taxpayer and filled with “homages” to the $500 hammer, the $10 thousand toilet seat, and that $400 million Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere. The Museum’s cafeteria would serve nothing but pork!

As the experiment progresses farther than Greg and the Hubbards ever expect, their efforts become increasingly more sophisticated and their quest more serious. They don hidden cameras and meet with lobbyists who instruct them to break the law. They go undercover and meet with Republican Congressional staff who assure them that despite earmarks recently being banned in the House and Senate, there’s still plenty of federal funds for their museum project. The Hubbards’ experiment gives new meaning to the saying, “be careful what you wish for” as Ellen and Greg eventually find themselves face to face with one of Washington’s most powerful players–and realize they just might get their anti-earmark earmark after all.

Their website can be accessed at:

http://www.museumofgovernmentwastemovie.com/

Think about the irony of this effort. Someone is trying to get the Washington political class to waste money on building a museum about government wasting money. Precious and pathetic at the same time.

4) We have often discussed the reality that many school systems across the country are facing tight financial times. From the lingering effects of the recession to decreasing populations to onerous union contracts and retirement requirements to wasteful spending, many schools are under tremendous financial pressure and strain. 

According to a January 9, 2015 article on the Education Action Group website, the schools in Buffalo, New York fall into this financial need category. In January, 2014, the Buffalo News reported that Buffalo schools were facing a $50 million budget shortfall. Dire straits that puts pressure on the quality and quantity of education that can be done for Buffalo kids.

Despite this financial situation. the school districts in Buffalo are still required to provide free plastic surgery for their teachers. That perk cost the Buffalo schools over $5 million In the 2013 -2014 school year, a benefit that requires the teachers to pay nothing for any plastic surgery they elect to undergo. And these surgeries have nothing to do with disfigurement as a result of a car accident or a fire or other accident. This free teacher perk can be used for a tummy tuck, nose job, or other strictly cosmetic reason.

Eliminating this perk alone would wipe out out more than 10% of the budget shortfall. It is a superficial teacher benefit that those citizens paying teacher benefits via taxes cannot use themselves.

Now, one could possibly make the claim that these teachers deserve this extra perk because they are doing a superlative job of educating Buffalo kids. That would be viable if that was the case but sadly, the kids in Buffalo are not getting a superlative education. Just over half of Buffalo kids are graduating high school, a horrible success rate but one that has improved from a really bad 48% to a plain bad 56%. Only 12.2% of Buffalo kids are rated proficient or better on standardized English tests and only 13.1% are rated proficient or better in math.

Sounds like a typical political class run government operation: low quality at very high costs, much of which is wasted. No accountability, no checks and balances,no pay for performance. Just wasteful spending on non-essential items.

That will do it for today, our second installment on this month’s political class insanity. Much more to come over the next few days so stay tuned in to find out what our politicians are screwing up as we speak. Trust it is a BFD.

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.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Part 3, August Political Class Insanity:Food Assistance Abuse Goes Jamaican, Gang Membership Up, Political Integrity Down, Buffalo Teachers Looking Good In Front Of Uneducated Students

We are now into our third post in this month’s series on political class insanity and lunacy. It is a very good bet that we will break the record, set just last month, for the most consecutive days needed to cover all of the stupidity that continuing come out of the mouths and actions of the American political class. The first of this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/08/part-1-august-2013-political-class.html

Unfortunately, for us, our freedom, and our nation, the rate of insanity and the depth of its idiocy is accelerating quickly, as the following episodes illustrate:

1) Food stamp usage is at an all time high. The number of Americans requiring government food assistance has increased about 50% since Obama took office. There are over twenty million Americans who are either unemployed or under employed. Times are rough in this country, just feeding the hungry.

Which makes the antics and stupidity from Louisiana state government officials all that more insane. State health inspectors destroyed 1,600 lbs of deer meat donated by hunters to a local homeless shelter. And this was not road kill type quality. The meat had been handled, prepared, and shipped to the shelter by a state accredited slaughterhouse.

Reverend Henry Martin, executive director of the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission, which provides food and shelter for the homeless in Northwest Louisiana, said that his organization had been serving deer meat donated by area hunters for decades without any problems, complaints, sicknesses or deaths from the donated and properly prepared meats. The Louisiana chapter of Hunters for the Hungry, which is also endorsed and approved by the state government via the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry and the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on its website, donated the meat through the area meat processing facility.

Apparently, there is a state law that prohibits the serving of hunted deer meat and apparently some state bureaucrat just realized that what has been going on for decades is against the law and shut down the food source, hungry state residents be damned. The state confiscated the perfectly good meat and saturated it with alcohol to make it inedible to both humans and wildlife.

According to Reverend Martin, his effort serves three meals a day to an average number of 230 people every day. This comes out to over 200,000 meals a year and this deer meat program was a major source of those meals for hungry Americans. Again, remember, no one got sick or died from this program over decades, it died because of stupid government run by stupid bureaucrats and stupid politicians. 

Rather than work with all of these parties involved, the rescue mission, the hunters, the slaughterhouse, and public health officials, nearly a ton of meat was simply destroyed and the hungry went hungry. You know we are in a bad place when unnecessary laws trump hungry Americans. Pathetic.

2) On July 22, 2013, press secretary Jay Carney went off on a bragging jag, boasting how the Obama administration had added 7.2 million private sector jobs to the economy since Obama took office. But according to research done by the Daily Caller website, he left out some other, less encouraging statistics:

• Since February of 2009, 9.5 million Americans, 2.3 million more Americans than the Obama administration found jobs for, have actually dropped out of the labor force. 
• This equates to  1.3 Americans having dropped out of the labor force for every one private sector job the administration claims to have created.
• There are 15 million more Americans on food stamps today than when Obama assumed office, more than double the number of private sector jobs that Mr. Carney claims to have been created under Obama.
• At the end of January, 2009, 32,204,859 Americans received food help via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program but by April 2013, there were 47,548,694 Americans on food stamps.
• Under Obama, 1.6 million more Americans are collecting disability insurance. In February 2009, 9,334,369 Americans received disability payments. Today, that number is 10,953,733.

The insanity here is on Mr. Carney’s part where he attempts to glorify this Presidency without showing the whole, sad picture of the mismanagement of the economy by the political class and the Obama administration over the past five years.

3) The FBI recently released their latest crime statistics regarding gang violence and the findings are not good. According to FBI tracking, gang membership has increased since Obama’s election in 2008: “Some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs with about 1.4 million members are criminally active in the U.S. today.” 

In 2008, the FBI stated, “Approximately 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia as of September 2008.” This is a 65% increase in the number of gangs and a 40% increase in the number of gang members. The latest report also concluded that gangs are responsible for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions, and up to 90%  in others.”

I am not a sociologist so my explanation for this radical increase in lawlessness would be pretty shallow. However, I would bet that our failing public schools, our failing economy, the failing level of integrity, smarts, and morals in our political class, and the inability of the politicians in this country to do anything right and efficient have a lot do to with these alarming gang statistics.

And worse of all, I do not see any positive trends on the horizon that would reverse the trends in schools, jobs, and the competence of the political class.

4) The New York Post reported on gross abuses of the Federal government’s food programs in a July 21, 2013 article. According to the Post, many New Yorkers who are receiving taxpayer funded food assistance via the Federal government are using that assistance to buy and ship food to relatives overseas in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

Welfare recipients buy groceries with their government Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and then pack them in giant barrels for the trip overseas. The Post investigation found that the practice of using U.S. food assistance money to feed relatives and friends overseas is so prevalent and widespread that it  is common to find hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels along the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.

A Federal government official quoted in the article stated that this is an illegal practice, the food assistance program is for Americans who need food assistance, not foreigners. However, grocery employees also quote din the article confirm that this practice is well known and widespread.

So, let’s review. One part of the political class steps in to terminate a decades old food program involving healthy deer meat that has not harmed anyone and which has provided millions of meals over time. Another part of the political class is so inept that it results in American taxpayers funding the food needs of people overseas using a food program that is supposed to feed America’s hungry. Maybe, the political class and the governments it operates need to get out of the food business due to incompetence. Insanity.

5) I love this story from the Education Action Group (EAG) website. It beautifully illustrates how out of control the priorities are in this country when it comes to government operations of any kind, in this case, government operations of the public schools in Buffalo, New York.

According to EAG, a recent Open Record request they filed with the Buffalo school district revealed the school district actually increased its spending on cosmetic medical procedures for teacher union members in the past year, to the tune of $2.9 million  between June, 2012 and May, 2013. And that is up from $2.7 million during the 2011-12 school year.

That’s right, $2.9 million for skin peels, dental implants, tummy tucks, and any other plastic surgery teacher union members decide they want done, all funded by local taxpayers and the school board. By the way, this $2.9 million for totally non-education related expenses would have paid off almost 6% of the school district’s projected $51 billion deficit for the next school year, what would have been a nice start of getting education expense in line with revenue without impacting classroom resources.

Now, the Buffalo teacher’s union might have a case for such stupid expenses if the Buffalo school district was as shining example of how great public education and teachers unions’ performance can be. However, that is not the case:

• The district’s graduation rate actually went down in 2012 to 47%
• One high school had an astoundingly low 24% graduation rate.
• For the 2011-12 school year, only 25% of 8th graders were rated proficient or better in English Language Arts and only 24% of the same group were proficient in 
• Scores for the New York state Regents Test, an assessment required to receive a diploma, showed that only 21% of the students received an 85 or higher in English, only 3% of students scored 85 or higher in Algebra, and only 19% of students scored 85 or higher in U.S. History and Government.
• In the 2009-10 school year, Buffalo reported spending $23,907 per student to obtain these types of results, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Thus, in Buffalo, the student performance is ugly but the teachers look marvelous, certainly not the combination that a taxpayer or citizen wants out of their taxpayer funded schools.

That will do it for today, more disgraces from your politicians tomorrow. Bad use of food assistance dollars, bad news on the gang and crime front, bad economic data on jobs, bad priorities when it comes to feeding the needy in this country, and bad test and education results because of bad priority setting in Buffalo. Will the “badness” continue tomorrow? Tune in and find out if you dare.

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 

Political Situations That Make You Crazy

Today's post compiles information from a wide variety of sources and demonstrates how crazy our political world and situation has become. Unfortunately, it is not a good type of crazy or a funny type of crazy, it is a very disappointing type of crazy. It can get depressing reading about how our political class, including both parties, over the years, have neglected the major problems and have focused on the trivial matters, resulting in bizarre, expensive, ridiculous, and depressing situations. Consider:

• According to a short article from www.bloomberg.com that was published in the October 15, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, in 2008 almost 3,000 U.S. households reporting income of $1 million or more claimed and received income from unemployment benefits. The amount claimed was over $18 million. Now in the big picture of government deficits, $18 million, unfortunately, is no big deal. But it is real taxpayer money that has been wasted. Unemployment insurance payments should be configured to help a struggling family over a rough spot in their financial lives when someone in that family has lost their job. Someone who has made over $1 million in income does not need that help. I would assume that in most of these cases, if someone made over $1 million in 2008, a bad economic year, they probably made a lot of money in the good economic years leading up to 2008. There is no way that they have hit a rough patch relative to the vast majority of the country.  However, politicians have allowed this waste of taxpayer money to go on regardless of how stupid and wasteful it is.
• According to an October 12, 2010 New York Times article by David Brooks that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, the city of Buffalo has as many public government workers today as it had in 1950 even though the city has lost half of its population since then. Combine this ridiculous situation with the fact that computers, cell phones, and other pieces of technology have made working much more efficient and productive since 1950, and you can see that Buffalo has lost far more than 50% in productivity from its government workers in the past 60 years. This lost of productivity has been allowed to happen by our political class that is too scared to cut waste since it might cost them a few votes, better to just stick the remaining Buffalo taxpayers with the bill of atrocious productivity losses.
• According to  London Guardian article that was published in the The Week magazine's September 24, 2010 issue, the Untied States has slipped from second to fourth in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, now trailing Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore. A competitive economy and marketplace help to create jobs and grow the wealth base of a country and as that slips, the ability to grow and enrich a country's citizens declines. The index measures such factors as infrastructure, education, health care, record of innovation and more. Is it just a coincidence that as our Federal government has gotten bigger and more wasteful that our competitive ability as a nation has slipped significantly? This larger government and political class has certainly not helped to fix our infrastructure, education process, and other competitive needs.
• Political situations around the world can be just as crazy as here. In an article reprint from the Daily Mail that appeared in the September 24, 2010 issue of  The Week magazine, European Union political class safety actions might actually be killing people in Europe. According to the article, the European Union issued rules that prevent anyone from working in hospitals more than 48 hours a week. However, the reason that many medical professionals were working more than 48 hours a week was because they had to in order to handle the volume of sick people they were facing. By forcing work hour limits on these people, sick people are actually dying while waiting for help in hospitals. The article cites a British hospital experience where a man complaining of shortness of breath came to a hospital and was forced to wait more than five hours to see a doctor. Unfortunately, he died in the hospital before a doctor could see him. In another documented case, an elderly woman dropped dead in a British hospital because the hospital could only provide only one doctor to care for 100 patients, the other had to clock out at 48 hours. Talk about unintended consequences, by not understanding the underlying situation, the European political class is actually killing its citizens unnecessarily.
• According to an article in the October 15, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, New York City recently began changing out all of its 250,900 street signs, adjusting the type face from all upper case to upper AND lower case letters. The upper case type face has been use in the city for more than a hundred years. Why change now? Because the Federal Highway Adminstration says signs in which only the first letter of a word is capitalized are easier to read, enabling drivers to spend less looking at the street signs and more time looking at the road. This, in turn, should save lives. Now seriously, how many lives do we really think this will save? Most NYC residents already know where they are going the vast majority of the time and are unlikly to spend much time at all looking at new street signs. Visitors to New York City are most likely using some type of public transportation and have no need to read street signs. How many documented lives lost to street sign type face do the Feds have on record because a driver spent too much time looking at the type face of a street sig? Not only is a ludicrous waste of time, the cost for the changeout, according to the article, will be in excess of $27 million, taxpayer dollars that certainly could have been better spent on schools, infrastructure, and a plethora of other better uses. This is not the view of the City Transportaiton Commissioner who noted an additional benefit of the sign switch: " It's more polite. Writing in all caps means you are shouting." Makes you crazy, doesn't it, the waste, the bureaucracy, and the insanity justifying it all?
• According to an article that appeared in the October 9, 2010 issue of the St. Petersbug Times, Kenneth Feinberg and his law firm have been paid more than $2.5 million in just three and half months to administer the $20 billion fund set up by the government and BP to pay victims of the Gulf oil rig spill. For those of you who do not know Kenneth Feinberg, he is currently under employment in the Obama White House as one of Obama's czars. How can this not make you a) a crazy and b) not be a conflict of interest? Let's see, I am drawing a salary and benefits from the American taxpayer while I can still make money at my own law firm dealing with the Federal government. Obama pledged not to hire lobbyists when he came into office (a pledge that he has broken many times). How is this any different? Are you telling us that here was no other law firm in the country that could have handled this project? What a sweet deal for Feinberg, he can work both sides of the fence as insider government employee and an outside consultant getting money via a government agreement with BP.
• The Obama administration and Congress recently passed the Small Business Jobs Act which was a Hail Mary pass by the President to look like he was doing something, anything constructive relative to the high unemployment rate prior to the elections by incenting small businesses to hire. The feeling when this passed was that how good of an idea could it be if it took until now to come up with it? If it was such a great job producing piece of legislation, shouldn't it have been passed long ago? Well, it now appears that this is just what most expected to be, an economic dud and just a political ploy. According to an excellent analysis by Jill Priluck of www.Slate.com ,which was summarized in the October 8, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, the whole bill is likely to be just another multi-billion waste of taxpayer wealth. For example, only well established and thriving small businesses, businesses that are unlikely to need to hire a significant amount of new employees, will qualify for these loans under the strict requirements the legislation requires. Thus, those that qualify for the loans are the ones least likely to need a loan. Those companies that are most likely to hire many new employees are viewed as too risky by the bill. Brilliant. Also, the legislation provides tax credits to small businesses, credits that would hopefully be turned into new hires. However, tax credits apply only if a business is already profitable. Thus, we have the same problem. Only well established, profitable small businesses will qualify for the tax credit but are unlikely to hire new employees. It is the small businesses that have a high potential for growth who will hire but they do not qualify for the tax credits since they are still unprofitable. Apparently, you could not design a worse small business piece of legislation to attack the unemployment problems you want to attack than this ill conceived, stupid bill.

As you can see, we have not allowed our brightest and our smartest to gain political power  in this country and around the world. Our political class passes bills that do not work, allow productivity and waste to go on indefinitely (60 years in the case of Buffalo), pass rules that kill people and still do not know the definition of conflict of interest. Pitiful. It literally makes you crazy.

However, there is a way to start bringing sanity back to our world. It starts with the implementation of many steps outlined in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government," steps that include imposing term limits on all politicians, stopping the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, requiring all politicians to take and pass a class on economic theory, and downsizing the federal government by 10% a year for five years. If this was done in Buffalo, you would finally have an affordable city government scaled to the current day population numbers. The same needs to be done at the federal government level, eliminating waste and some of the craziness and stupidity we have to live with today.

Finally we need to take the step of dumping every incumbent politician out of office in November. We need to use the strategy that a professional clown recently and successfully deployed in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest state (The Week magazine, October 15, 2010. The clown actually won a seat in Congress using the campaign slogan: "It can't get any worse." Brilliant! The same applies to the United States in November. It can't get any worse, we live with crazy and inane political situations while real issues are never addressed and solved. Dump the clowns in November, how much worse could it get?


Our new 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 these other sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/