Love My Country, Loathe My Government: catherine pugh

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Tuesday, March 10, 2020

March, 2020, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Corruption, In Baltimore, Corruption In The FBI, Corruption In Congress

It is 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.

Let’s get started:

1) As we have often pointed out, political corruption is not reserved just for Washington politicians, as we find out from what recently happened in Baltimore:

Mike LaChance, writing for the American Outlook website on February 28, 2020, reported that the former mayor of Baltimore has been sentenced to prison on multiple corruption charges.
Catherine Pugh ran a scam which required companies to buy copies of her childrens’ book in order to do business with the city of Baltimore.
In other words, buy my book and you get city contracts which in the process makes me wealthier.
According to Fox News: “Catherine Pugh, a former mayor of Baltimore, was sentenced to three years in prison Thursday following her conviction on federal tax evasion and conspiracy charges related to the sale of her “Healthy Holly” books to help fund a political career, the Baltimore Sun reported."
She also has to pay back money to the University of Maryland Medical System and almost $12,000 to the Maryland Auto Insurance Fund, both of which had to purchase her book.

Corruption pervades all levels of American government.

2) A new Justice Department report found evidence that the ineptness of the FBI may have allowed a number of terrorist attacks to take place in the country during the Obama administration:

Specifically: “The FBI has acknowledged that various weaknesses related to its assessment process may have impacted its ability to fully investigate certain counter-terrorism assessment subjects who later committed terrorist attacks in the United States,” according to the report.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that the report shows that the FBI made inadequate attempts to fix its assessment process even though they knew they existed.
Since September, 2001, in country terrorists have committed over 20 terror attacks in the country with six of them occurring during the Obama administration when Jame Comey led the FBI.
According to the report: “Before some of these terrorists committed the attacks, they had been “the subjects of FBI assessments or investigations that had been closed by the FBI.””
These “subjects' ' went on to kill over 60 Americans in just two of these attacks, the foot Hood terror attack and the Pulse Nightclub terror attack.
These two attacks were part of a larger screwup by the FBI: “Since September 11, 2001, HVEs have carried out over 20 attacks in the United States, some of which occurred after the FBI closed a counterterrorism investigation or assessment on the individual. Following these attacks, the FBI conducted reviews and determined there were weaknesses in its HVE assessment processes. However, we found that the FBI has not taken sufficient action to address these weaknesses.”

So they knew they were screwed up and yet did not fix anything, likely resulting in the unnecessary death of American citizens on our own ground. One has to wonder if the FBI and Comey had not been so interested in framing Trump and denying him the duly elected presidency that maybe they actually could have saved some American lives.

A primary, very basic function of government should be to protect the citizens it governs. Comey and the FBI he led failed misrerably to fulfill that basic premise.

3) Congresswoman Maxine Walters of California has been one of the more obnoxious, inane, and useless politicians in Washington for a long time. To hear her talk and the gaffes and hate that come out of her mouth is overwhelming at times. She is almost always on anyone’s “top ten” list when it comes to political corruption.

But even worse, perhaps, is the self enrichment she has showered on herself, as pointed out by an article on the Three Percenter website:

Keep in mind that when reading the following facts and realities that Walters annually earns $174,000 as a member of Congress, before taxes and living expenses.
To my knowledge, she has had no other job or spouse that would have gotten her personal wealth up into the millions of dollars.
But according to the article, Walters owns a $4.5 million Los Angeles estate that is a half a city block long and is in one of the most affluent sections of LA, not in her Congressional district.
She also owns two other homes with an approximate value of about $1 million and she also has a timeshare property in Palm Springs, California, one of the more affluent locations in the whole country.
Her expensive, $4.5 million estate is managed and maintained by a private company that involves extensive landscaping.
This is a massive 6,000 square foot home surrounded by a brick wall and protected by iron gates.
It has a custom barbeque area and an indoor swimming pool which sits in a separate structure from her mansion.
According to the article: “The Waters estate boasts large scale rooms touted as “perfect for for gracious entertaining” in one LA-based publication. It includes a “stunning entry with dramatic staircase. Lovely pecan paneling in the family room. Guest house too!””

Now, keep in mind that she supposedly accumulated all of this wealth by earning not more than $174,000 a year over her long Washington career. Also keep in mind that California has some of the highest state income taxes and property taxes in the country,both of which would take a huge chunk out of her annual salary. And ask yourself: how was she ever able to get so rich on so little salary, relatively speaking, living in such a high tax state as California?

Maybe she should shut up about the Trump tax returns in case someone ever asks to review her tax returns and maybe find out where her wealth came from. It is doubtful that she is so frugal as to have gotten so wealthy by pinching her Congressional pennies.

Corruption in Baltimore, corruption in the FBI, and corruption in Congress, gets tiring after a while doesn’t it?

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

November, 2019, Part 11, Political Class Insanity: Corrupt Mayors and Elizabeth Warren's Idiocy of A Tax Plan

Let’s get started:

1) One would hope that those running for office and getting elected to that office were the best, the brightest, and had high levels of integrity. But all that is is an elusive hope as the vast majority of the time those elected are not bright, not the best, and have very low levels of integrity combined with serious self enrichment and greed issues.

We have illustrated these types of low life behavior before, A Georgia Congressman actually thinks the island of Guam can physically tip over. A Texas Congresswoman thinks that the Constitution is 400 years old and wonders out loud if one of the Mars Rover vehicles will be driving past the Moon area where Armstrong landed. Just about every Illinois governor from the past few decades is in prison or was in prison. The list goes on and on.

And now, we can possibly add the former mayor of Baltimore to that list:

According to November 20, 2019 article by Zachary Evans on the National Review website, the former mayor of Baltimore could be facing 20 years in prison for corruption.
Former mayor Catherine Pugh was recently indicted on Federal charges including fraud and tax evasion.
According to the article: “In March, federal authorities began investigating allegations that Pugh made $500,000 from selling her children’s book Healthy Holly to the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) while she was serving on the UMMS board. It was then revealed that health-insurance provider Kaiser Permanente had paid Pugh $100,000 for 20,000 copies of the book, at the same time the company was seeking a contract to insure city employees.”
Federal agents raided her home back in April in search of evidence which led to her resignation on May 2.
While Pugh had at first has called the investigation a witch hunt, her resignation letter kind of admitted to the fraud and corruption she put forth for the “harm that I have caused to the image of the city of Baltimore and the credibility of the office of the mayor.”

Another day another potentially corrupt American politician. No wonder that Trump and others have chastised the local politicians for letting Baltimore degenerate into a miserable place to live and work for its residents, the mayor was possibly too busy lining her own pockets to pay attention.

2) But wait! Pugh is not the only city politician to get caught possibly breaking the law:

Muncie, Indiana mayor Dennis Tyler was arrested early one recent morning at his home as it was raided by FBI agents.
This raid was the result of a four year FBI investigation.
In 2018, one of Tyler’s associates, Craig Nichols, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.
The investigation of Nichols led to the investigation and arrest of Tyler.
According to the news reports, “Others charged in the probe include Nikki Grigsby, the Muncie Sanitary District administrator; Tracy Barton, another official with the Muncie Sanitary District; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney Barber.”

The good news is that if Tyler and Pugh are guilty, than it is great that they will face justice. The bad news is that we have no idea how many other corrupt mayors, governors, and Congress people are also as greedy and as corrupt.

3) We have often made the case that most politicians are totally ignorant when it comes to basic math and economic principles. Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren showed she has neither of these simple traits when she recently announced her latest tax plan to tax the rich to unheard of heights:

Warren obviously did not do the basic math underlying her tax the rich to death plan since with one simple example the Wall Street Journal showed that it was easily conceivable that some Americans would end up paying over 100% of their annual earnings in taxes.
Think about this lunacy for a moment: for every dollar one earned in wages, interest, dividends, etc. you could end paying more than a dollar in Federal taxes BEFORE state and local taxes are layered on top.
This is basically slavery, a government taking everything you worked for in any one year.
Warren would get to this economic idiocy by raising the top Federal tax rate to 39.6%, she would impose a new 14.8% Social Security tax, she would tax an American’s individual total wealth by 6% on people worth more than a billion dollars, and she would raise the capital gains tax to match the income tax rates.
Let’s do the math as outlined by the Wall Street Journal: let’s assume that a billionaire had a $1,000 investment that gained him or her an annual 6% return.
That would be a $60 investment gain for them.
But between the increased Federal income tax rate, the additional of a new Social Security tax, and an increase in capital gains tax, the Federal government under Warren would take 58.2% of that $60 gain in Federal taxes or about $35.
But she would also hit him or her with a 6% tax on the total investment or an additional $60 in taxes.
Thus, the total Federal tax hit on that $1000 investment and the resulting 6% return would be $95, which is an effective tax rate of 158%.
In other words, for every $1.00 this investment made for the billionaire, they would have to pay $1.58 in Federal taxes.

How stupid is this?! Nobody is going to work, invest, and manage their assets in order to pay this high of a tax rate BEFORE paying state and local income taxes. Did nobody on her staff do this simple calculation to show how stupid this is? Or is she that stupid to think that this is actually a good idea, because it is not:

Almost always when politicians raise taxes they get far less than what they think they will get.
For example, when Maryland raised state income tax rates on its residents earning over a million dollars a year, very, very shortly they found that despite higher tax rates they were getting LESS total tax revenue from million dollar earners despite higher tax rates.
When Philadelphia raised the tax on soda sold in the city, they actually ended up getting far less in soda tax despite the higher soda tax rate.
When France jacked up the tax rates on its billionaires, those billionaires simply left the country and took their billions with them.
The same type of disasters will happen with this idiocy. People will stop working so hard, hurting the nation’s productivity and competitiveness with the rest of the world, because it makes no sense to try and earn that extra dollar when you will pay more in taxes than that dollar.

Billionaires have resources that most people do not. They will simply take their wealth and move out of the country where their wealth and talents will be more than welcome by just about every other country in the world. The wealth that they have and the investments and the growth in the economy that wealth produces will be lost, making us a poorer country in the process.

Even Steve Rattner, former economic advisor in the Obama administration thinks this is stupid: “I would say it’d be disastrous for the American economy.”

And think about this reality, that usually goes unnoticed: do we really think that Warren and her cohorts in Congress will do anything good with whatever money they can bilk out of Americans with this plan? As we stated above, one current Congressman thinks that the island of Guam can actually top over in the middle of the ocean. A Congresswoman thinks the Constitution is over 400 years old. A New York Congresswoman has no concept of how the basic unemployment calculation is made and also thinks the three parts of the Federal government are the Presidency, the House,and the Senate. These are the types of people we should be giving our current taxes to, never mind giving them a lot more of our wealth.

And if you are not a billionaire and think you personally are going to get any of this wealth theft, forget about it. Washington politicians will find a way to waste while destroying the economy, driving highly productive citizens out of the country, and eventually causing ALL of his to pay higher taxes once the billionaires either move or go dry.

Again, why did not someone on her staff do the simple math and apply basic economic principles to this fallacy? Surely, if she is this ignorant on this simple stuff there is no way this country should put her in charge of anything more complicated. Raising taxes almost always results in LESS tax revenue, see Maryland and Philadelphia examples above.

That will do it for today’s insanity: unbelievably stupid tax plans from Elizabeth Warren and two potentially corrupt and criminal mayors of U.S. cities get arrested for their possible criminal deeds.
This will also do it for this month’s political class insanity. Unfortunately, it took us 11 posts to get through just the typical stupidity, greed, corruption, and incompetence of the American political class. We did not even tap into the farce that is the impeachment proceedings and most of the other Presidential campaign idiocy.

Gets depressing, doesn’t it? How did we get to this point where we pay more and more in taxes and get less and less integrity, intelligence, and production from the political class in this country?

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Friday, May 10, 2019

May, 2019, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Corruption In Baltimore, Letting Terrorists Vote, and Impeachment Nonsense

Let’s get started:

1) Political corruption does not just exist in DC. Consider the latest local political class corruption at the city level down in Baltimore. According to Fox News, the mayor of Baltimore is resigning as more and more evidence of corruption crop up concerning her misdeeds. Catherine Pugh resigned as a result of state and Federal corruption investigations into whether she used sales of her self published book, “Healthy Holly,” to launder and hide monetary kickbacks.

Apparently, Hugh made political decisions and appointments in return for those benefiting from her decisions arranging for the bulk purchase of Pugh’s book. Fortunately, law enforcement found out about the arrangements and as a result a likely corrupt politician is out of a job and facing potential criminal charges.

2) Consider some of the major problems and issues facing the country today:

Medicare is going bankrupt.
Medicaid is going bankrupt.
Social Security is going bankrupt.
We have a major immigration, criminal, drug trafficking, and health crisis on our southern border.
We have millions of Americans who are homeless, hungry, sick, and drug addicted.
We have a Federal government debt of $22 TRILLION which will likely bankrupt the country.

Given these major issues that will likely affect every single American, what issue is Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders all worked up about? Sanders wants convicted felons still serving time in prison to be able to vote in elections. So murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals serving time should have the right to vote in his reality.

Even terrorists, those that have shot and bombed Americans to death or injury, should have a right to vote. Yes, even though their victims and ordinary Americans who died violently at the hands of murderers and terrorists and who were deprived their right to vote, and their right to live, can no longer vote.

Of all the major issues, this is what Sanders is excited about. Bankrupt social programs, a bankrupt country, hungry and homeless Americans, etc.. take a back seat to felons voting. I would bet that if you asked Americans where they would put the “let felons vote” issue in their rank order of most important national issues, the voting rights of felons does not crack the top 100.

Oh wait, someone actually did that survey. A Business Insider/Survey Monkey poll found that a whopping 75% of those polled thought this was a stupid idea. Only 15% said allowing violent felons still in prison to vote is a good idea. Of course, Congressional bimbo Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out in support of the idea showing continuing lack of good sense and right priorities.

Fortunately, it appears that most Americans have good sense and a good moral compass. If you commit a crime against society, you need to be held accountable for your deeds and pay the price, a price that includes suspending your right to vote. Unfortunately, politicians like Sanders do not have the same good sense and good moral compass. If they did they would not even consider allowing terrorists and murderers to vote after they denied their murdered victims that same right.

3) Politicians say the darndest things, we have proven that over the years oh so many times. Unfortunately, the insanity and stupidity never stops, as witnessed by the latest stupid statement by Congressman Al Green: “If we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

So inane on so many levels:

What is wrong with him getting re-elected if he wins the election, the voters and citizens should decide who is and who is not elected, not some impeachment infected Congress people.
Getting impeached means that Trump has been accused of crimes, not that he has been convicted or shown to be guilty so why not vote for him again, remember, in this country it is “innocent until proven guilty.”
Do these impeachment nuts realize that even if they bring impeachment charges that Trump will still remain in office? I constantly get the impression that these Democrats never read the Constitution and think that impeachment means removal from office, an incorrect assumption.
On what charges do these types of people think they will bring against Trump, you cannot impeach a President just because you do not like him personally.
Mueller spent two years, spent over $30 million, had a staff of nineteen lawyers, and reviewed lord knows how many documents and came up with nothing that would lead to impeachment. I doubt that this Congressman or his peers in Congress are able to match that effort in order to find impeachment worthy actions.

Two bottom lines here. First, Congress people, in the absence of hard, hard evidence hashed out in a trial, should not be dictating who voters can or should vote for, that is not how we a have a free country. Second, can we get off this impeachment kick, the Mueller non-event, and related, non-productive nonsense?

When are we going to get our priorities right in DC and start working the real issues listed above, not this impeachment fantasy and voting rights for murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. More insanity to follow.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

March, 2020, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Corruption, In Baltimore, Corruption In The FBI, Corruption In Congress

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

November, 2019, Part 11, Political Class Insanity: Corrupt Mayors and Elizabeth Warren's Idiocy of A Tax Plan

Friday, May 10, 2019

May, 2019, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Corruption In Baltimore, Letting Terrorists Vote, and Impeachment Nonsense

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