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

January, 2015 Update, Will the Center Hold: Common Core, Horrid School Lunches, Gun Control, and More

On a semi-regular basis, we run a discussion on whether or not “the center will hold?” In other words, what happens if and when Washington issues a law or a decree and the rest of the country simply ignores it, will the center hold? Never in my life have I seen the country so divided and struggling to push back on the over reaching politicians in Washington.

From gun control to school lunches to warrantless spying on citizens to Common Core education standards to health care to many other issues, states and individual citizens are more and more taking formal and informal action and telling Washington types to butt out of our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms. We have gotten to the point where state legislatures are actually passing legislation saying that they will not abide by certain Federal decrees and laws and making such compliance a crime within their state borders.

To review the many previous posts we have done on this question, enter “will the center hold” in the search box above to see the widespread resistance that is building up across the country. For the latest push backs against Washington, continue reading below and you decide: will the center hold?

1) One of the biggest issues that the rest of the country is resisting from Washington is the so-called Common Core education standards. Common Core seeks to impose one set of educational standards on every state and every child in the country, standards that are written by Washington bureaucrats. Needless to say, given Washington’s poor record of getting anything right, many states are having second thoughts of surrendering their education principles to Washington. 

The second major reason for resisting Common Core is that in states where it has already been deployed, test scores of kids in those states have declining substantially compared to test scores prior to the Common Core standards. Thus, logic says, why surrender to a set of standards that fail to accomplish what they promised and are substandard relative to the status quo?

The latest state to consider dumping Common Core is Mississippi. Recently, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant attended a stop Common Core rally in his state.

Bryant spoke at the rally: “We’re not here today to say take away those academic challenges. We’re here to say make them better but take them away from the control of the federal government.” 

He and other state politicians were present at the rally to try and pressure the rest of the state legislature to act and formally withdrawal the state from the Common Core program. Another state that might tell Washington to pound sand, this time as it applies to Federal educational guidelines.

2) One of the biggest rebellions against the Federal government has been against the new school lunch program guidelines that Washington implemented, and which were vigorously supported by First Lady Michelle Obama. These guidelines were supposed to make kids eat healthier lunches at school in order to combat childhood obesity.

Unfortunately, as we have reported many times, the program has largely been a failure since the kids are not eating the supposedly healthier meals that schools must provide under the Washington guidelines. While the food might be healthier, it does not matter if the kids do not eat it. Horror stories have been reported around the country of how putrid and/or tasteless the new lunches are and how they are just not being eaten. You can lead a kid to a healthy lunch but that does not mean he will eat it.

So much “healthy” food was being thrown out at one school district we reported on that they cut a deal with local hog farmers to use the thrown out food as hog feed at the farms. According to the Education Action Group website, at Rogers High School in Gers, Arkansas, much of the “healthier food was also being thrown out: “We’re feeding trash cans a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Robin Kinder, president of the Arkansas School Nutrition Association and assistant child nutrition director for Springdale Public Schools, told NWAonline.com.

This high school had the following experiences with the new guidelines:

• The school forced students to take healthy food options when going through the cafeteria line but even forcing them to put the health food on their trays did not result in it being eaten, it usually just got dumped in the trash can: “It would just go straight to the trash sometimes,” Estefany Corleto, a junior at Rogers High School, says of the foods students are required to take. “I think it was just a waste of food.”
• According to Kinder, low-sodium and low-fat foods were not developed with kids’ tastes in mind.
• The low-sodium mashed potatoes, for example, were roundly rejected: “I have never seen children throw mashed potatoes away,” she says.
• Pickles can only be served with “certain meals.”
• As a result, the school managers found that food costs and garbage volumes were going up while sales were going down.

Another top down Washington program that made a current issue worse. Rather than kids eating more of less healthy meals, they are now eating far less of healthy meals, getting far less calories than they need to grow and thrive in school rooms and school activities. Healthy eating habits needs to be addressed by a nationwide, long term public health campaign and education effort. That is how you resolve the problem. Washington mandating a non-solution will never work.

This problem, like most problems, will not be solved by having faraway Washington bureaucrats and politicians trying to dictate what is on a kid’s lunch tray.

3) One of the more hotly contested issues that the country is pushing back against Washington is the effort President Obama has undertaken to bypass Congress and the American people and to unilaterally give amnesty and government benefits to millions of illegal aliens. Since the states are going to have to absorb the costs and burden of many of these illegal aliens, they are now pushing back, through the judicial processes to block this unConstitutional and illegal Presidential dictate.

According to a Heritage Foundation article written by Hans von Spakovsky on December 31, 2014, 25 states, half of the states in the union, have filed a Federal lawsuit to block his unilateral plan to grant amnesty. The lawsuit claims that Obama has “unilaterally suspend[ed] the immigration laws as applied to 4 million of the 11 million” illegal aliens in the United States.

The states are requesting that a judge find that Department of Homeland Security directives implementing Obama’s plan violate the "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" cause  of the Constitution, as well as various provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act because they are arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and were issued without regulatory authority or the required notice and opportunity for public comment.

Here are the 25 states involved in the lawsuit:

Alabama

Arizona

Arkansas

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Indiana

Kansas

Louisiana

Maine

Michigan

Mississippi

Montana

Nebraska

North Carolina

South Carolina

North Dakota

Ohio

Oklahoma

South Dakota

Tennessee

Texas

Utah

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Half of the country thinks Obama and his administration are wrong when it comes to this action and are spending money and resources to push back on this clearly illegal action. Makes you wonder what will happen if Obama tries to force his will through anyway, regardless of what the courts say: will the center hold if half the country tells Washington no on amnesty? What would Washington do if half the states do not do what Washington wants them to do on this issue? Interesting times we live in.

4) One last piece of resistance for today. Earlier in 2014, the Idaho governor signed state government legislation would ignore and nullify all future Federal government gun laws. The legislation was passed unanimously in both the house and senate of the state legislature.

Erich Pratt, Director of Communications for Gun Owners of America, cheered the governor’s action. “By signing this nullification bill into law, Idaho has joined an elite class of states that are telling the feds to ‘get lost’ — especially when it comes to unconstitutional gun control infringements.” 

Specifically, the law will: “protect Idaho law enforcement officers from being directed, through federal executive orders, agency orders, statutes, laws, rules, or regulations enacted or promulgated on or after the effective date of this act, to violate their oath of office and Idaho citizens’ rights under Section 11, Article I, of the Constitution of the State of Idaho.”

The legislation continues to establish: “Any official, agent or employee of the state of Idaho or a political subdivision thereof who knowingly and willfully orders an official, agent or employee of the state of Idaho or a political subdivision of the state to enforce any executive order, agency order, law, rule or regulation of the United States government as provided in subsection (2) of this section upon a personal firearm, a firearm accessory or ammunition shall, on a first violation, be liable for a civil penalty not to exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) which shall be paid into the general fund of the state…”

As a result of this action in Idaho, but related to the bigger issue of states and citizens fighting back against Washington overreach, Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin said that the new Idaho law has opened Pandora’s box even wider: “People are beginning to realize that this practice is completely constitutional and legal. In the near future, you will see a wave of states passing even broader legislation to fight the federal government on everything ranging from more traditionally liberal issues like hemp and marijuana, to more conservative issues like Obamacare. Nullification isn’t a left vs. right issue. It destroys the fallacy of the left right paradigm and is the remedy for all unconstitutional laws.”

Just another day in the country's desire to get out from under the repressive and aggressive actions of an out of touch and incompetent Washington political class. Today we learned that Mississippi is just the next state to fight back against Common Core, the Michelle Obama dictatorial healthy school lunch plans are still failing across the country, half the country is formally fighting Obama and his forced and illegal unilateral amnesty program, and Idaho has joined several other states to proclaim they will not obey Washington gun control laws. Will the center hold?

Check back on a regular basis as we will continue to review this fascinating, if somewhat scary potential future, a future that may see the rest of the country decide what, if any, Washington actions it will obey or ignore.

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

October, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: No To Chocoloate Milk, Failures In Geography, Over Taxation, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to check in with the American political class to see what insanity they have wrought over the past month or so. It is always amazing to follow the exploits, quotes, and actions of our politicians and the government entities they operate to see how often idiocy, incompetence, and heartbreak are almost always the output from their actions.

We started dong these updates several years ago, usually taking one or two days every month to get all of their insanity covered. Unfortunately, over time, the insanity has seemed to accelerate almost exponentially, causing us to now have to take six or seven posts each month to get it all in. This month will be no different. As our foreign policy implodes, the economy stagnates, and the midtem elections approach, the insanity levels are intensifying daily.

To check out past instances of political class insanity in this post, simply go to the first week of each month and check out the posts that begin, “Political class Insanity.” For the latest insanity, read on:

1) The Tax Foundation recently published the first ever global statistic called the “International Tax Competitiveness Index.” Details about this latest index measure include the following points and facts:

• This index measures two financial criteria, competitiveness and neutrality, by examining “the extent to which a country’s tax system adheres to”, these “two important principles of tax policy”.
• To do the calculation, the index than analyzes 40 tax positions and policies in each nation studied. 
• The United States does not come off well at all, relative to other countries, finishing an obscene 32nd out of the 34 nations analyzed.  
• Two of the most damaging reasons for ranking the United States near the very bottom of the list include the highest corporate tax rate (39%), as well as the “rare demand that money earned overseas should be taxed as if it were earned domestically”. 
• Thus, the United States outranked out only Portugal and France out of 34 industrialized nations.

Thus, one reason for the tepid/anemic economic growth over the past five years could be the fact that heavy taxation is forcing companies to move their operations and focus to other countries or not investing in U.S. markets since anything they earn will be taxed at very high levels relative to the rest of the world.

How bad and oppressive are U.S. business tax rates and policies? According to analyses done by the accounting firm KPMG, only one country in the entire world has a higher overall corporate tax rate than the U.S. The United Arab Emirates’ 55% rate is an exception, however, because it usually applies only to foreign oil companies.

High taxes = lower economic growth, it is not a hard concept that has been proven over and over, both at the state level in this country and at the country level around the world. Everybody gets it except…. for the Washington political class. And that is likely a main reason why the real unemployment rate is still over 10%, why about 17 million Americans are unemployed or under employed and why we have not annual economic growth over 2% for what seem like forever.

2) It has been a recent, continuing news stories that both the Bush and Obama administration have been providing military grade weapons and armored vehicles to local police forces. This so-called “militarization of American police forces” has created concern and opposition from people throughout the political spectrum.

But according to a recent article by the Education Action Group EAG), it is not just police forces that are getting military grade weapons and armaments. According to a recent EAG article by Victor Skinner, almost two dozen legal, civil rights, and education advocacy organizations have sent a letter to the U.S. departments of Defense, Justice and Education to plead with Federal officials to stop sending military equipment, weapons and armored vehicles to public schools.

It seems that many of school districts across the country have taken part in the Department of Defense’s Excess Property Program, commonly known as the 1033 program. The Huffington Post reported that at least 20 schools have taken in military-grade equipment, from grenade launchers to laptops, since the program started in 1997. The equipment is given to schools, public university police forces and local police agencies free of charge.

This story hits quite home for me since as a resident of Pinellas County, Florida, the article documented the fact that Florida’s Pinellas County School District, received almost two dozen M16 rifles under the program. Really? M-16 rifles for a school system that is responsible for educating kids from kindergarten through high school? 

What possible situation could arise that would require school district personnel to break out M-16 rifles? Shouldn’t that be a job for local police and local SWAT teams, not art teachers? Possibly even worse, American tax dollars were used, and wasted, to provide armored personnel vehicles capable of withstanding mine explosions to San Diego and Los Angeles school districts.

I do not get it. I doubt any personnel in any school system is properly trained to handle M-16 rifles and armored personnel carriers. I can think of not situation in my entire lifetime where a school principal lamented that if only they had had a dozen or so M-16s on site they could have better handled the situation. 

I have yet to hear a teacher complain that the lack of an armored personnel carrier resulted in lost lives. The probability that these situations ever arise is too small to measure since they have never happened before. Wasting of taxpayer money, endangering of our kids.

3) Connecticut legislators recently passed state legislation that bans chocolate milk in the state’s cafeterias. The bill was passed in response the Michelle Obama-driven Federal standards for healthy lunches. Supposedly, those who supported the ban said chocolate milk isn’t suitable for children because of high levels of sodium.

Really? Chocolate milk has too much sodium which makes it a health danger? What happens when kids that only like chocolate milk no longer drink ANY milk and start having calcium deficiencies: “What concerns me is that if chocolate milk is not one of the available options, then students will decrease consumption of milk overall,” said Lonnie Burt, the head nutritionist in Hartford’s school district.

Fortunately, the governor has repeatedly said he will not sign this bill into law. Do state legislators have nothing better to do in this difficult economic times than worry about chocolate milk? Especially since their remedy is to deny kids access to a great and nutritious option at meal time? Political class insanity is not restricted to Washington. 

4) The Obama administration recently started bombing suspected terrorist sites within the sovereign country of Syria. The sales job included the fact that ISIS terrorists within Syria could attack other countries including our own and that is why they needed to be destroyed now even if it meant attacking another country.

This is very serious stuff. It involves endangering the lives of U.S. military personnel and probably billions and billions of dollars of American taxpayer wealth in this pursuit to destroy a perceived enemy. One would hope that the Obama administration had all of its ducks in a row in order to do the best job possible. 

But it seems that hope of any kind left this administration long ago. Despite the gravity and seriousness of the situation, during a recent press briefing, a senior Obama administration official, who was not identified by name under well-established rules, was speaking on a conference call with reporters about ISIS when he made the geographic screw up when he said: “ISIL has been, I think, a galvanizing threat around the Sunni partners in the region. They view it as an existential threat to them. Saudi Arabia has an extensive border with Syria … So what we have here is a galvanizing threat from ISIL that is, I think, leading our Sunni partners in the region to join us along the range of potential capabilities that my colleague mentioned.” 

The screw up is that Saudi Arabia does not have an extensive border with Syria, in fact it is NO border with Syria:




If you are going to lead your country into a war, don’t you think you would have a better grasp of basic geography of where you are leading the country to? Leaves a big doubt in one’s mind that the administration knows what it is doing if it has no concept of where we are doing it.

Steven Bucci, who knows his way around the Middle East as a former Army Special Forces officer and who now oversees foreign and defense policy at The Heritage Foundation, called the senior official’s comment “embarrassing” as the White House prepares for military action in the Middle East” “It is not reassuring when the leaders of the Obama administration, on the day of a huge address by the President, make a gaffe this embarrassing.” 

That will do it for today. Chocolate milk as a priority, failing grade in geography, excessive taxation, and armaments in schools. The scope and variety of political class insanity never ceases to amaze us. And rest assured, you will be amazed even more over the next week or so as we have only scratched the surface of the latest insanity from Washington and elsewhere.

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

Will The Center Hold, October, 2014 Update, Part 1: Telling Obama Care, School Lunches, and Statehoold To Hit the Road

Every month or so we revisit the theme and interesting question of whether or not “the center will hold?” In other words, given the rebellion and push back that state and local governments along with individual citizens have been giving to Federal government dictates and laws, do we get to at point in this country where the Washington political class and machine issue a law or edict and the rest of the country simply ignores it?

It certainly seems like we have never seen so much objection and hostility to Washington. As Washington and its politicians overreach and over demand relative to Constitutional limitations, the rest of the country has pushed back on a number of major issues:

• Obama Care
• Medicaid Expansion
• Gun Control
• Common Core
• Spying on Citizens

These are just a few of the various issues that have the rest of the country looking for ways to escape out from under Federal mandates and laws. To see past examples of how extensive this push back has become, enter the search term “will the center hold” in the search box above.

Let’s take an inventory of the latest rebellious acts underway around the country:

1) We have often cited opinion poll numbers that show the country’s citizens regards for Congressional politicians is at a historic low and the approval rating for the Obama administration has been steadily dropping over the past year or so. 

Thus, it should come as no surprise when a recent Reuters news report cited a reputable polling organizations finding that about 25% of the nation’s citizens supporting the concept of their state seceding from the union. Details of the poll include the following:

• The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted from August 23 through September 16.
• 23.9% of those polled said they either strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away.
• 53.3% of almost 9,000 respondents strongly opposed or tended to oppose the notion.
• The desire to get out from under Washington generally cut across party lines and regions, though Republicans and residents of rural Western states are generally warmer to the idea than Democrats and Northeasterners with more than a third of Western area poll respondents supporting the concept.
• The poll found anger with Obama's handling of issues ranging from healthcare reform to the rise of Islamic State militants driving some of the feeling along with the childish and long term Washington gridlock also being a major driver of the 23.9%: "I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference anymore which political party is running things. Nothing gets done," said Roy Gustafson, 61, of Camden, South Carolina, who lives on disability payments. "The state would be better off handling things on its own."
• From North Carolina: "That [Obama care] has really hurt a lot of people here, myself included. My insurance went from $40 a week for a family of four up to over $600 a month for a family of four," said Brittany Royal. "The North Carolina government itself is sustainable. Governor (Pat) McCrory, I think he has a better healthcare plan than President Obama."
• From Texas: "Texas has everything we need. We have the manufacturing, we have the oil, and we don't need them," said Mark Denny, a 59-year-old retiree living outside of Dallas.
• As the national debt gets more and more out of control due to wasteful Washington spending, as economic conditions continue to languish at historical lows, as no major issues ever get resolved by Washington, at what point does the center not hold and we go from 23.9% to a majority of Americans saying enough is enough, we want to go it alone. 

When does the majority conclude that it could not get any worse under a different course, a course that we are more likely control vs. dictates from far away that suppress freedom and economic vitality? Will the center hold?

2) An issue that we have not discussed much at all in this series but one that is growing in aggravation and agitation is the imposition of new school food guidelines by the Federal government, an imposition and legislation that is supposedly driven by First Lady Michelle Obama. 

Let me say upfront, that healthier eating habits should be a national priority. The country and many, many of its kids are overweight or obese, leading to higher incidences of ill health and higher health care costs to treat the obesity problem. This is a public health care crisis that should be addressed by a public health care initiative to instill healthy eating habits in American families over time.

Having said that, the wrong way to do it is to have the Washington political class pass and enact a law that mandates instant changes in the way the country eats. Just because a Washington bureaucrat dictates that a kid in a far away state can only consume so much fat, salt, and sugar at their school’s lunch table does not mean it is going to happen.

And it is not happening. School districts across the country are rebelling against this new Washington dictate and dumping the guidelines that the law put forth. The schools are finding that kids are not eating what Washington wants them to eat, resulting in millions of dollars in food being scrapped every day, kids not getting enough nourishment at lunch, and school districts running into serious financial troubles since the revenue from selling school lunches is way down.

The situation has gotten so bad that a recent article by Victor Skinner, writing for the Education Action Group, showed that schools in Missouri and Alabama have already bowed out of the Federal school lunch program despite losing Federal dollars to stay in it. The article found that: “Those schools and numerous others across the country are ditching the federal regulations and the funding that comes with them to save their cafeteria programs, which have experienced a nose-dive in sales and skyrocketing waste since the new rules were implemented in 2012.”

A large high school in Missouri, Norte Dame High School, saw lunch participation rate drop by half. They turned to local restaurants to provide healthy food that actually tasted good, as opposed to the healthy but badly tasting Federally mandate food to make sure kids actually ate lunch.

Saxony Lutheran High school also did the same thing: “We want to make sure we’re serving a well-rounded, healthy, balanced meal,” Saxony principal Mark Ruark told SEMissourian.com. “We don’t think the current federal guidelines give kids enough calories to sustain (them), especially those in extracurricular activities. Kids will not eat what doesn’t taste good.”

At Cleburne County Schools in Alabama, lunch participation dropped by 29 percent under Michelle Obama’s and Washington’s edicts. A local mom, Maria Gilbert, is quoted in the article saying that her children will no longer eat school food. Her 11th grader says it’s “nasty” and has opted to bring microwave food from home. at least until the school removed the appliance from the cafeteria. Gilbert said she’s often forced to find a quick meal for her famished kids after school, AnnisonStar.com reports. 

In Ohio, it’s the same problem: “We are seeing a trend where meal counts are going down just because students aren’t accepting all the changes that are taking place,” Ohio School Nutrition Association member Jeni Lange told ABC.

A National School Nutrition Association survey found food waste is up in 81.2 percent of schools nationwide, and a study by Cornell and Brigham Young universities estimates the waste at $4 million per day. Students in Los Angeles schools alone are throwing away $100,000 in food per day, ABC reports.

In a Vermont school district, school employees devised a plan to “repurpose” their lunch waste as feed for about 3,000 hogs at a local pig farm. In Medina, Ohio, volunteer parent Marcie Henning is taking advantage of the massive waste in her district to feed the homeless and less fortunate.

You get the idea. Again, Washington never understood the root causes of a problem, the need to educate parents, families and kids about the need to eat better under a public health approach. Instead, Washington tried to fix a problem they did not understand and the unforeseen consequences by dictating a top down solution that, like Obama Care, has no chance of working.

As result, kids are eating less and going hungry, school district financials and revenues are being devastated, and the country’s unhealthy food chain is unchanged. When we see our kids going hungry and our tax dollars being fed to hogs, how long will the center hold?

3) One more quickie for today, we will conclude this update to our "will the center hold” series tomorrow. The Washington Examiner recently did a piece on this concept and how the relationship between the Washington elite and bureaucrats and the rest of the country has probably never gotten this dicey. 

The article points to Obama Care as one of many drivers in this resistance to Washington. It cites the reality that 36 states said no to the Obama administration relative to setting up Obama Care health insurance exchanges, forcing the Federal government to do it by itself in those three dozen states. Another 20 or so states decided not to expand Medicaid within their borders as they were allowed to do under Obama Care.

I could be wrong, but from my history classes I do not remember any state that said they were not going to participate in Social Security or Medicare or any other major Federal initiative. This recent resistance seems to be a new phenomena. And according to
Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Texas public policy think tank, it seems I am correct: “This is the biggest push back that I’ve seen in my lifetime, even more so than, I think, you had in the Civil Rights era. There’s this growing sense out there, that there are areas that are the purview of states, and the states ought to be allowed to do that.”

So I am not alone in wondering if the center will hold. From Obama Care to secession to something as simple as school lunches, the center in Washington is dictating and the rest of the country is saying hold up or something worse. More rebellion and resistance tomorrow as we try to figure out "if the center will hold."

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

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