Love My Country, Loathe My Government: einstein

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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Part 2, By The Numbers: More Chicago Killings, More Medicare and Medicaid Fraud, and More Foolish Funding of the California High Speed Rail Line

On a regular basis we do a series of posts labeled, “By The Numbers.” In these posts we look at real life numbers and discuss them relative to the fantasies, lies, incompetence, and stupidity of the American political class. As we have always said, “politicians lie but the numbers do not.”

1)Unfortunately, we review these following numbers all too often. The city of Chicago is a violent and murder infested urban area. It has been like that for years and apparently, it still is, with no local, county, or state politician having any idea how to fix the violence:

Recently, in a single drive by shooting incident in the city, four residents were killed.
People were out socializing on a summer evening, nothing out of the ordinary, when the drive by happened.
In total, 13 women and five men were shot, ranging in age from 21 to 32 years old.
Two women and two men were among the dead.
Last year, over the Fourth of July weekend, over 100 Chicago residents were shot and 19 died.

It is a pretty good chance, given the politicians' inactions, the violence numbers this Fourth of July this year in the city will be just as bad.

2)We have also often discussed the pathetic wasting of taxpayer wealth through incompetence, criminal fraud, and employee fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid processes. For decades, they have wasted untold billions of dollars, dollars that could have been better used to help more unhealthy Americans at a lower cost.

And thanks to recent successes by the Justice Department, we now get a look at what just a small part of the corruption and criminal activity looks like:

As part of the Justice Department’s 2025 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, criminal charges were recently laid onto 324 health care defendants,
They were charged with ripping off the Federal government and the American taxpayer via health care scams to the tune of a whopping $14.5 billion.
This action was the result of cooperation across 50 Federal districts and 12 state attorney generals.
Those arrested included 96 doctors in addition to nurses, pharmacists and other licensed professionals.
The arrests resulted in the seizure of over $245 million in cash, luxury vehicles, cryptocurrency, and other assets.
Previous to this take down effort, the government announced in another operation that it had blocked over $1 billion of taxpayer wealth being paid out to bogus medical claims against Medicare by over 200 individuals.
“This record-setting Health Care Fraud Takedown delivers justice to criminal actors who prey upon our most vulnerable citizens and steal from hardworking American taxpayers,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “Make no mistake – this administration will not tolerate criminals who line their pockets with taxpayer dollars while endangering the health and safety of our communities.”
According to FBI Director Kash Patel: “Health care fraud drains critical resources from programs intended to help people who truly need medical care. Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to pursuing those who exploit the system for personal gain. With more than $13 billion in fraud uncovered, this is the largest takedown for this initiative to date. Together, the FBI and our law enforcement partners will continue to hold those accountable who steal from the American people and undermine our health care systems.”
The criminals involved both domestic and international criminals with some of the criminals from faraway places like Estonia.
The criminals set up fake companies and began submitting claims to Medicare for catheters and other medical equipment by using stolen identities of American citizens.
At least one banker was arrested and charged with helping to launder the stolen Medicare funds.
For decades, the state government of California has been trying to build a modern, high speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

In another law enforcement effort, charges were recently filed in Illinois against five alleged criminals in connection with the theft of $703 million in Medicare funds.
A criminal who was arrested in Pakistan stole about $650 million from Arizona Medicaid.
Also in Arizona, seven people were arrested and charged with filing over $1 billion in fraudulent claims to Medicare.
In Tennessee, prosecutors arrested three people, including a pharmacist, with a $28.7 million scheme to defraud the Federal Employees’ Compensation Fund.
They billed the Federal government for injured post office employees that never had any medicines formally prescribed for them.

And yet, despite this impressive crackdown on those that would steal billions form taxpayers, Democrats and liberals across the country are claiming that Trump is an evil man for protecting taxpayer wealth. I do not get it, so petty on their part, great on Trump and the Federal government’s effort to protect our tax dollars.

3)It is rumored that a very smart man, Albert Einstein, once said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” A current day example of this principle was recently demonstrated in the final Californai state government budget:

The state government of California has been trying, for decades, to build a modern high speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
I say trying because the project has been a management disaster from the start: severely missed build out deadlines, severely overrun budgets, and little progress at all.
We recently updated the sad state of this failed government project in the following post:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2025/05/trump-and-musk-continue-to-uncover_13.html

We will not go into the details of the post but the conclusion from that post is basically that the state has been throwing good money after bad money, that the costs and benefits of the project will never materialize and that failure will cost the residents untold billions and billions of dollars.
And yet, when the latest state budget was approved, the state government politicians did not follow Einstein’s advice and allocated yet another $1 billion a year for the next 15 years or so to fund a PORTION of the original plan.
The original plan to build the entire rail line was supposed to cost $28 billion for the entire project and be done by 2020.
Now, the state politicians want to spend another $15 billion to finalize just a portion of the line which is already $100 billion over budget BEFORE this new funding plan.

The true definition of insanity: spend more and more and get less and less at a much later date. The numbers are bad but the state politicians keep making them worse.

More killing in Chicago, more fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, more insanity in California, and more political class insanity.

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https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom

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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/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

Saturday, June 17, 2017

June, 2017, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Medical Ripoffs, NATO Ripoffs and Education Taxpayer Ripoffs

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. We are getting started as little late this month since we needed to review the latest global warming.climate change insanity from the likes of Al Gore, culminating in our review of the 26 reasons why it was appropriate and necessary for Trump to pull us out of the Paris Climate Agreement:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/06/june-2017-part-4-i-am-global-warming.html

But let’s quickly get into this month’s political class insanity because over the past month or so there has been a lot of it was Washington implodes into a useless pile of incompetence:

1) We have often pointed out how horribly most public schools educate our kids these days. Despite spending trillions of dollars at every level of government over the past few decades to educate our kids, the results have almost always been abysmal. Our kids usually rank behind the kids of dozens of other countries whenever scores on standardized tests are compiled despite the trillions of dollars spent, and wasted, on education in this country.

And apparently things do not get much better for many of our college graduates either. Consider a recent report by Douglas Belkin, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

The College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+) is administered to freshmen and seniors at about 200 U.SA. college across the country.
After four years, the test results are compared between the freshmen test results and the senior year test results.
The test is meant to determine the critical thinking skills of our college graduates, not what they think or know but how they think and reason.
The latest results show that at more than half of the 200 schools using the test, more than a third of college graduates “were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document and interpret data in a table.”
At some of the most prestigious, and expensive colleges, in the testing program, the ability to improve thinking skills from freshman year to senior year showed little or no improvement.

As the world and technology change more and more rapidly, those college graduates that have no ability to think clearly, reasonably, and logically will not only leave themselves behind but also help the country remain more and more uncompetitive vs. the rest of the world. All of this despite trillions and trillions of dollars wasted in this country on educating our kids.

And when an outsider comes into the picture, someone like Betsy DeVos, to try and change what is obviously a failed approach to education, from Head Start through college, the political establishment players go crazy. They would prefer the failed, expensive and current policies then even try to do something different.

What did Einstein say once: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” We are truly insane then when it comes to education.

2) Some people both in this country and in Europe got really upset when Trump dared to suggest that most members of NATO were not living up to their commitment to defend themselves and the NATO alliance. Given that Obama allowed these European allies to slide by for eight years without doing what they committed to do trained the Europeans to lash out when someone actually told them the truth.

But Trump was right when you consider the numbers and realities. As the U.S. continues to spend more than half a trillion dollars a year to defend itself and NATO allies during the Obama regime, consider what the Europeans were doing, as reported in a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Although during the Cold War the Netherlands maintained a tank force of 445 tanks, by 2015 they had put its last 60 tanks up for sale and had sold off all of its helicopters and most of its minesweepers.
During the Cold War, Germany had over 2,100 tanks but now has only 244 of which about half actually work.
As of last year on average, 9 of German’s 48 NH-90 transport helicopters and 40 of its just 123 jet fighters were usable at any one time.
Today, European NATO forces have less than half of the number of soldiers today vs. 1983 and less than half the number of tanks.
The European NATO forces had 84 destroyers in 1983 but only 54 today, it had 2,672 fighter planes in 1983 but only 1,897 today, and it had 173 frigates but only 92 today.

This the reality that Trump was talking about and why he was looking out for the American taxpayer: why should we continue to pay for a defense of Europe when Europe is not willing to pay for a defense of itself. Trump was doing what all American Presidents should be doing: looking out for the welfare of Americans and America.

3) We recently reviewed the reality that the Federal government wastes or criminally loses at least $144 billion a YEAR from its government programs with Medicare and Medicaid, the main Federal health insurance programs, wasting the vast majority of that $144 billion.

A recent article in the AARP magazine described a medical scam that was going on in California and illustrated that it is not always seedy street criminals who are stealing money via health care scams, those stealing of money from insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid are often doctors themselves.

While the article’s details, highlighted below, are not directly connected to Medicare and Medicaid and taxpayer ripoffs, it does illustrate what is likely going on within the criminal activities relative to those programs also:

California state officials recently announced that a group of doctors, pharmacists, and others were arrested for ripping off $40 million from state insurance companies.
Twenty six people were arrested in the fraud investigation.
13,000 victims were ripped off as were 27 insurance companies.
A husband and wife couple who owned a medical billing and medical management companies allegedly recruited doctors and pharmacists to provide unnecessary treatments and medicine that were illegally billed through insurance companies.
Part of the scheme involved pharmacists creating medicinal and unnecessary ointments, ointments that had no medical value, that cost very little to produce but were billed anywhere from $200 to $750 per ointment tube.
Another part of the scheme had doctors prescribing unnecessary urine tests that were, of course, criminally billed to insurance companies.

You get the idea. If the insurance companies could not catch the criminals before $40 million was ripped off, you can imagine how many billions of dollars are currently be ripped off by doctors and pharmacists via Medicare and Medicaid using similar scams. That is how easily inept Federal government programs can lose tens of billions of dollars over the years.

That will do it for today’s insanity: medical and insurance ripoffs, European nations using American taxpayers to fund their defense, and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent but our kids are still massively under educated. 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:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Thursday, January 5, 2017

January, 2017, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Criminal Politicians, Out of Control Federal Spending, and Still Losing The War On Drugs

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy."

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistleblowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) Terence P. Jeffrey, writing for the CNS News website on December 12, 2016, showed how much Federal government spending was out of control:

In the first two fiscal months of 2017, October and November, 2016, the Federal government collected a record $213,300,000,000 in individual income taxes.
On average, this comes out to about $1,700 for every U.S. household in just two months.
This two month total broke the previous record set in the first two fiscal months of last year.
Despite this record setting collection of taxes from the American people, the Washington political class still managed to run up an amazing $180,843,000,000 spending deficit in the same two months.
At this current deficit rate, the Washington political class will incur another TRILLION dollar worth of national debt this year.

In other words, despite collecting more taxes than at any other time in the history of humanity, the politicians could still not run a balanced budget. Another trillion dollar deficit will place an additional debt burden of about $3,000 on every man,woman, and child in this country, piled on the current individual debt burden of over $60,000 for every man, woman, and child from the $20 TRILLION in national debt that the Washington political class has already incurred.

As this insanity proves, consistent with other spending insanity we have previously discussed, we do not have an under taxation problem in this country, we have an overspending Federal government problem in this country. HIghest tax collection rate in the history of the world and they still run a huge deficit. Pathetic.

2) An additional scary revenue/spending issue identified in the above article was the reality that while income tax collections hit an all time high in early fiscal 2017, Social Security and other payroll taxes totals actually declined in early fiscal 2017 vs. fiscal 2016. Social Security and other payroll taxes dropped from $165,746,890,000 in October-November of last year to $164,936,000,000 in October-November this year.

This is scary since we know that the Social Security expenses and costs will continue to get higher and higher every month as more and more Baby Boomers retire but it appears, at least in this time frame, that the revenues needed to pay these increasing costs are flat or declining a little. More proof that Social Security is heading towards a fiscal cliff unless serious and smart changes are made to the program, changes that were outlined in our book, ”Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”

Unfortunately, the word “smart” and the Washington political class are two concepts that rarely are mentioned in the same sentence or context.

3) An article in the Salt Lake Tribune,written by Tom Harvey and Jennifer Dobner on December 17, 2016, discussed a criminal investigation going on in Utah as it pertains to retiring U.S. Senator Harry Reid. Keep in mind, that Harry Reid is presumed innocent until proven guilty despite being the focus of a criminal investigation involving a potential kickback or bribe worth $2 million. According to the article:

A $2 million cashier’s check was created at a St. , Utah bank on November 5, 2010.
The check was then sent via FedEx to a lawyer in Los Angeles, a lawyer that was employed by Ireland-based Full Tilt Poker.
The check was made out Mail Media LTD which was eventually deposited at Basler Kantonalbank in Switzerland where Mail Media LTD has an account.
The article alleges that Mail Media LTD is a subsidiary that is owned by Full Tilt and that it is used to launder online gambling funds.
From Switzerland, it appears the money went into a Marshall Islands account owned by Searchlight Holding Inc.
And that is where Utah Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings is trying to determine if that money eventually was used by Searchlight to benefit or bribe Senator Harry Reid.

In addition, documents obtained by investigative reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune, including state and Federal government court filings, public record requests, audio recordings and transcripts of interviews, emails, and other materials show that the Federal Department of Justice and the FBI failed to follow up in any way to see if Reid was the illegal recipient of the $2 million.

Even the Utah state attorney general has not turned over any funding that would help Rawlings determine once and for all, possibly via a grand jury, whether Reid is a dirty politician. Which has left Rawlings wondering who, if anyone, is telling the DOJ, the FBI, and others to stay clear of the case.

Of course, the FBI denies it is shirking its investigative responsibilities, according to FBI spokeswoman Sandra Yi Barker said, "At no time has the FBI or DPS been asked to back off of an investigation of any public official."

Rawlings provided some context for the FBI wavering in the article: "The FBI, via the Salt Lake City Field Office, was willing to investigate these allegations … wanted to actively engage. The Salt Lake office was taking steps to do so, but suddenly they were not."

Again, Mr. Reid is considered innocent until proven guilty. But given how the Obama administration has politicized and bastardized the DOJ and the FBI over the past eight years, it is not a stretch of the imagination for this administration to protect one of its own relative to self enrichment. That is the way of Washington where the rich get richer and we continue to pay record high taxes.

3) Let’s stay with the theme of crooked politicians for this next discussion where we have a politician that was actually proven guilty. According to Charlie Hoffman, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on December 12, 2016:

Former Congressman Chaka Fattah was sentenced to ten years in prison in mid-December.
He was found guilty of a number of Federal charges including corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.
In total he was convicted on 23 charges for which the prosecutors wanted a sentence of 17 to 22 years in prison.
Some of the charges including illegally taking a $1 million campaign contribution when he was running to become the mayor of Philadelphia, using campaign funds to pay off his son’s college debt, funneling money through a fake non profit organization, and taking $27,000 in bribes from a fundraiser.
His ten year prison term is the second longest for any member of Congress convicted of corruption charges.

Just another in a long line of Washington politicians where self interest and self enrichment are their primary functions as opposed to serving those that elected them. And remember, Harry Reid is innocent until proven guilty.

4) While many Washington politicians are greedy and criminal, Mexican drug cartels have to at least be given credit for creativity and originality in their pursuit of profit. According to the MRCTV website’s Brittany Hughes, writing on December 12, 2016:

Mexican drug cartel smugglers are using air cannons to launch shipments of marijuana into the U.S.
Unfortunately, one of those packages was picked up by a couple of American teenagers that happened to be in the area who were subsequently picked up by U.S.Border Patrol agents.
And this was not a couple of ounces, the projectile of grass weighed in at 34 pounds.

Never underestimate the creativity of a criminal when there is profit to be made regardless of whether or not that action is legal. Consider some other inventive ways that have been thwarted by the Border Patrol when it comes to smuggling illegal drugs into this country:

In mid-December, the Border Patrol arrested a 23 year old Mexican after they found him trying to sneak a whopping five tons of grass into the country, street value over $5 million, via a shipment of vacuum pumps.
That same day the Border Patrol agents found $370,000 worth of grass inside a horse trailer.
They recently found 190 pounds of weed inside a Mazda, $80,000 worth of cocaine inside an SUV, 36 pounds of meth in a Toyota, 16 pounds of meth in a Honda, half a million dollars worth of cocaine in a Dodge truck, and 17 pounds of heroin in freezer bags in toy boxes in a car coming over the border.
This should not be a surprise since in 2015, the Border Patrol seized, on average, 9,500 pounds of illegal drugs every DAY.
In other words, almost five tons of illegal drugs were intercepted every day throughout the year.
Border Patrol agent with the Grande Valley Sector of the the U.S.Mexican border testified for Congress that the Border Patrol nabs a pretty low percentage of drugs coming across the border, meaning that if almost five tons a day were being intercepted, many, many more tons were getting through to the streets of America.

We go over these numbers to prove once again what a failure that the Federal government’s “war on drugs” has been. Forty plus years and at least a trillion dollars later, the drug cartels and criminals are still smuggling tons of illegal drugs into this country every DAY, resulting in the deaths of upwards of 50,000 Americans every year.

It is time to stop the war on drugs and start the war on treatment and prevention. What the Federal government has done over and over with failure at each turn reinforces an old Einstein quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” The failed war on drugs and the politicians who continue to support it prove Einstein right every day down on the Mexican and U.S. border.

That will do it for today’s insanity: a failed war on drugs, a convicted criminal politician, a potential criminal politician, and still spending more money than they are getting in Washington. More insanity tomorrow.