August, 2014 Political Class Inanity, Part 1: Stupid Political Class Quotes, Leave My Corruption Alone, and More

It is that time of the month where every month we review the latest insanity, ineptness, wasteful spending, stupid quotes, and other frivolity of the American political class. Unfortunately, we have a pretty full plate this month, a plate that is going to take a long list of posts to get through as our politicians continue to prove that we are living through the worst set of politicians today that this nation has ever had to endure.

1) Ms. Eleanor Holmes Norton is the non-voting Congressional delegate for the District of Columbia in Congress. At a recent Congressional committee hearing that was looking into potential law breaking by a member of the White House staff, she got real hissy and angrily yelled out that the White House should not be held up to scrutiny. She claimed that Congress, and by proxy the American people, had no right to know what it was doing behind closed doors at the White House, even if illegal acts were being done:

"You don't have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government." 

She made these public comments during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

The key word here is “oversight.” Contrary to what Ms. Norton has to say, this committee by its definition is responsible for overseeing and making sure that government and its representatives act in accordance with the existing laws of this country. Her rant goes against the false promise of this President that he was going to run the most transparent Presidential administration ever. Hard to do that when Congress is held back from doing its job.

The ignition for her rant occurred because the committee's Republican majority voted to ignore a claim by the White House that David Simas, director of it's Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, was immune to a Congressional subpoena to testify. Republicans believe the office is being used a political campaign operation, a violation of Federal election law. So I guess in her mind it is okay to ignore the law as long as you work in the White House.

Her idiotic comments can be viewed at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch=YfXoK68YXFc&feature=youtu.be

2) We have always been a big fan of term limits. Without term limits, politicians tend to very quickly start worrying about their own self enrichment rather than operating an efficient and effective government. Over time their only focus becomes staying in office in order to reap the financial and other benefits of being in office, both legal and illegal. 

That is why when a politician gets caught doing illegal acts it is usually the ones that have been around the longest and have been rigging the system, to their economic well. That is why our term limits website and effort, 

www.howmuchworsecoudlitget.com 

is important, it would help get rid of politicians before their corruption reaches the depths that it does now.

The latest example of a long time politician really running afoul of the law is unfolding in Dallas. After being in political office for about four decades, John Wiley Price, a Dallas County Commissioner, was recently arrested along with three colleagues on suspicion of bribery and fraud. According to a local media station‘s news report, KDFW, law enforcement officials say the long time elected official received nearly $1 million in payouts and other improper benefits for at least a decade beginning in 2001.

Details of this and other shady dealings over the years include the following:

• This current Federal indictment claims that the payments were primarily made “to influence and reward Price to take action or refrain from taking negative action, as specific opportunities arose.”
• The arrest comes after an investigation began several years ago, an investigation that involved FBI raids of his home and office, among other locations. 
• His arrest came just weeks after prosecutors attempted to reach a plea bargain with Price, which his attorney rejected.
• Local U.S. Attorney Sarah Saldana called the indictment against Price “a shocking betrayal of public trust,” asserting that he received a “steady stream” of illegal kickbacks and bribes.
• The charges include one count each of conspiracy to commit bribery and conspiracy to defraud the IRS, three counts of submitting a fraudulent tax return, and six counts of mail fraud.
• According to the Dallas Morning News, Price’s legal troubles began to surface as far back as the 1970s when he served as the Democratic Progressive Voters League chairman. 
• Back then he reportedly pleaded guilty to making false statements during a Federal trial in 1976 but the charges against him were dropped following an appeal.
• During his four decade career in politics, he has been arrested for assault, disorderly conduct, and other crimes, he faced several allegations of outrageous behavior, including shooting a dog and point a gun at its owner, physically attacking multiple police officers, threatening to beat an elderly man, defacing private property, and smashing the windshield of a constituent’s vehicle.
• He was caught on tape threatening a reporter in 2011.

Nice guy. If term limits had been in place, this fellow would have been gone and forgotten 35 years ago and the people of Dallas would not have had to put up with this nonsense, corruption, and dishonesty. More details of his shenanigans can be found at:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/dallas-democrats-arrest-comes-decades-scandal/#Q78FeQ80HeWFHLLp.99

3) This falls into the good news/bad news category. According to New York Times reporting, the governor of New York state, Andrew Coumo, took the bold and correct step when, in the summer of 2013, he established a powerful independent commission to look into and hopefully root out corruption in state politics. Good news, setting up an outside agency to look inwards to state political class corruption.

Now the bad news. The commission was in existence for less than two months when its investigators, hunting for violations of state campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York State Democratic Party. Sounds like a legitimate use of the an independent commission’s resources.

Oops. The commission investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also included Governor Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his political campaign when he ran for governor in 2010. When news of the subpoena got to a top Cuomo aide, Lawrence S. Schwartz, Mr. Schwartz called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse. According to three other witnesses that were present when Fitzpatrick received the call from Schwartz, Schwartz allegedly said: “This is wrong,” namely the subpoena to a Cuomo political operative was wrong. And that the commission needed to: “Pull it back.” with the “it” being the subpoena. As a result of the call, the subpoena was withdrawn and the investigation of potential wrong doing by the media company was halted.

According to the Times reporting, “Cuomo said early on that the commission would be “totally independent” and free to pursue wrongdoing anywhere in state government, including in his own office. “Anything they want to look at, they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman,” he said last August.”

So much for doing the right thing, so much for independence, so much for government transparency. Cuomo eventually and abruptly disbanded the commission midway through its expect 18 month tenure and now the FBI is investigating the whole sordid mess. I guess it is okay to investigate political corruption as long as you do not investigate my political corruption.

4) One more piece of insanity for today. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a U.S. Congresswoman from Florida. She is also the head of the Democratic National Committee. 

In that capacity of representing the positions and views of her entire party, you would hope that she would do a little bit of basic research before opening her mouth in a public forum, a forum that she knew she was going to be a part of. But much like one of her peers, Nancy Pelosi, a politician whose quotes have made our monthly political class insanity posts numerous times, Ms. Wassermann-Schultz leaves you shaking your head over saying stuff that she obviously knows nothing about.

The following exchange took place during a TV interview in the state of Nevada:

Wasserman-Schultz: “Just take a state like Nevada. Where you have a governor who refused to implement a state exchange and as a result people who get Affordable Care Act healthcare plans are getting them on the federal exchange..."

TV Interviewer: “Hang on. Let me just stop you for a second, because you’re misinformed about that. Brian Sandoval put in a state exchange. He did. So, whoever briefed you on that is wrong. He did put in a state exchange. He was the first Republican governor to do that.”

Wasserman-Schultz: “OK. That’s not even the point I’m making. I stand corrected. I’m not from Nevada.”

And she supposedly is one of our Congressional leaders. I am sorry, you cannot be considered a leader when you do not even know basic facts about what you are talking about, in this case, the local Obama Care situation in Nevada. Maybe this is why Obama Care is such a disaster, those who wrote it, voted for it, and supported it do not even know or can comprehend basic facts. 

The live interview of her ignorance can be viewed at:

http://eaglerising.com/7574/democrat-national-spokesperson-idea-whats-going/#scYDP3BZuLb5XQGk.99

That will do it for today. A Congressional representative that wants the White House to do illegal acts while impervious to Congressional and citizen overview, a typically corrupt long term politician, this one in Dallas, a politician that wants to root out everyone else’s corruption but not his, and a Congressional leader that has no grasp of reality or facts. Sounds about right for the first act in this month’s political class insanity.

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 2, September, 2013 Political Class Insanity: Lies, Extortion, Wasteful Spending And Einstein's View Of Today's Government

This is the second in what promises to be a long series of posts on the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Yesterday we reviewed 15 of the latest abuses and wasteful spending of taxpayer money as identified by the Heritage Foundation. We learned that a major human smuggling ring operating out of the Phoenix was being run by a Mexican national that had already been deported eight times. We learned that in just one of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts it had spent and wagered $600 billion for less than $20 billion in return. Pathetic and disgraceful.

But the insanity and lunacy continues today:

1) The first set of insane political antics comes form the Washington Could Learn A Lot website and their compilation of the latest statistics on what is going on in the country from a posting on their website on August 6, 2013, “Everything Sucks:”

• Home ownership is at an 18-year low at 65%. People are renting instead of buying. 
• College graduates are moving in with their parents to save money or bide their time.
• The only reason unemployment numbers are at 7.5% is that they don’t count those who just stop looking for work. People who are not in the labor force increased by 240,000 in July relative to the 165,000 jobs gained.
• And when people can find a job, it’s usually part-time and/or unsatisfying. Of the 953,000 jobs created in 2013, 731,000 were part-time. And only about one-third of people feel engaged at work.
• The weekly Gallup Economic Confidence Index shows that on a scale from -100 to 100, confidence has remained above -30 since January of 2012, and this is up from a low of  -65 in 2008. 
• In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal Polls we see that a record-breaking 83% percent disapprove of the job that Congress is doing. 
• While more than 45% of Americans were confident that the POTUS had the “right set of goals and policies to improve the economy” in 2009, that confidence has dropped all the way to 33% while economic confidence has risen.
• Washington has made a lot of promises to fix all this junk, and we know what you are thinking: “WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG?? %$#@!!”

Great question. Why  is it taking longer than expected or do these politicians in Washington have no idea, inclination, or will to make things right and resolve the major issues of our time. I vote for the latter explanation.

2) According to a recent General Accountability Office analysis and report, between 2008 and 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued more than $36 million in checks to about 6,300 farmers who had bought the farm, I.e. they were dead. 

If there is any good news in this disgrace it is the fact that the Department of Agriculture is less inept today than it used to be. The Department’s  Farm Service Agency (FSA), which oversees farm income subsidies and disaster payments, had paid out a whopping $1.1 billion to 172,801 deceased farmers between 1999 and 2005.

The USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA), which administers the Federal crop insurance program is not much different when it comes to handing out taxpayer wealth for no reason. This agency provided $22 million for some 3,434 farmers who had been dead for two or more years. Yesterday, we found out that taxpayers were sending checks to people in jail. Today we are sending checks to dead farmers. Can hardly wait to see where our taxpayer wealth is fraudulently being spent tomorrow.

3) And politicians continue to wonder why most of us never believe what they say. Bloomberg caught the Justice Department and Eric Holder in a bad math lie in the middle of August. The Obama administration claimed that it was cracking down and rounding up mortgage providers that illegally operated and helped cause the Great Recession. 

Obama’s Mortgage Fraud Working Group in the Department of Justice wrongly claimed it had criminally charged 530 people who had victimized 73,000 Americans. When Bloomberg journalists reporters got underneath the claim, the Department first stalled and then admitted it had inflated the claims themselves, a fib they admitted late on an August Friday, a time when news reporters are getting more focused on the weekend than reporting.

We are not talking minor math rounding errors here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. Turns out the actual figure was 107 or 80% less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to downward to 17,185, a reduction of about 75%. Estimates of homeowner losses associated with these mortgage frauds dropped to $95 billion from $1 billion.

Makes you wonder what else they are lying about. Or probably more accurately, are they telling the truth about anything that they speak of. Again, these are not rounding errors, they are outright lies and deceptions. Thankfully, at least two reporters were doing their jobs correctly and uncovered just the latest lies from this administration.

Given that they would lie about a relative trivial matter like this, the administration should not be given any credibility and benefit of the doubt when we are talking about major issues such as illegal IRS targeting, Benghazi, spying on news organizations, NSA spying, etc.

4) Comedian Jeff Dunham once made the somewhat accurate observation that the only difference between the government and the Mafia is that the Mafia is profitable. Listen to the audio dialog at the following site and then tell me if this is not akin to a Mafia shakedown of a legitimate business:

http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/08/22461-voicemail-leaked-of-democrat-congresswoman-using-bribery/

This is an actual voice mail that a lobbyist firm kept that contains a voice mail message left for them from sitting Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Basically, she is telling the lobbyist that he had not sent any money to  her perpetual reelection campaign and that was not good since she sat on several Congressional committees that were involved in the areas this lobbying firm focused on.

This was basically an extortion phone call from a member of Congress. It has the undertones of an Al Capone standard operating procedure. It is this type of gangster-like behavior that requires that 1) we establish term limits for all Federal politicians since there is no longer any perpetual reelection efforts and 2) we need to fix our politics processes so that only individual American contribute to election campaigns. PACs, businesses, lobbyists, unions, etc. would be forbidden to do so, only individual Americans.

Both of these steps were proposed in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” The term limits idea has been operational zed at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

We should not have to pay protection money to a sitting Washington politician in any, any circumstance.

5) According to an article in the August 2, 2013 issue of The Week, the Federal government is getting into the magic industry. Believe it or not, American taxpayers are paying for this Department of Agricultural insanity.

The Department recently and officially demanded that magicians that use rabbits in their act submit plans to the Federal government on how they would save their rabbits in the face of a natural disaster. I swear, you cannot make this stuff up. Somewhere in the obese government bureaucracy actual human beings are worried about stuff like this. And being paid for it with my tax money.

In the face of this idiocy, magician Gary Maurer said he would carry around a reminder note so that in the case of a natural disaster he would read the note which says: “Take rabbit with you when you leave.” That was his plan. For this common sense we need a government bureaucracy. Insane.

6) According to another article from The Week magazine that appeared in its August 9, 2013 issue, the U.S. government has spent over $24 million over the past six years to fly a plane over Cuba that broadcasts American-sponsored television programming to the island below. However, the Cuban government blocks the signal with signal jamming equipment so no Cuban citizen has ever seen what is being broadcast.

Despite this fact, according to the article, Congressmen representing the Cuban exile community insist that the useless flights continue. Einstein must have this insanity in mind when he said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.” 

How stupid and wasteful is this program. Its funding could have kept the White House tours going for more than 24 years instead of broadcasting stuff over Cuba that is never seen.

Lies, wasteful spending, extortion, and more. Never a dull moment, or rational moment,  when dealing with American politicians. And we are  just getting warmed up, more tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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