Love My Country, Loathe My Government: evan low

Showing posts with label evan low. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

March, 2021, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Lame Priorities Continue in California, the Human Carnage Continues in Chicago, and the Over Regulation of Americans Continues in Washington.

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

1) The vast number of government regulations that are on the books usually do very little to make life better for ordinary Americans. These regulations usually:

Protect existing businesses and industries from new, innovative, better and market disruptive competitors.
They are rewards that enrich certain companies and individuals that support a politician’s political campaigns.
They are used to justify a government bureaucracy’s existence while not making life any easier or less expensive for Americans.

Trump realized this when he came into office and one of his accomplishments was the severe downsizing of Federal government regulations that were unnecessary and clogged up the free market’s effectiveness and functioning. This downsizing is estimated to have saved the American economy $160 billion (per an analysis from the American Action Forum) over the four year term of his Presidency or about $400 for every man, woman and child in the country. Thus, a four person American family got about $1,600 in economic benefit from his actions.

He accomplished this with a very simple rule: for every new regulation that someone in the Federal government wanted to impose, two existing government regulations had to be abolished. Additionally, he imposed financial limits on how much any new regulation would cost. As a result, Trump had issued almost 300 deregulation orders and his administration had added the fewest new regulations to the Federal register since records were started being kept in the 1970s.

And guess what? The world did not end, chaos did not ensue, criminality did not go up, life was just as good, and economically better, with fewer government regulations.

But along comes Biden and all of that good work goes to waste since one of his first executive orders was to rescind the simple yet elegant rule that two regulations go away for each new one put forth. Thus, the $400 in economic savings we all enjoyed because of Trump is now likely history as the growth in the size and wasteful spending of the Federal government is now back on track.Thus, even when Washington finally does something worthwhile, they still eventually screw it up.

2) Unfortunately, far too many times in this blog we have discussed the reality that Chicago politicians have failed miserably in providing the most basic government service to its citizens: protection from crime and violence. Over the years, Chicago has been the undisputed murder capital of the country with hundreds murdered and thousands wounded by gun violence despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the country.

And the carnage is still going on:

In 1982, Chicago politicians put forth a strict handgun ban to crackdown on crime.
Unfortunately, this created the exact opposite effect since gun controlled, law abiding citizens were disarmed and were then at the mercy of gun toting criminals who could care less about gun control.
Over a recent weekend, 40 Chicago citizens were shot and 10 died from their gunshot wounds.
In just one day over that weekend, 4 were killed and 11 were injured.
The violence occurred even though the city had dispatched “community mediators” (think defund the police idiocy) into heavy crime neighborhoods to try and reduce the gun violence.

Thus, Chicago area politicians continue to be clueless on how to curb the violence and death and because of their incompetence, Chicago residents continue to be killed and maimed. A basic function of government and they continue to fail miserably.

3) We have often discussed how much state politicians have screwed up California and how bad the quality of life has become in the Golden State:

Given the high cost of housing, caused by idiotic housing rules, regulations and laws enacted by state politicians, California is now the poorest state, on average, in the whole country.
California has some of the worst education results in the country.
It has the most homeless Americans in the country.
The homeless situation in LA is so bad that Medieval diseases (e.g. typhus) are making a comeback because of the explosion in the rat population caused by the unsanitary conditions of a large homeless population.
State residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country.
The state has huge, unpayable future unfunded financial liabilities.
Big city politicians in the state have made it not illegal to defecate, urintate, or shoot up drugs in public.
Crime rates are rising rapidly across the state.
Poor, middle class, and wealthy state residents are fleeing the state, reducing the tax base and the tax revenue stream requiring the state politicians to raise tax rates and introduce new taxes which drives more residents, and businesses, out of the state and the financial death spiral is underway.

Bottom line: the state is in horrible shape from a quality of life, tax burden, and freedom perspective. In the midst of these disasters, what are state politicians worried about:

A propose law by California Assembly members Evan Low and Cristina Garcia would require California retail stores to have one unisex department for children’s products and clothes.
In other words, there would be no “Girls Section” and separate “Boys Section” for shopping in stores in the state.
The stores would also be forbidden to put up any signs that would indicate a toy or product was meant for a boy or a girl.
Names that are allowable include kids, unisex, or gender neutral.
According to Low: "This is an issue of children being able to express themselves without bias."
A store that had separate sections could be hit with a $1,000 fine.
The proposed law only applies to stores with over 500 employees.

So kids in the state are getting a horrible education, many kids in the state are going hungry and homeless along with their parents and other adults, the state economy is in sad shape along with employment opportunities because of the pandemic and the state’s political class botching the recovery and reopening, etc. And of all the issues and challenges that state residents are facing, this is the garbage that two state politicians are focusing on. Such a lame set of priorities.

Lame priorities continue in California, the human carnage continues in Chicago, and the over regulation of Americans continues in Washington.

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.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com

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

Thursday, May 14, 2020

May, 2020, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: More Free POress Failures, Arrogance in the Chicago Mayor's Office, and Bad Priorities In California

1) We have often pointed out that a strong, aggressive, fair, and unbiased free press is critical to defending our rights and freedoms and uncovering scandals and misdeeds by politicians and government officials. We have also often pointed out how the journalism field and news industry in this country have failed to uphold those lofty and important pillars of freedom.

News reporting and journalism in this country today is a disgrace, amoral, and totally biased to preconceived notions, wants and TV ratings. And the American public has grown more and more tired of journalists and news people being out of integrity for a long time now. According to Gallup, 58% of those surveyed now have very little or no trust in the journalism industry today. That pessimism level was only 28% back in the late 1970s and has trended steadily worse since then.

Nowhere has this failure of the press to be unbiased, fair, and aggressive been more pronounced than in the recent Tara Reade situation. Ms. Reade was a member of Senator Joe Biden’s staff long ago. She has recently accused him of sexual molestation and digitally penetrating her during an encounter many years ago.

When similar accusations were made when Brett Kavanaugh was being considered for the Supreme Court, news outlets, news papers, and news pundits jumped on the accusations immediately and basically concluded that Kavanaugh was guilty of nasty sexual acts without any real proof, facts, or credible evidence, all of which melted away after a very bitter and biased investigation by Congressional Democrats. But the fact remains that the journalism industry in this country jumped on the first inkling of sexual accusation and went hard after Kavanaugh.

But now Ms. Reade comes forth with actually more proof of evidence that Biden is guilty than the Kavanaugh accusers ever had, and the news media, in all forms, somehow choke on their word processing programs:

It took the New York Times and Washington Post almost three weeks to even acknowledge that the accusations were being made.
CNN took over three weeks to even acknowledge Ms. Reade’s existence on their website and coverage after that was weak and flaccid.
And worst of all, National Public Radio (NPR), a left leaning, liberal organization took almost a full month to acknowledge the Reade situation, a fact that NP management recently admitted.
NPR reporter Asma Khalid, was assigned the Reade story back in March.
Despite the accusations, Khalid did not speak to Reade initially, claiming that she needed to do some research.Her editor at NPR, Kelly McBride, admits that the research process could have been finished inside of one week.
Khalid took nearly three weeks to do the “research.”
Compare that to the Kavanaugh situation where Khalid issued a report ONE DAY after the Kavanaugh accusations broke, i.e. she didn't take three weeks of research and then another week to put the story together.
Not only did it take so long to actually put the Reade NPR story together, Khalid omitted an interview she did with one of Reade’s friends that could have substantiated the claims that Reade has made.

Again, freedom, liberty and democracy relies on a strong and unbiased news industry to process the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unfortunately, the biases that exist today across all major news outlets not only distorts or ignores the truth, it undermines our freedoms since now nothing is real, nothing is the truth when all news reporting is done for personal, political, or business gain, truth be damned.

2) Let’s go back out to Chicago. The Mayor of Chicago is Lori Lightfoot. She has placed the city under some pretty stringent stay at home rules. But she acted like a typical “do as I say, not as I do” politician when a few weeks ago she had a beauty salon open up, which violated her own rules, to get a haircut. Her response after getting called out for the violation was that she needed to look good since she was in the public eye. Never mind that she violated her own rules and put other Chicago citizens in danger.

But her hypocrisy has continued since that bad optic beauty salon visit:

She recently wanted “defiant churches” that she will take action against them if they hold church services in violation of her edicts, the edicts she ignored.
She had previously warned churches against holding services via what she called “educational outreach.”
Now, she is getting more aggressive and threatening unspecified action if she continues to be ignored: “We’re going to be communicating over and over again over the course of this week. I understand that people are getting anxious. But defying common sense and public health guidance only puts their congregations at physical risk. We’re going to continue to have that discussion but, if necessary, we are going to take action to make sure there is compliance to the stay-at-home orders.”
Cristian Ionescu, the pastor at Elim Romanian, called his church’s first in-person service in two months an “extraordinary success” and claimed that his church took extreme measures to protect church participants.
He went on to say that political leaders should have worked with the churches in the city and state to protect the First Amendment and the congregants rather than dictate terms and conditions for gatherings: “They should cooperate with us, not dictate to us. I take offense that they think they care more about our people than us.”
Joe Wyrostek, pastor of Metro Praise International Church had the same view: “I just feel like we were put at the back of the bus. We were not in any of the discussions. We have to stand up for ourselves at some point. We’ve lost trust in what they’re doing. We have to peacefully resist and see where it goes.”

It is certainly easy to lose trust in elected officials when they violate their own rules to get their hair looking nice. The purpose and skill of a politician is leading and peacefully coming to a consensus that addresses any many issues and concerns as possible across all parties. Dictating what one should do and not do is not leadership, it is authoritarian.

3) One last piece of local political class insanity to finish up today. We have often pointed out how screwed up the state of California is, from huge unfunded budget liability holes to failing schools to crumbling roads to a dysfunctional housing market to an enormous homeless problem to higher and higher taxes.

Thus, given these critical issues. One would hope that local and state opticians were hard at work, focused on these issues that probably touch every single resident of the state and not in a good way.

But you hope would be crushed when you find out what one state politician’s priorities are:

Evan Low is a California state assemblyman.
In February, he introduced legislation that would make it illegal for retail stores with 500 or more employees to have separate boys and girls sections for clothing and toys in their stores.
Of course, such requirements would increase store merchandising costs which would either reduce the stores’ profits or much more likely result in higher prices for consumers and shoppers in those stores.
Higher prices for absolutely no reason.
The basis for this proposed law is that the 9 year old daughter of a member of Low’s staff told Low that she did not like it when boys and girls clothes and toys were separate sections.
As a result, the desires of a nine year old, California may soon require private stores to merchandise their stores according to the whims of a 9 year old.

So rather than work on the budget holes, the homeless problem or probably dozens of other, much more pressing and important issues, this politician is taking advice from a 9 year old on an issue that really is not an issue. I am sure that if you took a poll of Californians about what are the top 50 issues their families face, the separate retail merchandising of boys and girls products does not crack the top 100. And yet this politician is wasting taxpayer wealth and resources on this nonsense.

Nonsense in California, nonsense in newsrooms and nonsense in Chicago, no wonder things are screwed up when politicians and news people have such lousy priorities and moral standards.

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

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

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Sunday, March 15, 2020

March, 2020, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Bernie's Ignorance, Bloomberg's Double Cross, And More Bad California Priorities

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

Let’s get started:

1) Bernie Sanders is running for President on the Democratic ticket. He has no medical training or any kind of health care training. But like many politicians, that would never stop someone like him from voicing a stupid and ignorant opinion without any rational thought or basis.

He recently did such a thing. He recently opined that coronavirus could kill more Americans than U.S. soldiers died in World War II which was over 400,000 people. Let’s do some simple math:

The death rate of those that contract the disease is about 3%.
Which means that for Sanders to be right, 400,000 deaths, the total number of Americans that contract the disease would be over 13,000,000, a number we are nowhere close to so far.
Less than 50 Americans nationwide have died from this virus so far, a far cry from Sanders fear mongering 400,000, .0125%.
In the worst flu season of recent times, 2017-2018, about 61,000 Americans died from that strong flu strain, about 15% the size of what Sanders says could happen.

In other words, Sanders at this point in time has no idea what he is talking about. The vast majority of Americans recover from the worst flu strain and the coronavirus. The history and current numbers on bad flu strains and the coronavirus are nowhere close to Sanders’ 400,000 estimate.

Could he be right? Possible. Should we wash our hands, avoid crowds, and anyone who may be sick, either with the flu or the coronavirus? Certainly. But given his total lack of expericne in the field and his desire for media air time for his failing Presidential run, forecasting the future, especially stupid forecasts, have to be taken lightly. Keep in mind the words of a great American philosopher, Groucho Marx: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Sanders is no exception to this reality.

2) Michael Bloomberg is already out of the 2020 Presidential race, having spent almost half a billion dollars for virtually no return. But that does not mean he did not lie like a long term politician:

According to Politico, Bloomberg had promised people that he had hired for his Presidential campaign that they would have a job until November even if he withdrew from the race.
But now it seems that he is firing staffers across the country despite promising them that they would have a job until almost the end of the year.
And while they will get to keep their Bloomberg campaign-issued iPhones and MacBooks, they will have to apply for a new job with Bloomberg’s political action team if they still want a job.
However, most staffers will get their last Bloomberg paycheck on March 31, eight months before they were supposed to be let go.
This is a serious breach of the original promise of employment until November which would include a monthly salary up to $6,000 along with a $5,000 relocation bonus and with full dental, healthy, and vision benefits.
One staffer, according to Politico, thinks the job opportunities offer has a shady side to it: “I think they are using the FEC regulations as an excuse to lay off a bunch of people” because they have to set up a new political entity.
Another Bloomberg staffer had the following take on this lie: “I didn’t think I was going to have to apply for a job. It was presented as being automatic. Field organizers were told during interviews that they had a guaranteed job through November.”

He was a politician for only a few months and yet he had raised the art of lying to a level usually attained by lifelong politicians.

3) The state of California is in pretty poor shape. It’s infrastructure is among the worst in the country, its schools are terrible, its tax burden on citizens and businesses are back breaking, it has over $200 billion in unfunded liabilities, and it has a homeless problem that is so bad that that the state has 53% of the entire nation’s homeless population, a homeless population that has already led to the revival of at least one Medieval disease, typhus.

Given these crises, one would hope that the state’s political class and state government was focused on fixing on many, if not all, of these critical crises. But as always with California politicians, their priorities are elsewhere and they are pathetic:

One state California politician thinks that it is horrible that clothes stores have separate displays for boys clothes and girl clothes.
And he wants to punish California stores that dare to separate boys and girls clothes.
California politician, Evan Low, has drafted legislation called AB2826 that would fine stores that had separate areas by gender for children.
He says this idiocy was inspired by a discussion with an 8 year old kid on why stores should tell the kid what is a girl’s piece of clothing or toy and what is a boy’s piece of clothing or toy.
The penalty for daring to separate boys and girls products would be $1,000 for each infraction.
This is obviously a bone thrown to the LGBTQ lobby at the expense of convenience for shoppers.

Seriously, this is what this politician is worried about? The displaying of boys and girls clothes products in a retail store? Forget the $200 billion in unfunded liabilities. Forget the homeless problem. Forget the high taxes. Let’s listen to an 8 year old and have the kid drive legislative initiatives. Such bad priorities and a waste of resources.

Stupid priorities of California politicians, Bloomberg stiffs his staff, and Bernie Sanders talks about something he has no knowledge about. Stupid, cheap, and ignorant, sound about right for American politicians.