July, 2015, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Hunting Down Whistleblowers, Obama's Golf Hypocrisy, and More

At the beginning of each month we take a week or so to review the latest insanity from the American political class. Insanity from them includes a wide range of very depressing actions which can include wasteful spending, idiotic quotes, an inefficient and ineffective government bureaucracy, failed economic policies, etc. Every month we continue to prove that we are being served by the worst set of politicians ever.

And as you will see, this month’s review and discussions do nothing to prove that this thesis is wrong in any way:

1) We reported last month that the TSA airport inspectors had flunked simulated weapons and bomb searches 95% of the time when tested for the ability to identify airline passengers carrying weapons or bombs. One would have hope that the TSA would be putting all available resources towards fixing an error rate of 95% relative to the safety of the traveling public.

One could hope but one would be wrong. According to a recent Washington Examiner article, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, the home of the TSA, testified in front of Congress that he was investigating the leak findings of the undercover operation in which investigators were able to slip through airport security with weapons and phony bombs more than 95 percent of the time: “We have started an investigation to determine where the leak was,” Inspector General John Roth told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Yes, the TSA cannot do its job 95% of the time and they are looking for the person who exposed them, not doing everything possible to fix the situation. And why would they go headhunting, whistleblower hunting: “I was as disturbed as anyone that this information got into the media,” the inspector general said.

Whoever leaked the information should get a medal, not hunted down. Who knows if we ever would have found out how inept the TSA is, based on their failure rate of 95% in this test, and how we are certainly not getting our money’s worth funding such incompetence. Knowing how untransparent the Obama administration is, we need every whistleblower we can get.

2) But the airport whistleblower is not the only whistleblower to be harassed by the Federal government and the Obama administration. Taylor Johnson was a senior special agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE). a division within the Department of Homeland Security. Her story is even more harrowing since the Department actually identified her as a whistleblower and then, according to her statements to the press and Congress, they went after her with a vengence.

According to Fox News: Johnson told lawmakers she ran into resistance after investigating the so-called EB-5 program, which offers visas to investors. She said she looked into the program over concerns about security risks, questioning whether visas were being approved with little scrutiny.

According to a CSPAN transcript: “I began investigating the EB-5 Regional Center, and some of the violations investigated surrounding the project included bank and wire fraud and I discovered ties to organized crime and high-ranking politicians and they received promotions that appeared to facilitate the program. I disclosed this to my management and then specific examples of national security risks, and some of the security risks coincided with what the FBI and CIA already discovered as well. During the course of the investigation, I discovered applicants from China, Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia had been approved in as little as 16 days and the files lacked the basic and necessary law enforcement enquires,” Johnson said.

She did her job and then the following started to rain down on her:

• Other government agencies and high ranking Washington politicians started to complain about her findings.
• Their complaints resulted in her being removed from the investigation.
• She was placed on administrative leave and forced to turn in her weapon and credentials.
• But in her own words to Congress, it then got really nasty: “My government vehicle was confiscated, and access to the building and all government databases was revoked and I was told I could not carry my own weapon, which was a constitutional violation. When an adoption social worker tried to contact and verify employment, she was told I had been terminated for a federal offense and I almost lost my 1-year-old child. I am continuously placed in dangerous situations with no way to protect myself or others.”
• When asked to try to explain why the Federal government was coming after her, she opined: “I think that because of the people that were involved with the investigation, it was put in a different light and there was extra outside influences and back and forth with the different members and different agencies.”

Again, so much for the most open and transparent administration ever, just one of dozens of broken promises or outright lies from this Presidency. God bless the whistleblowers for their integrity and courage, two characteristic sorely lacking from today’s Washington politicians and bureaucrats.

3) One thing that the political class does very well is hypocrisy. Obama Care is great for the country...but not for Washington politicians. We all need to sacrifice for the good of the country...but no Washington politicians. We all need to do our part to fix the man made global warming/climate change problems… but not the President. 

Obama recently took another trip, an another expensive cross country trip to California, to attend several political fundraisers, one of well over seven hundred he has already done in less than seven years in office. He flew directly to northern California. At one of the fund raisers, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi heralded his visit to “a state that is in the lead on climate change.” Hurrah.

But that is when the bad optics started. Rather than stay in northern California to play golf, which I am sure has some great golf courses, the President hopped on Air Force One and traveled to southern California. Specifically, he flew to Palm Springs where he played golf on the ultra exclusive Annenberg Estate Sunnylands golf course. 

Thus, he took a large plane and burned lord knows how much carbon just to get to a far away golf course. He upbraids those of us that do not totally buy into the whole man made global warming theory. Cannot be that bad if you can jet around just to play a specific golf course. Or is this just another example of Washington hypocrisy, you out there in the country make the sacrifices while we continue to live the good life here inside the Beltway.

Even some of the liberal environmental groups got on his case for this lack of good sense. According to the New York Times, Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica said, “President Obama needs to take a mulligan and rethink golfing in Palm Springs in the middle of a drought.” And they were not the only ones to call out just another case of political hypocrisy.

4) One last piece of insanity for today. Despite veterans not getting the healthcare they were promised, despite millions of suffering drug addicts across the country, despite millions of people still not getting the medical care they need, despite millions of homeless and hungry Americans, the Federal government and the American taxpayer spent about half a million dollars for a Johns Hopkins effort to study the anal penetration of young black men.

Let me repeat that. Yes, in light of all the other suffering Americans, the Federal government sponsored a study to look at the impact of anal penetration of young black men: “Prior work has demonstrated that same-sex relationship trajectories support the development of self-esteem in young gay and bisexual men, while opposite same-sex relationships may be associated with homonegativity. Little is known about the meaning and function of first same-sex experience in AA adolescent men and whether satisfaction with first penetrative same-sex experience impacts sexual trajectories."

The study abstract, if you do not believe $500,000 was spent on this project, can be accessed at:

http://projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8669742&icde=24280595

Let’s end the insanity here for today. Half a million dollars to study a very small sub-segment of Americans health and life issues while very large segments of Americans are still suffering in oh so many ways, a President who says one thing about global warming but does the opposite in order to not interfere with his golf addiction, and the Obama adminstration hunting down whistleblowers who are only doing their job and who actually care more about the country and its citizens than their own well being, a trait sadly lacking in today’s politician. More insanity 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2014, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Screwing Up The Army, Arming The Middle East Crazies, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and governments around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

1) The U.S. Army has a proud tradition of fighting and winning land wars over the centuries. It is the main component of any “boots on the ground” facet of American foreign policy. Which brings to the latest insanity out of the Pentagon, namely right out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. At a recent conference he suggested that part of the U.S. Army be repurposed as “a coastal defense force.”

Say what? A coastal defense force against who? ISIS is marching through the Middle East, Russia is busy annexing parts of Europe, our southern border is being overrun with illegal immigrants and the top ranking person in charge of our armed forces thinks that the Army should be used to protect our coasts? From who?

Now, if he had said to protect our land borders with Mexico, that may have made at least a little sense. But no, he very specifically talked about coastal defense, a non-existent threat today if there ever was one. Insanity.

2) The October 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine had a summary of an article from MarketWatch.com. The main thrust of the article is that from 1995 through 2012, American taxpayers paid out $11.3 million in farm subsidies to billionaire-owned farms and agribusinesses. Thus, non-millionaires were paying millions to billionaires, that is how upside down and illogical our political class and Federal government have become.

How many homeless and hungry Americans could have been taking care of with $11.3 million without having any trace of downside to billionaires? How many veterans would get much needed medical help without crimping a billionaire’s lifestyle? Shameful.

3) Very few people would disagree that the Middle East is a mess. Shiites fighting Sunni, religious minorities fleeing or fighting for their lives, Iran trying to go nuclear, Israelis fighting Palestinians, etc. A lot of different entities get blamed for the turmoil including ISIS, religious terrorists, poverty, and dictators.

But perhaps the worst element in the whole mess is not over there but right here in this country. According to an article from VOX.com, that was summarized in the October 10, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, in just the first seven months of this year, the U.S. exported $557 million worth of guided missile technology to more than twenty countries around the world. And more troubling,  Middle East countries were six of the top ten buyers.

This is just guided missile technology. This does not include the other arms and weapons that have been sold or given by the U.S. to various ground forces in the countries throughout the region. So maybe, just maybe, we are the ones causing a lot of the turmoil, using American taxpayer dollars, to make the Middle East more of a violent mess than it otherwise would be.

4) The Obama administration recently tried to make points with the fact that this year’s Federal budget deficit will dip below half a TRILLION dollars for the first time since Obama took office. Of course, they failed to point out the insanity that this lower annual deficit number is still higher than ANY deficit put forth by ANY previous Presidential administration.

They also failed to point out a recent analysis from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which shows that Federal government spending will outpace tax revenue by $9 trillion from 2014-2024. The details of their analysis are highlighted in the following chart:

If this estimate comes true, it will add $9 TRILLION onto our already obscene $18 TRILLION national debt burden, resulting in a total national debt load of about $27 TRILLION or over $200,000 for every household in America. As you can see, unless the political class grows some backbone and finds a way to truly reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the main drivers of this ever growing national debt, the debt load will likely collapse the economy and our democracy long before ten years are up.

5) One last piece of insanity for today. The Heritage Foundation recently ran a nice summary of President Obama’s campaign fundraising activities (see chart below). While his administration has accomplished very little in the first six years of its run, one cannot deny that the President has been very busy doing political fundraising.

While he has been hopping around the country on strictly political junkets and activities, Americans are suffering through the worst economic recovery of recent history, the Middle East is spinning out of control, Russia is aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, the Chinese economy continues to outgrow ours, Iran and North Korea advance their nuclear weapons programs, etc., etc., etc. I think it can safely be said that when Presidential leadership was required, this President was more often out of town doing political fundraising or on the golf course.

According to the Heritage count, in less than six years in office, Obama has attended 426 political fundraisers or about 74 a year, an amazing 1.4 fund raisers a WEEK since he has been in office. Bush attended a total of 318 political fund raisers in his eight years in office, an average of less than 40 a year, a rate that is 46% less than Obama’s.

Add in Obama’s 200 plus rounds of golf and we see that this President has been out of the White House raising political funds or playing golf more than twice a week during his term. An insane focus on bad priorities in the face of a country with so many problems.

That will do it for today. A clueless Secretary of Defense, enriching billionaires, arming the Middle East crazies, exploding the national debt upwards, and an absentee President. So much insanity in such varied ways, and more to come 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