December, 2016, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Congressional Criminality, Congressional Idiocy, and More

It has been almost a month since Donald Trump has been elected which means at some point in the future we may run out of material to talk about. With the demise of the Obama administration, eight years worth of wasteful and excessive spending for nothing in return, foreign affairs blunders, Obama Care disasters, and assorted other administration and government blunders and screwups might end with the onset of a new administration. Trump may usher in a new paradigm of government actions that are limited, effective, cost efficient, and protective of the Constitution. If so, then this blog would run out of material to discuss and would have to be shut down.

But I doubt it. Even if Trump is truly a different type of President, he is still fighting over 500 embedded and entrenched politicians in Congress and thousands and thousands of government bureaucrats who will not go peacefully into the night for the good of the country. I wish him well and hopefully he can fix at least some of the myriad of problems the American political class creates everyday but until then, enjoy the latest political class insanity from Washington and beyond:

1) Over its almost eight years, the Obama administration has probably spent about half a TRILLION dollars on our national defense. This comes out to about a per household cost of over $4,300 for every American household in the country. So, according to the Heritage Foundation’s recently published annual analysis, “The 2017 Index of U.S. Military Strength, “ what did each American household get for its $4,300:

• Only 43% of the Marine Corps' aircraft are considered usable.
• Back in 1992, the Air Force was acquiring about 200 aircraft a year on average while in the past few years that number is about 25.
• The Air Force is short of 700 pilots and 4,000 maintenance personnel.
• In 2017 the Navy will likely be able to fulfill only 56% of its needs for aircraft carriers
• “The Army currently is having to choose between being ready to defend the country today and defend it in the future.”
• And things are not trending favorably with the Heritage Foundation asserting that their “threat score,” which attempts to gauge our enemies’ threat to our country, was raised from “Elevated” in 2016 to “high” for 2017.

Nice going Washington, half a TRILLION dollars and you have still somehow managed to turn our armed forces into a ragtag, under equipped, vulnerable set of defenses.

2) Often over the years we have discussed the reality that very often outright criminals end up in Congress. Remember when:

• Congressman Randy Cunningham of California received a sentence of eight years for taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.
• Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio received two and a half years in jail for taking bribes from a lobbyist.
• Congressman James Traficant of Ohio received a seven year sentence for bribery and racketeering.
• Congressman William Jefferson was sentenced to thirteen years in jail for accepting bribes, the longest term ever imposed on a Congressman on bribery charges. He was the guy who hid his stolen loot in a freezer.

This is just a small example of the corruption we have covered over the years. And now, thanks to the Reboot Illinois website, we have news of another Washington politician that has potentially gotten caught in his life of crime:

• A Federal grand jury recently indicted former Congressman Aaron Schock on two dozen criminal counts.
• The charges include fraud, theft of government funds, filing false tax returns, and making false statements.
• The indictments charge that Schock “engaged in a scheme to defraud the government, his campaign committees, and others for his direct personal benefit and for the benefit of others.”
• Not only has he been criminally indicted but he may have no one to blame but himself since according to the Reboot Illinois, “The Peoria congressman, who was considered a rising star in the Republican Party, came under media scrutiny after photos posted to his Instagram account depicted a lavish lifestyle, including exotic trips taken by way of donors’ private jets and most notably his “Downton Abbey”-style office makeover on Capitol Hill.”
• The details of the indictment include nine counts of wire fraud, five counts of falsifying Federal Election Commission filings, one count of mail fraud, one count of theft of government funds, two counts of making false statements and six counts of filing false federal income tax returns. 
• If found guilty on all charges the ex-Congressman could be facing 78 years in prison.

Of course, he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. But these are serious charges and a lot of them and a crooked Congressman is not out of the realm of possibility. But despite the seriousness of these many charges, the ex-Congressman seems to still be in denial by claiming he did nothing wrong and these were just “honest mistakes,” honest mistakes he did at least 24 times.

3) Politicians’ quotes are always a source of humor and sadness at the same time. Humor because their comments are so funny and out of touch with reality and sad because it is these types of people that vote on laws that affect all of us. 

Someone named Phoenix, writing for the US Chronicle website, pointed out a classic politician’s inane view of the world. Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, while advocating for a total assault weapons government ban, suggested that the ultimate solution to prevent mass shootings from happening is to simply take guns, with large magazines, off of the shelves of stores that sell guns: “If they’re not in the stores, they can’t be bought.” 

My gosh, why didn’t we think of that before? Just take the guns and related materials out of stores and no one could get them, so simple. This same approach worked so well when we made it illegal to sell heroin in stores. Oh, wait, we are in the midst of a heroin epidemic in this country that is killing thousands of Americans every year despite heroin not being available in stores. 

This same approach worked so well when we made it illegal to sell illegal methamphetamines in stores. Oh, wait, we are in the the midst of a meth epidemic across the country that is killing thousands of Americans every year despite meth not being available in stores.

How out of touch with reality is this politician? Numerous studies have shown that very few criminals walk into a store, get a background check done on themselves, buy a gun, and then go out and commit a crime with that gun. They get guns on the black market, from friends, ones they steal from other people, etc. If there is a demand for something, be it a loaf of bread, a can of beer, heroin, meth, or guns, someone will fill that demand and quite often the fulfillers will be criminal elements. 

To think that not allowing guns to be sold in stores will make guns unavailable in society is a lunatic that knows nothing about the real world. And these types of people write and vote on the laws of our land, scary, very scary.

4) One last piece of insanity for today. You really cannot talk about the American political class without talking about the main stream media. One of the tragedies of the 2016 Presidential election, besides the fact that we were forced to choose from two of the most unfavorable candidates ever presented by the two major parties, is the fact that news and journalism disciplines in this country took a beating for being so biased and skewed in their writing and coverage.

How biased and horrific was their reporting in the minds of Americans? Consider the results of a recent YouGov opinion poll that was conducted on November 9th and 10th after the election: 

• Almost 7 in 10 (69%) voters do not believe the news media are honest and truthful.
• Almost 8 in 10 (78%) of voters believe the news coverage of the presidential campaign was biased, with nearly a 3-to-1 majority believing the media were for Clinton (59%) vs. for Trump (21%).
• Even 32% of Clinton voters believe the media were “pro-Clinton.”
• 8% of Trump voters said they would have voted for Clinton if they had believed what the media were saying about Trump.
• The good news, if there is any, is that 97% of voters said they did not let the media’s bias influence their vote.

Democracy is in very bad shape when no one trusts anyone be it politicians or journalists. Democracy relies on truth and actual facts in order to make accurate decisions and when the availability of actual facts is filtered by inept politicians and their campaign staffs and biased and unprofessional journalists, a country is in serious trouble.

First day of this month’s political class insanity and we are off to a good start: another potentially crooked, criminal member of Congress, another inane and idiotic take on gun control and reality by another member of Congress, an overfunded but under prepared military and no one trusts politicians or the media anymore. 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:


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

July, 2016, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Political Hypocrisy, Common Core Fails Again, and The Bank Bailouts Illustrated

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. In fact, last month we set a record, needing ten full posts to cover it all.

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.

It looks like our politicians have been especially insane over the past month or so let’s continue with the latest insanity from today’s American politicians:

1) Common Core is a proposed education process and strategy that we have discussed many times in past posts. Common Core was an attempt by the Federal government to force top down educational standards on every school kid in the country. 

As with most top down Federal programs, Common Core has been resisted and a failure across the country. Many state politicians and state educational officials have decided to opt out of many, if not most, of Common Core’s standards. Even worse, the educational results have not raised the education attainment levels of kids subjected to Common Core standards. A nice graphic presentation of how Common Core has depressed educational attainment can be checked out at the following link along with a detailed discussion of Common Core’s failures:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/10/will-center-hold-october-2014-part-2.html

As if these past discussions and failing educational results were not enough to convince people how bad Common Core is, consider a recent review by Mary Clare Reim of the Heritage Foundation that found college professors are lamenting the decline in educational proficiency of kids that were subjected to Common Core standards. An analysis by ACT, the organization that produces one of the two primary college entrance exams standardized tests found that:

• “While secondary teachers may be focusing on source-based writing [essays written about source-based documents], as emphasized in the Common Core, college instructors appear to value the ability to generate sound ideas more than some key features of source-based writing.
• “Some early elementary teachers are still teaching certain math topics omitted from the Common Core standards, perhaps based on the needs—real or perceived—of students entering their classrooms.
• “In addition, many mathematics teachers in grades 4–7 report including certain topics relevant in STEM coursework in their curricula at grades earlier than they appear in the Common Core.”
• “The Common Core math standards do not adequately provide a child with the skills needed to succeed in the classroom, forcing teachers to add on extra material to their limited instruction time.”
• “High school English teachers must now emphasize material that leaves students lacking in original thought and analytical skills, according to many college professors. For example, only 18 percent of college professors surveyed rated their students as prepared to distinguish between opinion, fact, and reasoned judgement—a skill determined to be important for college-level work.

Federal government dictating the same educational standards across 50 states and tens of thousands of schools has failed to educate our kids to the level attained by other kids around the world. Not surprising, given that every other thing that the Washington political class touches turns into a disaster it should not surprise us that the educational field is any different.

2) With the FBI allowing Hillary Clinton to get away with no penalties for breaking Federal laws and guidelines as it pertains to sensitive government information, it has reinforced the notion that the majority of Americans hold that the political class and elitists play by a different and better set of rules, laws, and behavior than the rest of us ordinary Americans.

A recent article in the St. Helena Star newspaper in St. Helena, California illustrated just a small example where today’s politicians think they are more important, more entitled than the rest of us, as reported by an eyewitness:

“Last Saturday afternoon (June 4) I’m standing on the west side of Main Street directly across from the Hunt Avenue intersection chatting with friends. Of course, traffic was heavy in both directions.

A large perfectly polished and gleaming black SUV is attempting a left turn from Hunt onto southbound Main (not easy). Suddenly blue/red lights are flashing from the windshield area of the SUV (like you would see in an official fire/police vehicle). I said to my friends, I’ve never seen that before on a “regular” vehicle and I’d think that’s illegal and dangerous. They agreed.

The big black SUV then darts out across both lanes of traffic with lights flashing in both front and rear windows. It goes directly into the red zone/fire hydrant area in front of Padis and Footcandy.

A St. Helena police car happens to be going northbound and pulls into the center lane and the officer starts shaking his arm and hollering at the driver of the SUV. While this goes on a man exits the SUV assisting a woman from the vehicle. She dashes off to Footcandy while he waits by the SUV in the red zone.

The SHPD car leaves and proceeds northbound.

My friends and I are puzzled, say goodbye and I walk south on Main. As I approach Footcandy, Nancy Pelosi comes out with her shopping bags and the man assists her into the awaiting SUV. The SUV, with lights flashing, bursts back into southbound traffic."

Yes, it is nice to be a politician. Driven around in a car with a personal driver that was no doubt paid for by taxpayers, able to intrude into traffic with police like lights flashing so as to not be inconvenienced. All to pick up some shoes more easily. Abuse of power and ego out of control. Insanity.

Note: The local police chief did acknowledge that the incident happened and his acknowledgement was also published in the paper.

3) I have never been a fan of hypocrisy which makes such a critic of the American political class. General Petraeus was forced out of government service because he shared a little bit of classified information with his mistress. At that time, Obama declared there would be ZERO tolerance for playing loose with classified information. 

However, when Hillary Clinton incurs orders of magnitude more in classified information atrocities, he goes campaigning with her. Pathetic hypocrites. And the Against Crony Capitalism website recently exposed another gross political hypocrisy, this one with a state politician in California. 

Former California State Senator Leland Yee, a voracious gun control advocate, is now heading off to prison for, wait for it, weapons trafficking. Yee received a five year sentence of accepting bribes and trafficking in weapons. Apparently, he had received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in exchange for political favors in addition to him and two associates being involved in a weapons transportation plot.

So, here we have a politician who advocates against Americans owning guns and then goes out and profits by running guns. Great hypocrisy if it was not so sad. But we should not expect anything less. Consider a summary from the Washington Post that was in the same article that captures the current status in this country of the political elite vs. ordinary Americans, or in the Post’s words. “The managers vs. the managed”:

“A key part of the crony system is the idea that there are the managers and the managed. That there are those who are wise and benevolent enough to rule and then there is the great unwashed rabble which at best should be tolerated and farmed for tax revenue. The unwashed rabble need to be told what to do. The unwashed rabble doesn’t know what’s best for it. And hey, if the political class can get rich while telling the rabble what to do, then that’s just. Doing well while doing “good” is what being in the political class is all about after all.”

Kind of says it relative to the American political class today.

4) With this theme of the managed vs. the managers, the elite vs. the ordinary, take a look at the following illustrative video from the Against Crony Capitalism website. It illustrates in a very entertaining and straightforward, easy to understand manner how the political class took care of itself and its cronies in the financial and banking industries during the last recession. All of this was paid for by what the Washington Post just called the ”unwashed rabble.” 

Again, default on your mortgage, tough luck. Be a bank and default on your investments and business decisions, just throw some campaign money at our politicians and they will arrange for your bad decisions to paid for, at an astronomical cost by the American taxpayer:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/06/this-video-may-blow-your-mind-the-best-illustration-of-the-post-crash-bailouts-ive-ever-seen/

That will do it for today’s insanity: bailing out the bankers with American taxpayer money, political hypocrisy at both the state and Federal government level, and more evidence that Common Core is still a major failure. More insanity tomorrow and probably for several more days to come, all courtesy of the worst set of politicians we have ever experienced in this nation.

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

Mourning The Senseless Shootings In South Carolina

Today, most of the country mourns the senseless mass killing of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina by a despicable human being. Nine people who were doing nothing wrong, nine people who were exercising their religious rights were needlessly killed by a complete stranger. No stretch of logic or reasoning is possible that would justify such hate.

So today, we are going to rerun one of our more popular posts, a post that called for more hate control before more gun control. This post was written in the aftermath of the Newtown school shootings in Connecticut. At that time, there was an outcry for more stringent gun control. 

However, rather than make the case for more gun control, this post made the case for more hate control. Hate killed those school kids a few years ago. Hate killed the nine churchgoers yesterday. A gun may have been an instrument of the hate, but hate was the root cause the violence and killings.

A hypothesis of that post is that in this country today, most hate starts from the political class. Our political process and the politicians that manipulate those processes, along with their allies in the media, have gotten to the point where getting elected is now both the ends and the means to power and personal wealth. Thus, it is okay to denigrate, name call, and reduce other citizens to hated stereotypes who do not deserve any respect or in some cases, right to life. 

Rather than go on, I will let the post below make our case that if we had better, more decent politicians in office, politicians that viewed dissent and diversity as healthy and not something to be purged in any way possible, we would not have as much crime and the underlying hate that goes with it.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control, Part 1 - Maybe Hatred Is The Real Root Cause Of Mass Shootings 

Be forewarned: there is some bad language and implied bad language in the following so please pass if this might offend you. These are not my words but actually the words of our politicians and their supporters.

Today is the first of a four part series regarding the Newtown, Connecticut shooting where innocent kids and teachers were needlessly slaughtered be a deranged young man. Let me state a few facts up front:

• I was tremendously saddened by this senseless act of violence. 
• I do not know how a young man can become so separated from compassion and reality and have so little respect for life that he would kill innocent children and teachers. 
• I am not a psychologist and have no understanding from a psychology/scientific perspective of the root causes which trigger a young man to execute this type of terror, and neither do 99.9% of the people with an opinion on this matter and 100% of those in the Washington political class. 
• I am not a member of the NRA and have never fired a gun, never mind owning one. 
• I am a fervent defender of the U.S. Constitution including the Second Amendment.

Today I want to consider a concept that I have not seen discussed in the media and certainly not by those in politics that want to strip law abiding, common sense citizens of their right to bear arms. The concept involves the idea that maybe we should do a little hate control BEFORE we recklessly and senselessly go off on a gun control tangent, a tangent that will likely increase crime and gun play, not reduce it (more on this latter concept tomorrow).

Let’s be honest, there is a lot of hate and venom circulating in the country today. Much of it is fomented by the political class as they foolishly try to incite their supporters and degrade their opponents in the most dehumanizing and disrespective ways possible. 

The more you dehumanize others, the easier it is to see them as less worthy of their opinion and their life. Maybe if we started respecting each other a little more, taking some of the hate and venom out of our politics, thought processes, and speech, incidents like the shootings in Newtown, in south Chicago, in the ghettos of Detroit, etc. might be become a little less frequent if we respected each other a little more.

This increase in respect and humanizing of other human beings should start with our so-called leaders, However, as we have pointed out many times in this blog, these so-called leaders are a big cause of the problem, not the solution. They have had a busy, and disgraceful past couple of years degrading and abusing the opinions, lives, rights, and very existence of the citizens they are supposed to be serving:

• Democrat Speaker Of The House Nancy Pelosi called citizen opponents to Obama Care unpatriotic for simply having a difference of opinion with many politicians in Washington. 
• Democrat Charles Rangel slandered millions of Americans who opposed Obama Care by calling them racists for simply having an honest difference of opinion with many politicians in Washington. 
• Democrat Shelia Jordan Lee slandered millions of Americans who opposed Obama Care by associating them with the Ku Klux Klan. 
• Union boss and Democratic supporter Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. stated that his union was at war with the Republicans and Tea Party citizens and that these people "need to be taken out." 
• Democratic Congressmen Mike Doyle and Henry Waxman and Vice President Joe Biden slandered American citizens opposed to unfettered and destructive government spending and debt by calling them terrorists (those people that bomb and kill innocent civilians). 
• When ordinary Americans objected to the building of a Islamic mosque near the World Trade Center property because of the sad memories of 9-11, Democrat Nancy Pelosi said THEY should be investigated for simply having a passionate opinion on the mosque. 
• Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Walters said all Tea Party American citizens can go to hell simply for having a difference of opinion with her.

When you viciously and unfoundedly associate ordinary citizens with racism, call them terrorists, question their patriotism, when you wish they would go to hell, and then threaten to take them out/exterminate them, you have dehumanized them in the eyes of your political supporters, making it easy to imagine them actually going away permanently. 

Maybe this type of hate and venom and dehumanizing goes through the head of a young man when he decides to go off and actually follows the advice that those people “need to be taken out.”When your so-called leaders call for this type of behavior and language, it can’t be wrong, can it?

But our political class, and their direct supporters, also direct their hate and venomous words towards other politicians:

• The campaign manager of Democrat’s Gerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign called his Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, a whore. 
• White House czar Van Jones publicly called all Republicans a**h****s. 
• Democrat Alan Grayson called all Republicans knuckle dragging Neanderthals. 
• TV host Montel Williams publicly hoped that Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachman would commit suicide by decapitating herself. 
• Ed Schultz, an on air commentator for the Democratic leaning MSNBC news channel, called Laura Ingraham of Fox News a slut. 
• HBO TV host Bill Maher, a major donor to Obama’s 2012 Presidential Super PAC (a $1 million donor), said on air that Republican Sarah Palin “would f*** Rick Perry if he was black.” 
• Bill Maher called Republican Sarah Palin a disgusting and derogatory name that I will not repeat here. 
• Playboy magazine’s online website offered a detailed analysis on why and how each of ten Republican women in politics should be hate raped. 
• Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likened Republican critics of Obamacare to the Nazis and their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. 
• A rap artist gave a Minnesota concert that was billed as the “F*** Michelle Bachman” concert (spelling out the entire f-word), a Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota. 
• A Democratic operative insulted Ann Romney, and millions of other American women, by slandering and demeaning her as a stay at home mother. 
• Martin Bashier of MSNBC News showed a video of Mitt Romney’s campaign bus that was interspersed with video clips of buses blowing up in balls of fire, explicitly wishing that the Romney bus also blow up and those inside die a fiery death.

When you label others as sluts and whores and suggest they should be raped or be killed, either by themselves or a fiery bus explosion, you set another stage for dehumanization. If you political opponents are just sluts and whores, no big deal if they go away, right? 

I maintain that this type of disgusting, hateful behavior is an influence in our society and not an influence for good. It infects the undertone of how we view others. It reduces the amount of respect we have for others, making it easier to abuse others, possibly violently.

It usually does not cause someone to go off and actually start killing others but it certainly cannot help. It also cuts short the ability to listen to each other and appreciate the diversity of opinion each brings to a potential solution of a problem.

If I have allowed the political class and their ardent supporters to frame you as a racist or a slut or a terrorist, I am unlikely to consider any good you can bring to my life or to a solution of a problem. If I think it is a good thing that you self decapitate or die in a bus explosion, you will probably not get my attention when it comes to working towards a better society.

As a result of this hateful divisiveness the political class has driven into our society, we despise others that have a different opinion from ours. Major issues, such a failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, skyrocketing national debt, high health care costs, illegal immigration, etc., never get resolved. The hate prevents us from listening to each other, from calibrating our view of the world with others’ views of the world. 

And possibly in the case of Newtown, we go beyond not listening and we start shooting. Not because guns are legal but because we have allowed the political class to desensitize us to each other as human beings.

But it is not only politicians that spew the hate and venom, hate and venom that others take to heart, hate and venom that their children take and internalize. Consider just some recent examples that have appeared in the news:

- Consider the hateful speech and intentions of Professor Richard Parncutt of the University of Graz regarding other human beings that are global warming deniers, those daring to have a different opinion than his: “In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW [global warming] deniers... They [global warming deniers] are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate… With high probability it will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.”

Different opinion, therefore you should die. I wonder what he would do to people like me, given our opinions on global warming; should we die also or just suffer some horrible disease since we are not influential enough:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/11/wishing-al-gore-would-shut-up-why-i-am.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/11/wishing-al-gore-would-shut-up-why-i-am_10.html

As an aside, in 2009, the CIA opened up a new division, The Center on Climate Change and National Security. The purpose of this group was to examine the impact of global warming from a national security perspective. A few months ago, with little fanfare, they disbanded the organization. Is the CIA also worthy of Professor Parncutt’s death penalty or was it just common sense that this global warming organization was not longer viable or needed?

- Pulitzer nominated newspaper columnist Donald Kaul recently wrote an article for the Des Moines Register where he called for the killing of gun owners and “dragging legislators who disagree with gun control behind pickup trucks until they get the message.” Don’t agree with my opinion? Thus, we should have more killing and more torture for those that dare to have a difference of opinion. How does this stop the cycle of hate that starts with the political class?

- Erik Loomis, PhD, assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island decided he needed to get into the hate and venom game also when he recently stated on Twitter that he wanted the death of National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre, branding the gun rights group he heads as a terrorist organization:

"[I] want Wayne LaPierre's head on a stick." A little hateful, a little violent?

- Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union recently had some violent rhetoric of her own to share: “Do not think for a minute that the wealthy are ever going to allow you to legislate their riches away from them. Please understand that. However, we are in a moment where the wealth disparity in this country is very reminiscent of the robber baron ages. The labor leaders of that time, though, were ready to kill. They were. They were just – off with their heads. They were seriously talking about that.”

And this person is associated with educating young minds and kids. Don’t like someone or are jealous of their wealth, that in all probability was garnered via honest hard work and sweat, than just off with their heads. 

I maintain that you cannot have such hate and disrespect and venomous speech floating around and it not have a negative impact on how we treat each other, how it dehumanizes others. I am not saying the Newtown shooting was directly caused because of this poisonous environment but it certainly did not help. Was the shooter seated around his dinner table through the years when slurs and demeaning things were said about others, how others that were different from him were worthy of being “taken out.“

And it certainly does not allow us to sit down and go face-to-face with others to leverage everyone’s knowledge and skills to confront all of our problems from school shootings to high debt, high illiteracy levels, failing public education, a failing health care system etc. 

But if we solved all of our problems, on what issues would our politicians run on? And that, my friends, is the root cause of most of our problems, from school shootings to the lack of a national energy problem, our shameless politicians need the hate and venom to frame and finance their continual reelection effort.

So tonight, when you are sitting around the table with your family, how about a little more hate control and a lot more respect for others in front of our kids. Again, it couldn’t hurt.

And tomorrow if you should come across someone who thinks other human beings need to be taken out, killed, dragged behind a truck or hate raped simply for having a difference of opinion, may I suggest you walk away? Engaging in such a discussion with these types of people just spreads and intensifies the hate and gets yourself muddy, as the old saying goes: “Never mud wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.”Walk away, stay clean, and let the hate spewer stew in his own mud. Help break the cycle of hate.

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Hate is the root cause of yesterday’s tragic shooting, not guns or gun control. And the political class is the main cause of the hate and are also not smart enough to keep guns out of the hands of people that hate, no matter how much they think they can.

Two last things to contemplate in the light of the latest shooting incident. According to NBC Los Angeles:

"President Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive at Los Angeles International Airport Thursday afternoon aboard Air Force One, then headline two Democratic National Committee fundraisers.

Obama’s first stop will be the Pacific Palisades home of television producer Chuck Lorre for a $16,700-per-person event benefiting the DNC’s 2016 White House Victory Fund, the entertainment trade publication Variety reported.

The invitation describes the event as an “intimate, living room style event” with only 30 people, but a chance to have “an open dialogue and discussion with the president,” according to Variety. The event will be closed to reporters.

Obama will then head to the Beverly Hills home of filmmaker Tyler Perry for the second fundraiser."

After giving a shallow, perfunctory statement on the shootings that, as always, had to include a political slant, the President decided that political fund raising was more important than leading the country in this time of tragedy, political fund raising was more important than discussing the need to reduce hate in our political rhetoric, political fund raising was more important than publicly reaching out to support the families of the deceased, political fund raising was more important than asking the country to pause, reflect, pray, and pull together.

But this type of leaderless behavior should not surprise us. When two dozen Americans were fighting for their lives in Benghazi, this President went to sleep because he had to leave early the next day for a trip to Las Vegas to….political fund raise. Today he leaves for another entertainment capital to raise political money from rich people while the rest of the country mourns.

Oh, and by the way, NBC Los Angeles also is reporting that Hillary Clinton will also be in LA to hobnob with rich people at a fundraiser in ritzy Newport Beach before heading to Los Angeles for three Hollywood fundraisers Friday. Another leadership void in the political class.

Perhaps Michelle Jesse, writing for the Allen West website, summed up many Americans; disgust and dismay with our political leadership with the following words: “While the nation prays for healing in the aftermath of yesterday’s tragedy, I must add a prayer for a true leader to enter the White House in 2016. One who puts national unity above politics and recognizes times when his or her power is best wielded in the name of bringing us together — rather than bringing in more cash to fund the next political battle.”

More hate control, more leadership, less fund raising is the path to a better country and life, three simple steps that continually eludes the politicians in America today, regardless of what senseless tragedy arises.

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 6, Political Class Insanity: Revisiting The Great Recession, State Funded Booze In Virginia, And Gunless In D.C.

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.

This is our sixth post in this month’s series so the insanity continues to flow out of the political class and into our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms. New insanity continues today:

1) Probably the most frequently quoted person in this blog is Albert Einstein and the most frequent Einstein quote is: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And that is how we start off today’s insanity.

According to a recent Washington Times article by Stephen Moore, the Federal government has decided to get back into the subprime mortgage lending arena, supporting the housing market by backing mortgages taken out by those consumers that might not be able to afford them. That’s right, it worked so well the first time, resulting in the Great Recession, millions of home foreclosures, hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funded bailouts, and other chaos, that the Feds want to do the same idiocy again.

Details from the article include the following:

• The Obama administration announced it wants to provide more support to a weak housing market by bending the home lending rules to make it easier for banks to make loans and marginal buyers to take on a mortgage.
• Ÿ For example, the Federal Housing Finance Agency will lower down payment requirements from an already too low 5% to a insanely low 3% on many loans that are eligible for Federal mortgage insurance assistance and backing, one of the main contributors to the housing meltdown that led to the Great Recession.
• How stupid is this new policy? Consider a study done by researchers at the University of Texas in Dallas which looked at some 30 million mortgages issued before the housing bubble burst in 208. They found that “[t]he evidence strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a house” — i.e., whether they paid a high or low down payment. This study found the down payment was a much stronger prediction of whether a loan would end up in default than the credit score of  the borrower.
• Since many homeowners had no equity tied up in their homes because of the low, low down payment requirements, they simply walked away from the homes since they had nothing to lose and let the homes fall into foreclosure, saddling taxpayers with the default bills via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Before the recession, many people could get a home mortgage, backed by the American taxpayer, with little or nothing for a down payment, the exact behavior the Federal Housing Finance Agency is now pursuing.
• The Federal Housing Finance Agency is even considering suspending some of the rules that had required higher fees on riskier loans. 

Did the Washington political class learn nothing from the causes of the Great Recession? Oh, I forgot. Remember a couple of days ago we went through a Politico list of the biggest political campaign donors over the past three months? Remember who was the second heaviest contributor to political campaigns? It was none other than the National Association of Realtors, the group of people who are most likely to enrich themselves with looser mortgage rules. 

Thus, maybe politicians did learn the lessons from the Great Recession, they just don’t care since the political money from realtors across the country is too good to pass up. Anyway, why should they care, it is the taxpayer that will pay to clean up the newest mess that these new looser mortgage rules eventually cause. The definition of insanity….

2) A recent article from The Week magazine pointed out that alcohol abuse kills about 88,000 Americans every year. Thus, one would not think it would be a good idea for government at any level to subsidize alcohol addiction, given the damage it does to health, families, and health care costs.

One could think that but one would be wrong, at least in the state of Virginia. According to a recent Heritage Foundation article:

• The city government of Richmond is probably going to put up $31 million of taxpayer money, combined with $4 million from the state government, to build a brewery on the James River.
• The plan is for the city to build the brewery, i.e. take on all of the up front risks and then lease it back to the Stone Brewing Company who will operate it.
•  Stone Brewing is promising to hire 288 local workers to work at the brewery once it is built. 
• But simple math shows that the city and state will be paying out $36 million to generate 288 jobs, assuming they all materialize, at a cost of a whopping $125,000 a job. How long will it take for the city and state to break even when they forked out so much money upfront, to a company that is not even based in the state. Stone is based in California.

Lets try and estimate that payback rate:

• The weighted average state income tax rate in Virginia is probably about 5%.
•  Let’s assume on average each of those 288 workers makes $50,000 a year.
• Thus, each year each brewery worker will pay about $2,500 in state income taxes.
• If we divide this estimated annual state income tax ($2,500) into the cost per employee at the brewery ($125,000) we see that the payback period is 50 years to break even.

The payback period is probably longer since some of those 288 workers were probably already paying income taxes from another job, not all 288 brewery workers are likely coming from Virginia’s unemployment ranks and that $50,000 salary estimate might be too high, also resulting in a longer payback period.

Insanity to spend $35 million of taxpayer money on a brewery of all things that likely has a payback period of over 50 years to break even when so many Americans die every year from alcohol abuse.

3) The insanity is crazy not only at the Federal level and the state level but also at the local political level. Consider this harebrained scheme from politicians in Washington D.C.:

• District of Columbia Councilman David Grosso recently told an audience that, “I think we ought to get rid of guns in the city and that police shouldn’t have guns.”
• Fellow Councilman Jimmy Wells spoke up to defend such the notion, noting there are entire countries where police don’t carry deadly weapons.
• Grosso went on to defend his position with the following rationale: “I think we have to reimagine the way that we relate to one another, across the board, and that includes [the D.C. police department],” as quoted in the Washington Post. “When you have a gun it changes the dynamic completely. If we had a police force that could be trained to de-escalate situations without a gun like in other countries, I think we’d be in a better place. … Call me a radical, but I’m trying to change things in our city.”

I would not call him a radical, I would call him so out of touch with reality that he cannot even recognize reality if it hit him over the head. Does he really think that local thugs, drug dealers, etc. are going to give up their evil ways, and weapons, because a police officer has been trained to verbally defuse situations? In Chicago the police kept their guns, it was only the law abiding civilians who lost their guns, and Chicago became one of the most violent cities in the country. 

How much more violent would Chicago have become , and D.C. would become, if even the police were disarmed? Crazy talk from an out of touch political class. 

That will close out the insanity for today. Local politicians who believe that criminals can be verbally talked out of their criminal ways, state politicians that find it okay to build a money losing brewery for a company that is about 3,000 miles away, and Federal politicians who want to recreate the conditions for a Great Recession II. And we are still not done with the latest insanity from all politicians at all levels of government.

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

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control: More Americans Protecting Themselves With The Second Amendment

Several weeks ago we ran a series of gun control-related posts under the theme, “How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control” as a result of the Newtown, Ct., school shooting. The initial post in that series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-about-more-hate-control-before-more_4871.html

The basic premise of that series is that maybe we should start changing our political dialog before we start shredding the Second Amendment. Our political dialog is one of hate and venom where we ridicule and dehumanize those with a different opinion than us, with the dehumanization making it so much easier to accept bad things, including violence, befalling those that differ from us.

This reason alone is why destroying the Second Amendment is not the right course of action in this case, it will likely solve nothing and make certain situations worse without dealing with the hate and venomous speech. However, we also explored other reasons why excessive gun control and confiscation is not the solution to this problem, with one primary reason being the fact that innocent, law abiding Americans are defending themselves everyday from thugs and violence. A representative sample of these incidents were reviewed in the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-about-more-hate-control-and-less.html

Since that post, more examples of Americans using their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves, their families, and their property have come to light:

1) A January 31, 2013 report by Houston's NBC 2 News discussed how a mother who used her handgun to fight off three armed intruders while her son was in his bedroom. The three armed men broke into her home and confronted her, demanding money. She told them that her TV was the only thing of value and to take it but they insisted she give them any money she had. She was able to lie and distract them until she could get to her gun in her bedroom. At that point she began shooting, wounding one of the thugs and chasing the others off, possibly saving her life and the life of her son.

2) Detroit local news sources reported on January 24, 3013 that when a young man tried to rob a 56 year old woman, a great-grandmother, on a bus in Detroit, the woman fought back. The man stole her purse and backpack and jumped off the bus at the next stop. But the great grandmother got off the bus, went after the thieve, and confronted him. When the suspect turned to come at her, the grandmother, a concealed weapons permit holder, defended herself, drew her legal semi-automatic 9mm pistol and fired 11 shots at the suspect.

The punk ran away and it is unknown if the man was hit. The woman used a semi-auto 9mm that held at least 11 rounds. This type of weapon would be banned under Dianne Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban.

3) On January 14, 2013, CNN reported on an incident in San Antonio, Texas where a homeowner came face-to-face with a burglar. The burglar was already out of the house carrying a television when the homeowner pointed his legally owned shotgun at the man and told him to get on the ground. The police believe that this action stopped a burglar string that had been plaguing the homeowners neighborhood.

4) On January 29, 2013, KVFS News in Missouri reported on a police report that stated an 82-year-old Ellsinore, Missouri man shot a man who reportedly broke into his home. The police report identified Charles L. White, 30, of Ellsinore, as having broke into the residence and assaulting the 82-year-old. The suspect fled after being shot by the homeowner but was shortly apprehended in a nearby home after a search warrant was served. The 82-year-old homeowner was taken to a hospital and then by air ambulance to a St. Louis hospital with head injuries.

Thankfully, the beatings stopped once the gun owner fired on and hit the intruder. Otherwise, the injuries might have been far worse.

5) WCYB NBC News in Tennessee had a report on February 4, 2013 on how an 86 year old woman and homeowner was able to defend her home when a female intruder burst in after breaking a window with a wrench. The homeowner wrestled with the intruder and was eventually able to get off a shot from her legally owned weapon, hitting the intruder and scaring her away before the 86 year old was seriously injured. The intruder turned herself in the next day to police.

6) On February 10, 2013, KING Channel 5 News in the Seattle area reported that a thug who broke into an occupied home was shot by the home's owner with his legally owned gun. Police arrived at the home after the shooting to find a 51 year old man with a gunshot wound.

The wounded man had broken into the home, causing the homeowners to call 911 to report the early morning break in. They armed himself with a pistol while waiting for the police to arrive. However, at one point, the intruder charged down a hallway toward the homeowner, who fired a shot which struck the suspect. After a brief struggle, the homeowner held the suspect at gunpoint until the police arrive.

7) An early February, 2013 report from 8 News NOW in Las Vegas reported how a 72-year-old homeowner retrieved his handgun when he heard several home intruders attempting to gain entry to his Las Vegas residence early one morning. When the multiple intruders entered his bedroom, he opened fire, killing one of the suspects and sending the rest fleeing. Police reported that the intruders were carrying weapons when they ran into the legal gun owning residence.

When police arrived at the Las Vegas home, they found one of the intruders trying to escape in a car which ended up hitting hit a patrol car. The suspect attempted to flee on foot but police were able to capture him. A second suspect, described as a Latin male, was last seen running from the neighborhood where the attempted robbery took place and was not taken into custody. A third male, armed with a handgun, was found dead in the homeowner’s backyard. The cause of death was determined to be a gunshot wound, likely form the homeowners weapon.

The incident was the second time in three days that a homeowner in Las Vegas had used a firearm during an attempted burglary and fired at an intruder.

8) ABC News TV out of Pensacola, Florida reported on an incident where three teenage punks broke into the home of an elderly gun owner. One of the punks hit the homeowner in the hit with a baseball bat as they entered his home. Fortunately, the home owner was actually packing a legal firearm, pulled it out, and started firing.

Although his hit on the head took eight stitches to close up, he did manage to hit two of the three home invaders but refused to fire at the third because he would have shot him in the back, certainly a class act on the homeowner's part. All three criminals were arrested. The news report quotes the homeowner as worrying what would have happened if he did not exercise his second amendment rights.

9) ABC News TV in Detroit recently reported on how a 70 year old high school basketball coach used his gun to protect students on February 4, 2013. The coach was escorting two members of his girls’ basketball team outside of their high school when two young thugs came up to the three and put a gun to the coach’s head.

The coach pulled out his legally owned handgun and shot both of the attackers. One died at the scene and the other was put in the hospital Lord knows what could have happened if the coach was not able to exercise his Second Amendment rights.

We could go on and on but hopefully you get the idea. Disarming innocent, law abiding citizens of their right to bear arms is going to result in a crime wave never before seen in this country. Every day and in every part of this country, citizens are successfully defending themselves against thugs and punks that are up to no good and who would have brought harm and violence to these many innocent citizens listed above if they had not legally armed themselves.

So when, a gun control advocate tells you that we need to shred the Second Amendment because people are killed by guns every year, ask them three questions:

1. How many of those deaths by guns were caused by people having illegal guns, people that would not register their guns or stop from owning a gun despite increased gun control laws?
2. How many of those deaths were bad guys killing other bad guys, criminals killing other criminals, in which case I have little sympathy for their deaths.
3. How many more deaths of innocent people would occur if the right to legally bear arms was severely restricted or outlawed?

You cannot look at just the number of gun deaths every year and be upset. You have to look at the number of guns deaths PREVENTED every year by the Second Amendment in order to get a complete picture.

We will look at another aspect of this issue tomorrow, namely the fact that law enforcement and state and local governments will not abide by any severe Second Amendment restrictions, a situation that could represent a severe judicial and Constitutional confrontation between defenders of the Second Amendment and an illegal overreach by the Federal government.

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control, Part 4 - Protecing Our Kids, Protecting The Second Amendment, No Tax Increases, it Can Be Done

This is the final post in our series on how to protect ourselves and our families from violence and gun play without shredding the Second Amendment in the process. We have discussed how the political class is again not looking for the root causes of the violence that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last month, instead focusing on the “what” of the incident, guns were used to kill innocents, rather than the “why” of the incident, why and how could someone become so irrespective of life and humanity. As a result, we will end up with less freedom via more government control without solving the root causes.

We have discussed several real life examples of how Americans and their legally owned weapons defended themselves, their families, and their assets from violent criminals, an option that some politicians would like to see eliminated via more draconian gun control laws.

We discussed the fact that more stringent gun control laws do not reduce violence. We reviewed examples of where higher legal gun ownership resulted in less crime but lower gun ownership, more restrictive gun control laws resulted in higher rates of violent crime (e.g. Chicago). We reviewed scientific studies that proved this point and other studies that pointed to the legal overmedication of Americans as a high potential cause for mass slayings like Newtown, not the availability of guns.

We concluded from all of this discussion that outlawing or severely restricting the ownership of guns by responsible Americans will result in more violence, will not cause violent criminals to turn in or register their guns, or solve the problems like what happened in Newtown.

But there is a simple, better way to protect our kids without endangering the rest of the population, without shredding the Second Amendment, and without viciously dividing the country again along political lines. On December 24, 2013, we proposed a way to protect our kids in while in school from violence and gun play without raising the taxes on any American:

*******************************************
Thus, the Independent Journal Review’s vote for the worst Federal spending in 2012:

• Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits pay nothing in Federal income taxes($91 million worth of taxes)
• Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
• Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
• The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
• Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
• Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
• Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
• “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
• Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)
• The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour, paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)
• Out-of-this-world Martian – $947,000 – NASA is studying what food astronauts could eat on Mars by simulating a Mars outpost at a barren location in Hawaii
• ObamaPhones’ – $1.5 billion. Enrollment in the Lifeline program has skyrocketed as people sign up to get free cell phone for which they qualify if they are on federal tested programs
• Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
• Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
• Another bridge to nowhere – $520,000. A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds
• Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees – $142,419. A Department of Transportation grant paid for free bus rides during the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Average prices for Super Bowl tickets are around $3,000
• Movie theater field trip to see “Red Tails” – $57,000. Federal education funds were misused in Texas to send fifth-grade boys to a movie theater to see “Red Tails” (girls were left behind).
• Self-reflection video game using Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 writings – $40,000. National Endowment for the Humanities funding pays for video game simulating Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond.
• U.S. Iraqi police State Department training program burns through hundreds of millions, crashes in flames – $400.2 million. State Dept’s Iraq police training program has failed miserably, according the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. No objectives were created, and classes did not help Iraqis at all. The State Department will hand over to the Iraqis several building projects that ended up being unnecessary
• The streetcar named No Desire – $35.6 million. Federal transportation money will help build a trolley in St. Louis that has been called the “Streetcar Named No Desire” by one local. It duplicates existing light rail and public transportation, some say.
• Sidewalks to nowhere anger local citizens – $1.1 million. Department of Transportation funds are used for “sidewalks to nowhere” in Florida and Michigan that have local citizens angered. In Florida, the sidewalk was a “safe route to school” that was still unsafe. In Michigan, Federal requirements forced a county to make sidewalk ramps at an intersection without sidewalks.
• Congressional salaries total almost $100 million. Seems like they should be able to get something done for that much money? Especially since these people will work only 13 Fridays in 2012 and worked less than three weeks in the three months leading up to the November elections.

These 22 wasteful spending expenses total $2,160,420,419. Let’s
do some simple math, in light of the Connecticut school shootings:

• According to the Federal government, there 132,183 private and public schools in this country up through high school. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in this country earns about $55,000 a year.
• If we decided to place an armed, trained police officer in every school in America, the annual cost would be about $7.3 billion a year.
• If we could somehow magically redirect the above wasteful spending away from these trivial expenses to funding protection for our kids in school, we would be able to put a trained, armed police officer in 30% of the nation’s schools. ($7.3 billion in police officer costs divided into the $2.16 billion in spending on the 22 projects/program listed above.)
• Thus, if we could find another 50 or so other, similarly wasteful Federal government spending instances (something that would be extremely easy to do), we could annually put a trained, armed police officer in EVERY U.S. school, without raising taxes on any American.
• Another approach would be to magically redirect the $2.16 billion to protecting 30% of our schools and charge every American household just $.85 a month in taxes to cover the other 70% of schools.
• Still another approach is to consider the fact that the U.S. has needlessly deployed over 130,000 troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Rather than using taxpayer money to defend Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, maybe it is time to maybe it is time to use that taxpayer money to defend our kids within the confines of this country.

The bottom line is that, as nation, we have the wealth and ability today to more fully protect our kids in their schools without killing any vital Federal program or project, without going through the fruitless and divisive political debate of gun control, and without raising taxes on any American.

***********************************

Since this blog post and the solution it proposed, we found out that:

1. President Obama signed legislation that will guarantee that he and his family, along with former Presidents, will have armed, Secret Service protection for life.
2. The school that President Obama’s kids attend is protected by 11 armed guards everyday in addition to the Secret Service detail assigned to protect his kids.

If the President can provide trained, professional armed guards for his kids in their schools, why can’t we do the same for every American kid while in school? The above math indicates it is possible if we just cleaned up wasteful government spending a little bit.

But there is another way to finance such a program, without raising taxes on any American, if we only could force the political class in Washington to stop spending and wasting taxpayer wealth on themselves and start spending it on our KIDS.

In our January 6, 2013 post, we revealed excessive and useless wasting examples of politicians spending our money on themselves. A few examples include the following disgraces:

1. Georgia Senator Isakson - Arranged a $4 million earmark for Northrop Gruman in exchange for a $7,000 donation and arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Scientific Research Corp. in exchange for a $2,900 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
2. Hawaiian Senator Inouye - Secured a $135 million taxpayer financed bailout after intervening on behalf of a poorly managed, non-qualifying bank. Why? Inouye had most of his net worth invested in that bank. (Source: Hawaii Free Press)
3. Illinois Senator Durbin - Arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Gentex in exchange for a $2,000 donation and arranged another $1.6 million earmark for Epir Technologies in exchange for a $2,700 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
4. Rep. Corrine Brown (D - Fla.) - Between 2005 and 2010, Brown helped secure $21.9 million for six clients of a lobbying firm where her daughter works.
5. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D - NC) - Butterfield has helped obtain $817,500 over the past few years toward revitalizing buildings in Wilson, N.C. The lawmaker owns 19 properties within three-quarters of a mile of the project.
6. Rep. Norm Dicks (D - Wash.) - In 2008, Dicks, as an appropriations chairman, secured a $1.82 million earmark for a Washington state environmental agency where his son worked as executive director.

These are just six random examples of politicians wasting our money on their families and their careers, money that could be spent protecting OUR kids. You can visit the dozens and dozens of other examples of similar waste at that January 6th post.

If you did read that post and added up the amount of waste that the political class in Washington dispenses for its own goals every year you would find it sums to $711.6 million. Since, on average, it costs about $55,000 a year to staff a police officer throughout the country, if the political class had used $711.6 million in taxpayer wealth to put an armed police officer in schools rather, than divert the taxpayer money to their financial backers or their friends and family, as outlined in detail in our January 6, 2013 post, we could have armed protection in another 13,000 schools protecting our kids.

Since we have already calculated above that terminating just 22 wasteful government projects would allow us to staff armed officers in about 39,300 schools, this additional savings would put armed police officers in 52,300 schools or about 40% of our schools. No taxes raised, no Second Amendment shredding, just good solid trained protection in over 50,000 schools FOR OUR KIDS! It is that simple.

All it requires is for the Federal government to stop spending over $2 billion a year on stupid, inane, useless projects and programs and stop the political class from using taxpayer money to grease their reelection campaigns and the personal wealth of themselves and their family members. You decide what are the better spending priorities, I know what my answer is.

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