February, 2016, Bonus Post, Political Class Insanity: Restricting Viagra Sales, Taxpayer Money for Casinos and Prostitutes, and More

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.

I thought we were done with this month’s insanity yesterday but a late flurry of insanity showed up over the past couple of days that deserves to be reviewed this month: 

1) According to the I Have The Truth website, if you are a man and living in Kentucky, if a Kentucky legislator has her way you will have to get your wife’s permission before you can buy Viagra. Yes, according to David McIntosh writing for the website on February 14, 2016, state representative Mary Lou Marzian is putting forth legislation to such effect in the name of “family values” and “to protect men from themselves.”

Her bill, HB 396, specifies only married men can get Viagra and requires a “man to make a sworn statement with his hand on a Bible that he will only use a prescription for a drug for erectile dysfunction when having sexual relations with his current spouse.” What is interesting is that this legislator is a Democrat, you know, the political party that is always talking about sexual freedom and keeping the government out of our bedrooms.

In reality, Marzian is ticked off that there are currently several anti-abortion bills pending in her legislature and this is a frivolous, nonsensical reaction to those bills. Rather than have an adult conversation about the issues, she files this time wasting, taxpayer dollar wasting, embarrassing piece of legislation to get attention. These antics resolve none of the issues facing her state or the country.

2) The insanity and corruption of politicians does not exist only in Washington, if often extends down to local politicians also. The DC Gazette recently reported that almost the entire city council of a Texas town was recently arrested by the FBI. Vianna Vaughan wrote on February 8, 2016 that all but one member of the Crystal City, Texas city council was arrested under a Federal indictment that accuses them of operating an illegal gambling operation and taking thousands and thousands of dollars in bribes.

According to the indictment, the five arrested “used their official positions to enrich themselves by soliciting and accepting payments and other things of value” and “voting to award contracts in exchange for bribes, extorting payments from contractors, turning a blind eye to Nguyen’s illegal gaming business while taking action to shut down would-be competitors, and agreeing to reduce Nguyen’s taxes in exchange for him waiving debts, among other dealings.” If found guilty, they each face up to 10 years in Federal prison and a quarter million dollars in fines.

American political corruption, from town hall to the halls of Congress to the White House.

3) The national debt recently cross into the $19 TRILLION range territory and remains on a course to eventually crash our economy, our wealth, and our freedoms. When that happens, remember how a recent Heritage Foundation report showed where a million dollars of that growing $19 trillion went. Christopher Oleska and Romina Boccia, writing for the Heritage Foundation on February 8, 2016, reported that from July, 2013 until June, 2014, over 4,000 separate transaction totally $1 million in taxpayer wealth were incurred at gambling casinos using Defense Department government travel and credit cards.

But it gets even worse. Nine hundred more transactions were incurred, at an expense of $96,576, at “adult entertainment establishments.” And it gets even worse: as of May, 2015 only 41% of these transactions went punished.

But we should not be surprised. The Defense Department is not the only abuser of government credit and travel cards:

• Employees of the State Department abused the cards by funding unauthorized first class trips to Hawaii.
• Over $600,000 was used for golf and tennis lessons and other abuses instead of being used for the intended purposes of helping Hurricane Katrina victims.
• IRS employees abused their cards by buying everything from diet pills to alcohol and pornography for their own personal use.

Disgusting abuse. But as the article points out, every law passed by Congress to stop the abuse over the past several years has been a failure, much like everything else Congress does.

4) Speaking of wasting taxpayer money, the Labor Department recently announced that it will spend $20 million this summer to create summer jobs and “career pathways” for young Americans. On the surface, this seems like a good thing. The unemployment rate among teenagers is very high and the lack of summer and other part time jobs does not give them the experience in the work force that would serve them well in the future. 

In fact, the unemployment rate for kids aged 16 to 19 is 16%, more than three times the overall unemployment rate. Up to $2 million will go to each of 10 local workforce development organizations to pump up existing summer job programs.

But if you do the math, this is really an insanely bad idea and waste of taxpayer wealth. Let’s make a few assumptions:

• Assume the kids work for 12 weeks over their summer vacation.
• Assume they work 40 hours a week.
• Assume they get paid $10 an hour.
• If we multiply 12 weeks times 40 hours times $10 an hour and divide that into $20 million, we find that this program will create, wait for it, about 4,000 summer jobs for the whole country or about 80 summer jobs per state on average.

Given that millions and millions of kids need summer jobs, this effort of 4,000 jobs is a nit on a much bigger problem and resolves nothing except wasting $20 million of taxpayer wealth. And this assumes that all $20 million is used to finance jobs, knowing how government works, a big chunk of that $20 million is likely to be lost in administrative overhead or criminal fraud.

A better solution is to have politicians who have some sense of how to put sound economic policies in place, reduce business taxes, and reduce the staggering burden of government regulation so that the market creates jobs naturally. 

But since the Obama administration in particular and Congress in general have no idea how to execute a well run economy we get stuck paying for these minimal piecemeal government programs that resolve nothing and just waste money.

5) But politicians do not only waste money on stupid ideas, they also waste time on stupid ideas.The state of Illinois is a financial basket case wasting to die. Their current expense streams and future expense liabilities are much greater than their current tax revenue streams. But raising taxes to help pay the outrageously high government expenses is likely to drive away businesses and families from the state, further reducing the tax revenue streams.

Things had gotten so bad last year from a revenue perspective and political gridlock perspective that for a while the state did not have the money to pay off state lottery winners or pay the claims of state workers’ health insurance plans. It was behind in payment to vendors for months and months. It is a state in dire need of leadership, focus, and strategic planning.

But instead of those traits, Illinois state politicians have recently been working on legislation that would establish a state holiday in honor of Barack Obama. Under the proposed state legislation, it would be a state wide holiday for which state employees would get the day off with pay, as if the state did not have enough financial challenges.

Talk about bad priorities. A state that was technically in default of its debt for a short time in 2015, a state that has bloated pension and retirement benefits for state workers, so bloated that it may bankrupt the state government, city schools that do not educate, a gun and homicide epidemic in its biggest city, and the political leaders are worried about establishing a state holiday for a President who should have been impeached years ago, a President whose administration has been a failure on so many levels. Insanity.

That will definitely do it for this month’s insanity, I cannot take anymore. But rest assured, more insanity is sure to put up by this time next month.

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

September, 2015, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: Antarctic Ice Growing Quickly and As Hurricanes Go Away

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control on our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical posts listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims.

1) Jason Samenow, writing for the Washington Post on September 23, 2015, posted an article that stated the Antarctic sea ice had recently hit a 35 year high. This is hardly what one would expect if man made global warming was actually a reality.

Details from the article including the following facts:

• The sea ice has grown to a record size for the second straight year, minimizing the possibility that this was a single year fluke.
• The size of the ice sheet is now 19.51 million square kilometers according to the stats from the National Snow and Ice Data Center website.
• This is the largest size of the ice sheet since records were began back in late 1978, i.e. the time period when supposedly global warming was taking over the world.
• In many recent months, the size of the ice sheet was beyond two standard deviations, indicating that from a statistical perspective the ice sheet is significantly larger than expected.
• Jimlum Zhang, an obvious global warming supporter from the University of Washington, is puzzled: “The overwhelming evidence is that the Southern Ocean is warming. Why would sea ice be increasing? Although the rate of increase is small, it is a puzzle to scientists.”
• As we have pointed out many times, global warming scientists’ forecast models have always been wrong and this is just another example of global warming scientists being wrong in their theories relative to reality, according to Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes: “This modeled Antarctic sea ice decrease in the last three decades is at odds with observations, which show a small yet statistically significant increase in sea ice extent.”
• And in yet another global warming excuse for bad theories and forecasting, a recent study by Lorenzo Polvani and Karen Smith of Columbia University hypothesizes that the model-defying sea ice increase may just reflect natural variability. 

Right. How come when a single data point that supports a global warming advocate’s view is hyped as a trend but then a multi-year trend is justified, poorly, as “natural variation?” Hypocrisy.

2) Lets follow up on the point made above that global warming advocates like to explain anything that upsets their reality as a fluke while they jump on any single event that might prove their views. If a wildfire breaks out in the American west, it must be caused by global warming even though if you look at the history of American west wildfires you will see the number of fires has actually been declining during the most intense years of supposed global warming.

If a drought breaks out somewhere, then it must be caused by global warming even though 1) the world has been having droughts from the beginning of time and 2) if you actually look at the data, the number of droughts has actually been decreasing during the global warming hysteria.

Same thing with hurricanes. When Hurricane Katrina swept through the southern states ten years ago, the global warming advocates went nuts, trying to make the connection between global warming and Katrina. They shouted and stomped their feet that Katrina, a single weather event, was going to be repeated over and over as global warming swept over the world.

But Katrina was also a false flag, according to an analysis of government and other data that was published in the September 11, 2015 issue of The Week magazine:

• In the history of the deadliest hurricanes that have hit the U.S., Katrina was not even the worst one.
• It ends up as the third worst deadliest hurricane to hit, reaching only a Category 3 status.
• Two other hurricanes were actually Category 4 hurricanes and they hit in 1900 and 1928, long, long before global warming was even a theory.
• The worst hurricane to hit the U.S. occurred in Texas in 1900 and killed 8,000 people, more than four times as many people that Katrina killed in a year that had far fewer people living in Texas. Again, the worst hurricane from a power and death perspective occurred about 70 years before global warming was being discussed.
• Of the other seven worst hurricanes to hit the U.S., they occurred between 1856 and 1957, long before global warming fears and mania were going on.

Thus, another global warming myth is destroyed, there has only been one significant, top ten hurricane to hit the country during the entire global warming era. Having lived in Florida for the past ten years and experienced a grand total of zero hurricanes, I have seen first hand that the extreme hurricane weather predicted by global warming advocates just never materialized. Katrina was not a trend, it was an abnormal blip.This post will get this month’s global warming/climate change updates going. We will go through another post or two in the coming days which will prove again, that it is perfectly sane and rational and scientific to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science. Just ask the the Antarctic ice sheet and those that have NOT suffered through the horrendous hurricane weather that Al Gore types loudly predicted.
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

Part 2, Why There Is Hope To Better Educate Our Kids, Something That The Political Class Never Provided, Hope and Good Educations

It is no secret to anyone in the know that we are doing a terrible job of educating our kids in this country. On international achievement tests, there are usually kids from dozens of countries who score better on all different types of tests than American kids. It is truly a national disgrace.

A national disgrace especially when you consider that we have spend more and more on public education in this country over the years and have seen no improvement of positive return on that spending. This embarrassment was captured by the following graph from the Cato Institute, using California as an exmaple:



It is not as if the American political class has not tried to fix the problem, they have just proven they do not know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the graph above. Their solution always involves spending more money which in turn has gotten us nothing. Their latest attempt, via the so-called Common Core effort, has also proven to be a disaster. Where Common Core has been instituted, in states like Massachusetts and Maryland, the results have been a disaster. 

At one time, Massachusetts turned out the smartest kids in the country. Under common Core, they have slipped to seventh place. Several years after Common Core was established in Maryland, test scores have plummeted:


Step 27 proposed a solution to this problem that did not include any input from the American political class. Over the past several decades they have proven themselves incapable of not injecting politics, greed, and their lack of knowledge of education principles and strategies. As a result we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars funding the Federal Department of Education and lord knows how many billions of dollars developing Common Core, of which both investments have failed horribly and disgracefully.

But that does not mean that we cannot heal our education processes and start turning out smart kids again. In fact, there are success stories in this field all across the country, a few of which we will shall over the next two days. One of the common themes underlying these success stories is that the political class has been cut out of the education process, resulting in tremendous successes without tremendous costs.

1) Yesterday we showed two examples where it is possible to give our kids a high level of quality education without excessive or with no input from politicians. We discussed the high school in Watts in Los Angeles where the entire senior class from this all boys schools were accepted into college, a record that very few schools anywhere in the country can match.We also discussed an article from the website, www.sfbayview.com, from a few years ago that showed how ten African-American kids were thriving academically in so many artistic and academic fields. 

Let’s start today’s continuing examination of kids in America getting a good education with an article from the Heritage Foundation that was written by Lindsey Burke. The article, “How Charter Schools Spend Less Than Public Schools But Achieve Better Results,” examined recent research on how charter schools, the bane of teacher unions and the politicians that depend on those unions for their perpetual electioneering, are outperforming public education processes at a lower price.

Details and research from the article include the following:

• In America, there are about 2.5 million kids enrolled in 6,500 charter schools in the U.S.
• Enrollment rose almost 100% from 2001 through 2011.
• Burke assumes that this incredible growth rate is because “may be due to the schools’ productivity and ability to improve learning outcomes on a more limited budget than traditional public schools enjoy."
• Burke backs up this assertion by quoting recent research on charter schools: “…the public charter school sector delivers a weighted average of an additional 17 [National Assessment of Educational Progress] NAEP points per $1,000 invested in math, representing a productivity advantage of 40 percent for charters. In reading, the public charter sector delivers an additional 16 NAEP points per $1,000 invested, representing a productivity advantage of 41 percent for charters.”
• The research also dispelled the myth that charter schools perform better because they get smarter and more motivated kids to begin with: “Any claim that the higher productivity of charters relative to [traditional public schools] TPS is because charters serve a more advantaged population would be undermined by these findings, as all charter sectors outperform their [traditional public schools] TPS on productivity measures even though half of the charter sectors enroll a more low-income population of students than their TPS.”
• Although counter intuitive, the researchers conclude that charter schools are more efficient because they have LESS financial support and budgets: “It appears to be likely that much of the basis for the higher productivity of public charter schools rests on the fact that they receive less funding and therefore are highly disciplined in their use of those education dollars.” 
• A Stanford University researcher, Caroline Hosby, found that going to a charter school from kindergarten through eighth grade brings lower socio-economic kids’ academic performance up to the level of affluent suburban schools in math and would close 66% of the gap in English achievement levels.
• A 2010 Department Of Education survey found higher levels of satisfaction among parents with both the quality of schools and their child’s development.
• The average charter school has a waiting list of 300 kids trying to get in, indicating a high level of acceptance and desire in the communities they serve.

So charter schools deliver high academic performance at a lower cost that attracts high levels of enrollees and provide high levels of satisfaction to parents relative to their kids’ education. This all proves that all kids from all segments of society can get a great education. But somehow along the way American politicians find a way to not accomplish what is doable despite spending hundreds of billions in a vain attempt to do so.

2) New Orleans is a city which has had good education results with charter schools. Nine out of ten kids in that city attend charter schools, a reality driven by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. This makes New Orleans the city with the highest level of charter school penetration in the country.

How has that effort worked out for their kids? Stacy Telcher Khadaroo writing for ChristianScience Monitor on March, 2014 went looking for those answers:

• In New Orleans, there is no longer a traditional central district office that dictates what schools students will attend, a central office that usually hires and promotes teachers in negotiation with a union, and controls everything from budgets to textbooks. 
• In New Orleans, families get to select among charter schools citywide that have to meet certain benchmarks in order to have their charters renewed.
• Although 82% of the students in New Orleans schools are considered low income, charter schools’ test scores and graduation rates have climbed steadily over the past decade or so.
• Andy Smarick, a partner at the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners in Washington believes that New Orleans has shown that "we can move government out of running schools" and have it focus on oversight instead.
• A charter superintendent, Patrick Dobard, gave some insight on why New Orleans charters have been successful: "Our model is about empowering educators that are closest to the children, to give them the autonomy to have great schools, but to have a strong accountability system in place...ensuring there is equity and access throughout the whole system."
• Academic results in New Orleans schools have moved ahead of the state average for high school graduation by several points, with 77.8 percent for the class of 2012 graduating within four years – up from just over 54 percent in 2004.
• Based on a state based academic performance school, in 2004-05 only 12 percent of students in New Orleans attended 'A' or 'B' schools while nearly 75 percent attended 'F' schools. By 2012-13, just 17 percent of students were in 'F' schools, while 34 percent were in 'A' or 'B' schools.
• Even better, the percentage of New Orleans students qualifying for college scholarships prior to Katrina was less than 6 percent of students in 14 high schools that were later taken converted into charter schools. By 2013, that 6% had increased over four fold to 27%. by the RSD qualified for these scholarships, NSNO reports. In 2013, 27 percent did.

The entire article can be viewed at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/0301/New-Orleans-goes-all-in-on-charter-schools.-Is-it-showing-the-way

The writer goes into much detail on the mechanics of education in charter schools that helped attain the tremendous improvements listed above. Regardless of how they do it, the results are what any parent would want for their kids: high and improving academic performance, better chance for college scholarships, etc. 

More proof today that we as a nation can do a much better job educating our kids. But somehow the political class gets in the way of allowing that improvement to happen. That is why Step 27 from our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” along with the track records of the education endeavors we have reviewed over the past two days, are needed to finally give our kids the education they deserve in an efficient and cost-effective manner. 

Allowing national politicians and Federal bureaucrats have given us the exact opposite: inefficient and lower education levels in a high cost manner.

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

December, 2014, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Auditing the Auditors, Useless Taxpayer Funded Video Games, and More

It’s the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from America’s politicians. Whether it is wasteful spending, inane quotes, faulty government operations, or insulting the American public, there is always new material spewing forth from these people, usually enough to fill up half a dozen or so posts every month. Given what we know today, this month should be no different as the insanity seems to be expanding exponentially from those in office today.

1) We have often talked about the disaster that is the new set of school lunch Federal guidelines that failed in an attempt to establish healthier eating options in the nation’s schools. This legislative effort got a lot of publicity and hype because of Michelle Obama’s active pushing of healthy meals via legislative fiat, not public health behavior change.

And that is the point we kept making. Everyone is in favor of healthier, less obese kids. That is a fact for most Americans. But thinking that having Washington politicians and bureaucrats (and First Ladies) simply decree what others should eat is not going to work. This requires a public health solution, not a new law.

As a result, kids are eating less, food is being thrown out by the tonnage, and school budgets are being devastated since their revenue from school lunches is way down. A recent Johns Hopkins study found out the same thing that we have been yelling about.

The researchers tracked the eating habits of 274 New York students between kindergarten and second grade in an attempt to determine how much of their healthy lunches they actually eat. 

The researchers took photos of specific lunches as they were being served to the kids and more pictures as the lunches were being discarded. They found that much of the so-called healthier food ended up in the trash can rather than in the mouths of growing children: “We have been thinking that if young children choose healthy food, they will eat it,” explained researcher Dr. Susan Gross. “But our research shows that is not necessarily so.” I could have told them that without all of the fuss, if the food does not look good or taste good, kids are not going to eat it regardless of what Michelle Obama says.

The study found that less than one in four students took even one bite of a vegetable on their tray. As a result of their findings, researchers noted that it will take more than a revamped menu to turn students into healthy eaters. Yes, it will. It will take a long term public health initiative that looks at all aspects of healthy eating, not just school lunches.

Again, the Washington political class has passed a law/dictate that ignores the root causes of a problem. And thus, their solution ends up half baked, no effective, expensive, ends up in the garbage can and causes more problems than it resolves.

2) Former Congressman Allen West recently wrote a long narrative on yet another Afghanistan scandal and massive wasting of taxpayer wealth. We have previously discussed the State Department facility that was built in that country at the cost of $60 million, to be abandoned after it was done since the State Department only then realized it could not withstand a terrorist attack.

We have previously discussed the Pentagon scandal where they had spent about half a billion dollars for planes to be used in Afghanistan only to scrap them for a value of only $10,000 shortly after they were minimally used.

We have previously discussed how the Pentagon had spent tens of millions of dollars on a military headquarters building in Afghanistan that was never used.

And now a it appears, according to Mr. West and the Washington Free Beacon, that $420 million worth of weaponry and other “sensitive equipment” has gone missing in Afghanistan. The loss was confirmed by an internal Inspector General’s report. Even worse, the final report noted that this loss of almost $420 million comes on the heals of another report that found an additional $586.8 million worth of military equipment had been “lost.”

Athough I do not know this for a fact, it is probably a good bet that a lot of this equipment has ended up in hotspots around the Middle East and probably a lot of it is in the hands of the barbaric ISIS terrorists, courtesy of a political class and clueless government that cannot keep track of its own military inventory.

3) A Washington Examiner article on November 13, 2014 by Sarah Westwood is a real doozy in that it covers a scandal that goes back for a decade, all the way back to Hurricane Katrina. According to her reporting:

• More than nine years after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, billions of tax dollars in recovery funds remain in limbo since most of Federal taxpayer funded projects in New Orleans have yet to be properly documented.
• An amazing 20,000 out of 24,000 FEMA funded projects and efforts have not yet been settled even though the issue has been analyzed and reported on over the years by the Department of Homeland Security auditors.
• “What is particularly disturbing about this relatively large percentage of small projects being open for eight years is that GOHSEP [the government oversight entity responsible for managing the funds] has already paid applicants for these projects. As the years pass, confirming whether applicants ever completed these small projects will grow difficult,” said a September, 2013 IG report.
• In one example, the University of New Orleans Research and Technology Foundation got $12 million to fund 12 projects in the wake of Katrina but somehow ended up spending $19 million without getting prior approval to spend the additional $7 million.
• Ÿ In another case, another audit found that work on 20 of 29 planned projects by the Audubon Commission, a City of New Orleans public body responsible for museums and park facilities, had not yet even begun about a decade after the disaster.

Some days you cannot even think these disgraces up. Emergency funding that was supposed to help the citizens of New Orleans cope with such a devastating disaster are still going on long after the storm is over. All because of the incompetence of the Federal government, incompetence that the political class seems unwilling or unable to remedy.

4) We often talked about the incredible waste and risking of taxpayer wealth when the Obama administration freely gave out grants and loan guarantees to alternative energy companies. At last count, if I remember correctly, the administration and squandered well over $30 billion on such failed alternative energy companies such as Solyndra, A123, Spectra, and dozens of others, getting no societal benefit in return. 

To add insult to injury, not only did massive amounts of taxpayer wealth get squandered, almost every single company that got that wealth was in some way associated with the Democratic party, either as a former Democratic politician, a heavy Democratic fund raiser, or other such connection. Thus, the squandering of money was not based on a valid, overarching strategy but simple crony capitalism.

I bring up that history because history is about to strike again, according to reporting and research by the Heritage Foundation. A solar energy facility called Ivanpah, in California, originally received a $1.6 billion taxpayer back loan to support its operations.

But the facility is failing to meet its targets of energy creation because it is simply not getting enough sunlight relative to what it had planned on. So as a failing alternative energy company, what should it do? The same thing all of the other failed companies did, ask for a taxpayer bailout. 

In a contorted piece of logic, the company is asking for a $539 million taxpayer grant to pay off the original $1.5 billion taxpayer-backed loan. So it took out a loan with Federal backing and wants more taxpayer money to pay off its original debt of taxpayer money. Again, you cannot make this stuff up, it is too wild.

But wait, there is more. Two major companies have financial interests in Ivanpah, energy giant NRG along with Google. Google, one of the richest companies in the world wants a government bailout for a business they have a financial interest in and should have had a financial risk in also when it failed. If this Ivanpah was such a good idea, then Google, NRG, and their shareholders should have taken the risk and made the investment, not use taxpayer money to make the investment and avoid the risk.

The alternative energy boondoggle and wasted taxpayer wealth continues under the Obama administration despite dozens of other such failures in the past. As Einstein once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Sound familiar?

That will do it for today’s insanity. The wasting of more billions of dollars on failed alternative energy programs, losing almost a billion dollars worth of military equipment in Afghanistan that could end up killing our own soldiers somewhere in the Middle East in the future, Hurricane Katrina programs and spending that never ends, and kids that are still not eating the hideous food Michelle Obama demands they eat. And the insanity will continue to roll on tomorrow and then some.

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