July, 2017, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Obama Phone Fraud, Voting Fraud, and Other Fraud

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:

1) Nowhere has the political class been such a failure than in Chicago where the local, county, state, and Federal politicians have failed repeatedly to provide a basic government service to the citizens of Chicago, namely bodily protection. Every day people are gunned down on the streets of Chicago resulting in the maiming and death of hundreds of people every year. V. Saxena, writing for the Conservative Tribune website on July 3, 2017, updated us on the latest violence in the city:

• 46 people were shot and at least four died died in Chicago on this July 4th weekend.
• The wounded included a 13 year old teeanger who was simply walking down the street.
• There have been over 1714 shootings this year in the city, almost 300 a month, about 10 shootings a day.
• And while the Trump administration is at least taking some action to fight the crime and violence wave, something that Obama never did for his home town, I doubt that sending an additional 20 ATF agents into the city is going to make any big difference.
• “I think Barack Obama has ignored the black community for eight years, and now he’s coming to take a bow in Chicago while our neighborhoods are suffering from disinvestment and soaring unemployment. We are seeing young black men getting gunned down at a horrific rate, and he has shown no willingness to seriously address these issues,” remarked Ja’Mal Green earlier this year, referencing the then-president’s farewell speech, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune.

What a mess, a fatal mess that the political class apparently has no plan to fix.

2) We have previously discussed the corrupt and wasteful Obama cell phone program (“Obama Phones”) that was supposed to place inexpensive cellular technology in the hands of poor people in our society and help them find jobs. But according to a recent study from the Government Accountability Office:

• One out of three people taking advantage of the program are not eligible for the program.
• A whopping 10.6 million people are in the program meaning over 3 million people are getting taxpayer wealth for nothing.
• The study also found that the program has resulted in $9 billion stuck in private bank accounts.
• Over 5,500 program participants have two phones, which is not kosher, and 6,400 people who are already dead also have phones in their names.
• And despite how big and expensive the program is, there is no plan in place to see if the program is actually meeting its intended objectives.

Wasteful spending on likely a useless program, sounds about right.

3) Will Brown, recently writing for the U.S. Chronicle website, explained how a corrupt state politician was recently sentenced to hard time in jail for her crimes in the state of Pennsylvania:

• Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has been sentenced to 10-23 months in Federal prison for illegally disclosing details of a grand jury investigation in order to embarrass her political rival.
• She was also sentenced to 8 years probation after the term is served.
• The judge accused Kane of adopting an “off with your heads” mentality despite being the state’s top law enforcement officer in the state and also called Kane a political “neophyte” who never transitioned from politician to public servant after she got elected.
• And now the tattle tales have come out of the darkness about what a bad person Kane was, with Erik Olsen, former Chief Deputy Attorney General under Kane, claiming she created a “terror zone” in the office using “a pattern of systemic firings and Nixonian espionage.” Nice person.

It’s a shame that this type of corruption goes on everyday at every level of government but at least this corrupt official got her just rewards.

4) Let’s stay with political corruption. Scott Osborn, writing for the Joe For America website on July 3, 2017, told the sad story of a Hillary Clinton operative going to jail for breaking the law in the name of Clinton:

• Lead Hillary Clinton political community organizer Andrew J. Spieles, aged 21, pleaded guilty to registering multiple dead people to vote in the last Presidential election while working for Hillary.
• He could have been put in jail for up to a year as a result of an investigation of local police and the FBI but by pleading guilty he faces 100 to 120 days behind bars.
• The local TV station WTVR channel 6 reported: “A man paid to register Virginia voters prior to the 2016 Presidential Election will spend at least 100 days in prison for submitting the names of deceased individuals to the Registrar’s Office.”
• He got caught submitting voter registrations for dead people and one of those dead people was the father of a current Rockingham County judge.
• According to the government investigation: “Spieles later admitted that he prepared the false voter registration forms. He obtained the name, age, and address of individuals from ‘walk sheets’ provided to him by the Virginia Democratic Party, fabricating a birth date based on the ages listed in the walk sheet, and fabricating the social security numbers.” 

Again, this is another assault on our freedom and integrity of our democracy. Fortunately, he got caught. However, it makes you wonder if this type of behavior is going on and undetected around the country.

This is a good start to this month’s political class insanity: attorney general fraud, voting fraud, Obama Phone fraud, and still no political solution to the Chicago violence. More insanity to follow for days and days to come.

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

While There is Still Hope for America, Part 3...Despite The Political Class: Cutting Unnecessary Defense Spending, Cutting Unnecessary Government Reports, and More

Unfortunately, when discussing the political class in America it usually gets pretty depressing. Runaway national debt, leaky borders, escalating healthcare costs, a lost war on drugs, failing public schools, selfish politicians whose only priority in life is their own personal enrichment and egos, a government bureaucracy that fails at everything it does, etc. It can get pretty depressing with all of the bad news that originates with a petty and inept political class. 

This situation led us to write the book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” a fifty step plan to fix what ails the country. Sadly, since the book was published in 2009, the politicians in this country have followed absolutely none of the common sense steps that were proposed. Doing so would have put the country in a much better position today vs. what we are currently living through.

So rather than dwell on the continuing bad news that is spawned by today’s political class, lets take a couple of days to talk about some good things that are going on that should give us all some hope that eventually we can actually fix what the political class has broken and finally actually resolve some major issues of our times.

1) We have often discussed the reality that the American taxpayer wastes at least tens of billions of dollars every year by garrisoning military troops around the world. Step 30 from “Love my Country, Loathe My Government,” strongly suggested that such massive deployment of military personnel around the world was useless and wasteful. 

In fact, like most Washington efforts and strategies, a strong case can be made that these deployments made our international situation and homeland security worse. Every year or so it seems there is another rape case on Okinawa involving a local Japanese woman and U.S. military personnel.

Even though the Korean War ended six decades ago, we still have kept tens of thousands of American troops stationed in South Korea, possibly making North Korean leaders even more paranoid and dangerous if we did not have troops massed on their borders.

And though the Cold War ended about three decades ago, why we have continued to station tens of thousands of troops there to fight a non-existent enemy is beyond logic and certainly wasteful.

Thus, it was encouraging to find out recently that the Pentagon was going to close down 15 U.S.military bases in Europe. The closures are expected to save $500 million a year and be completed by the early 2020s. That’s the good news, a real good first step.

The bad news has several components. These positive steps will not be completed for a decade or so, requiring billions of dollars to still be spent on obsolete military bases. The process should be done much quicker. Second, while a couple of thousand U.S. troops in Great Britain will no longer be needed, there will still be tens of thousands of U.S. troops still on the continent costing tens of billions of dollars a year.

But it is a start and that is the good news. To the tune of half a billion dollars a year.

2) Congress also deserves some credit for starting to cut down on Federal government bureaucracy if only a little bit. They voted to eliminate 48 useless annual government reports that probably very few people ever read and which almost definitely never was worth the effort to compile. Hopefully, the President will sign the bill terminating these reports.

To show you how inane these reports are, consider just a few of the more outlandish ones:

• One report dated back to 1930 and was related to dog and cat fur imports. Yes, in 2014, someone, somewhere in th Federal government was compiling the amount of dog and cat fur imports, all paid for by the American taxpayer.
• Another report tracked how many acres of farmland was devoted to raising peanuts.
• Another report reconciled all of the reports related to the Corporation for National And Community Service.

The good news is that this is a small but positive step at cutting down unnecessary Federal bureaucracies and it will save the American taxpayer about $1 million a year. The bad news is that the Federal government will still be compiling another 4,921 annual reports every year, most of which are probably just as useless as the ones that have been discontinued.

If we could somehow terminate half of those $4,921 annual reports and save at the same rate, we could reduce unnecessary government report expenses by about $50 million a year. $50 million a year could shelter a lot of homeless, feed a lot of hungry, treat a lot of the addicted and do a lot lot more good than being used to create reports that no one ever uses.

3) The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that a statewide grand jury has recommended criminal charges be filed against Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen Kane. The charge include perjury and contempt of court related to the leaking of secret grand jury information. Let me say up front that these are only charges and that she is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

However, the good news is that someone in the state government of Pennsylvania is actually looking out for the integrity of the law in the state regardless of political position held or political power. The fact that charges were brought is a sign of hope that all are treated the same under the law, at least in Pennsylvania.

The background of the case is centered around a local grand jury that handed down indictments of two Democratic state legislators for taking bribes in exchange for their votes on a bill.Although the grand jury came back with criminal indictments, Attorney General Kane refused to prosecute the case involving two members of her same political party.

As a result, a judge convened a state grand jury with a special prosecutor to follow up on the whole situation which ended up indictments of Kane. Again, innocent until proven guilty but the good news is that the process worked and even the top law enforcement agent in the state is not above the law and scrutiny for integrity.

4) And last piece of good news: the price of oil continues to drop with the resultant price of gas at the pump continues to drop also. Now some politicians are licking their jobs at this good news and thinking that raising the gas tax at this time is a good thing to do. God forbid the American consumer get a break. 

However, I am more hopeful than ever that the American consumer will not stand for more taxation at a time when government wasteful spending is at an all time high. Just in case, may I suggest you give your Washington representatives a call and tell them no to more taxes, in any form.

That will do it for the three days of good news we have reviewed.Today we learned that small but positive steps have been taken to cut down unnecessary military base expenses and government report expenses. We have learned that at least in Pennsylvania, no politician is above the law. And gas prices continue to sink despite the best efforts of Washington politicians to make it more expensive to gas up. 

I hope you enjoyed this brief review of hope and good news because tomorrow we dive right back into the insanity, incompetence, wasteful spending, and dangers of the American political class.

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