October, 2019, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Lying Politicians, Greedy Politicians, and Clueless Politicians

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

Let’s get started:

1) It is our experience that the Washington Post loves anything and everything Democratic and liberal. So it really catches our attention when it says anything negative about Democrats and liberals, as they recently did in the midst of the whole Ukraine/impeachment circus:

• Adam Schiff is the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives calling for the impeachment of Trump.
• The whole false basis of Schiff’s impeachment theory is the story of an unknown whistleblower.
• In order for the whole impeachment fallacy to have any kind of integrity it must be seen that Schiff is just an investigator and not a planner of the whistleblower’s story.
• In fact Schiff claimed in an MSNBC interview that he and his staff had “not spoken directly with the whistleblower.”
• But in fact, the Washington Post gave Schiff its highest designation of lying, four Pinochios, since that is not true: "Schiff on 'Morning Joe' clearly made a statement that was false. He now says he was answering the wrong question, but if that was the case, he should have quickly corrected the record. He compounded his falsehood by telling reporters a few days later that if not for the [inspector general's] office, the committee would not have known about the complaint. That again suggested there had been no prior communication. The explanation that Schiff was not sure it was the same whistleblower especially strains credulity. Schiff earns Four Pinocchios."

Again, if the Washington Post thinks you are lying despite being a Democrat, then you must REALLY be lying to get the highest rating of lying. But a Washington politician lying should not come as a surprise, we have shown hundreds of times in this blog the propensity of politicians everywhere to look us in the face and lie directly to us. It is just nice every once in a while to see a liberal piece of the mainstream media actually agree with us.

2) Kamala Harris is a California Senator who is running for President. In a recent public event she violated the first rule of public speaking, “know your audience”:

• She was recently speaking at a town hall event in Reno, Nevada when she said she wanted to “engage in real talk” about next year’s Presidential race.
• She addressed a topic that is being asked of every candidate, namely is she or anyone else who is running electable: “In this election, in the last couple- I mean, maybe couple of months, certainly a few weeks, there’s this whole conversation that has been coming up about electability focused on our campaign. Is America ready for that?”
• When she posed this question to the audience, is the world ready for her to be elected as President, people in the audience shouted out “No!”
• A little shook, Harris responded to the negativity by saying, “Well, yes they are.” 

Again, Ms. Harris, 1) know your audience and 2) do not ask a question that you may not like the answer to. Not only do the overwhelming number of Democrats not want you to be their candidate (Harris polls in the single digits, well behind several other candidates) you were not smart enough not to ask a loaded question in an open forum. Given you cannot control a small audience in Nevada, it is doubtful you could control the office of the Presidency.

The embarrassing exchange can be seen at:

https://preservefreedom.org/kamala-harris-get-publicly-humiliated-after-she-asks-crowd-this/

3) Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is a freshman Congresswoman from Michigan. She has been a very vocal, crude, and profane enemy of Trump, Israel, and anyone who does not agree with her socialistic views. She is quick to criticize, often in profane terms, but provides no positive energy, ideas, or programs to fix anything that needs fixing in this country.

But there may be some karma coming to the forefront as she may have gotten herself into some serious illegal activity:

• According to Politico, the House Ethics Committee is reviewing a potential campaign financing issue incurred by Tlaib.
• This happened during her 2018 campaign for Congress.
• The committee has recommended that a preliminary investigation be done with the alleged violation being that Tlaib took money from her campaign financial funds after the election was over, a violation of campaign financing laws and regulations.
• She allegedly took $17,500 from her campaign funds after the election on November 6, 2018.
• The payments of the $17,500 took place on November 16 and December 1.
• Her office denied that any violations occurred.

Although innocent until proven guilty, it is interesting that three of the four freshman Congresswomen of “The Squad,” who have spouted off nonsense and hatred since being elected, Tlaib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez, have all been accused or proven to have violated financial guidelines when it comes to personal financial gain. 

Seems that it did not take the newbies long to figure out how to get rich while accomplishing nothing in a do nothing Congress. It is just their bad luck not to be good at skimming funds, they all may have been caught and are guilty of financial misdeeds for personal gain.

That is a good start to this month’s insanity: politicians skimming money for personal gain, politicians lying, and politicians too stupid to know their audience. More insanity to follow.

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

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

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

March, 2015, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Watching Porn, The Financial Struggles of Congressmen, Keystone LIes, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time once again to review the latest insanity and ineptness from the American political class. We do this review every month to prove our hypothesis that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of our country. 

They waste hundreds of billions of dollars of our wealth every year, they never resolve any of the major issues facing Americans today, they continually put their foot in their mouth with their idiotic statements and positions, and they operate government functions that are bloated and ineffective in delivering quality service to taxpayers. And worse of all, they have rigged the country’s elections processes so that their election and subsequent re-elections are almost guaranteed to ensure their mediocrity continues. 

To review the past examples of political class insanity just type in “political class insanity” in the search box above.

So lets get started on what is now a multi-day review of their latest incompetence and insanity:

1) Yesterday, we discussed the rare good news coming out of the Washington political class, namely that two Congressmen are trying to get legislation passed that would terminate the traditional pension benefit for Congressional members. Since most the nation's workers no longer have a chance at a traditional pension, it is not fair for those same taxpayers to pay to subsidize the pension benefits of Washington politicians. This is especially true when these people are paid more than three times the median annual household income of regular Americans.

However, even given how good these intentions are, passage of such legislation is not a guaranteed thing, especially when viewed against recent selfish and inane comments of Nancy Pelosi. As background, know that some members of the Department of Homeland Security may have to go without pay for a little while until Congress gets its act together to agree on some pieces of legislation related to the un-Constitutional gambit of Obama to unilaterally give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

This postponement of wages would obviously place a financial burden on those working to defend our borders, no doubt about that. But Pelosi goes on to claim that even Washington politicians could not survive without a regular paycheck: “I don’t know about you, but I think almost everybody I know cannot live without having our paycheck on time – members of Congress even.”

Really? Those people that are paid over $170,000 a year with great benefits would have trouble surviving? The fact that Congressional millionaires would have trouble surviving if their paychecks were postponed? Keep in mind that the Pelosi household is worth well over $20 million and she has the nerve, the gall to make such an outrageous statement? 

If this is indeed the reality in Washington, then the people serving us in Congress are the most pompous in the world or the most foolhardy and economically ignorant when it comes to doing their household budgeting. And the last thing the nation needs now are pompous and ignorant people in charge.

The video of her idiocy can be viewed at:

http://800whistleblower.com/nancy-pelosi-even-members-of-congress-cannot-live-without-getting-paychecks-on-time-video/

2) Often our review of political class insanity is to show how even though Americans are paying more taxes than any other time in the history of the country, they are getting very poor service from government entities in return for such high taxation. A recent report and study from the Post Office's Inspector General shows how poorly the U.S. Postal System (USPS) is doing relative to delivering friendly and efficient service:

• The overall conclusions of the Office of the Inspector General work is that Americans think the Post Office is failing to deliver on customer service.
• And give that the USPS continues to preside over a declining market and business model, it handled 5.2% fewer retail transactions in 2014 than the year before, one would have hoped that they would make up for their declining revenue and customer base with superior customer service.
• Negative customer feedback about retail experiences in local post offices increased 8.7% in the most recent analysis with overall satisfaction below 80% compared to a customer satisfaction target of 90%, which is not that great even if it was attained.
• According to the audit, Americans feel that Postal Service workers are coming up short when it comes to treating people as valued(24.9 percent), being pleasant (21.5 percent) and friendly (20 percent), as well as treating customers with courtesy (20.5 percent) and respect (20.3 percent).

More taxes, more expense for less service and satisfaction, just another typical Federal bureaucracy coming up short in serving the taxpayers who make their existence possible.

3) Several years ago we reported how various news media had discovered that many Federal employees were spending their days, and taxpayer wealth, using their government computers and networks to watch, enjoy, and download tremendous amounts of pornography during work hours. And unfortunately, many of them were never fired for behavior that would be a sure fire job termination in the private sector. Those reports can be read at the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/04/while-financial-markets-collapsed.html

Several years later it appears that life is still good for porno addicts in the Federal government workforce. According to a recent CBS report from early March, 2015:

• The CBS report focused on the reality that even if a Federal employee is caught doing porn on the job with government equipment, it is almost impossible to terminate the employment of that employee.
• Specifically: "At the Environmental Protection Agency, red tape is preventing the removal of a top-level employee accused of viewing porn two to six hour as day while at work since 2010.”
• Specifically, the investigators found 7,000 pornographic files on his computer, caught him red handed watching porn on his computer and still could not get him fired. 

Now we know why the Federal government continues to not provide efficient service in a timely and cost effective manner: a lot of them are still watching porn on the taxpayer’s dime, years after the problem was first identified.

4) Many, many times we have pointed out the lies and deceptions of this President and his administration. From "if you like your insurance policy you can keep your insurance policy” to “we will cut the annual Federal government deficit in half,” the lies and deceptions have been coming fast and furious. For those of us that take integrity and honesty seriously in our lives, at some point long ago we stopped believing anything this President said since we were much more likely to correctly assume a deception than to assume he was telling the truth.

It seems that he recently told another whopper and this time the usually Obama-friendly newspaper, the Washington Post, gave him four Pinocchios, the highest level of lie status possible. Specifically, on February 26, 2015 in an interview on WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota, the President uttered the following quote: “I’ve already said I’m happy to look at how we can increase pipeline production for U.S. oil, but Keystone is for Canadian oil to send that down to the Gulf. It bypasses the United States and is estimated to create a little over 250, maybe 300 permanent jobs. We should be focusing more broadly on American infrastructure for American jobs and American producers, and that’s something that we very much support.”

But as the Post correctly points out with its highest lie rating, the Keystone oil will not “bypass the United States:”

• While all of the Canadian crude will be sent to the U.S. Gulf coast refineries, much of it will be turned into regular gas and diesel fuel with current trends and demand indicating that at least half of the refined products will stay in the U.S. for our use.
• An analysis by IHS Energy, a consultant firm for energy companies, estimates that the Canadian crude will be a good substitute for declining imports of heavy crude oil coming in from Latin America, with IHS estimating that 70% of the refined Canadian oil will stay in the U.S.
• Now, some environmentalists may believe that IHS is biased towards the oil companies it consults with but their findings are consistent with the findings and conclusions of Obama’s own State Department, which had to do their own analysis since the pipeline affects more than just the U.S.: “Comments were received throughout the review process speculating that WCSB heavy crude oil supplies carried on the proposed Project would pass through the United States and be loaded onto vessels for ultimate sale in markets such as Asia,” the State Department said. “As crude of foreign origin, Canadian crude is eligible for crude export license as long as it is not commingled with domestic crude. However, such an option appears unlikely to be economically justified for any significant durable trade given transport costs and market conditions.”

Thus, the President is disagreeing with his own administration’s findings. Plus, who cares if it only creates a few hundred jobs, it is a few hundred, good paying American jobs that do not exist today and it will not cost the taxpayer anything. In reality, most reputable sources, i.e. those that do not lie on a regular basis, estimate that thousands of temporary and permanent jobs will be created by the endeavor which will help make us more energy independent.

And for those who think that not building the pipeline will improve the environment, consider this: that Canadian oil is going to be used somewhere in the world. Whether it is used in this country with our stricter pollution controls or shipped overseas (e.g. China) where pollution control is certainly not as high a priority, that oil will be used somewhere, somehow regardless of the pipeline fate.

That will do it for today's insanity. Today we learned that:

1. At least according to the usually Obama-friendly Washington Post, Obama received the highest rating of lie possible, a lie that disagrees with his own State Department, regarding the Keystone pipeline.
2. Porno viewing by Federal government officials and employees is still a big issue and one that has not been resolved as of a CBS report.
3. The United States Post Office continues to under serve and overcharge American, delivering poor customer service in the process.
4. And despite being paid more than three times the median household income in this country, over $170,000 a year, many Congressional members, according to Nancy Pelosi are barely living paycheck to paycheck.

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.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.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

The Obama Epic Fail Series,Part 1: Transparency and Integrity

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, eic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:

• Transparency and integrity
• Foreign policy
• Economic policy
• Healthcare policy

Transparency and Integrity

Obama came into office promising to operate the most transparent Presidency ever. Sounded like a great future for full government disclosure and integrity of governing, we would be entering a new age of honest politics where politicians and the government it operates would be an open book to the world.

As with most Obama promises, the reality was the exact opposite of the promise. This has turned out to be one of the least transparent administrations in recent memory. From “losing” IRS emails to claiming executive privilege in the Fast and Furious scandal to stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests to hiding Benghazi witnesses, this Presidency has hidden, stonewalled, and lied about just about every scandal and law breaking act.

One way to measure transparency and integrity is to quantify whether someone is telling the truth. And the method to quantify this administration’s integrity has already been developed and published by the Washington Post. The Post runs a regular feature where they take government and politicians’ quotes and assertions and determine how truthful they are. Their measurement system is a scale of “Pinocchios.” The more deceptive or incorrect the statement, the more Pinocchios the Post assigns to the lie.

According to the Post’s website, the scale is defined as follows:

One Pinocchio - Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.


Two Pinocchios - Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.


Three Pinocchios - Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.



Four Pinocchios - Whoppers.


And finally, an upside down Pinocchio is a unbelievable whopper of a lie.

Using this scale, a recent posting on the Minority Report website reviewed the many assertions and statements of the Obama administration and published the Washington Post’s Pinocchio rating of each of those statements and assertions. If a Presidency was truly transparent and in integrity, they should receive a minimal amount of Pinocchios.

Before we get started, lets recall that this process previously awarded Obama the “Lie of The Year” last year for his lie that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under Obama Care. In fact, according to the Post’s analysis, Obama not only got the top lie last year but, in total, placed three lies in the top ten. Not a good start when talking about transparency and integrity.

Let’s see what the Minority Report found with other Obama assertions (please note that the following false assertions and statements are for ONLY 2014):

• “Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
• “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
• “We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
• “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
• “Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
• “[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress.” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
• “I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
• “At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
• “When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three pinocchios, 6/26/14)
• “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
• “If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money. That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
• “Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
• “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
• “If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are. Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck. That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
• “Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
• “We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
• “Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
• “Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
• “If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)
• “It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.” (One Pionocchio, 12/17/14)
•  “The history is that I have issued fewer executive actions than most of my predecessors, by a long shot. … If you ask historians, take a look at the track records of the modern presidency, I’ve actually been very restrained.” (Two Pinocchios, 12/31/14)

If you add up the total number of Pinocchios, assuming that the single upside down Pinocchio is worth five Pinocchios, you end up with a total of 55 Pinocchios across the 21 statements above. This gives you an average Pinocchio rating of about 2.6, putting per Presidential statement the average degree of lie approaching the “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” level. Four of the 21 statements were assigned four Pinocchios and one was assigned an upside down Pinocchio, making them “Whoppers” or worst. 

You cannot claim you are a transparent Presidency when even a main stream media entity, one that has been very favorable and biased in covering the Obama administration, rates the President’s statements so unfavorable and deceptive. Thus, if his absence in Paris was an epic fail and a missed opportunity, then his failure in the area of transparency and integrity arena was also an epic fail. 

If he was true to his promise of government transparency, he could have ushered in a new dawn of trust between Washington and the rest of the country. The only thing he has ushered in is a new low in trust of anything that comes out of a Washington politician’s mouth. Epic fail. 

More analysis in different areas coming in the following days.

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