November, 2016, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: More Public Education Failures, More IRS Corruption, and An Overwhelming Debt Burden

It is the beginning of 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.

The current monthly record for the number of posts that were needed to cover one month's worth of insanity is ten. We equaled that record last month when we needed ten days to cover one month’s worth of political class insanity. There is a very good chance that the ten day record could fall this month since as we get closer and closer to the election, the volume of ineptness grows almost exponentially. 

But today and for all of the insanity posts this month, let’s start off with a welcome piece of honest political dialog. It comes from a State Department spokesperson. Mark Toner, who is about to start the daily State Department press briefing. In a joking matter, he makes the following quote: "Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy." 

He then burst out laughing at his own quote, indicating he also knew what a joke the Obama administration has been, especially Mr. Toner’s State Department, when it comes to cover ups, lack of transparency, denial of Freedom of Information Act requests, the prosecution of whistle blowers, etc. But at least it was a little refreshing to finally hear some actual honesty out of Washington as we see from the actual clip of the news conference:

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2016/08/when-even-the-state-department-spokesperson-cant-keep-a-straight-face-about-things-anymore-video/

With that context of honesty, let’s see what other insanity has been going down:

1) Obviously, the Federal government and Washington politicians have a lot to say about how our schools educate our kids these days. There is the Federal Department of Education which gobbles up tens of billions of dollars every year in its budget. Since its founding, I would bet that the Department has spent over a trillion dollars over the decades. 

And what have we gotten for our dollars? According to a recent Heritage Foundation article by Walter Williams on October 12, 2016, not much, given the sorry state of public education across the country today:

• 93% of Detroit public school eighth graders are not proficient in reading.
• 96% of them are not proficient in math.
• These horrific results occur even though the state of Michigan spends $13,743 per student every year in Detroit to educate the city’s kids, putting them in the top 6% of per pupil spending in the state.
• In an article by the American Psychological Association, 80% of teachers surveyed say they had been violently victimized at least once in the past or prior year.
• In the public schools of Baltimore, on average, every day four teachers and staff members are assaulted and the Baltimore Sun has reported that that last year over 300 Baltimore school staff members had file workers’ compensation claims because of injuries received via assaults on the job.
• In Detroit, annual teacher attrition rates are about 5% and in California, $20,000 signing bonuses for teachers are not enough to keep teachers from leaving their schools or seeking out less violent schools.

But these problems are not unique to just a few school districts across the country. Many times we have reported how this country's public schools, and the government bureaucrats and politicians that oversee them, spend a lot of money to vastly under educate our kids relative to the rest of the world. One would have hoped that spending a trillion dollars over the years would have had a better payoff than violent schools, dumb kids, and disgruntled teachers.

2) It is pretty clear from all of the evidence that the Obama administration conspired with the IRS several years ago to deny First Amendment rights to hundreds of citizens and organizations that wanted to attain non-profit status from the IRS to indulge in perfectly legal political actions. The applications that were sent to the IRS from Tea Party, Republican, and conservative groups were stonewalled, ignored, or rejected simply because they were not in alignment with the Obama administration’s policies and positions.

Although it can never be proven, such actions may have prevented Romney from becoming President in 2012 since many grassroots organizations had been blocked from putting forth their Romney friendly ideas in front of the public, facilitating Obama's reelection. In any case, such illegal and un-Constitutional action did not help Romney and certainly did not harm Obama, which may have been the plan the whole time.

Alice Greene, writing for the Punching Bag website on October 20, 2016, pointed out that recent judicial actions lend credence to the reality that the IRS did conspired to deny First Amendment rights to many, many Americans:

• While the Obama administration via the IRS and the Justice Department refused to investigate, indict and prosecute those responsible for the denial of tax exempt status to over 500 organizations, the judicial system has stepped and done their job for them to a certain degree.
• District Court Judge Reggie Walton ordered the IRS earlier in October to resolve all pending applications for tax exempt status of the affected groups by November 11, 2016: “The IRS will, at long last, be required to disclose the details of the lawless and unconstitutional Tea Party targeting scheme,” said Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. “As a result of Judge Walton’s order, these years-long applications processes are finally concluding, and the organizations are receiving the review and determinations they deserve. This is a major victory.” 
• As an example of the IRS stonewalling, Sekulow’s organization asked for tax exempt status seven years ago but never received approval.
• This ruling came about because back in August, 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit found that even after all of the publicity and damage done by the IRS, the court found the stonewalling was still going on.

While all of this is good news and those denied their rights have finally had the truth come out, the author points out why this is actually a hollow victory: “November 11th is too late. The damage has already been done. Tea Party groups were unable to operate fully during an important election year. The responsible parties at the IRS has not been punished for blatant criminal activity. If Hillary Clinton is elected President of the United States next month, this sort of behavior will become the norm, and individuals like Lois Lerner will continue to act against conservative groups with no consequence.”

Justice delayed is justice denied and the embedded and corrupt political class wins again even when they lose.

3) Lauren Bowman writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 29, 2016, had some really depressing news as it concerns the terrible financial shape that the Washington political class has placed the country into:

• The House of Representatives Budget Committee recently released their analysis of what our high national debt is doing to our economy and our country.
• As Washington continues to spend more than it collects in taxes in any fiscal year, it has to borrow wealth from other sources to close that annual budget gap, adding to the national debt burden every year.
• On the current spending path, by 2046, every American family will need to pay an incremental $12,000 a YEAR to pay for the accumulated debt and other Federal government expenses.
• Obviously, if every family is paying an additional $12,000 a year in Federal taxes, that is $12,000 fewer dollars they have to buy a house, buy a car, go out to dinner, take a vacation, etc., i.e. that removal of that $12,000 will have a severe economic drag on overall national economic growth.
• We are seeing the beginning of that already since over the past few years, as Obama has doubled the national debt from $10 TRILLION to $20 TRILLION, national economic growth has stagnated at around 2% a year, far less than the historical average which is over 3% a year.
• Not only has overall economic growth suffered under this increasingly heavy debt load, but the number of Americans working part time since the last recession is still up by 42% while about 14 million Americans have left the labor force since 2009, many too discouraged to continue to look for a good job.
• Obviously, once economic growth slows, tax revenue growth slows and the debt gets even worse, leaving the only solution left to contain the damage: substantially reduce government spending.

Outside of Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party, neither Clinton or Trump have any kind of plan to help your kids and your grandkids avoid paying an incremental $12,000 every year to pay for the wasteful spending of today by Washington.

More political class failures in the realm of public education, more corruption in the IRS, and more and more debt that will cripple the economy and the future of our kids and grandkids. 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

February, 2016, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: More Debt, More Taxes, More Disgust With Government

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.

So let’s get started with the latest insanity:

1) According to the history books, one of the main drivers that American colonists had for rebelling against the British was the high level of taxation that the British throne had placed on the colonies. The colonists understood way back then that you could not have political freedom without financial freedom. “Taxation without representation” became their rallying cry and their efforts to throw off the yoke of high taxation led to our freedoms and liberties in subsequent centuries.

Well, according to a recent piece on the Against Crony Capitalism website, taxation with representation is not so great either. Their research found that the average American today spends more on taxes than food, clothing and housing COMBINED (click on the chart for a larger view):



These calculations from the Tax Foundation estimate that all Americans will paid $4.8 trillion in taxes to all government entities in 2015 and spent just over $4 trillion on food, clothing, and housing in 2015. The $4.8 trillion is about 31% of the total national income of all Americans. Thus, in reality, we are paying over 30% of our earnings to the “government” each year, a government that is inept, wasteful, crony infested, and generally incompetent.

Another way to view this taxation repression is to multiply 31% by 365 days of the year, in which case we find that we working until late April each year just to pay the government. Pathetic and insane, a complete contradiction of the principles on which this country was founded.

2) Given the high level of taxation and the wasteful spending that their wealth is used for by the political class, it should not be a surprise that Americans despise government agencies. In fact, according to a new survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Americans' level of satisfaction level in Federal agencies, including everything from Treasury to Homeland Security, has 1) fallen for a third consecutive year and 2) reached an eight-year low.

Not surprisingly, the Treasury Department, home of the notorious IRS, got the lowest marks of satisfaction compared to all other government agencies. Not only are they the ones that come and take our money, they are also the agency that continues to show up as being one of the more inept ones in this blog, one that fails to collect almost $400 billion a year from tax evaders, one that erroneously sends out billions of dollars a each year to criminal activities and enterprises, and the agency that denied the First Amendment rights of millions of citizens by delaying and sandbagging people’s requests to form non-profit entities to support political stances that were contrary to the Obama administration.

"Satisfaction is linked to broader goals in the political system that it wants to maximize, like confidence and trust," said Forrest Morgeson, director of research at the ACSI. "It's much more difficult to govern if the entire population dislikes you." This may partially explain why the Obama administration has been such a failure. It failed to deliver basic government services to Americans, resulting in a record low satisfaction level with government, and in this case the Obama administration. Funny how the eight year low satisfaction was reached seven years into the Obama Presidency.

3) Terrence Jeffrey, writing for the CNS News website on January, 26, 2016, may have identified another reason why satisfaction with government is at an eight year low. According to the article and the U.S. Treasury, the U.S.national debt has grown over $8.3 TRILLION in the first seven years of the Obama administration. This comes out to an additional debt load of $70,612.91 for EVERY U.S. family.

For comparison purposes, before the liberal readers of this blog go nuts, during the entire eight year Bush Presidency, the national debt burden went up just under $4.9 trillion or $44,104.65 for every American household. But given that the Obama administration has another year of debt accumulation to account for, there is a very good chance that Obama will add twice as much debt to America than Bush did. In fact, there is a very good chance that Obama will increase the national debt by the same amount that ALL previous Presidents COMBINED:



From the beginning of Bush’s first term to the end of Obama’s seventh year in office, the national debt increased $13,213,630,160,947.51 which comes out to $112,219.57 for each of the 117,748,000 households that were in the country as of September, 2015. As we said before, taxation with representation is not so great either.Maybe if we had gotten something for our individual $112,219.57 debt burden, we could justify this type of government spending. But our roads and bridges are still falling down, our public schools still fail to educate our kids, our border is still not secure, we are no safer from terror attacks than we were seven years ago, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are still hurtling towards financial insolvency, government operations are wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective, etc. $112,219.57 for basically nothing in return. If government was a new car, we would have had it recalled as a lemon decades ago.That will do it for today’s insanity. An ever growing and crushing debt burden, a never growing and crushing tax burden, and an ever growing disgust with government and the politicians that operate it. And we are just getting warmed for this month’s political class insanity.

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

February, 2015, Part 1: By The Numbers: Military Overreach, Ecnomic Under Perfromance, and More

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. Today, and at least tomorrow, we will look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us.

1) Politicians at all levels of American government, local, state, and Federal, have a lot to say about how our kids are educated. Unfortunately, despite spending trillions and trillions of dollars over the past few decades to educate our kids, the bottom line is that America does a horrible job at education. Our kids constantly fall below the academic performance of many other countries on standardized testing.

Which brings us to our first set of numbers today: what states do the most efficient job of educating our kids with the right combination of expense vs. performance, i.e. most bang for the taxpayer education bucks being spent? There are four combinations to this question, three of which are not optimal:

1. Spend a moderate amount and give kids a great education, the preferred route.
2. Spend a lot and give kids a great education. Not bad but not getting the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars spent.
3. Spend a moderate amount and not optimize the education experience. Taxpayers might be happy but the kids are underserved.
4. Spend a lot and not optimize the education experience. The worst combination, taxpayers pay a lot for little in return.

The National Center For Education Statistic recently put together a state by state index analysis of how well each state fell into each category above. Their findings range all of the map:

• The state of Utah spends its education dollars the most efficiently, scoring 86 points in the index analysis despite spending only $6,441 per pupil, on average, less than every other state in the country. Despite the lowest spending, the Utah’s kids reading and math scores beat 20 other states. Thus, Utah falls into the first category listed above, moderate expense and great education.
• Compare Utah to New York which got only 28 points vs. Utah’s 86 points in the index analysis despite spending a whopping $19,396 per pupil per year, about three times per student that Utah spends with far worse results, falling into the fourth category above: spending a lot and getting very little education bang in return.
• The District of Columbia is even worse than New York, with an analysis value of only 26 despite spending more than even New York per student per year, $19,847.
• Massachusetts is also interesting in that their kids are the most educated in the country but they spend a lot to get that level, generating only 39 points in the analysis, a little more than half as effective as Utah.

In general, as we see in the U.S. map below, states outside of the northeast get much better bang for their education dollars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of kids in the northeast so there are a lot of U.S. kids not getting a good education despite the large amount of money being spent on them on a relative basis.

The bottom line is that some states across the country are getting the best of both worlds: efficiently spending of taxpayer dollars but still getting good to great education results. If the Federal government was doing its job, it would be collecting the best practices from the blue states above and disseminating those best practices across the country. 


But as in most cases, the Federal government bureaucracy, specifically the Department of Education, is not doing its job relative to the rest of the world’s kids. We as a nation end up in the fourth category above, high cost of education with low results.

2) One budget number from Obama's recent Federal budget submittal to Congress stands out. That number is 2.3%, the assumed annual economic growth in our economy in the future. And that number might be optimistic, according to the Congressional Budget Office who foresees an annual economic growth for the country of between 2.1 and 2.2%.

Why are these depressing numbers? Since the end of World War II, annual economic growth in the United States has averaged 3.3%. But since 2007, the annual average growth has been only 1.5%, less than half of the long term trend. 

According to Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum and former Congressional Budget Office Director, if the country does not attain at least an average annual 3% growth per year than the economy will underperform to the tune of NOT producing 1.2 million new jobs and long term will depress average household income by over $4,000.

But the Obama administration does not think we can do any better than a weak 2.3% annual growth. That is how unimaginative their thinking and abilities are. If we agree with their status quo approach, than the economic reach, freedom, and wealth of all Americans will be lower than any time since the end of the Great Depression.

But it does not have to be that way, as we pointed out with many suggestions in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government:”

• Simplify the tax code, with an emphasis on overall tax reduction, so that it promotes growth and injects capital into the private sector of the economy where it can be used more efficiently than wasted by the Federal bureaucracy.
• Reduce Federal government spending by 10% a year for five years to get the deficit spending and national debt burden under control to reduce the amount of wealth that the country has to devote for debt payments and interest on the national debt.
• Reduce the ridiculous amount of over regulation of business in this country so that business owners can focus on growing their business and the economy and not on complying with inane Federal regulations.
• Finally come up with a strategic national energy plan that reduces the outflow American wealth to oil exporting countries and reducing the economic burden of energy costs for businesses and consumers, freeing up more money for economic growth.
• Fix the problem of escalating healthcare costs once and for all, something that Obama Care comes nowhere close to doing, in order to free up more wealth for economic growth.

It is possible to return the country to robust economic status. It is just the current set of Washington politicians are not capable of doing the job, otherwise they would have done it already.

3) One last set of distressing numbers for today. According to a recent Huffington Post article:

• During the fiscal year 2014, the Federal government had deployed U.S. Special Operations military personnel into 133 countries around the world.
• Thus, we have military personnel in 70% of the world’s nations.
• These numbers in the article supposedly come from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt who is a public affairs officer with the U.S. Special operations Command (SPOCOM).
• At some time over the past three years, our Special Forces were in a staggering 150 different countries.
• Their missions ranged from training to kill or capture military raids.

I get it that we need to protect the country and our citizens from terrorists that might be anywhere in the world. But do we really need to be in 150 countries? Is that a cost effective way to spend our military budget dollars? Is that a good diplomacy approach to build good relations with other countries and their citizens, sticking U.S. special Forces in 150 different countries? I would love to see a cost benefit analysis of such a world wide interference and/or presence in so many countries but I doubt that it exists. 

Maybe, just maybe, these deployment numbers are why the Defense Department budget is so high, regard for America is so low, and our safety from terrorists attacks seems to get weaker and weaker every day.

That will do it for today’s numbers:

• Military personnel and the supporting budget deployed in well over a hundred different countries.
• A political class that has no clue how to grow the economy to at least historical standards and is planning for anemic growth in the future.
• We continue to spend education dollars in record numbers for minimal results despite some states that have found ways to spend a moderate amount of money for outstanding educational results.

More depressing numbers tomorrow as we continue to prove that we are living through an inept and unimaginative set of politicians whose inability to lead and create is depressing our wallets, our freedoms, and our futures. The numbers prove it.

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

August, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Bonus Post: Incredibly Stupid Political Quotes, Spying On The Senate, and Paying More For Prisons Than Schools

Just when we think we have corralled and documented all of the political class insanity from the previous month, by the time the posts are run, more insanity pops up. The latest insanity is requiring us to do this bonus post on the subject even though we promised yesterday would be the last insanity post for this month.

The following gems from the American political class cannot wait until next month. They are perfect illustrations of how wasteful, out of touch, and inept the current set of American politicians have become and how inefficient and ineffective the government operations they oversee have become.

1) The Washington Times recently wrote an article that again exposed the reality that many Federal government employees across many government agencies spend a lot of their time and taxpayer wealth looking at pornography on their government issued computers on government work time:

• The latest scandal of government employees viewing pornography on work time is centered at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
• But investigation records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the problem is widespread.
• One FCC employee is quoted in the Times article that the reason government employees view porn on the job is that “things were slow, he told investigators, so he perused it “out of boredom.” 
• One FCC employee was found to be accessing porngraphy on the Internet about eight hours a week during work hours.

You know that government has grown too large when even government employees admit that there are too many Federal workers chasing too little work to do that watching pornography is how they fill their days. And politicians like Nancy Pelosi continue to shout there is no place to cut government spending. Pathetic on both counts. 

A more detailed description of the problem can be seen at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/08/164037-wait-hear-federal-workers-excuses-surfing-porn-8-hours-week-job/

2) Quotes from people like Nancy Pelosi are what keep many bloggers knee deep in rich material. Another great place for idiotic quotes is from Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. She recently, and I think unintentionally, said the President Obama does less than work than any other President since Grover Cleveland. Huh? Why would you call the leader of your political party lazy and why Grover Cleveland, what data suggest that Obama and Cleveland are that lazy? 

You decide what she was saying with the following quote:

“… by voting for the first time in American history to sue the President of the United States for doing his job. And doing his job actually, less often and at a rate that is lower than any President since Grover Cleveland…”

When Democrats are saying that the President is lazy than something must really be wrong at the White House, which may explain the sad shape of the country. More details and her actually speaking the quote can be seen at:

http://eaglerising.com/7704/awesome-democrat-leader-say-obama-never-works/#BbjmViXxEotbEJGd.99

3) While Wasserman-Schultz’s comment is pretty funny political class insanity, the following insanity is not. The Central Intelligence Agency admitted illegally and immorally hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, contrary to what CIA Director Saxby Chambliss vehemently denied of doing so earlier this year. Thus, even though government agencies like the CIA and the NSA were formed to spy on and protect us from foreign threats, it appears that they have now gone rogue and are focusing taxpayer wealth and resources on spying on anyone in the country, from the lowest citizen to U.S. Senators.

The Washington Times reported, based on an internal CIA audit, that CIA personnel did indeed illegally search a Senate computer system, trying to find a damaging document that the agency believed had been stolen, but which Senators said the CIA had voluntarily turned over to Congress. Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who initiated a Senate probe of the snooping, said the CIA’s behavior was “appalling and deeply threatening to our system of checks and balances” and that agency leaders need to take steps to restore trust.

Great, now the politicians know how it feels to be spied on for no reason and having their Constitutional protections ripped away in secrecy.

4) Okay, back to political silliness. Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has also been a great source for insanity and inane comments. Her most famous quote is when she publicly wondered if the Mars Rover was going to go past the site where Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. You cannot make this stuff up.

Recently she got all up and crazy when discussing the fact that House Republicans have initiated a formal law suit against the President for his continual overstepping of Constitutional bounds.

According to various news reports, Lee not only claimed that the law suit was little more than a forerunner to impeaching Obama, but that she and her Democrat colleagues never considered impeaching George W. Bush: 

“I ask my colleagues to oppose this resolution for it is in fact a veiled attempt at impeachment and it undermines the law that allows a President to do his job. A historical fact: President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority.”

Unfortunately for Lee, not only did the House Democrats actually did introduce a resolution in 2008 to impeach Bush but…..Sheila Jackson Lee co-sponsored it. 

Liar, forgetful, or senile? You decide.

5) Let’s keep going with the silliness. Congresswoman Maxine Walters' history of saying outrageous and often insulting things is well known. A few years ago in public she actually said that all supporters of the Tea Party should go to hell. Nice language from a supposed leader of the country, telling ordinary citizens to go to hell for simply having a different opinion than hers.

News reports say that Congresswoman Waters recently gave a speech at the Islamic Society of Orange County, California, where she called those who oppose Islamic Sharia law implementation “bigots” and “fear mongers.”

For those of you that do not know what Sharia law is, beware. It is a most intolerant form of religious justice that is barbaric and intolerant of women, gays, and just about everything else. But according to Ms. Walters, those that oppose this type of man-focused harsh rules and judgments are the bigots. Unbelievable.

6) And finally consider this analysis from the Heritage Foundation that shows how screwed up this country is from a priority perspective. We recently looked at a report that showed the prison incarceration rate by country. Unfortunately and embarrassingly, the United States had both the highest number of citizens in prison and the highest per capita imprisonment rate.

Very, very sad that a country with our heritage of freedom and liberty would lock up so many of its citizens. I would bet that a large percentage of those imprisoned are for non-violent drug usage but the discussion on our lost war on drugs is for another day.

The damning research from the Heritage Foundation found the following bad priorities:

• The research shows nearly all states spend more on prisons than on our kids' public education in their states.
• In some states the difference is amazing, e.g. in New York, that state spends about $60,076 per prison inmate annually but only $20,639 per pubic school student annually.
• Which raises the question: if the political class actually knew how to operate successful schools and education, would there be less need to spend money on incarcerating citizens later down the road? Are the two connected?
• Heritage raises the same question: Would you rather have your taxpayer dollars going to an increase in school funding per K-12 student if that helped reduce the cost imposed by poorly educated offenders thanks to the high current outflow of funding prisoners?

How did we get this screwed up by our politicians that we spend so much more putting and keeping people behind bars vs. educating our kids for a better future for themselves and their families? And ask yourself this disturbing question: do you really think that people like Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Walters, Harry Reid and the rest of the do-nothings in Washington have any chance or any ability or desire to fix this situation? 

Given their complete lack of evidence of any problem solving or strategic planning ability, I see no way that they have the courage or the smarts to fix this situation. Einstein once said: “We cannot expect to fix our problems using the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.” Replace the word “thinking” with the words “incumbent politicians” and you will see what I mean.

To see how your individual state’s expenses for prison matches up to you state’s spending on education, go to the following website:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/02/state-funding-go-school-books-orange-jumpsuits/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

That will definitely do it for this month’s insanity, I just cannot take it any more. I am sure the quotes will keep coming, the porn will keep flowing, and the dollars will still be wasted when we check back in next month on the antics and silliness of our 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Today's News Outlets: Where Freedom of The Press and Integrity Has Been Replaced By Conflict Of Interest, Part 2

Yesterday, we took a first cut at examining our hypothesis that freedom and integrity of the press have been replaced by blatant conflict of interests on the part of our news outlets. We examined the family relationships that exist between high ranking officials in the Obama administration and their relatives, spouses, etc. who hold high ranking positions in news organizations that have generally given the Obama administration failures a free pass.

We discussed how many career journalists have forsaken their careers in journalism to take high ranking positions int he Federal government and how all of these former journalists came from news organizations that were almost always easy on and sympathetic to the Obama administration's many failures and shortcomings. In both areas. we raised the question of whether conflict of interest was becoming more important in today's press than integrity of reporting.

Today we will continue that loss of integrity question, starting with the old cover photo switcheroo tactics of Time magazine:

3) The September 16, 2013 issue of Time magazine in the United States had a picture of a football player and the question: “Is it time to pay college athletes?” Nothing suspicious there unless you find out what Time put on the cover of its non-United States covers for their September 16th edition:






Yes, the rest of the world got a feature article and cover that focused on the rise of Vladimir Putin and how he had rescued President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the rest of the world from a potential military fiasco if the U.S. had attacked Syria. We have already discussed what a mess the President had made of the Syria crisis in a series of posts starting with:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/political-class-insanity-special.html

We will not go into those Syrian details here. The real story is how the left leaning news organization, Time magazine, has protected the President’s foreign policy bungling  by not carrying the same article about Putin’s rise to prominence at the expense of the United States in its U.S. edition.

The foreign covers acknowledge Putin’s triumph over Obama, telling foreigners that Putin “doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.” Another example of certain news outlets protecting “their” guys rather than being true journalists and reporting facts and realities.

Oh, by the way, Time editor Rick Stengel was a managing editor of Time magazine over the summer but recently fulfilled his decision to leave Time magazine for a position …wait for it…of running the State Department’s public diplomacy mission. He will be working for none other than John Kerry, one of the Obama administration bumblers who totally mismanaged the Syria situation. He apparently received the offer early this summer and immediately accepted but not leaving Time until very recently.

Makes you wonder if journalistic integrity took a back seat to a new job in the State Department when  Mr. Stengel got around to putting the latest Time magazine covers together, both domestic and foreign.

4) But apparently, this is not the first time that Time magazine has protected their guy on the left by having a  different cover in the U.S. edition of Time magazine from the covers shown across the world. On July 2, 2012, the overseas covers featured China’s fast-growing manufacturing sector, while the U.S. cover was about “The History of the American Dream.” Wouldn’t America have been better served if we had a better understanding of how well China was doing vs. our shrinking manufacturing base?

The Dec. 5, 2011 cover featured an alarming picture of Egyptian street protests, while the U.S. cover told increasingly worried U.S. readers that “Anxiety is Good for You.” Wouldn’t America have been better served to learn all it could about the dynamics and forces going on in Egypt, a situation that the administration never saw coming, than worrying about how good anxiety was for us? 

Yes, in both cases it would have been more beneficial and better journalism if these real world problems were presented to the American public. However, it would not have put the Obama administration in the best light so just like with the Putin/Syira cover switcheroo, Time magazine took the political way rather than the integrity way.

5) One last example of potential journalistic conflicts of interest. This one had baffled me for a while until I understood the underlying dynamics. To me, for the last five years, MSNBC has been nothing more than an extension of the Obama administration’s public relations arm. 

Everything Obama did, no matter how much it blew up and failed, was either a success or the result of Republican or conservative sabotage. If you did not agree with the President’s policies, according to MSNBC you were a racist. Facts, realities, respect for a difference of opinion did not matter, you were a racist or an idiot. Hardly the stuff of unbiased news reporting.

The nadir of MSNBC’s reporting occurred during the run up to the 2012 Presidential election. At that time, MSNBC put together a montage of movie scenes where buses exploded into a fiery death scenes. They billed the video as a wish that this would happen to the Mitt Romney Presidential touring bus. 

At that moment it became abundantly clear to me that MSNBC, more than any other news source in this country, had lost all journalistic and human integrity when it wished a fiery death on a political opponent. The details of this disgrace and our contempt and disgust for their behavior can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/06/hated-and-vile-polticial-dialog.html

But I still wondered what would make a so-called news organization behave so disgracefully. And then it hit me. Up until relatively recently, MSNBC and its sister news properties had been owned by General Electric. 

General Electric received hundreds of millions of dollars from Obama’s economic stimulus program. General Electric does a nice chunk of business with the U.S. government and the U.S. Military. The General Electric chairman sat on Obama’s economic development council. A council that accomplished nothing. But most importantly, General Electric generally makes billions and billions of profit dollars every year and usually gets a tax refund, rarely paying anything in U.S. business income tax. Details at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/06/relationship-between-president-obama.html

Thus, there has been a very cozy relationship between General Electric and the Obama administration, one that likely extended into the world of journalism, given how rabidly MSNBC protects Obama’s image and interests, and how much, until recently, General Electric benefited from Obama’s policies and lack of any tax reform strategy.

As I said before, I am not making any accusations of conflict of interest, quid pro quo, etc. But I believe that we no longer have a free press in this country, we have a press that takes sides, distorts facts, ignores facts, and denies the American public the ability to make decisions based on the realities and facts of our issues.

And maybe that is one of the reasons why major issues of our times never get resolved. We are still losing the war on drugs after decades of failure. We are still under educating our kids relative to the rest of the world, a situation that Reagan identified as a problem thirty years ago. We still do not have a coherent national energy strategy, almost forty years after the Arab oil shocks. 

Quite possibly, as the examples over the past two days have shown, our press has been too busy concealing and spending much less time help us correct: “No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” Tom Stoppard

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

The Lamest Set Of Politicians EVER - Only 18 Trivial Laws Passed In The First Seven Months Of 2013

In the first seven months of 2012, the political class in Washington had managed to pass and enact a meager 54 pieces of legislation. At that time, it was viewed as the least productive set of Federal politicians in the history of the United States. A pathetic performance from so-called leaders, people who on average earn more than three times the annual income of the average American family.

But, as we have observed many times in this blog, just when you think our politicians cannot get any worse, they manage to under perform even more. According to an article in a recent issue of Business Week magazine, in the first seven months of 2013, Washington politicians have managed to enact a meager 18 pieces of legislation. Beyond pathetic.

Now, I have never supported passing legislation for the sake of passing legislation. Far more often than not, when politicians pass laws to resolve a problem they end up making the problem worse or waste far more taxpayer wealth. 

But if minimal legislation enactment resolves major issues, I am all for it. And Lord knows we are suffering through a ton of weighty problems in this country:

1. Unemployment is chronic and has set records for being above 7% for the longest period in our history.
2. Our national debt is any almost incomprehensible $17 TRILLION, a per American debt load of well over $50,000 per person.
3. Our public schools have been under educating our kids for decades relative to kids around the world in countries who spend far less than we do to educate our kids.
4. We have been fighting a losing war on drugs for decades which has created violent international drug cartels without fixing the original problem with drug addiction.
5. Our borders leak and we have over 10 million illegal immigrants hiding in this country.
6. Our health care costs are ever escalating and Obama Care is making the situation worse every day.
7. Decades after the oil shocks of the 1970s, we still do not have a coherent national energy policy and strategy.

If Congress and Obama enacted only seven pieces of legislation but those seven pieces resolved these seven problems, I would be ecstatic. 

But, passing only 18 pieces of legislation in seven months is really pathetic. And what is beyond pathetic, as documented in Business Week, is what these 18 pieces of legislation were actually for. Trust me when I tell you that none of the 18 were worth the pay rate of Obama and the 535 members of Congress:

1) Four of the pieces of legislation were not new laws at all, they only renewed existing laws:

• Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013
• Animal Drug and Animal Generic Drug User Fee Reauthorization Act of 2013.
• Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013.
• Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, needed to avoid a government shutdown.

2) Two of the eighteen pieces of legislation were not renewals of existing laws but were simply small tweaks to existing laws:

• H.R. 475 amended the IRS code, adding a $.75 excise tax on some flu vaccines.
• S.716 modified the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012

3) One of the eighteen pieces of legislation undid an existing law:

• The Reducing Flight Delay Act of 2013.

4) That leaves 11 remaining, underwhelming pieces of legislation:

• NO Budget NO Pay Act of 2013 which stopped salary payments to Congressional members if their respective houses of Congress did not produce a government budget proposal on time. Doesn’t stipulate that the budget is good or has been passed, just makes sure that each house has a budget document on time, no matter how lame it is.
• The District Of Columbia Chief Financial Officer Vacancy Act which allowed the acting chief financial officer to act as the DC chief financial officer until the job is officially filled.
• The Stolen Valor Act of 2012 which made lying about your military service for financial gain a crime.
• The Freedom Fish Act which allowed Tennessee and Kentucky fishermen to fish in areas that the Army Corp Of Engineers wanted to ban fishing from.
• H.R. 360 which awarded a Congressional Gold Medal to 1963 Sixteenth Baptist Church bombing victims.
• H.R. 324 awarded the same medal to a World War II American/Canadian commando unit.
• The Disaster Relief Appropriations Act sent $60 billion to Hurricane Sandy victims, possibly the only real piece of legislation passed in the past seven months.
• H.R. 1151 ordered the Secretary of State to endorse Taiwan’s attendance at an international aviations regulations meeting. You cannot make up this nonsense.
• H.R. 1071 let’s the U.S. Mint print coins for baseball’s 75th anniversary of its Hall of Fame opening.
• H.R. 2383 renamed a bridge in the St. Louis area for recently passed away baseball legend Stan Musial.

Again, you could not make up such an inane, underwhelming list of legislative accomplishments if you tried. Not a single one of these enacted bills will have any impact on the seven major issues we listed above, issues that touch the lives of every single American in one way or another. 

These eighteen pieces of legislation, giving out medals, renaming a bridge, opening up fishing grounds, etc. should have been handled in the first hour of the first day of their first meeting back in January. It should not have taken seven months to come up with this garbage.

How much did this cost the American taxpayer? If you assume the average Congressional member makes about $170,000 a year and throw in the President’s salary, on a seven month prorated basis, just the salary cost to come up with these 18 pieces of legislation is well over $50 million. I maintain that we would have been better off as a nation if we had saved the $50 million and did not have to deal with these 18 pieces of legislation.

But the cost is far higher than $50 million. This estimate is just for salaries. It does not include the loaded benefits of Washington politicians and does not include the salary and benefits of the thousands of Congressional and Presidential staff members who worked to produce this lame list of legislative “accomplishments.” I would venture a guess that the American taxpayer paid over a billion dollars for this legislative non-accomplishment.

But the far greater cost is that we have allowed the Washington political class to waste and wallow away another seven months of inaction and we are no closer to resolving any of the major issues facing the nation. Seven months have gone by and unemployment is still chronic, our debt is still going up, our kids are still getting under educated, etc. That is the true loss and true embarrassment of this, the lamest set of Washington politicians in the history of our nation.

If you feel the same way and are tired of their lameness, please join our cause to implement term limits for all Federal politicians at the following website:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, after a paltry passage of eighteen bills in seven months, bills that are next to useless when running the affairs of the nation, how much worse could it get? 

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 

It's Now Official: Political Campaign Donors More Important Than Constituents, Part 1

Many Americans had long suspected that Congress and other Washington politicians were not working very hard for the good of the country and the good of their constituents. The war on drugs was declared over forty years and is still a lost cause. In the early 1980s, a Reagan commission on pubic education showed how poorly our schools were educating our kids. Three decades later that situation has gotten even worse. In the 1970s, the nation’s economy was shocked any number of times by oil shortages, exposing the fact that the country did not have a long term strategic plan for energy independence and stability. Almost four decades later we still have no such plan.

What the heck has Congress and the politicians in it been doing for the past four or five decades? We know that they do not work 40 hour weeks, 50 weeks a year. In fact, Congress will only be in session about 115 days this year. What do they do during these less than robust working hours.? They obviously are not coming up with solutions to the major issues facing the nation.

Well, thanks to a January 8, 2013 Huffington Post article, it is pretty obvious why they have not resolved any major issue: they really are not working on them, being far more concerned with raising money for their next election and their political party. Details from the article include the following details and disgraces:

• The two writers of the Huffington Post article got their hands on a PowerPoint presentation that was given to freshmen Congressmen and women by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
• The presentation outlined how a typical member of Congress should spend their days when actually in Washington.
• This prototype daily schedule laid out by the Democratic leadership expects a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington, of which four hours are to be spent in “call time,“ i.e. calling people in order to get them make a political campaign donation.
• Another hour is supposed to be dedicated to "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work, i.e. more fundraising time and effort.
• Another hour is to be blocked off for "recharge."
• And finally, three to four hours a day are to be used for the actual work of being a member of Congress -- hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents.
• It is especially good if these constituents are also high potential donors, kind of like killing two birds with one shot.
• In addition to these daily fund raising activities, the presentation also made sure that Congressional members knew that they had to take time to compile quarterly fundraising reports for the Federal Election Commission, more time and energy taken away from actually doing real work and solving real problems.

So, not only do members of Congress not do a lot of real work, i.e. solving problems, there is an actual formal process that discourages that type of problem solving behavior in favor of raising money to keep incumbents in office. No wonder nothing ever gets resolved or real budgets developed and lived up to or fraud and waste wrung out of government operations, the political class is off taking care of themselves and their political careers.

Let’s do some simple math:

1. The average American works about 250 days a year, 50 weeks by five days a week.
2. Congress will be in session about 115 days this year. Let’s assume that they will work another 25 days a year back in their home state or Congressional district, giving them a work year of 140 days.
3. Thus, relative to the average American, Congressional members work only 64% as long (140/250).
4. During the average workday, the average American works about 8 hours a day.
5. During an average workday, we now know from Hufffington Post that the average Congressional members only works about four hours a day on real work.
6. Thus, the average politician works half as hard on real work than the average American (4 hours a day/8 hours a day).
7. Since a member of Congress earns about $170,000 a year, given their work load and what we now know they spend their time on, their annual pay should be reduced to $54,400:

$54,400 = $170,000 X .64 (ratio of working days) X .5 (ratio of working hours per day)

This would be a truer measure of their value, not $170,000. And at $54,400, given their poor productivity, they still might be overpaid.

Consider some quotes from the article that prove how ludicrous and shameful this behavior is:

• "What’s my experience with it? You might as well be putting bamboo shoots under my fingernails. It’s the most painful thing, and they’re no sooner elected and they’re down there making phone calls for the election in 2014." said Congressman. John Larson , a high-ranking Democrat.
• According to former Congressman Tom Perriello, who now works at the Center for American Progress, the four hours allocated to fundraising may even be "low-balling the figure so as not to scare the new Members too much."
• "It bites into your private life. It bites into your leisure time. You shouldn't only do what you have to do, you should be able to read. ... It cuts into time members spend with each other," said former Congressman Barney Frank.
• "It really does affect how members of Congress behave if the most important thing they think about is fundraising. You end up being nice to people that probably somebody needs to be questioning skeptically. It's a fairly disturbing suggested schedule. You won't ask tough questions in hearings that might displease potential contributors, won't support amendments that might anger them, will tend to vote the way contributors want you to vote,” said former Congressman Brad Miller.
• "One thing that's always been striking to me is even the members playing a leading role on specific issues actually could not talk about the issues. They didn't have enough knowledge on their own issues to talk about them at length. I'm probably guilty of that," said a current member of Congress who wished to remained anonymous.

So we end up with distracted members of Congress, members of Congress that do not ask the tough questions or make the tough calls because it could affect fundraising, and we have members of Congress that do not know the details and ramifications of what they are voting on and sponsoring. Great, no wonder nothing ever gets resolved.

This article alone justifies Step 39 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federally elected officials. Maybe if all of these members of Congress knew that they could not run for office for a second term, they would focus more and doing the right thing and not hitting up the right political donor. How much worse could it get with term limits compared to the current process laid out in the Huffington Post article?

If we implement Step 39, which would remove the word “incumbent” from our political vocabulary, and combine it with Step 6, which would allow only individual American citizens to contribute to political campaigns, we might finally get back to representative government that is for the people and by the people as opposed to the current government which is by the political donor and for the political donor.

Two final thoughts:

1. The article also exposes the seedy underside of committee assignments. We will cover this other disgrace and insult to democracy tomorrow.
2. Second, consider a paragraph from the article and visualize the writers’ description of “call time.” It reminds me of a prison work detail, I picture these Congressional people marching off in a straight line to the hard labor work of making fundraising calls, chained together in striped prison garb, based on the writers’ vivid description of the process:

Congress members make the dreaded calls from a room in the office of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or a similar one at the headquarters of the National Republican Congressional Committee. After votes in the House, a stream of congressmen and women can be seen filing out of the Capitol and, rather than returning to their offices, heading to rowhouses nearby on First Street for call time, or directly to the parties' headquarters. The rowhouses, where Larson said he prefers to make calls, are typically owned by lobbyists, fundraisers or members themselves, and are used for call time because it's illegal to solicit campaign cash from the official congressional office. Former Rep. Walt Minnick's (D-Idaho) career in finance enabled him to buy a Capitol Hill rowhouse that he allows Democrats to use for call time. "There's less turmoil and background noise" in the rowhouses compared with the DCCC call center, said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who retired from office this year.

Again, disgraceful and certainly not worth $170,000 per year per Congressional member.
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