Almost Five Years Later, The Obama Presidency Is Still A Failure

A few years ago we did a series of posts that summarized the dozens and dozens of failures of the Obama administration. The failures include law breaking, lies, unConstitutional actions, and many other screw ups. In our opinion. Obama oversaw one of the worst Presidential administrations in recent time, getting nothing accomplished except to get his massive ego stroked for eight years. During that time, the lives and financial conditions for ordinary Americans went downhill the whole time.

We called this series of posts “The End Of An Error…”. Place that phrase in the search box above and you can review all of the failures that Obama accomplished.

The American Freedom Fighters website recently reviewed this failed administration and listed out many of those failures and scandals:

• Mexican gun running to drug cartels
• The purposeful slaughtering of Seal Team 6.
• The Obama State Department and Hillary Clinton lying about Benghazi.
• Voter fraud when military personnel did not get their votes counted and some counties where more votes were cast than there were registered voters.
• The NSA monitoring the phone calls, emails, and other communications of journalists and millions and millions of ordinary Americans, violating their First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights.
• Giving a private company, 123 Technologies, $300 million of taxpayer money right before the company went bankrupt and was sold to the Chinese, giving the American taxpayer no return on the $300 million.
• Giving weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
• Using the IRS to target and harass his political enemies.
• Using Kathleen Sebelius, the head of the HHS agency under him, to illegally shake down health insurance companies.
• Giving Solyndra $500 million of taxpayer wealth, a company that declared bankruptcy just three months later and which was sold to, wait for it, the Chinese, wasting half a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth.
• Ordering the release of almost 10,000 illegal immigrants and lying about it, blaming the budget sequester.
• The President’s repeated violation of Federal law by not providing Congress a budget in the legal timeline required by law.
• The purposeful and illegal recess appointments to Federal government jobs, an effort that the Supreme Court ruled illegal.
• His State Department’s interfering with the inspector general’s investigation into a sexual misconduct situation in the State Department.
• Facilitating the lying of Hillary Clinton, IRS executives, James Clapper, and Eric Holder to Congress and the American people.

Quite a list of failures and only a partial list. This listing does not include his multiple, annual trillion dollar Federal budget deficits. Adding almost as much debt to the nation’s debt load as all other previous Presidents combined. The failure of Obama Care along so many dimensions. Playing over 300 rounds of golf, more rounds than any other President over the previous 60 years.

You get the idea. Eight years of a Presidency and nothing to show for it. Sometimes you think that Washington politicians must be fooling with us, nobody can be that inept. Or as Groucho Marx once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” It is almost as if Groucho knew Obama personally.

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/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

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

 

 

The Obama Era, Part 3: Memories From The Worst Presidency Ever?

We are coming up on the end of another year so I thought it might be a good time to review everything that I remember about the Obama administration. He has been in office for seven years, seven long years that in my opinion have been horrific in so many ways. This was someone who entered office with approval ratings that were above 70% and who represented the so-called “hope and change” that many Americans were seeking.

Seven years later hope has become very scarce and change has almost always been for the worst. Now, before someone says that I am just a sour grapes Republican, conservative, or neo-con, understand that I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life (I started voting in the 1970s). Up until 2010, I had never voted for Republican for national office in my life. I fully support gay rights and respect a woman’s legal right to an abortion. Thus, none of what you are about to read over the next few days comes from a Republican sour grapes perspective.

But unless you have had completely had your head in the sand or elsewhere, this has been the worst Presidency that I have experienced in my lifetime. From horrid legislation (e.g. Obama Care) to a failed foreign policy (e.g. Syria) to daily lawlessness on the part of this administration (e.g. use of unsecured email accounts by high ranking administration members), the ineptness and ineffectiveness of this administration is mind boggling.

Thus, given this set up, in no particular order, this is what I will remember about the Obama Presidency:

- I remember that Obama found time in his first term, a period of time, marked by high unemployment and stagnant economic growth, to film a television commercial for the George Lopez show, to appear on The View television show, to appear on Oprah’s television show, to jet off to Europe to lobby for his home town of Chicago to get a Summer Olympics (an effort that failed miserably), and to conduct an untold number of photo ops with athletic teams, college and professional, despite promising that if elected President he would devote his entire life to serving Americans. 

- I will remember how peeved Obama was when American aid worker James Foley was beheaded by ISIS since it forced him to hold a perfunctory press conference in order to not miss his golf tee time.

- I will remember how the number of Americans receiving monthly food assistance has increased and stayed 50% above the levels they were at when he became President, indicating that his economic policies are a failure or his ability and plan to curtail food assistance fraud is a failure.

- I remember that this administration was also not able to produce anything close to an enduring peace arrangement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

- I will remember how this administration allowed North Korea and Iran to get seven years closer to becoming a nuclear weapons power.

- I will remember how Obama’s Afghanistan policies and strategies has not come close to defeating the Taliban after seven years, requiring him to continue to deploy thousands of U.S. troops in the country into an indefinite future.

- I will remember how this administration presided over the first credit agency downgrade of the Federal government’s creditworthiness in the history of the country.

- I will remember how this administration’s economic policies failed to improve the economic plight of minorities in this country, both on an absolute basis and relative to non-minorities.

- I will remember how Obama promised not to appoint high powered lobbyists to positions of power in his administration and once elected, promptly installed high powered lobbyists in his administration.

- I will remember how Obama ignored existing law forbidding foreign military aid to any country that is toppled by a military coup when a military coup toppled an elected government in Egypt but still received American military aid.

- I will remember how Obama illegally allowed lucrative taxpayer funded financial credits to Congressional members and their staffs to pay for Obama Care policies in violation of the Obama Care legislation.

- I will remember how this administration abused Federal government resources to inhibit and harass companies and businesses (e.g. Gibson Guitar and Boeing) whose business agendas did not line up with the President’s political agenda.

- I will remember how this administration intentionally violated the WARN act by telling companies to not announce layoffs that were in compliance with the WARN Act prior to the 2012 Presidential election, promising to pay any WARN Act fines in the future with taxpayer money those companies may incur as a result of violating the WARN as requested by the Obama administration.

- I will remember how this administration violated the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 by illegally allowing able bodied welfare recipients not to fulfill the weekly work requirements of that legislation.

- I will remember how Obama failed to fire James Clapper, a high ranking member of the President’s national security team, after Clapper lied to Congress about how much electronic information the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting on every American citizen.

- I will remember how Obama personally signed off on the assassination of American citizens in foreign lands, e.g. the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki via a drone attack in Yemen, denying him and other citizens a fair trial by their peers, negating the rights, and lives, of al-Awlaki and at least three other American citizens, violating their right “to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Fourth Amendment, and the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.

- I will remember how Obama failed to fire Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius after she allegedly pressured insurance companies to illegally contribute to the promotion and advancement of Obama Care.

- I will remember how Obama failed to fire Kathleen Sebelius after she violated the Hatch Law when she campaigned/endorsed a Democrat for office in North Carolina.

- I will remember how Obama failed to fire Kathleen Sebelius for general incompetence in overseeing the horrid rollout of Obama Care.

- I will remember how Obama slandered and cast slurs to Americans who happen to have a valid different opinion than his relative to global warming.

- I will remember how this administration violated the Federal Information Security Information Act (FISMA) by giving the Obama Care information systems infrastructure “authority to operate” even though it failed the required FISMA’s security control assessment.

- I will remember how Obama promised to use the Justice Department to go after any American who insults a Muslim but ignores Louis Farrakhan’s threat to gather 10,000 African-Americans to kill white Americans.

- I will remember how this President always took great interest when a white person killed a young black man but took no interest when black Americans killed black Americans, when a black person killed a white person, or when illegal immigrants he allowed to stay in this country killed American citizens.

- I will remember how Obama and his family spent hundreds of millions of dollars jet setting around the world for vacations, often disguised as pseudo government events.

- I will remember how Obama insulted Special Olympics children and their families when early in his term he compared his horrific bowling skills to the athletic skills of a Special Olympics athlete.

- I will remember how this administration and this President intentionally manipulated U.S. intelligence data regarding terrorism and ISIS to make it appear that their current foreign and military policies were performing better than they actually were.

- I will remember how this President labelled ISIS as a “JV” terrorist group right before it took over large swaths of territories and major cities in Iraq and Syria, how he assured the world that ISIS was “contained” right before a major terror cell, supported by ISIS, hit multiple targets in Paris France, killing over a hundred people and wounding hundreds, and how he boldly assured Americans that there was no credible terrorist threat on the horizon right before two terrorists killed 14 people and wounded at least 22 people in San Bernardino, California.

I will remember a lot about this Presidency, almost all of it very forgettable, regrettable and often disgusting, as we have discussed over the past three days. President Obama could have been one of the most impactful Presidents of all time. He came into office with sky high popularity and approval ratings. His party had a sizable majority in the House Of Representatives. He had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The country was ready to turn away from the Republican party.

But let’s review. We have had a President who sits silent and allows ordinary Americans with intelligent, informed, contrary opinions to be slandered and demeaned by his political allies. 

He uses deception as he tries to incite different segments of America against each other for his political gain. 

Every one of his economic policies have been failures. 

It is always all about him.

He tramples on the principles laid out in the Constitution, ignoring the rule of law as he sees as convenient, often trampling the liberties and rights of Americans in the process. 

Often it seems like his golf game, his fund raising trips, and his vacations are more important than running and leading the country.

His foreign policy activities have mostly been failures, failures that are dwarfed by the unfolding disaster known as Obama Care. 

He has not resolved, or even come close to presenting coherent plans to address the major issues of our times while the faulty operational aspects of the Federal government continue to be redundant, wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective. 

But the biggest reason for his disasters is his narcissistic inability to take personal responsibility for his actions and subsequent failures. It is never his fault. Someone else always ruins his plans. This lack of humility means a person never looks inward to see how he or she could improve. And a President without the ability to self evaluate and improve ends up leading a country that does not improve. 

And that is what I will remember most: this country, our freedoms, our democracy, and our financial well being are in far worse shape today than they were on that long ago day in January, 2009 when the Obama Error began.




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

April, 2015, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Drunk In The Secret Service, Prostitute Soliciting InThe Justice Department, Crimes In The Senate and More

Every month we do a regular series under the theme, “political class insanity.” We look at the many,many different, and often original, ways that the American political class wastes our tax dollars, undermines our freedoms, and generally act in the most idiotic ways possible, via their quotes, actions, and laws. For past examples of hundreds of instances of political class insanity, just page through the historical listings on the right side of this page at the beginning of each month or enter “political class insanity” in the search box above.

We usually do not start a new month’s insanity until the current month has ended. However, given the political class idiocy seems to be increasing, we are starting May’s insanity review a day early in order to get a little head start on what is shaping up as an epic month of insanity.

1) Eric Holder recently stepped down as Attorney General for the country. Before he did so, he found it necessary to issue a department wide edict that warned Justice Department not to solicit prostitutes: “I want to reiterate to all Department personnel, including attorneys and law enforcement officers, that they are prohibited from soliciting, procuring, or accepting commercial sex. This rule applies at all times during an individual’s employment, including while off duty or on personal leave, and applies regardless of whether the activity is legal or tolerated in a particular jurisdiction, foreign or domestic.”

The good news is that he recognized the problem and took a step to fix it. The bad is: REALLY? Soliciting prostitutes at the Justice Department is such a big problem that Holder actually had to make it clear that it is not right nor acceptable? My goodness, how long has this been a problem, why was it not curtailed long ago, and why do I feel that taxpayer money was likely and somehow involved and wasted in Justice Department employees’ pursuit of prostitutes? Pathetic morals and integrity.

2) Harry Reid is a Nevada U.S. Senator and until the last election was the Senate Majority Leader. Today I will not go into how I think,based on his actions, that he was likely one of the worst Senate Majority Leaders of all time. Today, the only Harry Reid material we will review is the possible criminal actions he took while Senate Majority Leader.

According to a recent Department Of Homeland Security inspector general report, Reid may have illegally acted on behalf of a company that is represented by his son. The alleged and potential crime is that he intervened in order to secure 230 EB-5 investor visas for the SLS Hotel and Casino project in Las Vegas. An EB-5 visa allows a foreigner to invest at least $500,000 in this country in return for a green card. Once the visas were approved, $155 million was freed up to flow into the casino project.

A watchdog group Cause of Action filed a formal charge with the Senate Ethics office in late 2013, alleging that Reid had unlawfully intervened with two officials at the U.S.Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in order to get visas processed. Previously, some of those visas had not been approved due to “suspicious financial activity” committed by those applying, i.e., USCIS had worries that some of the funds were lawfully obtained. After Reid’s intervention, all the visas were approved.

But this not the only potential Reid lawbreaking,the second one related to helping a fellow Senator help out a donor friend involving Medicare billing and Health and Human Services incident.According to reporting by Breitbart:

[Reid]…hosted a meeting between Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. At the meeting, Menendez made the case for his friend and donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, who was at the time embroiled in what was supposed to be an independent adjudicatory process at HHS involving $8.9 million the department said he overbilled Medicare.

Possibly coincidentally, Reid’s intervention came right after Melgen donated $300,000 to the Senate Majority PAC, which has close to the Nevada senator. By the end of 2012, Melgen had donated a total of $700,000 to the PAC. Yeah, just a coincident that the funding was wrapped up with a power play to fix a Medicare error or crime.

One would hope that the leaders in Washington had some integrity and respect for the law. But if these alleged crimes are true, it would just be another round of self-serving Washington politicians serving themselves,not the country or its taxpayers.

3) Hogan’s Heroes was a TV sitcom from the 60s and it had a regular character in the show called Sergeant Schultz, a German guard. Schultz was basically useless and never wanted to get involved in anything in order to claim ignorance. In fact, his regular recurring line on the show was, “I see nothing!” 

Well, it seems that 50 years later, our current President is channeling the Sergeant Schultz character. Despite having hundreds, if not thousands, of people directly working for him, despite having state of the art communications abilities, despite having the NSA,FBI, and CIA spying on the world and just about every U.S.citizen, Obama seems to get most of his information from TV news, about the same time everyone else gets it.

Tough to have a lot of faith in your government and politicians when it appears if they miss the nightly news broadcast they will clueless of what is going on in the world and in the country. Check out the best of Obama's Sergeant Schultz imitations on the wide variety of scandals engulfing his administration, all of which he found out about from the news broadcasts, not his own people:

http://www.mrctv.org/blog/compilation-obama-first-hearing-stories-news

4) American is supposed to be the “land of the free” but you would not believe that if you read an article from the April 24, 2015 issue of The Week magazine:

• The U.S. is now home to 25% of the world’s prison inmates but has only 5% of the world’s population.
• The total number of prison inmates across all levels of government was 320,000 in 1980 but 35 years later the prison population is almost eight times higher or 2.4 million people.
• It costs the American taxpayer $80 billion a year to house, feed,and clothe these 2.4 million inmates.
• Once released after serving their sentences, 60% of those released are back in prison within three years.

Do we think something is wrong with this picture? Many of those in prison are there because of non-violent drug crimes. Many in prison have no chance of ever being integrated back into society, given the 60% rate stated above. For $80 billion a year, we are getting very little back in return except for being the official world’s most imprisoned population. Insane.

5) Yesterday we discussed how far the Secret Service had fallen from being a highly respected law enforcement entity to just another incompetent government bureaucracy. Frequent fence jumpers at the White House, White House windows shot out, an intruder that got deep into the White House itself, etc.

To that infamous lists of failures we add another embarrassing incident that was summarized in the March 27, 2015 issue of The Week magazine. This incident happened when Secret Service personnel was investigating a suspicious package that had been left near the White House, fearing that it may have been a weapon or bomb. 

In the middle of the investigation, two senior drunk Secret Service agents drove their car right through the middle of the investigation. Which raises two questions:

1. How did the investigating Secret Service agents even allow a car to get that close to their investigation scene, never mind the fact it let drunk agents to be at the wheel of that car?
2. According to Congressional committee hearings, the director of the Secret Service only found out about the drunk incident when someone sent him an anonymous email five days later.

Seems like another week, another Secret Service screw up. Thank goodness their drunken actions did not result in accidently detonating a bomb and that no one got hurt….this time.

That will do it for today’s insanity: potential crimes in the highest reaches of the Senate, drunk Secret Service agents, soliciting Justice Department employees, and it is the rest of America that is in jail. Down the rabbit hole to political class insanity. More 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:

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

October, 2014, Part 6 Political Class Insanity: A Poitician Votes Early and Often, $100,000 Presidential Drapes, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to check in with the American political class to see what insanity they have wrought over the past month or so. It is always amazing to follow the exploits, quotes, and actions of our politicians and the government entities they operate to see how often idiocy, incompetence, and heartbreak are almost always the output from their actions.

We started dong these updates several years ago, usually taking one or two days every month to get all of their insanity covered. Unfortunately, over time, the insanity has seemed to accelerate almost exponentially, causing us to now have to take six or seven posts each month to get it all in. This month will be no different. As our foreign policy implodes, the economy stagnates, and the midtem elections approach, the insanity levels are intensifying daily.

To check out past instances of political class insanity in this post, simply go to the first week of each month and check out the posts that begin, “Political Class Insanity.” This is the sixth entry in this series for this month, with the first five posts appearing over the past few days. The first post in this update can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/10/october-2014-political-class-insanity.html

For the latest insanity, read on:

1) It seems that Democrats are always trying to get our political processes to a point where a photo id is not required, a piece of insanity that always baffles me. The act of voting is the truest form of democracy in our country that should be protected in order to protect the sanctity of every individual’s voice.

Plus, we have shown many times in this blog that research and reality proves that when states institute photo id laws, minority voting participation actually goes up, killing Democrats’ fears that photo id laws hinder minority voting. And finally, voting is a responsibility, is it too much to ask for a citizen to go to the relatively minor trouble of getting a photo id to vote?

The need for photo id voting laws became more evident with the recent arrest of a Democrat state representative in Connecticut who was arrested for illegally voting a whopping 19 times. The New Haven Register reported:

• Democratic State Representative Christina Ayala of Bridgeport, Connecticut was arrested on 19 voting fraud charges.
• Ayala is accused of voting in local and state elections in districts she did not live, the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
• Ayala’s arrest warrant also alleges Ayala provided created fake evidence to state Election Enforcement Commission investigators that showed she lived at an address in a district where she voted while actually living outside the district.
• Ayala allegedly voted in various Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee elections, a municipal primary election and a state primary election between 2009 and 2012 in districts inconsistent with the location of her residence.
• She is also accused of voting in the Bridgeport state general election in 2012 in a district where she did not live.
• According to the Connecticut Post, Ayala’s mother, Santa, was also investigated by the Elections Enforcement Commission and the commission recommended criminal charges be filed against her also.

And this children, is why we need photo id and other stringent laws that prevent no one from voting once but prevent everyone from voting more than once or in an illegal voting district. To say there is no voter fraud going on is insane.

2) Government and the American political class can waste money in a myriad of ways and locations. For example, one of our most popular posts talked about how the Navy had built two ships, the USNS Benjamin Isherwood and the Henry Eckford, for $300 million and then decided they would not be needed. This resulted in the Navy spending another $10 million to scrap them before they were ever used. (for details of this spending atrocity go to the following site: 
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/07/us-navy-ships-for-sale-cheap-never-used.html)

But as we have often proven that you do not have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy taxpayer wealth. President Obama recently traveled down to my metro area, Tampa, Florida, to address the people who work and serve at the McDill Air force base.

David Rufful, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on September, 29, 2014, described how the President needed a podium from which to give his speech, a speech that only ran for 18 minutes. The stage from whence he spoke, the drapes behind him, and the sound system he used cost the taxpayers nearly $100,000, according to a contract made public by the Air Force. This comes out to an amazing $5,242.22 per minute for the 18 minute speech.

Are you kidding me? McDill is a huge facility, are you telling me that they had no sound system on site capable of serving the needs for this short speech? They had no podium or stage setting that already existed on site or which could have temporarily been put together for a short speech? Why did they need drapes at all, why not set up in front of a huge taxpayer funded plane? That would have been cheaper and more dramatic than really, really expensive “drapes.” 

These people have no respect for taxpayers or the taxes they work hard to pay for. $100,000 down the drain when a short distance outside of McDill there are no shortage of Tampa homeless Americans who theoretically could have been given a meal or two with that $100,000. There are probably a few Tampa veterans who could have been given a little better medical care for that money. Instead, we fed another politician’s ego with “drapes” for no reason. Insane.

3) As most Americans know, the ISIS hordes of terrorists are running rampant throughout Syria and Iraq. Too bad we did not know about them before they gathered strength. It would have been a lot easier taking them out before they got so big, powerful, and dangerous.

Oh, wait we did know about them before they got so big. However, since we just found out that the President of the United States had only attended about 40% of his daily intelligence community briefings over the years, often out of town on vacation, golf excursions, or political fund raising, it is no surprise the matter was not addressed and resolved when a minimal amount of effort would have done the job.

The Washington Times recently reported, as have other news sources, that the White House and the President have been given detailed daily briefings on the activities of the Islamic State and their relentless spread of terror for well over a year. These U.S. intelligence community briefings and analyses warned that the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group was gaining strength in Syria and was on the verge of seizing territory deep inside Iraq, where the Iraqi military was struggling to respond.

Thus, the taxpayer gets screwed again. We probably spend tens of billions of dollars a year on the national security intelligence apparatus that is run by Washington only to have it all go waste when the President of the United States opts out of the daily briefings by that apparatus almost 60% of the time. Money wasted and the lives of many, many civilians and soldiers killed by this laxity in attention to a real terrorism threat.

4) Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States recently announced his resignation, to happen once a successor to his post has been named. I could probably make a strong case that Mr. Holder was likely the most inept, lawless, politically driven, and arrogant attorney general in the history of the country. However, I will make that case on another day. 

Given his performance in office, one would think that it is impossible for his approval ratings to be lower than other members of the Obama administration. However, if you thought that, you would likely be wrong. As of a recent opinion poll, he is only the third most reviled former or current Obama administration official.

According to a recent YouGov poll, only 26% of Americans have a favorable view of the attorney general. 37% have an unfavorable opinion of Holder. Pretty pathetic ratings. But believe it or not, there are two former members of the Obama administration that grade out even lower.

Only 19% of those polled had a favorable opinion of former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius while 41% had an unfavorable opinion of her performance, climaxed by the disastrous rollout of the Obama Care legislation. But even she could not outdo, in a negative way, the dismal performance of former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. When he resigned, only 18% of the public viewed him favorably while 40% viewed him unfavorably.

As we have observed many times before: in an educated country that has over 300 million citizens, is it too much to ask to find three people that could have done better jobs and been viewed more favorably than these three sub standard performers?

Another day, another day of varied pieces of political class insanity: pathetic approval ratings of important government figures, $100,000 for drapes and a microphone, a President who probably golfs and fund raises more than attending national security briefings, and a current politician that has taken the Chicago voting mantra, “vote early and vote often,” to heart.

More insanity tomorrow, we are just getting warmed up.

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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: A 23 Year Congressional Losing Streak, Stereotyping Hispanics, Still Too Big To Fail and More

Yesterday was the first in this month’s update to our political class insanity series. We do this series at the beginning of every month to catch up on the insanity, lunacy, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Yesterday we focused on a defense budget that is out of control, a government real estate situation that is out of control, and government bureaucrats partying that is out of control. All of this out of control business, of course, comes at the taxpayer expense.

Today’s update includes the following insanity:

1) Remember how the Dodd-Frank financial industry legislation was supposed to be Obama’s second biggest success story behind Obama Care? Well, we know from the numerous posts we do each month that Obama Care has turned into the biggest disaster in the history of Washington.

Well, Dodd-Frank might not be that much of a success either. According to a Moneynews article from February, 19, 2014:

• The 20 largest banks in the country now account for 62% of U.S. deposits.
• This is up from only 46% in 2003, well before the Great Recession and the theory that some banks prior to the recession had become “too big to fail.
• The cited data source for these estimates is Barclays Capital.
• Additionally, the total market cap value of the top 25 banks is 20% larger than it was before the recession.
• Given the huge size of the largest banks and their interconnectivity, the article concludes that the Dodd-Frank legislation would be of little help in avoiding another financial crisis since we still have a too big to fail problem in the U.S. banking industry, despite the legislation.

Thus, we have another piece of legislation that ran for thousands of pages worth of law and regulations that is likely to be useless, much like Obama Care, much like most of what Washington does. Washington suffers from the opposite effect of “too big to fail,” it is “too big to succeed,” in anything it does.

2) In one of the biggest and most ironic screw ups of the political class in the past 20 years, according to a recent article in the Sacramento Bee, was summarized in the January, 21, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• 80% of the world’s heroin is produced in Afghanistan.
• Afghanistan also happens to be where the United States fought the longest war in its history.
• Prior to the U.S. invading Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban prohibited the production and use of such drugs.
• The heroin trade now accounts for 15% of Afghanistan’s GDP.

So not only did we not defeat the Taliban in the country despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of our armed forces lives and limbs, we created the biggest source of illicit drugs in the world, much of which probably ends up in the bodies of Americans. Major, major screw up on all fronts in this political class misadventure.

3) I love this next piece of insanity, probably because it involves a long term politician from my home state of New Jersey. Congressman Robert Andrews has been a New Jersey Congressman for 23 years, according to a Washington Post article that recently appeared in the Tampa Bay Times. In those 23 years, he has written 643 pieces of legislation. Very impressive, that is almost 28 pieces of legislation every year for 23 years.

However, of those 643 pieces of legislation exactly zero of them got passed and enacted into law. That’s right, the Congressman is 0 for 23 years, 0 for 643 attempts. Name another profession where you can go 23 years without getting anything done and still keep your job, earning over $174,000 a year in the process.

As the Post article points out, he could not even get a courthouse or post office name through Congress, never mind anything of any significance. You would have thought the law of averages would have eventually caught up and given him at least one success over 23 years. This type of performance is a prime example of what we have been talking about through the years: the political class has hijacked, rigged, and contaminated our election processes so much that even people with a 23 year losing streak still get elected over and over again. 

The Congressman is finally stepping down and not running for reelection after his current term, taking a position with a law firm. Hopefully, he is more successful in the court room than he was on the floor of Congress.

4) A special Congressional election in the next Congressional district over from me in the Tampa Bay area is soon to be held to fill the vacant seat of Congressman Bill Young who recently passed away. The Democratic candidate for the seat is a Ms. Alex Sink.

Now, I always get a kick of many Democrats and liberals who claim that they are the more compassionate, caring, and tolerant of the two major parties. I never believed it, viewing most politicians, regardless of party, to usually be focused on themselves and not the most compassionate, caring, or tolerant of people.

Which brings us back to candidate Sink, who was recently quoted in the Washington Free Beacon: 

“Immigration reform is important in our country,” she said. “We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping? We don’t need to put those employers in a position of hiring undocumented and illegal workers.”

I wonder if that is the same view as President Obama and why he is so hot on addressing illegal immigration: we need these people to clean up our messes in hotel rooms and to pick the weeds in our garden beds? How much more degrading, stereotyping, and condescending can a politician get to assume that all Hispanic immigrants are good for nothing more than maid and garden service?

Ms. Sink’s own words out of her own mouth can be viewed at:

http://freebeacon.com/florida-democrat-without-immigration-reform-where-will-we-get-our-landscapers-and-maids/

5) The lunacy does not just come from elected politicians, sometimes government employees, such as the members of the Federal Reserve Board, also get into the lunacy and insanity game. 

Before we get into the details of this little bit of Fed insanity, consider the following graph which has the historical average selling price of U.S. homes on both an inflation adjusted basis and raw data basis (double click on graph for larger image):




Up until the 1990s, the average selling price of a house in the U.S., when adjusted for inflation, was relatively flat with possibly a little bit of an upward trend (red line). For the unadjusted data, there was a more pronounced upward trend but nothing radical, just a gentle, slowing increasing upward tendency.

However, beginning around the year 2000, both graphs go crazy as we see a major housing bubble get created which burst in 2008, leaving us with the Great Recession. No one in Congress, no one in the White House, no one in the Treasury Department, and no one in the Federal Reserve took time to look at such a simple graph to see such a pronounced asset bubble in housing. 

Now back to the latest insanity news form the Fed. Yahoo Finance reported recently that the Fed has released the minutes of its meetings from 2008. In a January Fed meeting that year, despite the data in the simple graph above, Fed Board member Dave Reifschneider stated: "We are not forecasting a recession. While the model estimates of the probability of recession have moved up, they are not uniform in their assessment that a recession is at hand." 

“Not forecasting a recession.” Looks like Mr. Reifschneider, and the rest of the Fed, missed this forecast by just a touch since by the time that year was over, the Great Recession resulted in some of Wall Street's oldest and more famous investment houses and banks ending up in the dustbin of history: Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual and a host of other financial powerhouses no longer existed. Additionally, the country was facing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It seems no one looked at our graph. “Not forecasting a recession.”

This is why I tend to disbelieve everything Washington tells me, regardless of who tells me. The Fed told the country in early 2008 that there was not a recession forecasted but then the worst recession in just about our whole history crashed down within months.

Nancy Pelosi told me that Obama Care would create millions of jobs, it did not. 

President Obama told me that if you like your current health care plan you could keep it, Americans could not. 

Kathleen Sebelius told me EVERY economist agrees that Obama Care is not hindering job creation, but I checked it out and find that over 400 companies have already publicly acknowledged that they are cutting jobs, cutting hours, of cutting hiring as a direct result of Obama Care. 

The President and his economic advisors told me that if his economic stimulus plan was not passed, the unemployment rate could go as high as 8% but even though it was passed, the unemployment rate set a record for most consecutive months above 8%. 

Former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the polar ice cap could totally melt by the year 2013 but the ice cap has gotten larger and larger over the past few years.

Broken promises, lousy and lazy forecasting, stereotyping Hispanics, a 23 year losing streak, heroin all around, and still too big to fail. Inanity from the political class in so many different ways. More lunacy and idiocy 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:

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

February, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: Closing Hospitals and Shredding the Constitution While Trying To Fix the Law

This is the fourth post this month that examines the unfolding disasters that are constantly coming out of Obama Care. For three years we have been correctly predicting that this will be a disastrous piece of legislation that will damage the economy without its intended purpose of reining in ever escalating health care costs.

Since August, 2013 we have usually had to dedicate upwards of six or seven posts a month to stay on top of the fiascos. Those in depth previous posts can be accessed by looking at the lists of posts each month to the right of this screen. The first post in this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/02/february-2014-unfolding-disaster-of.html

Let’s get started with Day 4’s disasters below:

1) Obama Care was supposed to reduce health care costs, the President promised that the average American’s annual health insurance bill would decrease by $2,500. But the law was written so poorly that many doctors are retiring early because of the hassles within the law which will reduce supply and increase health care costs, not decrease costs.

Early results of looking at Obama Care health exchange policies show that the vast majority of policies are MORE expensive than previous policies that Americans could own but no longer can get access to. This too will increase health care costs. 

Many medicines that were covered by previous polcies are not covered by Obama Care policies, further increasing costs for Americans. Thus, there are many factors and unintended consequences of the law that are doing the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do, i.e. reduce costs.

To that list of cost increasers it looks like we now have to add the fact that many hospitals across the country, especially those serving poorer and more rural populations of Americans, are being forced to close because Obama Care is causing the Federal government to decrease the reimbursement levels that had previously, pre-Obama Care, had been in effect.

As an example, the fourth Georgia hospital in two years is closing its doors due to severe financial difficulties caused by the law’s payment cuts for emergency services. The Lower Oconee Community Hospital is a small rural hospital that is suffering from serious cash-flow problems, largely due to the area’s uninsured population. Federal law requires all hospitals to treat all people that come to their emergency rooms for treatment and later be reimbursed by the Federal government for the service.

This hospital serves a poorer population where about 23% of the population does not have health care insurance. Thus, the uninsured usage of the hospital is high and as the Federal government cuts the levels of reimbursement, these four hospitals and others across the country have to shut down, leaving these poorer, less fortunate Americans with less health care coverage, all because of Obama Care.

Apparently, the problem is the result of the Supreme Court decisions that validated most of Obama Care but allowed states to opt out of its Medicaid expansion. The law was written assuming that all states would be involved in the Medicaid expansion. When half of them opted out, it destroyed the financial integrity of the law’s business case and the reimbursement levels to these less affluent hospitals.

Thus, we will now see a lower supply (i.e. fewer hospitals) which will grow the costs of health care even more since there is less supply and competition, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do.

2) It seems like every week or so for the past year, Obama has decided to change something in the health care law for a variety of different reasons. He, of course, had no right or legal standing to do so since the law was legally approved by Congress and turned over to the executive branch to execute and put into operation. Under our Constitution, the President has no authority not to implement the law as it was written, debated, voted, on and enacted. 

If any changes needed to be made, assuming the President actually accepted and believed in the Constitution, he would have gone back to Congress and worked with them to amend the law to account for unforeseen obstacles. That it was a democracy is all about, everyone gets to have their opinion heard and voted on. Apparently, that is merely a suggestion for the administration, not a centuries old tradition and legal precedent.

How many illegal unilateral changes has the President made? A recent Fox Business analysis on February 12, 2014 identified 28 major changes and counting:

1. November 6, 2012 Medicaid physician reimbursements: Increased reimbursements for primary-care physicians who treat Medicaid beneficiaries didn’t go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, as scheduled. 
2. January 31, 2013 Bundled Payments initiative: The Obama administration was late starting an experiment with changes to how doctors and hospitals are paid by Medicare, which was slated to take effect Jan. 1, 2013.
3. February 1, 2013 Medicaid funds and preventive care: Increased federal funding for states that eliminate Medicaid co-payments for preventive care didn’t really go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, as scheduled. 
4. February 6, 2013 Basic Health Program: The federal government announced a one-year delay for the “Basic Health Program.” 
5. February 20, 2013 Out-of-pocket costs: The administration announced that the law’s cap on out-of-pocket costs of $6,350 for individuals and $12,500 for families will not be enforced for some employer-based health insurance plans until 2015
6. April 1, 2013 Small Business Health Options Program: The federal government announced that the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) will be delayed until 2015. 
7. July 2, 2013 Employer mandate: The Obama administration announced that the employer mandate requiring employers with at least 50 full-time workers to provide them with coverage or pay a penalty will now be enforced starting in 2015, not 2014 as originally planned. 
8. July 2, 2013 Employer reporting requirements: The Obama administration announced that it is going to also delay, until 2015, associated reporting requirements relating to potential employer penalties. 
9. July 5, 2013 Verifying coverage status: The Obama administration announced that it has decided to roll back requirements for new state insurance marketplaces to verify health coverage status of people who apply for subsidized coverage. 
10. July 5, 2013 Verifying income: The Obama administration announced that it had decided to roll back requirements for new state insurance marketplaces to verify the income of people who apply for subsidized coverage. 
11. July 5, 2013 Electronic Medicaid notices: The Obama administration announced a delay in the requirement that state Medicaid agencies be able to use electronic notices to notify individuals of their eligibility for federal assistance. 
12. August 27, 2013 Finalizing federal exchange plans: CMS notified insurance companies that it would delay signing final agreements on plans for the new insurance exchanges. 
13. September 26, 2013 Online enrollment for small-business exchanges: HHS said employers with 50 or fewer workers will not be able to sign their staff up for insurance in federally operated exchanges until a month later, November 1, because of technical problems. 
14. September 26, 2013 Online enrollment in Spanish: The Obama administration announced that the Spanish-language version of healthcare.gov will not be equipped to handle online enrollments on Oct 1. 
15. October 23, 2013 March enrollment deadline: The Obama administration said that it would delay imposing penalties for six weeks on some consumers who might have been caught in a sticky timing problem for enrolling in coverage through the health law’s new insurance exchanges. 
16. November 14, 2013 Canceled insurance plans and minimum standards: The Obama administration announced that it is allowing insurers to extend existing individual and small group plans for one more year for current customers even if those insurance policies don’t meet the minimum standards set by the health reform law. 
17. November 22, 2013 Extra days to enroll for Jan. 1, 2013 coverage: Americans hoping to sign up for health insurance under health reform will have an additional eight days to do so for coverage to begin January 1, 2014. 
18. November 22, 2013 Health Insurance Enrollment for 2015: The administration pushed back the period during which Americans sign up for coverage under health reform in its second year of operation, a change that could reassure insurers while also avoiding the 2014 midterm elections. 
19. November 27, 2013 Online enrollment for small businesses: The Small Business Health Options Program, known as the SHOP exchange, will not offer online enrollment until November 2014, a one-year. 
20. December 12, 2013 Payment deadline delayed: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for the first time directed insurers to give consumers until Dec. 31 to pay their first-month premiums. 
21. December 12, 2013 High-risk insurance pools: About 85,000 people with a history of serious illnesses, who are enrolled in high-risk insurance pools created under the health reform law, will get a month’s reprieve before they lose that coverage. 
22. December 19, 2013 Delay of individual mandate for some: The Obama administration will not require the millions of Americans who received health-insurance plan cancellation notices to purchase a new policy next year. 
23. December 23, 2013 Extra day to enroll for Jan. 1, 2013 coverage: The Obama administration extended a deadline for health insurance under health reform, giving consumers shopping on HealthCare.gov in 36 states an extra day, until Dec. 24, to pick plans to kick in for coverage beginning Jan. 1.
24. January 14, 2014 High-risk insurance pools: About 30,000 people (down from 85,000 in October) with a history of serious illnesses, who are enrolled in high-risk insurance pools created under the health reform law, will get an additional two months -- until March 31 -- before they lose that coverage. 
25. January 18, 2014 Equal coverage rules: The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of a provision of the health reform law that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees. 
26. February 10, 2014 Employer mandate for medium-sized employers: The Obama administration announced it would give medium-sized employers (businesses with between 50 and 99 employees) an extra year, until 2016, before they must offer health insurance to their full-time workers. 
27. February 10, 2014 Employer mandate coverage percentage: The Obama administration announced that they would phase in the percentage of full-time workers that employers with more than 100 employees need to offer coverage to from 70 percent in 2015 to 95 percent in 2016 and beyond. 
28. February 10, 2014 Measuring employees for employer mandate: The Obama administration announced that they are allowing companies that have close to 100 workers some discretion in whether they have to comply. 

A more detailed discussion and the entire article can be accessed at:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy-policy/2014/02/12/28-delays-and-counting-to-health-reform/

A few of observations, beyond the illegality, unconstitutional, and probably impeachable offenses of making these changes to established law without getting approval of Congress and the people they represent, American citizens:

• First, how incompetent is this executive branch and administration if after three years, billions of dollars and probably tens of millions of man hours that they cannot put together an operation that now how has to be fixed by at least 28 major and different delays and changes? Answer: very incompetent.
• Second, I think we see another reason why this is such an amazingly bad piece of legislation. If you have to make 28 major changes to a law that you and your political peers wrote themselves, remember that no Republicans voted to enact this law, how badly was it written or how ignorant are you of reality that so many changes have to be made? Answer: very ignorant.
• Finally, how many of these decisions were made for the good of the country and the health of Americans and how many were done for political and political calendar reasons? I would venture a guess that the majority of these were done to minimize the negative impact on Democratic politicians rather than focusing on what is best for the country. That is what turns this President away form being a feraless leader and towards being nothing more than a typcial Chicago politician.

Okay, I thought we could get through all the disasters today but that was asking too much, especially when we start getting into obvious violations of the Constitution. Hopefully, tomorrow we can get through it all before more disasters unfold.

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