Showing posts with label sequester. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sequester. Show all posts

Friday, March 20, 2015

The Failed Presidency Of Barack Obama, Part 8: Previously Identified 61 Examples of Failure

Over the past week or so we have been reviewing the many ways and perspectives on how the Obama Presidency has been a total failure:
  • We reviewed the many, many lies and deceptions of this administration and this President, from cutting the annual budget deficit in half to promising that you could keep your doctors under Obama Care to many others.
  • We reviewed the many high ranking Obama administration officials that have illegally and immorally conducted government business, and likely government shenanigans, using personal, unofficial computers and email accounts, undermining the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and Obama's own promise to operate the most transparent administration ever
  • We reviewed the many instances where this administration has either allowed government functions and departments to continue to overspend but under deliver or allowed them to get even worse than when he took office.
  • We also reviewed some past posts that we had done previously that laid out numerous reasons and actions that should have already led to the impeachment of this Presidency, based on violations of existing law, judicial rulings, and the Constitution.
Despite all of these analyses across different aspect of being President, we are still nowhere close to being done. Between today and yesterday we will have reviewed previous posts from January, 2014 where we laid out over 60 reasons why this Presidency is a failure. Yesterday we went through the first 40, today we finish up with the next 21.

While these are not necessarily grounds for impeachment, they certainly are grounds for failure, with many of these failures using Obama’s own words to show how far short his administration has fallen of being even somewhat effective. Afterwards, we will update that original list with many other examples of failure that have occurred since that early 2014 analysis.


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THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014

Part 3: The Next 21 Reasons That Are Not Grounds For Impeachment and Removal From Office

Twenty More Reasons (Reasons 41 Through 61) For Which Obama Cannot Be Impeached and Removed From Office.

Let’s face it, the country is not in great shape these days. We have a government that cannot even develop a website despite spending well over $600 million to do so. We have a political class that is more concerned with their own welfare and perpetual reelection than the general welfare of Americans. We have a skyrocketing national debt that will burden Americans for generations to come. We have anemic economic growth. We have a President who claims he has no knowledge of the multitude of scandals erupting around him. Major safety nets such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are lunging towards insolvency. We have lost the war on drugs. The list seems endless some days.
In these desperate times, a person typically wants to find a culprit and make them accountable. The most obvious culprit is the leader of the country, President Obama. Unfortunately, there is a difference between incompetence vs. high crimes and misdemeanors that would allow the country to impeach and remove a sitting President from office.

Having stupid policies and programs, and mismanaging them to boot, is not grounds for removal from office. Maybe it should be, it would save the country a lot of suffering, but that is not allowed under our current legal system. The voting booth is supposed to be for that purpose. In order to remove someone from office, they must violate any of the tenets of the Constitution and Bill of Rights or existing law under which they should have been operating.

We have been trying to make that distinction over the past few days. While many of us feel that the Obama administration has been the worse one in the history of our country, sinking even below the disaster that was the Carter administration, there are a load of failures that cannot be used for impeachment and removal from office. We have been covering those failures and disasters in the past few days along with today.

Those first two lists of forty failures can be found at:



Today, after we finally finish going through the myriad of reasons that can not be used for impeachment and removal from office, we will go through a still substantial list of reasons while President Obama should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors in the following days. Consider that list to be the list of charges that would be read at a potential lawbreaker’s arraignment. 

That list of charges would then go to a grand jury, i.e. the House of Representatives, where they would decide which charges, i.e. indictments, if any, would be brought forth. Those indictments would then be debated and voted on for conviction or non-conviction in the Senate. 

That is the process: arraignment based on likely criminal charges, grand jury-like action in the House to lock down substantial and provable violations of the law, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, leading to a formal indictment, and then onto the Senate for trial, based on the House indictments. 

But first, lets finish going through the many disasters and failures that cannot be put on the list of charges that are reviewed for indictments that are then part of a Senate impeachment proceeding. Keep in mind that you cannot remove a President from office:

  • For having ineffective and/or stupid policies. 
  • For being ineffective in executing his duties of office. 
  • For being arrogant, narcissistic, and pompous. 
  • For waging class warfare and dividing the nation into voting blocs. 
  • For lying about his past or his promises. 
That is the reason that the following failures, and the many, many failures we have discussed over the previous two days, are not grounds for impeachment and removal from office; they may be despicable, they may be embarrassing, they may be wasteful, they may be outright deceptions, but they are not grounds for removal under the Constitution.

[Note: associated with many of the failures listed we have attached notable quotes from the President and other reputable sources to show how far and how quickly his promises and assertions degenerated into lies, deceptions, and failures]

President Obama cannot be impeached and removed from office because...

41) He failed to live up to his promise of reducing the obscene number of earmarks in the annual Federal government expense stream, with the value of earmarks at almost the exact same level of waste as when he took office five years ago.

Relevant Obama quote: “We need earmark reform, and when I'm President, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”

42) He signed the renewal of the Patriot Act with little discussion or change, a piece of legislation that has caused a significant drop off in freedom and privacy in this country.

Relevant Obama quote: "We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years." 

43) His administration has, at times, incurred MONTHLY deficit spending levels that were higher than almost every other ANNUAL spending deficits from every other President including Bush.

Relevant Obama quote: “Today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay — and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control.”

44) He failed to foresee the Arab spring, resulting in an unpreparedness that has considerably weakened the American influence in the entire Middle East region.

45) His Obama Care legislation has resulted in many new taxes being directly or indirectly imposed on every American.

Relevant Obama quote: “If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”

46) The national debt has increased over $7 TRILLION during his first five years in office, imposing an individual debt burden of over $50,000 on every man, woman and child in the country.

Relevant Obama quote: Relevant Obama quote: "America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit."

47) Of his many lies, one the biggest lie was to blame Congress for the impacts of the sequester, an idea that he proposed, and an idea he later denied ever proposing despite the public record of his proposal.

Relevant Obama quote: “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.”

Relevant Obama quote (Bob Woodward): “What the president said is not correct [that he did not propose the sequester]. He is mistaken. And its refuted by the people who work for him.” 

48) In cahoots with Congress, he secretly signed legislation that modified the STOCK Act, a secret signing that allowed Congressional members and their staffs to again conduct stock trading based on their insider secret knowledge of legislation that was pending, proposed or possible in the future.

49) He allowed his administration to spend millions of dollars to buy fake Twitter and Facebook hits and followers while at the same time signing legislation that reduced the pension benefits of our veterans.

50) Despite wining the Nobel Peace prize, according to Gallup's international polling, 23% of world citizens in a recent opinion poll still view the United States as the biggest threat to world peace, almost three times more than the next nearest threat (Pakistan), and more than four times higher than either Russia or China.

51) Despite promising to have the most transparent administration ever, Transparency International recently proclaimed that corruption in the United States was growing faster than anywhere else in the world except Cuba, Dominca, and Burkina Faso.

52) Analysis of IRS records showed that 36 Obama White House employees owed over $800,000 in back taxes and over 300,000 Federal employees owed about $3.5 billion in back taxes but all of whom were allowed to continue to draw their full Federal salaries and benefits; which should not be a surprise since he nominated any number of tax evaders and/delinquent tax payers to important government positions including Kathleen Sibelius (head of Health and Human Services), Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury), Solis (head of the Labor department), Tom Daschle (who ended up not working for this administration) and others.

53) He broke his promise not to sign non-emergency legislation before it had been posted on the Internet for at least five days.

54) He broke his promise to televise the Congressional hearings regarding Obama Care debates and proceedings on C-SPAN so the entire country would understand what was going into the legislation.

55) He lied when he stated that the Supreme Court had never overturned any law that had been passed by Congress, he lied when he said the auto bailouts he supported prevented Detroit from going bankrupt (it did go bankrupt), he lied when he said that Al Qaeda was almost defeated since we now know that Al Qaeda controls more physical territory in the world than it ever has before including battlegrounds in Iraq that cost Americans hundreds of lives and billions of dollars, he lied when he denied saying that he had ever declared a “red line” regarding Syria’s use of chemical weapons. (relevant Obama quote: “A red line for us is when we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around.”), he lied when he falsely claimed that health insurance companies were the cause of millions of insurance policies being cancelled when in truth it was the Obama Care legislation requirements that legally forced the cancellations, and he lied when he falsely claimed that an insurance company had refused to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment. Note: the Obama Care lies are too numerous to mention here, please go to the following link for a detailed discussion of those additional lies the phrase, "unfolding disaster"int he search box above.

56) Three years after the Dodd-Frank financial industry reform legislation has been passed, less than half of the needed regulations required by the legislation have been written by the executive branch.

57) He vindictively shut down White House tours and DC war memorials during the sequester and government shutdown, claiming lack of government funds, but somehow found government funds to keep his favorite government run golf course open the whole time.

58) He insulted the families who had loved ones die or be wounded by the Fort Hood terrorist attacker, Nidal Hasan, by claiming they were merely victims of “workplace violence” and not terrorism; this cold designation resulted in those families and victims not getting just compensation for their losses and suffering while at the same time paying over $200,000 in government salary and benefits to the shooter and terrorist Hasan as he awaited trial. 

59) He refused to fire the IRS employees who lost $67 million from an Obama Care slush fund, he refused to fire ATF employees who lost over 400 million cigarettes in their position, he failed to fire anyone connected with the $600 million Obama Care website that did not work, he failed to fire anyone who was connected with the botched rollout of Obama Care including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, etc.

60) He refused or did not care to rein in absolutely stupid and unnecessary government spending including research money used to build a robotic squirrel, development of a video game to simulate prom week, conducting pottery classes in Morocco, determining when dogs became man’s best friend, constructing a million dollar bus stop in Arlington, Virginia, keeping a dog handler (earning over $100,000 a year) on the White House payroll to handle the Obama family’s dog’s needs, keeping three full time professional calligraphers on staff, and other such extraneous, unnecessary and wasteful spending and nonsense.

61) He criticized waterboarding and secret rendition of suspected terrorists but then went forth and simply just killed suspected terrorists and collateral damage civilians directly by drone attacks.

Relevant Obama quote: "We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law." 

Let’s stop at 61 reasons. We could go on but you get the idea: this administration botched the whole Syrian civil war/poison gas debacle, tried to bribe a Pennsylvania politician (Joe Sestak) not to run against an incumbent Pennsylvania Senator (Arlen Specter), failed to take care of 200,000 veterans who are homeless on our streets, needlessly and recklessly stationed 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia for no reason, failed to rein in a growing poverty level, etc., etc., etc.

But let’s stop at these 61 reasons that cannot be used to impeach and remove the President from office. They are 61 reasons to get you ticked off for mismanagement of the economy, mismanagement of taxpayer funds, ineffective economic policies and results, cronyism, insider trading, etc. But no matter how ticked off you get, not impeachable offenses

But that does not mean there are not impeachable offenses in play. And that will be our topic over at least the next two days, serious breeches of the Constitution and existing laws that do rise to the standard of serious “crimes and misdemeanors.”

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Eight posts and we have still not identified all of the reasons why this administration is an abject failure. More evidence of the failure in the following days.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

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





Sunday, June 8, 2014

Thoughts on D-Day And My Dad ...And Presidential Gum Chewing

Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the day my dad went ashore at Omaha Beach, along with tens of thousands of other American servicemen, during the second day of the D-Day invasion. Their efforts and sacrifices, and the efforts of millions of others before them and after them have successfully defended this country and its freedoms. They should be treated with honor and respect by all…unlike the current President of the United States who decided chewing gum during the solemn memorial ceremony commemorating this event this weekend was appropriate behavior. 

But this is probably not unexpected, given the disrespectful track record of this Presidency towards our military folks. From classifying the Fort Hood terror attack as an instance of “workplace violence” and hence, denying appropriate benefits to those that were killed and wounded, to the unnecessary and politically motivated closing of Washington DC war memorials during the sequester period to deny elderly veterans access to their country’s tributes to them, to reducing the retirement benefits of veterans to the despicable medical treatment of veterans at our VA facilities to the illegal act of releasing five high ranking terrorists in exchange for an Army deserter whose act of desertion resulted in the unnecessary deaths of at least six other loyal soldiers who were sent to rescue him. I guess in this overall context of disrespect, chewing gum like a fourteen year old at a memorial service is pretty petty…but certainly indicative of the disrespect he has for those that gave their all for this country.

However, speaking for most Americans, let me give thanks and respect today to the memory and service my dad and all of those that did serve and do serve.






Saturday, June 7, 2014

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Government Duplication, Cleaning House in Minnesota, More Presidential Lying, and More

This is our fourth update this month to our continuing series on political class insanity. Every month we try to keep up with the ineffective programs and laws, the wasteful spending, and general ineptness of today’s politicians. It is a sad commentary that we need to take so many days to cover it all each month, and just about every month, as the incompetence of those in office seems to be growing exponentially over time.

1) Many times in this blog we have reported on how the Federal government has gotten so big that often many, many different parts of the government are working on the same issues, usually resolving none of them, but resulting in duplicative efforts and costs to the American taxpayer. The General Accountability Office (GAO) recently issued its latest annual report on this redundancy and found that not much has changed:
  • There is significant and duplicative effort within the Federal government’s disability and unemployment system, so much so that the Feds paid out more than $850 million a year in duplicative cash benefits to more than 117,000 people, “replacing a portion of lost earnings not once but twice."
  • The Department of Defense has an amazing eight separate organizations within itself that track down POW/MIA personnel that constantly fight over turf and resources which creates: “discord and lack of collaboration among the entities that account for missing persons.”
  • The Minority AIDS Initiative is somehow spread throughout ten different agencies just within the Health and Human Services entity.
  • Getting back to the Defense Department, it has spread its satellite control responsibilities across ten different organizations which “requires more infrastructure and personnel to manage when compared to shared networks,” according to the GAO conclusions.
  • Duplications like these waste taxpayer wealth, diffuse the mission of the organizations, and generally result in more time spent on protecting turf than resolving issues. The good news is that the GAO does a good job of analyzing the situation and providing solutions for them. The bad news is that the political class in Washington usually fails to implement those solutions, with only 124 proposed solutions having been implemented over the years out of the 380 that the GAO had proposed, a success rate of only 33%.
2) We are always critical when government and the politicians that operate it do stupid stuff. However, we should also commend and identify efforts when government does the right things right. Such is what happened in the state government of Minnesota which actually took the time and effort to clean out old, unnecessary, and stupid laws and regulations from their state government, according to a recent article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
  • In Minnesota, it is no longer a crime to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. 
  • The state’s telegraph regulations have been eliminated. 
  • It is no longer illegal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it.
  • In addition to these three idiocies, the effort also got rid of 1,172 other “unnecessary and incomprehensible laws.”
  • The effort also made taxes simpler to understand and follow, cut government red tape and bureaucracy, speeded up the process for granting business permits, and required state agencies to communicate in plain, non-legalese language.
The good news that Minnesota politicians took the time and care to prune back government which, hopefully, will save state taxpayers money, aggravation, and time when dealing with any aspect of government in that state. The bad news is that were 1,175 rules, laws, and regulations that could be terminated. If only the political class in Washington had the will, intelligence, and ability to do the same at the Federal level.

3) Many, many times this President has made promises and vows that never came true, were broken, or were just political stunts that were never intended to come true. President Obama promised to quickly shut down the prison at Guantanamo if elected, it is still open. He promised to cut the Federal deficit in half if elected, he then proceeded to run up five of the largest deficits in the history of the country. He promised you could keep your health insurance policy, your doctor, your hospital, etc. as a result of Obama Care, none of which turned out to be true.

In fact, three of his lies made the Washington Post’s top ten lie list of 2013 including taking the top spot for the top lie in 2013. And now it appears there may be another lie brewing. According to a mid-May investigation by the Washington Beacon, it is very unclear whether or not the President lived up to his promise to take a 5% cut in pay as a result of the sequester last year to show sympathy for furloughed Federal workers.

When recently queried whether or not that cut actually occurred, the White House could not or would not provide an answer. Since Federal law does not allow the President to unilaterally take a pay cut, his promise of returning 5% of his salary, or about $20,000, was to be accomplished by writing a personal check every month to the U.S. Treasury. Again, the White House could not confirm or deny whether of not the President reneged on this promise also.

In fact, although other Washington politicians made similar claims, it is unknown whether or not they too also fulfilled those promises. A discussion with the Beacon article writer can be viewed at:


The Obamas are worth millions of dollars. They get free room, board, and vacation travel expenses for eight years from the American taxpayer. $20,000 would be a minute amount of sacrifice on their parts. One would have thought that if the President actually fulfilled this promise, that a press release with copies of the checks he wrote, would have been readily available to the press as good PR. 

The fact that he has not made that proof of payment available and the fact that he has made so many other promises have been broken leaves one with the impression that this was must another piece of hypocrisy and deceit from a typical Chicago politician, not a true leader in any sense of the word. This type of behavior just reinforces the fact that we should not believe anything any politician says at any time until the absolute proof is made available, especially with this President.

4) Let’s finish up today with a funny yet pitiful video montage of high ranking officials of this Presidential administration “doing everything they can” to resolve the issues and crises of our times. These issues range from gun violence to Obama Care to the Russians taking over parts of the Ukraine to the IRS abusing First Amendment rights of private citizens to veterans dying as a result of VA incompetence to a whole range of other issues.

The really sad part is that while these officials are “doing everything they can,” the bottom line is that they are resolving nothing, they are accomplishing nothing, they have not a single success despite “doing everything they can.” One has to be left with the conclusion that if this is your best effort, according to your own words, and you still accomplish nothing, then you are not competent enough to retain your position, your high salary and benefits, or the trust of the American people. It is that simple, your best is not good enough:


Wasteful and expensive duplication still exists throughout all levels of government, silly and useless laws and regulations still exist throughout all levels of government, lies are ongoing and an embedded trait of this Presidential administration, and while maybe getting an “A” for effort for “doing everything they can,” they are still a bunch of inept leaders and managers of the country’s affairs. 

Have a good day, see you tomorrow for more 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w




Sunday, December 29, 2013

Retro Post, Wasteful Government Spending, Part 3: Robosquirrel, Presidential Golf Junkets, Circus Day Funding And Other Spending INsults

For the past several posts we have been re-presenting some of our most popular posts from the past as they related to wasteful government spending. Since many of these posts were written, the national debt of the federal government has grown to an unimaginable $17 TRILLION. This is over a $50,000 debt burden for every man, woman, and child in the country.

We are revisiting these posts now to once again prove how careless and stupid the Washington political class is with our hard earned wealth and to show what a disgrace the latest Congressional budget agreement is. We will delve into the details of this insult to the American taxpayer next month. The budget agreement promises to reduce annual Federal government spending by tens of billions of dollars in the future years while we really need to reduce spending by trillions of dollars over the coming years. Failure to do so will eventually lead to the collapse of our financial system, our way of life and our democracy.

Reducing wasteful spending in the name of reducing the national debt burden is not hard. We have showed how to that dozens of times. We have come up with a plan that would reduce Federal government spending by $9 TRILLION of ten years. 

However, the concept of living within your means and running a fiscally prudent, non-wasteful government seems to be a lost concept on politicians in Washington. That is why over the next few days we will restart the education process of how to get rid of wasteful government spending without creating hardships for the majority of Americans.

Today's post is from April of 2013 where we showed how the Washington political class was moaning about the so-called sequester cuts and how that was going to topple Westrern civilization. However, at the same time they continued to allow the Federal govenrment to pay for totally worthless programs and projects. These projects and programs had nothing to do with addressing the major issues facing Americans today. Some , in fact, used American taxpayer money to support the citizerns of far away lands, haivig nothing to do with supporting American citizens.

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Monday, April 1, 2013

Chicken Little and The Washington Political Class, Part 3: Final Words On The Sequester And Wasteful Spending 

We wanted to stop this series at two posts but the hilarity from our political class relative to the meager sequester spending cuts just keeps on coming. As many know, the Federal government was recently forced to reduce its outrageous spending ways by 2% as a result of a budget deal that Obama and Congress agreed to in August, 2011. Rather than work together to rationally cut the incredible amount of wasteful spending that goes on in Washington, the politicians in D.C. did nothing for 17 months, resulting in across the board cuts of about 2% to Federal spending.

Rather than do his job, the President went off like Chicken Little, ranting and raving that the end of the world was near because of this minimal spending cut. Even worse, though, he decided to make even these meager cuts as evil and vindictive as possible to make life worse for Americans. His petty reactions to the sequester was to terminate the long tradition of allowing American citizens to tour the White House, also known as the “people’s house,” not Obama’s house. 

He also unnecessarily release thousands of illegal immigrants from custody, hundreds of which had been convicted of violent crimes and also threatened to cancel the long tradition of a White House lawn Easter Egg hunt. He made sure that Federal funding for Native American kids education was cut.

His vindictiveness was proven in the following two posts where we reviewed many cases of unnecessary, wasteful, and often insulting spending by the Federal government, spending that could have easily been cut with minimal impact to the vast majority of Americans:



However, he chose the opposite path and chose spending cuts that would impact far more American lives than necessary.

Since these two posts ran, we have identified additional sources of spending that should have been cut first, and cut long ago, from the Federal budget rather than the petty, vindictive cuts this President chose.

Details on these first six examples of wasteful spending can be found at:


1) A major component of a $27 million plan by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to improve the economic competitiveness of Morocco involved training Moroccans to design and make pottery for sale both locally and in international markets. Yes, we spent money traiing foreign citizens to make more competitive pottery. Even the Inspector General USAID concluded the training was "ineffective and poorly implemented." 

The better conclusion is why did we spend this money at all? $27 million would have paid for over 27 years of White House tours, having a far greater impact on far more Americans than training foreigners to make better pottery.

2) The U.S. Department of Energy, not the Russian Department of Energy, has spent $15 million on a program which has helped Russian weapons institutes recruit scientists. The DOE says the program has created nearly 2,800 private sector jobs… in Russia. The $15 million would have operated the White House tours for over 15 years or maybe it could have created jobs for American scientists.

3) Smuttynose Brewery in New Hampshire has annual sales of more than $5 million Why then did the American taxpayer pay it three quarter of a million dollars to buy three new brew tanks and set up sewage connections for a new location outside Portsmouth? Shouldn’t this be a company expense and not a taxpayer expense, an expense that could have operated White House tours for almost a year?

4) A similar example of corporate welfare is shown by taxpayer funds, about $500,000, being given to Sergeant's Pet Care Products, a company with $140 million in revenue, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The money was for capital improvements, like buying machinery to make pet toothpaste and shampoo, money that should have been a company expense, not a taxpayer expense.

5) The following may be the most outrageous waste of taxpayer wealth I have ever come across. Researchers at San Diego State University and the University of California, Davis spent part of a $325,000 National Science Foundation grant to make “RoboSquirrel,” a taxidermied rodent that can wag its tail. Why you ask? To help study interactions between squirrels and rattlesnakes. You cannot make this stuff up it is so stupid:

A Congressional report correctly came to the following conclusion, in somewhat of an understatement: "During these difficult fiscal times of massive deficits, paying $325,000 for a robot squirrel seems a bit squirrelly." Hopefully, other projects that are in the planning, equally ridiculous, including RoboSquirrel 2.0 and RoboKangarooRat, will never see the light of day.

6) The National Endowment for the Arts has given $84,000 over the last three years to the Circus Day Foundation, now known as Circus Harmony, for a one-year circus arts program that teaches students how to juggle, hula hoop, and other circus skills, probably because these skills are in such demand in today’s job market (sarcasm). 

Now, some people might say that these are not worth worrying about, they are too small in the big picture. However, I would counter with the following discussion points:
  • While these expenses might be small relative to a multi-trillion dollar budget, why spend the money if you do not need to? Just because you can does not mean you should. 
  • You cannot save a billion dollars in wasteful spending until you save a million dollars in wasteful spending until you save a thousand dollars in wasteful spending. You have to start cutting waste somewhere. 
  • These are just a small sample of bad spending priorities. Multiply these types of unnecessary spending instances thousands of times across hundreds of government entities and these small numbers in the sample become really large numbers in total. 
  • These are just the specific program or project costs. Remember, that there are embedded government salary and operating costs that also have to be allocated to these programs. For example, salary dollars were spent by National Science Foundation employees to review the Robosquirrel proposal, taxpayer wealth wasted beyond the $325,000 grant. 
  • And finally, better to spend $27 million in Morocco on a failed program or less than one million dollars a year to keep White House tours going on?
7) Charles Cooke recently wrote a sequester article for the National Review that was summarized in the March 22, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. According to the article, and other news sources, the White House no longer allows tours of the building but still keeps THREE calligraphers on staff. Annual cost: $277,500. 

In this wonderful age of computers, why in the world does the President need one calligrapher on staff, never mind three? Are we saying that a secretary could not fire up her Mac computer and knock out some fancy invitations or stationery, saving the almost $300,000 annual expense? 

It is a bit ironic that the President uses an Autopen machine to sign important legislation into law that usually affects every American but insists on having manual labor do far less important signing and writing.

8) In that same article we learn again that the White House employs a full time dog manager for the family pet at a cost of over $100,000 a year, more than double the average U.S. household income. Shouldn’t family members be responsible for taking care of the family pet, even if that family is the First Family?

9) And finally from Mr. Cooke, we learn that it costs the American taxpayer $181,757 an HOUR to keep Air Force One in the air. Thus, the single trip the President recently took to Florida to play one round of golf with Tiger Woods probably could have paid for a year or so of White House tours.

You get the idea. These nine examples of useless spending, combined with the previous two posts of useless spending, show that much rational budget cutting could have been done to avoid the blunt axe of the sequester. But the Washington political class, starting with and Obama and driving down through each freshman Congressman and woman, had neither the initiative, the intelligence, or the ability to make smart cuts to stupid government spending. 

As a result, the Chicken Little reaction of this Presidency, leadership by hysteria, resulted in the shutting down of White House traditions and the release of potentially dangerous criminal elements into the population. At least Chicken Little hurt no one but herself.

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


Tuesday, May 7, 2013

May, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Taxing The Rain, Incest Cronyism, and More

This is the fifth but, unfortunately, not the last post this month that covers the political class insanity we have uncovered over the past month or so. It was a long, difficult haul to get all of the idiocy, wasteful spending, ego, and other lunacy compiled but tomorrow should do it, at least for this month. I am sure that early next month there will be another pile of political mess to review and disparage.

1) Let’s start with a U.S. Senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu. She has been in the U.S. Senate for almost 18 years during which time we have seen her and the Washington political class preside over and contribute mightily to the following:
  • The Great Recession.
  • The weakest post recession recovery in the history of the country.
  • Chronic long term unemployment and underemployment.
  • A national debt close to hitting $17 TRILLION.
  • An economic stimulus program that cost over $800 billion with no long term societal benefit in return because of its stupid priorities and programs.
  • Health care industry reform legislation known as Obama Care that has virtually no chance of succeeding in reining in out of control health care costs but will suppress employment and economic growth.
  • Drops in average household income and wealth that has accelerated since the Great Recession ended.
  • No resolutions to any long term national problem, be it illegal immigration, failing public schools, lack of a national energy program, sky high health care costs, a lost war on drugs, etc.
Quite a nasty track record, a track record that should shame and embarrass any politician that has been in office as long as Ms. Landrieu. However, the good Senator does not see it that way. She recently pronounced that: “Without sounding braggadocio, I’m indispensable in this effort to secure for Louisiana a significant and reliable string of revenue to save our coast.”

Given the above track record of the Senator and her peers, indispensable is probably the last word I would be using relative to any sitting politician on any topic or issue. Incompetent yes, indispensable no.

2) In our July 9, 2012 post we related a sordid tale of Washington political cronyism. In late September, 2011, the Department of Energy approved a $737 million loan guarantee to a company called Solarserve that is working on a solar plant in Nevada. Talk about a major “coincidence.“ Turns out that the brother-in-law of former Speaker of the House, Democrat Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Ronald Pelosi, is second in command at the primary energy investment fund that backs the Solarserve effort. Surprise, surprise.

But lightning recently struck twice regarding a national Democratic woman politician from California. Out of the entire universe of those who could have won the first phase construction contract for California’s high speed rail boondoggle, who do you think won the contract?

Richard Blum and his company won the contract. Turns out that Mr. Blum is the husband of California U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein. Blum is the principle owner of Tutor Perini, the lead firm in the three-firm consortium selected by the California High Speed Rail Authority. Surprise, surprise. The political class continues to take of themselves and their families while the rest of the country suffers and ends up paying for the cronyism mess they create.

3) The Federal government is going to spend $152,000 to study “voice therapy” for transgenders. Voice therapy for transgenders, really? We have a $17 TRILLION national debt and we are worried about voice therapy for transgenders?

Now, do not get me wrong. I really do not care what someone does to their own bodies or what their life style is. But it is their life, they should face reality and pay for the consequences of their choices rather than taxpayers paying for this type of wasteful spending. According to a National Institutes of Health grant:

“This study will illuminate the capabilities of the human larynx and inform the relationship between voice production and perception. The long term goal of this research is to inform and provide new directions for Transgender (TG) voice care, thereby improving the lives of TG people who feel their voice is a great obstacle to living as their preferred gender.”

Again, I have no problem with others messing with their gender. But they should pay for the alterations and the implications of those alterations, not the American taxpayer.

4) You know things are insane in Washington when your read an April 28, 2013 Associated Press article. Lawmakers from both parties have set aside nearly half a billion dollars ($436 million) in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams tank for the Defense Department.

However, even the bloated, out of control spending Defense Department does not think they need nor do they want the additional tanks. Why build more tanks then if the Army does not want them and future military conflicts are most likely to be against terrorist organizations where tanks will be useless?

The simple answer is politics and votes. The Abrams tank is made in one location in Ohio and both Ohio Democrats and Republicans in Congress have managed to keep this useless expenditure alive in order to not tick off voters back home in Ohio. Rather than find better uses for this taxpayer wealth, including returning the wealth to the taxpayers, we now have a Federal government that would rather spend the money on useless economic activity in order to protect their political careers.

Producing products just for the sake of producing products that will never be used is certainly suboptimal in any type of economy. It is pure insanity. It is similar to what the Navy did several years ago when they spent over $300 million to build two Navy ships almost to completion and then took them apart for scrap metal before they were ever used.

Between these two atrocities of waste, the combined $736 million could have been used to fund the suspended White House tours for well over 700 years. How many teachers, border agents, drug treatments, and other more beneficial activities could have been funded for over $700 million? But these beneficial activities never happened because some Ohio politicians wanted to protect their own political careers buy funding tanks that even the Army does not want. Pathetic.

5) The MarylandReporter.com reported on April 10, 2013 that the state of Maryland will institute a rain tax in nine of its counties, i.e. people in Maryland will be taxed on how much water falls on their properties. This rain tax will be determined by how much of a property’s area is covered by a hard surface such as a building or a driveway. This calculation will be determined by aerial surveillance of each property.

It will cost Maryland homeowners, business owners, and churches about $300 million a year. The state law exempted state and local government from paying the rain tax (of course, taking care of their own kind!).

Long ago the Beatles warned us this might happen, tax us for rain:

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

They just never imagined we could be taxed on rain.

6) The Washington Times reported on a nice piece of political class elitism on April 24, 2013. As we have discussed many times in this blog. It is quite apparent that President Obama decided to make the government spending cuts from the measly sequester budget cuts as painful as possible for the ordinary American citizen. The latest insult was to furlough air traffic controllers which has resulted in long delays for American travelers.

Well, at least most American travelers. The chief of the FAA told Congress that Washington D.C. area airports will largely escape the effects of the air traffic controller furlough, making travel for D.C. lawmakers much easier and more hassle-free than for most Americans.

Just another example where selfish Washington politicians take care of themselves before even considering taking care of the rest of America.

That will do it for today. I promise tomorrow’s post will be the last in this series of monthly political class insanity reviews. Tomorrow, we will also spend some time proposing steps that need to be taken to get this insanity, idiocy, and waste under control before it is too late…or before it rains.

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

 

Sunday, April 7, 2013

April, 2013 Political Class Insanity, Part 4: Oxycodone Medicare Scams, Congressional Staffers Going Hungry and More

This is Act IV of this month’s political class insanity. Despite the fact that we had already spent a lot of time reviewing stupid government spending in the latter part of March, it looks like we will still need four posts this month to cover the idiotic and inane actions of the American political class. Their behavior continues to waste taxpayer wealth, decimate our liberty and freedoms, and personally enrichment themselves.

1) I am a great believer that taxes should be as low as possible for both businesses and individual citizens. Governments should be as small as possible, doing only those functions that can be handled by an efficient central entity vs. having individuals be responsible for those functions. These functions would include such limited functions as national defense, a judicial system, police and fire protection and not much more.

However, this wish and hope for low taxes does not mean that large corporations, rich individuals, or politicians (see yesterday’s post (XXXXXX) should not pay their fair share. The fact that businesses, individuals, and politicians can rig the system for their own self-enrichment, causing others to pay more to cover their shortfall, should not be allowed to occur.

Which brings us to Apple and Facebook. According to a BBC.com article that was summarized in the November 16, 2012 issue of The Week magazine, Apple paid a corporate tax rate of only 1.9% on its earnings outside of the United States in its last fiscal year according to regulatory filings. On foreign profits of $36.9 billion, Apple paid only $713 million in taxes.

Facebook’s tax treatment is even worse. According to a Businessweek.com article that was summarized in the March 1, 2013 issue of The Week, Facebook’s first annual public earnings report showed that it had $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits but paid nothing in Federal and state income tax. Even worse, the company is expected to receive a $429 million tax refund.

Thus, while the vast majority of Americans saw their taxes go up 2% at the start of the year as a result of the fiscal cliff deal, these corporate giants were paying almost nothing in taxes. This is not surprising since we have previously reported how other companies, notably General Electric:

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

constantly pay little or nothing in taxes, often using the out of control tax code to get hefty tax refunds.

Again, in a perfect world, no one and no company should have to pay any taxes. We do not live in a perfect world but in an imperfect world, the U.S. tax code, and the politicians responsible for it, should not allow such wide differences in taxation.

Of course, we all know the reason why this type of thing happens. I would bet that Facebook, Apple, General Electric and plenty other companies and unions are heavy contributors to incumbent politicians’ reelection campaigns. Donations for tax breaks, the corruption cycle continues.

2) The massive, and massively flawed legislation called Dodd-Frank that was supposed to reform the financial industry in this country, seems to be not working, at least relative to the concept of making the nation’s economy not fall victim again to the “too big to fail” syndrome.

According to an article from Bloomberg.com, that was summarized in the March 1, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, the four biggest domestic banks, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, have combined assets of $14.7 billion, which is about the equivalent of 93% of the U.S. Gross National Product in 2012.

Thus, if the legislation was supposed to relieve the nation of the worry that a large bank failure would not substantially impact the economy, it has failed miserably. When the entire nation’s total economic output is just a little bigger than just four banks’ assets, too big to fail is also bigger than ever, thanks to the political class inability to fix a broken banking system.

3) An article in the monthly AARP magazine showed why Medicare and Medicaid waste over $100 billion a year due to criminal fraud and inefficiencies. The article described the exploits of a Georgia woman who could not get enough painkiller pills from her doctor for her needs.

As a result, she went around and eventually found 58 medical people who prescribed 3,655 Oxycodone pain pills for her in a single year. Obviously, this comes out to about a 1,700 day supply of regular pain killer usage. And worst of all, Medicare, and the American taxpayer paid for all of it.

Her case came to the forefront when the General Accounting Office reported on 170,000 identified cases where people went doctor shopping (defined as visiting at least five or more doctors to get their hands on one of 14 prescription drugs). This has focused law maker attention on those that operate the Medicare and Medicaid programs that they are screwing up when it comes to protecting taxpayer assets in this type of fraud.

Let’s do some simple math. It is tough to find a standard answer on what a single pill costs. It apparently depends on how potent the pill is, where, you live, who is prescribing it or illegally pushing, etc. A conservative/lo estimate would be $10 per pill.

If the AARP Georgia example is average, than the 170,000 identified cases of fraud (there may be more that have not been identified) would cost the American taxpayer about $6.2 billion a year. This wasted money would be enough to put an armed police professional in over 80% of the schools in this country to protect against another Newtown school shooting or would pay for half of the infrastructure funding that Obama wants in his new budget. The insanity of waste.

4) Our out of touch politician of the month goes to Florida Congresswoman and Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She recently made the most ridiculous claim that her poor Congressional staffers are unable to afford “good meals” because of the sequester.

This statement is so asinine on so many levels. First of all, most of Wasserman Schultz’s staffers earn between $44,000 and $160,000 a year, placing them well above the average American income level, they are not starving or cannot afford good meals. Second, I do not believe that the sequester resulted in her staff taking any kind of pay cut, which even if they got the average sequester cut of 2%, they would still be much more able than most Americans to get a good meal.

According to news reports, her Congressional office spent over $95,000 on mail and printing services in 2012. One of her part-time staffer alone earns $60,000 a year. If her staff actually got a pay cut, maybe she should have thought about downsizing or making her staff more efficient in order to keep her staff‘s salaries whole. We recently reported on the fact that Senator Rand Paul trimmed his Senate office expenses by $600,000, why couldn’t she have given him a call for the sake of her staff?

Why didn’t she? Because she does not care what happens to Americans and their 2% tax increase in January, only worrying about her little slice of life.

Let’s review: Facebook and Apple make a lot of money but pay little or nothing in taxes, a Congresswoman is more worried about her well paid staff than suffering Americans, Medicare and Medicaid get stiffed for billions of dollars a year in fraudulent claims, and the nation’s banks are bigger stronger and more likely to destroy the economy than before the Washington political class set out to make this situation go away.

Yep, sounds like a typical month’s worth of destruction from the politicians in Washington. We will finish off this month’s roundup of political class insanity and idiocy tomorrow when we review a fresh list of frivolous and stupid Federal government spending that has been recently compiled. If you are Elvis fans or fans of snowmobile racing, you do not want to miss 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.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 

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Chicken Little And The Washington Political Class, Part 2: Biden and The Hyatt Regency

Last week we did a popular post that showed how inane and stupid the Chicken Little talk was from Obama and other Washington politicians relative to the financial sequester:

http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/03/chicken-little-and-washington-political.html

The sequester required a small 2% across the board cut in spending by the Federal government because the President and those in Congress were too incompetent to come up with a rational plan to trim government spending over a 17 month period.

The President was given the task of deciding how to cut the spending by a measly 2% and he chose the most vindictive and cruel ways to do it, ensuring that the citizens of this country would suffer the most despite the fact that the government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

He chose to shut down school and family tours of the White House despite the low cost of continuing them and the tradition of continuing them. He chose to release over 2,000 illegal alien criminals, of which over 400 had been convicted of a violent crime. He threatened to shut down the long tradition of the White House Easter Egg Hunt despite its low cost. He threatened other measures to maximize the negative impact on America.

We pointed to a number of ways that the government could have cut far more expense with much less pain to Americans. However, politically, that was not the best route for the President, with vindictiveness and pain being his path of choice. A week or so after that post, we have uncovered a whole new set of wasteful spending projects and programs that Obama should have shut down long ago but did not.

1) Last week CBS News, a main component of the mainstream media, actually did a piece on government waste that should have been cut before it even happened. The IRS spent $60,000 to have a mediocre Star Trek themed video produced for internal use. The video can be viewed at the following link:

http://patriotupdate.com/2013/03/taxpayers-fund-irs-star-trek-parody/

You cannot claim that you are running an efficient government operation when tens of thousands of dollars are spent on unneeded videos, especially poorly made ones like this piece of trash that will have no redeeming value and impact virtually any American’s life. Makes you wonder how many more such government videos are produced that are just as unnecessary.

2) U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont recently wrote a letter to a Vermont citizen regarding the status of the next generation U.S. military fighter jet, the F-35 which has been under development since 2001: “The F-35 program has been poorly managed and is a textbook example of how not to buy military equipment. The causes of the F-35 program’s present difficulties are too numerous to detail in my response to your letter; however, I believe the F-35 program is approaching a point where the military services and a majority of Congress will recognize that the jet is just too costly to proceed with purchases at today’s planned levels.”

While I applaud the Senator’s candor, I think he is being a little too kind. According to a recent report from the Secretary of Defense by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, dated February 15, 2013, the fighter’s ultimate cost is likely to be about $1.5 TRILLION which will put it at 100% over budget. The plane currently cannot fly in bad weather, on instruments, or at night due to failures in many of it systems. These failures exist despite the fact that the American taxpayer has already spent $400 billion on this disaster.

$400 billion already spent, No viable jet fighter in sight. Over $1 TRILLION still to be spent. You could give a lot of White House tours for $1.5 TRILLION.

3) Apparently the Federal Department of Education has a great amount of say in the education processes on native Americans. As a result of sequester, this administration and its strategy to make these measly 2% cuts hurt as much as possible, forced expense cuts on Native American schools in Minnesota, according to the outraged Congresswoman from that district, Congresswoman Betty McCollum:
  • Native American schools in Minnesota are freezing salaries, leaving job openings unfilled, enlarging classroom sizes, and making other cost savings moves to satisfy demands being enforced by the Department of Education.
  • The White Earth Reservation tribal school may cut the school year down to save money.
  • The Red Lake School District has cut security staff.
However, at the same time these kids’ education capabilities are being cut, the Department of Education is creating a totally new position that pays over $127,000 a year. The job is going to a former aid of Congressman Charles Rangel, David Johns, and is titled, “Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans.”

I would assume that this is not a solitary position and that this new executive director will also have a staff of people burning through taxpayer money. You decide: do not create and staff this position and new entity, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in
order to minimize the cuts to Native American education processes or expand the Federal government bureaucracy and screw the kids’ education. Not being the vindictive type like our President, I would have kept the resources with the kids and not the bureaucrats.

4) And for the worst hypocrisy of all, Vice President Joe Biden. He recently flew to Europe where he spent one day London and one day in Paris. Total cost to the American taxpayer: about $1 million. Yes, one million for a two night stand in Europe. Copies of the receipts for these two nights can be seen at the following link:

http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/03/6986-biden-spends-585000-in-one-night-paris-stay-on-your-dollar/

Details of the London expenditures include the following:
  • Biden’s entourage needed 136 rooms at the Hyatt Regency, certainly not your low end hotel accommodations by any stretch of the imagination.
  • These 136 rooms resulting in a total of 893 room nights for the stay for members of his security force and other entourage members, all for a one night visit.
  • The total cost just for the hotel stay came out to $459,338.65, or a little more than $500 per room for these public servants
Comparable expenses were run up at the Paris stopover.

Look, I understand the need for our politicians to visit overseas locations and meet foreign leaders. I understand they need to be kept safe, it is a dangerous world out there. But come on, 136 rooms, Hyatt Regency, $500 a night? Why did these people not stay at our embassies, they are secure. The London embassy certainly has the room:





Or why couldn’t Biden have stayed at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in London, another secure location which also certainly has the space while the rest of his entourage stayed at the equivalent of the Red Roof:




The reason he did not is that Biden is just like every other politician in the White House and in Congress: they are so out of touch with reality and the need to intelligently and unselfishly cut expenses that they would rather have the people of America suffer before they see their plush, extravagant, and selfish life styles affected.

Biden’s expenses could have been used to operate White House tours for a whole year. Instead, the tours are out for Americans, the Hyatt Regency is still a go for politicians.

This Chicken Little behavior of our political class through this whole sequester mess, a process they agreed to 17 months ago, proves once and for all that we need term limits more than ever in this country, as proposed by Step 39 in “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” When the ruling political class is more focused on making life painful for the citizens in this country, it is definitely time to replace those that find being vindictive more preferable to being compassionate and caring.

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