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:

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/05/white-house-wont-confirm-obamas-sequester-pay-cut/

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:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/everything-can-administration/#!

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

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Bain Capital Is Now Obama's Golf Buddy, The President Gets His Briefings From the Evening news and More

This is our third post this month that looks at the insanity, lunacy, wasteful spending, and pure idiocy of the American political class that has erupted in just the past month or so. The ability of our politicians to come up with ineffective and inefficient programs and policies and to waste away our wealth and our freedoms should never be underestimated. 

The first post in this month’s series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-political-class-insanity-part_4.html

1) Although just about every Federal program wastes money, the way that Washington accounts for their spending of that wasted money even manages to undercount the true costs to taxpayers. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, a number of government programs actually cost taxpayers far more than what is shown in official budget figures and results.

For example of how this charade works, consider the skyrocketing student loan aid problem in this country. Some Washington Democrats have introduced legislation to reduce costs for student borrowers. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others, she seems to believe that the Federal government makes a profit from managing its transactions with student borrowers. Thus, student loan rates can be reduced to ease the debt problem without costing taxpayers any money. 

However, the CBO's analysis, using the correct accounting procedures, shows that Federal student loan programs represent subsidies to borrowers and COSTS to taxpayers, not PROFITS as Warren claims under her use of a bogus accounting approach. Applying fair-value accounting acid test to other government programs yields similar results:

• The six largest programs of the Export-Import Bank, which provides loans and loan guarantees to U.S. exporters, create $14 billion in savings under normal terms, but in the fair-value analysis, they cost $2 billion. Thus, the cost to taxpayers looks eight times better when the wrong accounting procedures are used.
• The Federal Housing Administration's single-family mortgage guarantee program for low-income families is credited with budgetary savings of $63 billion, but it really costs taxpayers $30 billion when accounted for properly.

Thus, even when they, our politicians, are costing us billions and billions of dollars for faulty and inefficient programs, they are undercounting the losses. Good rule of thumb: Never believe what a politician or government bureaucrat tells you when discussing costs and budgets unless you truly know the right way to do accounting for the program. It is a pretty safe bet that those responsible for their pet government programs are going to skew the accounting results to their benefit, not the taxpayer’s reality.

2) While recently appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” conservative columnist George Will discussed why the current government is so difficult to manage, namely it is “too big for meaningful oversight and effective management.” The lack of efficiency shouldn’t shock Americans:

But why are we surprised the government that runs the Post Office badly and runs Amtrak badly can’t run a health care system? Delivering a postcard from A to B or a passenger from point A to point B is a lot simpler than delivering health care. So, we shouldn’t be surprised by this.

We totally agree with Mr. Will regarding the obesity of the Federal government, with our comparison of likening the overgrown and obese Federal government bureaucracy to Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies: an overblown, overweight behemoth that is slow, mean, and a hoarder of resources but providing nothing positive to society in return.

You’d think the government would be able to handle something so easy as the postal system or a train network, but it has proven time and again that it cannot do either efficiently or effectively despite having been at those tasks for centuries or decades. Why should we trust a government like that with something so precious as our health care?

3) Hypocrisy alert. Back in the 2012 Presidential election campaign, Obama, Harry Reid, and other Democrats tried to demonize Mitt Romney and his association with Bain Capital, a financial firm that Romney used to run. Seems that Bain had the audacity to give money to Democratic political opponents and thus, incur the wrath and venom of election year politics and being depicted as the worse aspect of Republicans and our election system.

Fast forward to the last weekend in May, 2014: guess who Barack Obama played golf with over the last May weekend? Not only did Obama play golf at an exclusive Robert Trent Golf Club over the weekend, one of the people in his foursome was none other than a lobbyist for Bain Capital named Joe O’Neil. Those people at Bain that were so evail less than two years ago are now golf partners with the President, a President who falsely promised to stay clear of all lobbyists in his ill-fated “most transparent administration of all time” campaign promise.

As with government budget numbers, trust no one who has the word “politician” on their resume.

4) Getting back to the Post Office and its inefficiencies, consider a recent Inspector General report on the Post Offic. The report found that while the Postal Service pays its hauling contractors and truckers for fuel based on the miles they must drive to deliver the mail, the contractors' trucks are actually more fuel-efficient than what the Postal Service calculates the fuel payments for.

According to the Inspector General report, when estimating vehicle miles-per-gallon, the Postal Service uses a rate as much as 2.2 miles lower than the industry hauling and trucking average. This results in the Postal Service paying for more fuel than what the hauling contractors actually use, to the tune of almost $100 million a year. According to the Inspector General's report: "This can create an environment for fraud, waste, and abuse. The risk is that suppliers may use excess gallons for non-Postal Service operations, which is prohibited." 

Again, the Post Office has been around for a long time. Wouldn’t one think that it would know how to run an efficient and cost effective operation by now and not have to have its failures identified in a separate Inspector General report? If they do not know the reality of their own industry, it is no wonder that they are on target to lose almost $2 billion this year alone, a loss that will somehow be eventually dumped onto the American taxpayer. 

That lost of $2 billion could have been easily reduced by 5% if they just knew the reality of their trucking and hauling processes. But knowing reality has never been a strong suit of the Federal government or the politicians that run it.

5) You know we are really in bad shape as a country when we have to ask the question: relative to the major scandals of this Presidential administration, is the President ignorant of life and reality or is he a liar? We make this discouraging type of statement since it appears that this President finds out about the major issues and scandals of our time by watching the evening news on television. 

Is he really that out of touc and ignorant that television news is his primary source of what is happening around the country and the world? Or is he so incompetent and unable to address those issues and scandals that he disavows any knowledge of them, lying, until they explode into the national view? 

Are we to believe that with the large and well paid (or overpaid) staff at the White House that no one had the guts, the ability, or the face time to maybe give the President a heads up on such major issues as Fast and Furious, the IRS shredding the First Amendment rights of Obama’s political adversaries, the NSA spying, the disgraceful treatment of our veterans, etc.?

Consider the following set of video clips which seem to prove that we are living through the most disconnected, oblivious Presidential administration of all time:

http://www.westernjournalism.com/president-nothing-phony-anger-act/

If the President does not take the time to understand or does not have the ability to comprehend these major issues until he watches television, then it would be impossible for him to understand and take action to reform the workings of the Federal government. This is a government that probably wastes more than a TRILLION dollars a year through duplication, ineffectiveness, and outright criminal fraud. 

Or maybe those issues have not yet come to his attention because CNN has not had a news story on them yet. Lying or ignorant, you decide, but either option is certainly an embarrassing trait for the President of the United States.

So what did we learn today? We learned that the government uses faulty accounting, it operates a faulty train system, it operates a faulty postal system, if operates a faulty Presidential briefing system, relying instead on the evening news to brief the President, and Bain Capital and its lobbying money is back in good graces with this administration. More insanity tomorrow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Debating The Merits Of Yogurt, Unintended Heroin Consequences In Afghanistan, and More

This is our second post this month in our recurring monthly series on political class insanity. We do this update every month in order to stay on top of the never ending wasteful spending, idiocy, inane comments, and ineffective programs that the American political class continually piles on us, the nation, our freedoms, and the economy. 

1) Over Memorial Day weekend, traditionally a heavy car traveling time, the Obama administration set another dubious record relative to not having a comprehensive and strategic energy plan and vision for the country, a plan that would reduce energy costs while protecting the environment. 

May 26 marked the 1,251th consecutive day that the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline in this country cost more than $3 a gallon, according to AAA data. Recall that when Obama came into office, the average price for that same gallon of regular gas was about $1.89. Thus, during the first five and a half years of this administration, the cost of gas has gone up about 93% relative to today’s average price of just over $3.62 a gallon.

And given the Washington political class’s inability to think strategically or agree on just about anything, it is highly doubtful that the American consumer and driver will see any kind of breakthrough in this area in the near or distant future. Constantly high gas prices force consumers and households to divert their income and wealth to energy needs and not for growing the economy.

2) The next one I love since it proves that at whatever level of government a politician is residing, they almost always have the wrong priorities and work on the little stupid issues that no one really cares about in these time of high unemployment, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, leaky borders, etc.

State senators in New York were hard at work recently spending legislative time on whether or not to make yogurt the official state snack. Let me let that statement sink in for a minute. Of all the problems facing New Yorkers, these buffoons are not only proposing that yogurt become the official snack of the state they are actually DEBATING the issue. You cannot make this lunacy up.

The following video clip from Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart highlights the best moments of this debate. Take note how one legislator actually wants to argue the definition of what a snack is:

http://blog.heritage.org/2014/05/12/joke-new-york-senate-passes-bill-making-yogurt-state-snack/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

3) In a previous insanity post we had discussed the idiocy of having people on the payroll in Washington D.C. that are actually responsible for dictating how street crosswalks are to be designed and implemented. I guess they did not think that local politicians and local citizens could figure out how to implement safe school crossing signs. Such a waste of taxpayer wealth on Federal bureaucrats that add nothing to anyone’s life.

But this type of transportation related idiocy is not confined to street crossings. When the Federal government gives back each state a cut of the gasoline tax that the states collected in the first place, they dictate that 2% of those funds be used or set aside for Transportation Alternatives Programs or TAP.

TAP options include such things as sidewalks, streetlamps, bicycle paths and beautification. While some of these things might be necessary, e.g. sidewalks, does it make sense to force states to pay for shrubbery and bike paths when the country’s infrastructure is falling apart?

Is it better to fix a failing bridge or to plant some nice bushes next to a bike trail? Every dollar for beauty is one less dollar spent on safety. For example, the state of Pennsylvania is required to set aside $27.5 million for TAP programs in 2014 and NOT use that money to fix the 5,218 deficient and failing bridges in the state. Insanity that some nameless, faceless bureaucrat can dictate the priority of a bush over the safety of citizens.

4) The Obama administration has had an ugly and expensive tendency of betting taxpayer money on the wrong businesses and industries over the duration of its term. It lost tens of billions of dollars trying to prop up failing alternative energy companies, almost all of whom had contributed money to Obama’s election campaigns. These companies include but are not limited to, Solyndra, A123, Beacon, Evergreen, Spectra, and others.

Another failed bet, a bet that wasted billions and billions of taxpayer wealth, is General Motors. According to a May 15, 2013 Associated Press report, this is what we are getting from a quality perspective for our billions of dollars: 

• General Motors is recalling more than 140,000 2014 Chevrolet Malibu cars to fix a problem with the power-assisted brakes. 
• The recall affects models with 2.5-liter four-cylinder engines and stop-start technology that shuts off the engine at red lights. 
• The Malibus were part of a larger recall involving 2.7 million vehicles.
• The biggest component of the recall, 2.4 million midsize cars from model years 2004 to 2012, is concerned with brake lights that can fail.
• GM confirmed it knew about the defective brake light problem as early as 2008, about when the bailout plan involving tens of billions of tax dollars was starting to being formulated.
• This latest recall comes on the heels of another recall of 2.6 million smaller cars earlier this year for faulty ignition switches. 
• GM knew about that problem for at least a decade, well before Washington rewarded this type of behavior with a bailout.
• The ignition switch problem, which can unexpectedly shut down a car's engine, has been linked to at least 13 deaths.
• In total, GM has already recalled more than 11 million cars and trucks in the U.S. so far this year.

Three main insanity issues here. First, the Washington political class gave GM billions of dollars despite the many product problems it had that were likely killing Americans. Second, the Federal government, which is supposed to be protecting Americans from faulty products, failed miserably to act for over a decade despite being financed for all of these years with taxpayer money. And finally, did GM management intentionally cover up these fatal defects in order to have their company and careers saved by a taxpayer bailout? If so, is that a criminal act?

In any case, wasting money on defective products should never be a government function

5) About 80% of the world’s heroin supply is cultivated in Afghanistan, according to a recent Sacramento Bee article that was summarized in the February 21, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. Yes, the country where we were involved in the longest warfare in our history, a place where we wasted probably hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American servicemen’s lives, is now the premier producer of illegal heroin.

Under the Taliban, the entire Afghan heroin industry was almost totally wiped out. Under the corrupt government we helped install, the heroin trade is now worth about $3 billion a year or about 15% of the country’s GDP. 

Thus, another incremental cost of our Afghan military venture will be the cost and destruction of heroin right here in this country’s streets from drug addiction. Talk about unintended consequences. But unintended consequences are a staple of the American political class who never attempt or never have the ability to think through what problems their actions might result in before jumping in without a long term strategic plan in place.

That will do it for today, but more insanity will follow at least into tomorrow. Until then, consider joining our movement to impose term limits on all Federal politicians, one and done. 

Because really, how much worse could it get if we replaced all of the current politicians in Washington, the same ones that botched the whole Afghanistan mission, the same ones that took our money and gave it to their corporate cronies for nothing in return, the same ones that rate shrubbery more important than road conditions, etc. Let’s replace the current ones with a new set of people who might be a lot smarter and a lot more concerned with the future of the country than what we are stuck with now:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Exposing Our Own Spy's Cover, Our Lost Freedom Of The Press, Losing Libya, and More

It’s the beginning of another month, which means time for one of our regular features, political class insanity. The political class of America has been working overtime in the past month or so on their idiocy so we probably have a substantial number of days ahead of us to get all of the insanity in.

1) We have often made the case that we really no longer live in a free country. You cannot live in a free country when:

• The government controls most of your retirement income via Social Security.
• The government controls most of your retirement medical needs via Medicare.
• The government controls much of the pre-retirement medical needs via Obama Care.
• The government taxes you so much that in many states you do not starting working for yourself and your family until April of each year.
• The government decides that it can assassinate American citizens without legal due process.
• The government decides that it can hold citizens in custody for an unlimited amount of time without due process.
• The government spies on just about every piece of electronic communications that you use.
• The government controls most of the election processes that allows ill performing Washington politicians to manipulate those processes to stay in office despite their ineptness.

We could go on and on but you get the idea, anyone who still thinks we are living in a free country has not been paying attention.

And we now have another item to add to that list of our dwindling freedoms. The state of the free press in the U.S. is also on the endangered freedom list, according to the latest 2014 World Press Freedom Index. This index is annually compiled by Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières).

Unbelievably, in their current analysis the U.S. was ranked 46th among the 180 nations surveyed relative to freedom of the press in this country. This is a dismal drop of 13 places since last year. Finland, the Netherlands and Norway are among the most free nations for journalists. Iran, China and North Korea are among the most restrictive for reporters.

America's bad ranking was based on the conviction of WikiLeaks' informant Bradley (Chelsea) Manning and the treatment of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with the Obama administration's "increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks." These infractions include but are not limited to:

• In 2013, it became known that the Justice Department had secretly obtained phone logs of Associated Press reporters. The Justice Department was also caught monitoring the personal email account for FOX News reporter James Rosen in order to discover government officials speaking to the press.
• They also monitored and sought the testimony of James Risen of the New York Times to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information.
• Obama said in May 2013 that he was "troubled" at the possible overreach by the Justice Department and ordered the agency to review its guidelines on dealing with press investigations.
• The latest analysis accused the Obama White House of shielding the President from the press by not allowing the White House Press Corps sufficient access to photograph and question Obama during his official duties.

And when the Obama friendly New York Times agrees with the general conclusion of this analysis and index, you know things are getting bad from a freedom of the press perspective: "I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering," New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson told Al Jazeera America in late January. "The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It's on a scale never seen before." 

2) The Obama administration violated the Constitution when it involved the U.S. and our military forces in an illegal and unnecessary military action in Libya several years ago to oust Ghadaffi. The actions put U.S. military personnel in harm’s way and ate up well over a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth.

And we did all of this for apparently no gain since earlier this week, the State Department issued a warning and advised all Americans who remained in Libya to evacuate immediately: “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Libya and recommends that U.S. citizens currently in Libya depart immediately. The security situation in Libya remains unpredictable and unstable. The Libyan government has not been able to adequately build its military and police forces and improve security following the 2011 revolution.”

The State Department explained that a number of threats by “various groups” have been made against Americans in the nation while reinforcing the reality that its capability to offer protection or emergency services at this time is “very limited.” Staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli has been pared down as a result of the ongoing threats, the statement indicated.

Thus, by not having a long term strategy or knowledge of the whole Libyan situation, our participation in that internal civil war has resulted in a lawless, terrorist infested land that apparently has no sense of gratitude for us helping the Libyan citizens get rid of their long term dictator and tormentor. But this insanity should come as no surprise, this administration and the Washington political class have repeatedly shown absolutely no ability to think strategically and long term, think and act within established legal parameters, or generally get anything done right. The evacuation of Libya is just another failure on a long line of foreign policy failures of Washington over the past fifty years, regardless of who is in office in the White House or in Congress.

3) But American politicians are just as good as wasting money within our own borders as they are in wasting money in far flung disasters around the world. Researchers from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center recently completed a corporate cronyism study which found an incredible amount of taxpayer money being given out freely to corporations. A small sample of the wasteful spending includes:

• As of 2013, Walmart had received at least 260 special state benefits worth more than $1.2 billion. But for every 100 new Walmart jobs, an average of 50 existing jobs disappear as other retailers are crowded out so the incremental benefit of Walmart jobs is offset substantially by the killing off of other state jobs. 
• Apple got $370 million in state tax breaks for setting up in North Carolina. Since only 50 jobs were created within the state, North Carolina taxpayers ended up paying $7.4 million per incremental job created within the state. 
• New York granted aluminum giant Alcoa free electricity for more than 30 years (estimated value: $5.6 billion). In return, Alcoa pledged to make a $600 million investment and promised not to fire more than 165 workers. Subsequently, to pay for the deal, New York had to raise taxes multiple times on its citizens. This deal was even worse than the Apple/North Carolina deal since if we divide the 165 saved jobs into the $5.6 billion spent to save those jobs, the cost per saved job comes out to over $38 million per job.

Total insanity. Don’t these politicians know how to do simple math: spending taxpayer money at the rate of millions of dollars per job is no way to expand an economy. Stupid is too tame a word to use for these examples and others pointed out in the study.

4) The CIA has been around for about seventy years. The White House has been around for over two hundred years. Given the longevity of each, one would have thought they both would know how to keep a secret. After all, the CIA is our primary spy organization within the Federal government. They should be keeping all kinds of secrets and have processes in place to do so since a broken secret is highly likely to get somebody killed who is inside the CIA or working for the CIA and its spying and covert activities.

Well, one could think that but one would be wrong. In one of the most dangerous and idiotic goof ups of the Obama administration,

 the White House inadvertently blew the cover of the CIA’s top officer, its station chief, in Kabul. Afghanistan during President Obama’s recent surprise trip to Afghanistan. Unbelievably, the name of the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul was included on a list provided to news organizations participating in Mr. Obama’s visit with U.S. troops.

Nobody had to hack a CIA computer to get the name of the local CIA boss. Nobody had to capture and torture a CIA operative to get the information. Nobody had to plant a mole deep inside the CIA to ferret out the name of the CIA station head. No, the Obama administration just typed the name out on a piece of paper and then distributed it freely to many people.

You cannot make up this type of incompetence. If you went to Hollywood and had a movie idea that involved the President’s staff freely handing out the name of its top spy in one of the most dangerous areas of the world, they would laugh you out of the office. But that is what happened and that is why I continue to assert we are living through a period of our nation’s history where the most inept and incompetent people are in charge in Washington.

That will do it for today but plenty more insanity will be headed this way over the next week or so so brace yourself for more wasteful spending, ineffective programs, and the ongoing lunacy that is the political class.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w