November, 2014, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: Politicians For Sale, Lost War On Poverty, More Wastebook Waste, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and governments around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

This is our fourth post in this month’s series so the insanity continues to flow out of the political class and into our lives, our wallets, and our freedoms:

1) It is election time so it is no surprise that the many moneyed interests across the country are donating millions of dollars to various political campaigns in the hope of eventually billions of dollars in return via tax breaks, favorable legislation, etc. The top donors according to a recent Politico article to our broken political processes, in just the third quarter of 2014, are:

• U.S. Chamber ($28.4 million)
• National Association of Realtors ($18 million)
• U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform ($9.1 million)
• General Electric ($5.3 million)
• Boeing ($4.4 million)
• CVS Health ($4.3 million)
• NAM ($4.3 million)
• American Hospital Association ($4.3 million)
• American Medical Association ($4.2 million)
• Comcast Corporation ($4.2 million)
• Koch Companies Public Sector ($4 million)
• The National Association of Broadcasters ($4 million)
• Google ($4 million)
• National Cable and Telecommunications Association ($3.8 million)
• PhRMA ($3.7 million)
• United Technologies ($3.6 million)
• Lockheed Martin ($3.4 million)
• AT&T Services ($3.5 million)
• American Chemistry Council ($3.2 million)
• Occidental Petroleum ($3.2 million)

Just these twenty entities gave the political class almost $123 million in the past three months. Does anyone really think that the politicians that received these funds care more about our needs than those that gave them millions and millions of dollars? 

Never has there been more of a need for Step 6 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” a step that would allow only individual American citizens to contribute to political campaigns. No businesses, no unions, no PACs, no industry trade groups, etc. should be able to contribute to political campaigns. Only individual citizens, exercising their individual First Amendment rights, should have a say in financing political campaigns.

2) Cato recently pointed out that the War on Poverty recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Passed during the Johnson administration, this war was supposed to eliminate poverty in the country. According to Cato, the American taxpayer has spent $19 TRILLION in this “war,” making it the most expensive war in the history of the country

What do we have to show for our $19 TRILLION:

• About 46 million Americans, about one out of every seven, need monthly government food assistance.
•  The poverty rate of today is about 15%, about what it was fifty years ago.
• Millions of Americans are homeless and millions cannot afford basic medical care.
• As we reported a few days ago, much of the middle class cannot afford the luxuries that used to be taken for granted by the middle class so imagine how much worse off poorer Americans are if the middle class is under such financial assault.

Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” After fifty years and $19 TRILLION our politicians must truly be insane, doing the same things and programs over and over, since the war on poverty has been lost many times over.

3) We have already discussed some of the bigger wasteful spending follies that Senator Tom Coburn uncovered within the Federal budget earlier via his latest “Wastebook” research late last month at the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/10/wastebook-2015-unrelenting-wasteful_27.html

But since then we have come up with a few more from the Senator that are just as absurdly wasteful of taxpayer wealth:

•  The Federal government spent $190,000 to study compost digested by worms.
• It spent $297 million for the purchase of an unused mega blimp.
• It spent $1 million on a Virginia bus stop where only 15 people can huddle under a small roof. 

Almost half a million dollars spent on stupidity. As we said when we first discussed the Senator’s research, how many drug addicts could have been treated for half a million dollars? How many meals for the homeless and hungry could have been provided for half a million dollars? A half a million dollars is a very, very small part of the Federal government’s budget but it would be a very large part of a homeless American’s day.

4) And while Americans are going hungry, homeless, and unemployed, how is the Washington political class treating themselves? It must be a nice feeling to know that you can control how much you get paid even with such a pitiful performance while in office:

• The Speaker of the House currently gets an annual salary of $223,500, and will receive a payment of roughly that amount, depending on the years of service, for the rest of his life. 
• He gets paid this amount regardless of how poorly Congress and the political class performs in serving the country and its citizens.
• This $223,500 is about five times what the median U.S. household earns in a year.
• But that is probably at the lower rung of Congressional retirement benefits according to Cato. For example, Nancy Pelosi will not receive annually $223,500 for life, but roughly double that amount since 1) she is a member of Congress, 2) she is currently the House of Representatives’ Minority Leader, and 3) she is a retired Speaker of the House. 

ŸAnd Lord knows she is certainly not worth anywhere near that much, given her pathetic track record while serving in Congress.

Several steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” would remedy this disgrace and wasteful spending:

1. Step 37 would subject Congressional pay to an annual “customer/voter satisfaction” survey with the results determining how much Congressional members are paid, based on selected performance criteria
2. Step 39 would impose term limits on all Federal politicians, preventing them from every accumulating so many nonproductive years in Congress and pumping up their retirement benefits at taxpayer expense.
3. Step 41 would prohibit any member of Congress with a net worth of over $3 million from drawing a salary or pension from their service in Congress simply because they can afford to go without such compensation, given their personal wealth. Serving the country should be a calling, not a career.

The political class should not control their pay treatment and pension levels, we should, based on their performance, not their greed.

Another day another set of insanity. Overpaid and unaccountable politicians overseeing useless government expenditures to a failed $19 TRILLION failed war on poverty to the rich getting richer via the political process not via investment and hard work. 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

November, 2014, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Screwing Up The Army, Arming The Middle East Crazies, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and governments around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

1) The U.S. Army has a proud tradition of fighting and winning land wars over the centuries. It is the main component of any “boots on the ground” facet of American foreign policy. Which brings to the latest insanity out of the Pentagon, namely right out of the mouth of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. At a recent conference he suggested that part of the U.S. Army be repurposed as “a coastal defense force.”

Say what? A coastal defense force against who? ISIS is marching through the Middle East, Russia is busy annexing parts of Europe, our southern border is being overrun with illegal immigrants and the top ranking person in charge of our armed forces thinks that the Army should be used to protect our coasts? From who?

Now, if he had said to protect our land borders with Mexico, that may have made at least a little sense. But no, he very specifically talked about coastal defense, a non-existent threat today if there ever was one. Insanity.

2) The October 31, 2014 issue of The Week magazine had a summary of an article from MarketWatch.com. The main thrust of the article is that from 1995 through 2012, American taxpayers paid out $11.3 million in farm subsidies to billionaire-owned farms and agribusinesses. Thus, non-millionaires were paying millions to billionaires, that is how upside down and illogical our political class and Federal government have become.

How many homeless and hungry Americans could have been taking care of with $11.3 million without having any trace of downside to billionaires? How many veterans would get much needed medical help without crimping a billionaire’s lifestyle? Shameful.

3) Very few people would disagree that the Middle East is a mess. Shiites fighting Sunni, religious minorities fleeing or fighting for their lives, Iran trying to go nuclear, Israelis fighting Palestinians, etc. A lot of different entities get blamed for the turmoil including ISIS, religious terrorists, poverty, and dictators.

But perhaps the worst element in the whole mess is not over there but right here in this country. According to an article from VOX.com, that was summarized in the October 10, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, in just the first seven months of this year, the U.S. exported $557 million worth of guided missile technology to more than twenty countries around the world. And more troubling,  Middle East countries were six of the top ten buyers.

This is just guided missile technology. This does not include the other arms and weapons that have been sold or given by the U.S. to various ground forces in the countries throughout the region. So maybe, just maybe, we are the ones causing a lot of the turmoil, using American taxpayer dollars, to make the Middle East more of a violent mess than it otherwise would be.

4) The Obama administration recently tried to make points with the fact that this year’s Federal budget deficit will dip below half a TRILLION dollars for the first time since Obama took office. Of course, they failed to point out the insanity that this lower annual deficit number is still higher than ANY deficit put forth by ANY previous Presidential administration.

They also failed to point out a recent analysis from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which shows that Federal government spending will outpace tax revenue by $9 trillion from 2014-2024. The details of their analysis are highlighted in the following chart:

If this estimate comes true, it will add $9 TRILLION onto our already obscene $18 TRILLION national debt burden, resulting in a total national debt load of about $27 TRILLION or over $200,000 for every household in America. As you can see, unless the political class grows some backbone and finds a way to truly reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the main drivers of this ever growing national debt, the debt load will likely collapse the economy and our democracy long before ten years are up.

5) One last piece of insanity for today. The Heritage Foundation recently ran a nice summary of President Obama’s campaign fundraising activities (see chart below). While his administration has accomplished very little in the first six years of its run, one cannot deny that the President has been very busy doing political fundraising.

While he has been hopping around the country on strictly political junkets and activities, Americans are suffering through the worst economic recovery of recent history, the Middle East is spinning out of control, Russia is aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, the Chinese economy continues to outgrow ours, Iran and North Korea advance their nuclear weapons programs, etc., etc., etc. I think it can safely be said that when Presidential leadership was required, this President was more often out of town doing political fundraising or on the golf course.

According to the Heritage count, in less than six years in office, Obama has attended 426 political fundraisers or about 74 a year, an amazing 1.4 fund raisers a WEEK since he has been in office. Bush attended a total of 318 political fund raisers in his eight years in office, an average of less than 40 a year, a rate that is 46% less than Obama’s.

Add in Obama’s 200 plus rounds of golf and we see that this President has been out of the White House raising political funds or playing golf more than twice a week during his term. An insane focus on bad priorities in the face of a country with so many problems.

That will do it for today. A clueless Secretary of Defense, enriching billionaires, arming the Middle East crazies, exploding the national debt upwards, and an absentee President. So much insanity in such varied ways, and more to come 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

November, 2014, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Bingo Busting in Mississippi, Killing the American Dream, and Keystone Pipeline Insanity

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and government around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

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

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/11/november-2014-part-1-political-class.html

1) It never ceases to amaze us at how much and in so many varied ways that politicians and governments at all levels can waste taxpayer wealth, especially when there are so many other more important priorities and needs facing Americans. Consider a recent article by Steve Wilson writing for the website, watchdog.org.

Consider the track record of a Mississippi law enforcement organization:

• The Mississippi Gaming Commission’s Charitable gaming Division employs eight dedicated law enforcement agents. 
• This division is responsible for regulating the state’s…wait for it… bingo industry.
• Those eight agents have made four arrests since 2003 or one arrest about every three and a half years.
• The good news is that the agency used to have twenty full time law enforcement agents to make sure bingo games do not break the law.
• Now, the agency has issued 279 citations and collected fines of $176,672 since 2003, according to Rodney Smith, division director II with the Charitable Gaming Division. But that only averages out to about 25 citations and about $16,000 in fines per year.
• If we assume that each of those 20 law enforcement people earn $40,000 a year in salary, than the agency is paying out about $800,000 a year in salaries just to collect $16,000 in fines, a horrible pay back on taxpayer dollars. And that $800,000 does not include overhead expenses, benefits, etc. making the payback even worse. 
• At $40,000 a head in annual salary, the cost benefit ratio is about 50, meaning that for every $50 that Mississippi taxpayers put out for this agency, they get back one dollar for their efforts.

Talk about insane priorities.

2) Five years after the recession has ended, after five years of the Federal Reserve printing money to prop up the economy, over five years after the Obama administration spent over $800 billion to stimulate the economy, the political class has still not learned how to manage and support a growing economy. Food stamp enrollment is still sky high, long term unemployment is still high, the real unemployment rate is still over 10%, and household incomes have DROPPED during the post recession period, an unheard of historical event.

But things are probably worse than these top line numbers show. Consider a recent USAToday article by Erika Rawes that showed how the middle class could longer afford the following six luxuries and necessities of life:

- Vacations - A recent Statista survey found that this year 54% of people gave up purchasing big ticket items like TVs or electronics so they can go on a vacation. Others made financial sacrifices like reducing or eliminating trips to the movies (47%), reducing or eliminating restaurants meals (43%), or avoiding purchasing small ticket items like new clothing (43%) just to afford a vacation. Traditionally, middle class households did not have to make financial sacrifices just to take a vacation.

- New cars - Historically, middle class families could easily afford a new car every once in a while by choosing from a host of cars and brands that offered moderately prices cars for moderate income people. However, Interest.com recently analyzed the prices of new cars and trucks, as well as the median incomes across more than two dozen major cities.

Unfortunately, they found that new cars and trucks were now not affordable to most middle-earners: "Median-income families in only one major city [Washington DC - no surprise there] can afford the average price Americans are paying for new cars and trucks nowadays." As of 2013, new cars are priced at $32,086, according to the study which is about 60% of the median household income in this country. 

To pay off debt - Once reason Americans cannot afford vacations and new cars as easily as in the past is because the heavy debt load they are carrying, meaning that a lot of household income is going to paying off debt and not other parts of the economy. Consider the findings from Debt.org: "More than 160 million Americans have credit cards. The average credit card holder has at least three cards. On average, each household with a credit card carries more than $15,000 in credit card debt."

This is just credit card debt. It does not include mortgage debt, car financing debt, student loans, health care debt, etc. We have so much debt that, just like vacations and new cars, we cannot even afford our debt any more if you believe the work and analyses done Money-Zine.

Money-Zine evaluated household debt growth and income growth over the past few decades and found that "back in 1980, the consumer credit per person was $1,540, which was 7.3% of the average household income of $21,100. In 2013, consumer debt was $9,800 per person, which was 13.4% of the average household income of $72,600. This means debt increased 70% faster than income from 1980 through 2013."

Emergency savings - it used to be that households had enough money left over every month to have a “rainy day” fund inc ase expenses popped up unexpectedly or there was job loss. The rule of thumb back in those days was to have enough cash saved up to survive a six month financial crisis.

However, today it seems like most households cannot even find enough left over funds to save for any kind of emergency. A Bankrate survey found that:

• Only around one out of four households have six months of emergency money saved. 
• Another one-fourth have no emergency savings at all.
• The remaining household have a small to moderate amount of savings, but not enough to cover six months of expenses.

- Retirement savings - Social Security was never intended to be a person’s sole source of financial support during retirement. Middle class workers were encouraged to also set aside money for their retirement. However, the reality today is that nearly half of those who don't save for retirement say it's because they simply don't have the money.

Even worse, around 20% of people near 65 have not saved anything for retirement at all, and the majority of people, 59%, think that they don't have enough money saved for retirement.

- Medical care - Needless to day, many middle class Americans can no longer afford medical care either: 

• A Forbes article published data indicating that middle class workers in large companies "face nearly $5,000 in premiums, co-payments, deductibles and other forms of co-insurance."
• A study by Feeding America found that a 66% of households say they have had to choose between paying for food and paying for medical care and that a depressing 31% say they have to make that choice each and every month.
• The Federal Department of Health and Human Services report that about 108 million people in the U.S. have no dental coverage and even those who are covered may have trouble getting the dental care they need because dental health insurance is too expensive or does not fully cover more expensive needs.
• According to the Centers For Disease Control, nearly one in four American adults between the ages of 20 and 64 have untreated dental caries.

The American middle class used to be the American dream. Now that dream is more of a nightmare with vacations, cars, medical case, debt management, etc. being more of a luxury than the end product of the American dream. That is what happens when we trust our economic fates to ill suited and economically ignorant politicians and the insane and ineffective economic policies they implement.

3) One last piece of insanity for today. There has been much debate and discussion on whether to build the so-called Keystone Pipeline that would bring crude oil out of western Canada down into U.S. Gulf refineries. Today is not a discussion on the merits and downsides of building such a pipeline but how screwed up the decision making process is in Washington today.

Six years have gone by as the Federal government has done study after study to determine whether or not to build the pipeline. This has not included any construction time or progress, this is just the time to examine and study the permitting process. 

To show you how screwed up Washington is from a functionality perspective, the Heritage Foundation recently compared six major projects that were COMPLETED in less time than it has taken the Keystone Pipeline to be studied:

• It took four years and 600,000 rivets to build the Golden state bridge. Since its construction, over 2 billion cars have crossed the span.
• It took five years to build the Hoover Dam that at its base the dam is as thick as two footballs fields measured end-to-end.
• It took one year to build Boeing’s Everett factory which the Guinness Book of World records claims is largest building in the world by volume. 
• It took two years to build the Pentagon which housed 30,000 people during World War II and which has 17 miles of corridors.
• It took two years to build Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport which covers 4,700 acres and is the largest air passenger terminal complex in the world.
• It took two years to build Beaver stadium in Oregon which is now the second largest stadium in college football.

Six major and important structures built in far less time it has taken he Federal government to study a simple pipeline project. 

Is it any surprise that nothing ever gets accomplished by the political class and the government bureaucracy it operates when a simple environmental study takes so long to complete? No wonder we are still losing the war on drugs, our public schools are still failing, our borders still leak, we still do not have a national energy policy and strategy and why yesterday we found out it took 17 years for the Federal government to develop a DRAFT set of regulations concerning Tic Tac mints. Insane and pathetic.

Bingo enforcement overkill, just the plain killing of the middle class American dream, and overkill analysis of a simple pipeline. Such insanity that does not end today.

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

November, 2014, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Terrorist Panties, Tic Tac Regulations, and More

It is the start of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity that has been dumped on us by the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in the history of this country. From wasteful spending to bad priorities to general ineffectiveness, the insanity rolling out of Washington and other political centers and government around the country seems to be accelerating as the idiocy of our political times increases.

Last month we set a record by needing almost two full weeks of posts to get all of the insanity documented and discussed. Given what I see today, we will be hard pressed not to get close to or exceed that record of insanity this month. It keeps getting worse and worse and the effectiveness of the political class gets less and less.

1) Before we start with this first piece of wasteful spending insanity, think back, if you are old enough to the late 1970s. At that time, the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of this country and its Constitutional freedoms and liberties, was in need of extensive and costly repair. 

Despite its place of honor in our history and collective freedom, not a single taxpayer dollar was used to restore it and refurbish it. The entire renovation cost was covered with private donations from citizens and businesses.

Now, consider the reality that Federal taxpayer dollars have been allocated to fund a Gammy awards museum in Cleveland, Mississippi. Forty years ago the Federal government would not fund the fixing of the Statue of Liberty but today the political class and Federal government will use taxpayer money to build a music museum in that thriving metro area of Cleveland, Mississippi.

According to research done for the 2015 publication of Senator Tom Coburn’s Wastebook 2015, the Federal government gave Delta State University $1.25 million, via the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration, to help build an access road and upgrade infrastructure in preparation for the 2015 opening of the $18-million Grammy Museum Mississippi.

If the state of Mississippi and the town of Cleveland wanted to build a Grammy Museum to hype tourism, than the state of Mississippi and the town of Cleveland should be for everything connected to the museum, the rest of America should not have to pay for such nonsense. 

As proposed in Step 44 of “Love my Country, Loathe My Government,” a step that says no Federal money should be spent on any project unless it materially effects and benefit’s the residents of at least five states, this money never, ever should have been appropriated for this project. It is the thousands and thousands of dumb, localized projects that end up wasting tens of billions of dollars every year, calumniating and contributing to our $18 TRILLION national debt.

If we did not have to pay to fix the Statue of Liberty we should not have to pay for a silly museum in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi. How many homeless and hungry Americans could have been given shelter and food instead of building roads for a local museum? How many ailing veterans could have gotten better medical care for that $l.25 million Federal tax dollars? 

2) According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, six out of ten people polled said they do not trust the government to do what's right. Additionally, a majority feel that government’s ability to deal with and resolve big problems has been on the decline for the past few years.

While this is probably bad news for Democrats heading into next week’s midterm elections since they have controlled most of the Federal government over the past eight years or so, does anyone really think that Republicans can reduce that level of pessimism? They are all members of the same political class, a class of people that are always more interested in their own careers and self enrichment than resolving the problems of the country.

The insanity here is that a majority of Americans, and I would bet that it is a growing majority of Americans, have lost faith in the Federal government to do anything right. And the losing of faith makes turning the country around that much more difficult.

3) After the 9-11 attacks, the Washington political class thought it would be a great idea to create a new, super large Federal bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. These folks were going to protect us in the future from new terrorist attacks within this country.

With the rise of the super dangerous terrorists groups like ISIS, one would hope that this was a good idea. That the people employed by the Department of Homeland Security would be on the borders, focusing on threats in far away lands, and on the job of making sure that terrorists do not wreck havoc like they did on 9-11. One would hope that, but as always, with the political class and the federal government, one would again be wrong. 

But first, a little background. The Kansas City Royals just missed winning the baseball World Series in the past week. To commemorate their march through their season, the playoffs and into the World Series, Peregrine Honig, owner of Honig’s Birdies Panties shop in Crossroads, Kansas, said she designed the Lucky Royals women’s panties that were set to go on sale shortly after the world series ended. The panties read, “Take the Crown,” with “KC” across the bottom. She had a few dozen made to sell in her shop.

However, apparently her designs on the panties violated Federal copyright laws. By connecting the “K” and the “C,” she infringed on major league baseball’s copyright. How did she find out she had violated copyright law? Two, not one, Department of Homeland Security agents showed up in her store, flashed their badges, told her that her panties violated Federal copyright laws, and confiscated the few dozen offending panties.

Really? ISIS is marching across the Middle East beheading innocent people, threatening to invade America, wiping religious minorities in their path, and the Department of Homeland Security is physically sending agents into a small lingerie store to confiscate panties? Really?

The Commerce Department couldn’t send a registered letter telling Ms. Honig to cease and desist? How did the Department of Homeland Security even get involved in such a trivial matter? Insane. Are illegal panties that much of a threat to the homeland? You cannot make this nonsense up.

4) According to the December, 2014 issue of Reason magazine, in 1997 the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set out to regulate what was said on the labels of Tic Tacs, Certs, and other breath fresheners. A whopping seventeen years later, those draft regulations are finally done, resulting in a 145 page document to regulate Tic Tac et al labels. Seventeen years and they have juts gotten to the DRAFT of the regulations.

During the process, the FDA consulted with the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal trade Commission, the Department of Agriculture, and other Federal agencies. All this for a final effort that probably will be ignored by every American but at a cost of probably tens of millions of dollars. 

Your tax dollars at work (over seventeen years): determining what to put on a label of a breath mint. How many of billions of breath mints does one thing were consumed over that time frame without any kind of catastrophic effects, despite not having a federal approved label? Insanity.

That will do it for today. But buckle up, we are in for a long ride of insanity in the days, and possibly weeks to come.

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