Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

February, 2015, Part 4, Political Class Insanity: HIllary Clinton's Economic Fail, Corruption n Philly, IRS Follies and More

Last week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. So, let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

This is the fourth post in this month’s insanity series:

1) A recent Business Week article pointed out an epic fail when it comes to how the IRS is serving the American taxpayer:

In the upcoming tax season, the IRS is likely to answer less than half the calls it receives from taxpayers looking for help and guidance on filling out their tax forms.
Those callers that do get their call answered are likely to have been on hold for 30 minutes.
Those callers that do get through will only get basic tax questions answered by the IRS personnel answering the phones.

This is the type of service we are getting from an organizations that receives billions and billions of tax dollars every year. Now, some supporters of the IRS would say the reason for the lousy service is that Congress has cut its budget over the recent budget cycles, which is true. But consider this: the Treasury Department, the home of the IRS, recently admitted that at least 2,500 emails were passed between the White House and the IRS in an attempt to derail conservative political groups’ tax related activities.

Maybe if the many IRS employees who were suppressing the First Amendment rights of millions of conservative leaning Americans were actually doing their assigned government jobs and not someone’s political dirty work, service for basic IRS services would be improved. And on a larger scale, if the Washington political class ever got around to simplifying our onerous 70,000 page tax code we would need a much smaller and less expensive IRS staff while improving the economy’s chance of thriving.

2) As we have often pointed out, political class insanity and stupidity is not confined to the Federal level. Consider a really bad law that the California political class recently passed, as pointed out in the January, 2015 issue of Reason magazine. State law now prohibits anyone for working at a for-profit business and not receive a salary.

In the article, a very, very small winery got fined under this inane law because they had the nerve to accept and use the service of people who volunteered to help out at the winery. Apparently, volunteers willingly worked at the winery for no pay in order to learn the business. The winery was happy for the free help since their annual profits are usually only around $11,000 a year.

Everyone was happy. People got first hand winemaking experience and the winery stayed in business. However, the state bureaucracy came in, fined the winery over $100,000 (or about ten years worth of profits), the volunteers lost a valuable and probably enjoyable life experience, and the winery is now going to have to close down operations.

Great law: make citizens stop doing what they want to do which was not harming anyone else, force small businesses out of business, depriving the state of the tax that would have been collected if the winery had stayed in business, and causing other businesses to curtail or end their businesses since they too depend on volunteer help. This is not the slave trade, abuse of child labor, etc. These are adults doing what they freely want to do, something that should be allowed in a free country. Obviously, that is not the case in California.

3) We occasionally have done a series of posts that cite stupid politicians’ quotes. To access those past inane quotes, just type in “politicians say the darndest things” in the search box above.

We recently came across a really dumb politician’s quote that we decided to include in this month’s insanity series. Hillary Clinton, almost surely to be the Democrats’ Presidential candidate for 2016, recently voiced the following opinion: “Don’t let anyone tell you that is corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Huh? She apparently did not tell her audience who did create jobs.

This statement is just too stupid and insane to argue with, it is that ridiculous.

4) We have previously shown, using official government data, that it is almost impossible to get fired as a Federal government employee, regardless of how poorly one performs. In fact, a Federal employee is more likely to die than be fired, a situation that exists no where else in the world except in government.

An article from Reason magazine’s February issue showed how hard it is to get fired:

According to the General Accountability Office (GAO), 57,000 Federal employees have been on paid leave for at least one month during the past three years.
Several thousand employees were on paid leave between three months and a year.
Hundreds of Federal employees were on paid leave for more than a year as they waited to be either fired or reinstated.
Over the past three years, the American taxpayer paid out $775 million in salaries to these in limbo Federal employees but got no work or productivity in return.
These employees were also accumulating pension credits, vacation time, and sick days as they were paid to do nothing.
And it is likely these pathetic results are not as bad as they really are since the GAO study covered only about 60% of the Federal government’s organizations.
The official government policy on paid leave is that it is to be used in “rare circumstances.” 57,000 of anything is not a rare circumstance.

57,000 people being paid to not work. 57,000 people is larger than the entire employee size of Google to give you an idea of how many people we are paying for and that are not doing anything. As we have pointed out so many times before, the Federal government has gotten so large that is is now largely dysfunctional.

5) Two Pennsylvania Democrats in the state government from the Philadelphia area were recently indicted for bribery charges. The charges allege that they took money and gifts, e.g. Tiffany jewelry, in exchange for voting against proposed voter id legislation.

A lot of the evidence was obtained via taped conversations. The grand jury that handed down the indictments had 26 tapings of one defendant, Ronald Waters, accepting nine payments from a confidential informer. Those payments were worth almost $9,000. The other defendant, Vanessa Brown, was caught on tape accepting five cash installments with $6,000.

Scary that an elected politician and public servant can be turned into criminals for such low levels of payments. But integrity and high standards are not overriding characteristics of American politicians today.

6) It is not just politicians that are crooked, many times these days it is political supporters and groupies that are also corrupt. Thomas Lindenfeld, a long term Democratic political activist, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit honest service wire fraud. Lindenfeld has previously worked on Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign.

That will do it for today, another day of insanity from all over the political world. We have another government entity, the IRS, that is almost totally dysfunctional, whose customer service performance would cause it to go out of business in a short amount of time in the real world, a state government which dictates what people can and cannot do with their free time, we have a leading politician that has no economic sense at all, we have tens of thousands of Federal employees that get paid to do nothing, and we have local Philly politicians that are easily bribed for their votes. More insanity tomorrow, it seems to never end.

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

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

February, 2015, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Excessive Spending, Wasteful Spending, Stupid Spending

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again for the our monthly review of political class insanity. We believe that the nation is living through the worst set of politicians to ever hold office in this country, from the President down to the local mayors. Our current politicians never resolve any problems facing Americans, waste untold billions of dollars every year, and operate government programs that never deliver what they promise, always miss their deadlines, always go over budget, and often make the original problem even worse. And these shortcomings do not include outright criminal activity, a topic that will be an integral part of this month’s insanity review.

Over the past week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. So, let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

This is the third post in this month’s insanity series:

1) The Bankrupting America website always does a great job of finding financial, political, operational and other problems with our current set of politicians and the government functions they operate. On January 28, 2015, they published the following set of financial figures that are sure to scare any American, based on the latest Congressional Budget Office analysis, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2015 to 2025”:

The annual Federal budget deficits will stay steady, at the still unacceptable level of an amazing half a TRILLION dollars every year, through 2018, at which time they will start to grow steadily again, resulting in an annual deficit number of over $1 TRILLION.
This is an incremental debt burden of over $8,500 for every American household in just one year.
If the 2025 annual deficit, or any deficit, actually gets to $1 TRILLION in a year, that will likely put it about 4% or so of the nation’s GDP level, or about 50% higher than the historical average.
The cumulative deficits over the next ten years will about $7.6 TRILLION or about $65,000 for every U.S.household.
For comparison purposes, every American Presidency prior to Obama ran up a cumulative $10 TRILLION national debt burden. Thus, the Obama Presidency and the budget trajectory it put the country on will add far more debt to the national debt than EVERY previous Presidential administration combined.
If these numbers are attained,the CBO predicts: “Such large and growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences, including increasing federal spending for interest payments, restraining economic growth in the long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges, and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis.”
And while Obama promised that Obama Care would reduce everyone’s annual health insurance bill by $2,500 on average and would “not add one dime to the Federal debt,” the CBO predicts that just under $2 TRILLION will be spent to insure, in a best case scenario, about 25 million Americans, or a cost of an amazing $80,000 or so for each Obama Care customer and the law will add over $640 billion to the national debt, indicating that another two Obama promises/deceptions will go down in epic flames.

More Obama promises broken and broken very badly, epically bad. At what point do we all start assuming that everything and anything this President says is a lie, a deception, or likely to be wildly inaccurate?

2) Obama has been making a big push for raising the minimum wage even though there are far more pressing economic problems and crises to be focusing on (for a detailed look at his economic policy failures, please go to XXXX). The reality of his insanity of focusing on raising the minimum wage was pointed out numerically by a recent analysis on the Townhall website which quotes George Will:

Less than 3% of the American workforce earns the Federal minimum wage.
More than 60% of those earning the minimum wage now will get a raise above it within a year.
More than half of the minimum wage earners are either students or part time workers from households with average incomes of about $53,000.
There are more than 10 million Americans who are unemployed or under employed. The rollout of subsequent Obama Care requirements will likely increase that number, especially the number of part time workers. Millions of recent college graduates cannot get work in their fields of study and millions of them are having to return home to live with family in order to financially survive. A very high percentage of American households, as we have previously reported, would not be able to afford a car repair bill of medical emergency bill of $1,000.

All of these millions and millions of Americans are facing these financial traumas and this administration is worried about a manufactured minimum wage argument that affects far fewer people than the much bigger crises that should be addressed. More bad priorities and avoidance of the real problems that need to be resolved in this country.

3) As we have proven many times, political class insanity and wasteful spending are not contained just to the Washington D.C. political class and Federal government bureaucracies. A recent government audit found that the Virginia Department of Transportation wasted at least $3 million by failing to fine a nonperforming contractor, as reported by www.watchdog.com.

The state government inspector general found that the Department wasted at least $3 million by not holding a contracted company, Serco Inc. accountable for incomplete or undone work. Serco currently has a contract with the state to provide roadside assistance and other logistical service to the Department.

As we always ask, how many homeless people in Virginia could have been sheltered for the wasted $3 million? How many Virginia homeless could have been fed for the wasted $3 million? How many drug addicted Virginians could have been treated for the $3 million? The answer: a lot. The could have been but they were not because of the wasting of millions in taxpayer wealth just in this one instance.

4) When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the growing of opium poppy was outlawed and almost wiped out because drug use and abuse was not compatible with their tenets. Opium poppies are the base component of heroin.

Let’s review: we invade the country looking for Bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban, install an incredibly corrupt government and about a dozen years later the country has set a one year record for growing opium poppies. This claim was recently put forth by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. As you can see from the graph below, not only was a record set, but the probability for more and more poppies to be cultivated in the future is trending strongly upwards:

Thus, after more than a dozen years of having a military presence in the country, over 2,200 American servicemen have been killed, many more thousands have been wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars have been expended, and despite the Federal government’s best efforts, the flow of illegal Afghanistan-sourced drugs is probably at an all time high, probably ending up in American streets and addicts' bodies also at a record pace. Just another Federal government/Washington political class initiative that has gone horribly wrong for a horribly long time.5) The Federal government, via NASA, is working on the next generation of space rockets that are named Orion. Despite giving NASA billions of budget dollars over the years, according to a recent article on the Gizmodo.com website, as reported in the December 19, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, the computer processors being used TODAY on the Orion vehicles were built in 2002. Yes, the next generation NASA rockets will be operated by thirteen year old technology. Apparently, these processors are less powerful than the processors in current smartphones on the market today. The article quoted NASA's spokesperson Matt Lemke: “It’s state of the art compared to previous technology but it’s not state of the art compared to what you can get at Best Buy.” Typical government procurement: overpriced, out of date technology. Insane.That will do it for today’s insanity. We learned that our national debt burden is about to explode to unheard of and dangerous heights as a result of the Obama administration’s lack of budget skills, the administration is worried about a minimum wage issue that is minute compared to the much larger economic crises in the country, the state of Virginia can waste taxpayer wealth with the best of them, the unintended consequences of Washington’s efforts in Afghanistan is to create a record high production of heroin, and we are likely paying top dollars for antiquated parts for our country’s latest space rockets.Wasteful spending, excessive spending, stupid spending. Sounds about right for today’s political class. More insanity tomorrow and beyond.Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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

Monday, February 2, 2015

February, 2015, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: BFDs, Museum Of Government Waste, and More

Over the past week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. So, let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

This is the second post in this month’s insanity series:

1) A wise person once told me that someone swears and uses profane language because at the that moment they are either too ignorant or too lazy not to swear. This adage helped me curb my own cursing and swearing in my life, golf courses excluded. Given this advice, it was quite inappropriate when Vice President Joe Biden told President Obama that passing Obama Care “was a big f*#@ing deal” in front of a live microphone. Not the kind of language I would want or expect from a leader of the free world, pathetic.

Well, apparently this type of profanity is not restricted to the Vice President. The official White House website recently posted a short video with the title, “Things you didn’t know about the State of the Union.” No problem, sounds pretty innocuous. However, the video closes with writing on the screen that says: “It’s a BFD,” the exact same embarrassing words Biden used.

Now, I am not close to being a prude when it comes to profanity, I have used every known term at some point in my life. But really, you are representing the President of the United States, kids have access to that website and you have to top it off with a vulgarity like BFD. Pathetic leadership and lack of maturity.

2) As we have said many times, pathetic leadership and lack of maturity are confined to Federal politicians. Consider the embarrassment that a state politician in Virginia has brought to that state and it state government:

Joe Morrissey is an elected politician to the state government in Virginia.
He had been out of office for a while but apparently just got reelected.
He was out of office for a number of reasons including the fact he had gotten his teenage receptionist pregnant after previously becoming the father of three daughters by three different women, he was convicted of assault in 1999, and he lost his license to practice law in 2003.
But he recently got re-elected despite the fact that each night he has to go to the local county jail to sleep because of a six month sex conviction.
But the travesty continues since it recently became known that Morrissey has been indicted for allegedly submitting a forged document as evidence and lying under oath.

The Richmond Free Press newspaper has made the obviously statement and demand that: "The first bipartisan action of the 2015 General Assembly should be to get rid of Delegate Morrissey.”

This is the type of people that somehow get elected over and over again at every level of government in this country. And while most of them are probably not as big an embarrassment as the Virginia politician, their ineffectiveness and greed render them just as embarrassing and inept.

3) We have often talked about how wasteful and ludicrous Washington politicians are with our money. A small sample of their insanity and disregard for our wealth include the following very small handful of examples:

Taxpayer money was spent to determine when dogs became man’s best friends.
Taxpayer money was spent to build a video game the simulated prom week.
Taxpayer money was spent to assess whether online dating sites’ users were racist.
Taxpayer money was spent to determine why the same college basketball teams are always the most successful in the March Madness national basketball tournament.

Such wasteful spending and waste. Now, a filmmaker is documenting how pathetically wasteful the Federal government and its bureaucrats can be. A documentary film is being made that covered the five years just about wasteful spending. The filmmakers are following the exploits of regular citizens, Jim and Ellen Hubbard, as the work the halls of government to get taxpayer funding for...wait for it… the bogus Museum of Government waste.

The museum concept is completely bogus but they use the idea to get access to Congressional sources and lobbyists that are willing to help them or give them advice on how to get funding for their project. This is an experiment to find out how exactly the Washington political class has spent us into an $18 TRILLION national debt hole.

The synopsis of their effort is on their website and reprinted below:

They’ll recruit someone to become a part of the process. It’s called “participant observation,” a technique used by researchers to gain knowledge of the inner-workings of a culture by actually taking part in the culture. They tap radio host Greg Knapp, a regular guy with a wife and two kids who lives in the burbs and makes a living asking the tough questions. The Hubbards give Greg a task: try to get an earmark* for a ridiculous project: the Museum of Government Waste—an actual building that would be dedicated to the American taxpayer and filled with “homages” to the $500 hammer, the $10 thousand toilet seat, and that $400 million Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere. The Museum’s cafeteria would serve nothing but pork!

As the experiment progresses farther than Greg and the Hubbards ever expect, their efforts become increasingly more sophisticated and their quest more serious. They don hidden cameras and meet with lobbyists who instruct them to break the law. They go undercover and meet with Republican Congressional staff who assure them that despite earmarks recently being banned in the House and Senate, there’s still plenty of federal funds for their museum project. The Hubbards’ experiment gives new meaning to the saying, “be careful what you wish for” as Ellen and Greg eventually find themselves face to face with one of Washington’s most powerful players–and realize they just might get their anti-earmark earmark after all.

Their website can be accessed at:

http://www.museumofgovernmentwastemovie.com/

Think about the irony of this effort. Someone is trying to get the Washington political class to waste money on building a museum about government wasting money. Precious and pathetic at the same time.

4) We have often discussed the reality that many school systems across the country are facing tight financial times. From the lingering effects of the recession to decreasing populations to onerous union contracts and retirement requirements to wasteful spending, many schools are under tremendous financial pressure and strain.

According to a January 9, 2015 article on the Education Action Group website, the schools in Buffalo, New York fall into this financial need category. In January, 2014, the Buffalo News reported that Buffalo schools were facing a $50 million budget shortfall. Dire straits that puts pressure on the quality and quantity of education that can be done for Buffalo kids.

Despite this financial situation. the school districts in Buffalo are still required to provide free plastic surgery for their teachers. That perk cost the Buffalo schools over $5 million In the 2013 -2014 school year, a benefit that requires the teachers to pay nothing for any plastic surgery they elect to undergo. And these surgeries have nothing to do with disfigurement as a result of a car accident or a fire or other accident. This free teacher perk can be used for a tummy tuck, nose job, or other strictly cosmetic reason.

Eliminating this perk alone would wipe out out more than 10% of the budget shortfall. It is a superficial teacher benefit that those citizens paying teacher benefits via taxes cannot use themselves.

Now, one could possibly make the claim that these teachers deserve this extra perk because they are doing a superlative job of educating Buffalo kids. That would be viable if that was the case but sadly, the kids in Buffalo are not getting a superlative education. Just over half of Buffalo kids are graduating high school, a horrible success rate but one that has improved from a really bad 48% to a plain bad 56%. Only 12.2% of Buffalo kids are rated proficient or better on standardized English tests and only 13.1% are rated proficient or better in math.

Sounds like a typical political class run government operation: low quality at very high costs, much of which is wasted. No accountability, no checks and balances,no pay for performance. Just wasteful spending on non-essential items.

That will do it for today, our second installment on this month’s political class insanity. Much more to come over the next few days so stay tuned in to find out what our politicians are screwing up as we speak. Trust it is a BFD.

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:

Sunday, February 1, 2015

February, 2015, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Corruption and Ineptness at the Federal, State,and Local Government Level

Over the past week, we did an in-depth, multi-day analysis of how the Obama administration has failed in an epic way across five dimensions. As you will see over the next week or so, it is not only the President that is an epic fail in the American political sphere today. Let’s get started, it is going to be a long trek as the political class came out of the holiday season with more incompetence than ever before.

1) Before we delve into the first piece of insanity, consider the following realities:

Thousands of veterans are not receiving the medical care they were promised and deserve.
Millions of Americans are suffering from a wide variety of different cancers.
Millions of Americans face a future of aging diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Medicare and Medicaid are quickly approaching insolvency.

Thus, if the government is going to spend money on health care issues, then one would hope all resources would be focused on these four issues above. But, alas, that is not happening, as outlined by a January 22, 2015 article in the Washington Free Beacon:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently given $432,000 worth of taxpayer money to Columbia University to study how gay men use smartphone apps to hook up with other gay men.
The study is attempting to determine if gay men using smartphone apps are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior.
According to the grant: “Smartphone technologies have provided a new venue for sexual partnering among men who have sex with men (MSM). Indeed, there are a rapidly growing number of smartphone applications designed to facilitate sexual partnering among MSM.”

Where to start with this insanity:

This study, even if successful, will serve only a minute fraction of Americans, gay men who use smartphones to hook up for sex, as opposed to the tens of thousands of veterans who need medical help or the millions and millions of Americans who are facing a life of cancer and dementia.
The sample size consisted of only 60 subjects, nowhere close enough to being a valid statistical sample to make accurate conclusions.
Dividing the sample size into the study cost we see that the cost of the study comes out to an obscene cost of $7,200 per study subject. No way this is a cost effective study design.

Look, I have nothing against the gay lifestyle. But when viewed in the context of an $18 TRILLION national debt and the health and medical needs of millions of other Americans, this is a complete waste of resources for a very, small fraction of the citizenry on what is likely an invalid study design.

How many veterans could have gotten the real medical care they needed for the $432,000? How many cancer researchers could have been hired for the $432,000? How many dementia drugs could be tested for $432,000?

You get the idea, we have an out of control government wasting money on insignificant projects while big issues never get resolved.

2) Sarah Westwood, writing for the Washington Examiner on January 15, 2015, reported on how the Pentagon paid almost a half a million dollars to build a military training facility in Afghanistan that started “melting” once it got wet. Details of the wasteful spending and failure include the following:

The Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction called the failed facility “not only an embarrassment” but “a waste of U.S. taxpayers’ money,” given the fact that Afghans had to tear down the Defense Department contractors’ work and rebuild it themselves.
The facility cost $456,669 and was supposed to be a simulated Afghan village where Afghan troops could train.
Defense Department officials signed off on the completed construction in October, 2012, signifying that the building was completed, adequate, and ready to go.
But just four months later, the buildings began to disintegrate once rain water seeped into the bricks that were used to build it.
Thus, even though some Defense Department officials signed off on the completion, subsequent inspections showed that the contractor never followed proper protocol and building requirements in the construction, requiring the entire project to be stripped down to the foundations and rebuilt correctly since it was deemed “completely unsafe” by the Inspector General.

Thus, another half a million dollars of taxpayer money spent with absolutely no return benefit. Want to bet that no one involved in this project, including the officials that initially deemed the construction done and complete and safe, got fired or demoted for such incompetency?

How many homeless Americans could have been housed for that half a million dollars? Home many hungry could have been fed for that half a million dollars? How many drug addicts could have been treated for that half a million dollars? Answer: a lot. Instead we are left with a mountain of wet sand halfway around the world.

3) We have previously reported how Nancy Pelosi, when she was Speaker of the House, arranged transportation legislation to get passed that had a great financial benefit for her husband's real estate interests in California. We more recently reported on how California U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein supported Federal Postal Service legislation that provided a financial boon to her husband's business, possibly to the tune of a billion dollars.

However, it is not just Washington politicians that are inept, greedy, and criminal and who use their positions of public trust to self enrich themselves. Consider a recent New York Post article that reported how the Speaker of the New York State Assembly had been arrested by the FBI for criminal activity:

Sheldon Silver was accused of using his powerful state government position to arrange to get millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks that were falsely classified as legitimate income.
The FBI arrested him on a series of public corruption charges.
Law enforcement officials said at the time of his arrest: “There is probably cause to believe that Silver obtained about $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position.”
His attorney denied any criminal activity had taken place.
However, the Post article did point out that Silver did try to stifle a state government commission that was looking into just these types of public corruption in 2013.

American politicians today are mostly selfish, self serving hypocrites, whether in D.C., in Albany, New York, or elsewhere around the country.

4) Okay, we have talked about Federal government political class insanity, state government insanity, so it makes sense to sign off today with local government political class insanity. According to a recent Heritage Foundation article written by Kate Scanlon, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration announced that effective July 1, 2015, restaurants in New York City will no longer be allowed to serve any food in polystyrene foam containers, whether the containers are for food or drink.

Apparently, this edict fulfills a de Blasio campaign promise to eliminate the foam since it supposedly causes environmental harm. A spokeswoman for the Mayor claims that there are far better options for serving food and drink than foam that she claims has had dire environmental consequences including clogging landfills and not being biodegradable.

But is this a real solution to a real problem? Consider some other opinions and objections to this political decree:

A spokesman for the New York State Restaurant Association said alternative containers can be upwards of 50% more expensive that will either cause prices to rise or small food operators to go out of business.
Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy for the Heritage Foundation, claims that the ruling is mostly nonsense: “Mayor de Blasio would be better to to focus on more pressing problems plaguing New York City these days. The green lobby’s claims about polystyrene are largely nonsense, and the alternatives to foam consume more energy and produce more waste.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute also claims that foam containers are often more environmentally friendly.
A study by the research group Franklin Associates found that “the average 16-ounce polystyrene uses a third less energy, produces 50% less solid waste by volume, and releases a third less of so-called green house gases. than does a 16-ounce paper cup with a sleeve. Over their life cycles, polystyrene packaging products require 20 to 30% less water than do paper alternatives."
Plus, talking about self defeating, food providers with less than $500,000 in annual revenue can apply for a waiver that exempts them from the ban. Since I would be that many of restaurants and food stands and trucks that serve their food in foam containers make less than $500,000 a year, the ban will probably affect a small percentage of food providers.

A classic example where a politician’s actions make an existing problem worse. In this case, more pollution, less “green” behavior, and by exempting many restaurants, having a minimal impact anyway.

That will do it for today’s insanity. Stupid studies focused on gay smartphone apps, a building that literally melts at a cost of almost a half a million dollars, potential corruption at the highest levels of New York state politics, and a NYC solution that probably makes a likely imaginary problem worse.

Until tommorrow, consider joining our cause to impose term limits on all Federal politicians because really, how much worse could it get than melting buildings if we replaced every politician in Washington every few years:

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: