Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

November, 2015, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Obama Drops To Third Place, Paying For Foreign Mosque Repairs and More Bad Economic News

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
The stock market is stalling.
Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.\Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) We have often pointed out how Obama’s foreign policy strategies have been a complete failure in protecting American interests and citizens. The most recent summary of his failures can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2015/10/obamas-massive-foreign-affairs-and.html

A recent embarrassment of this administration puts a nice topping on this pile of failure. For the longest time, America has been the strongest, freest, and brightest beacon of hope relative to the rest of the world. As a result, the President of the United States was almost always viewed as the most powerful person in the world, for better or worst.

However, according to the latest annual analysis by Forbes relative to naming the world’s most powerful person, not only is President Obama not viewed as the most powerful person in the world, he has slipped to the the third most powerful person in the world. It is another dubious first for the Obama Presidency: at no other time in the history of the Forbes list has a sitting U.S. President not been at least the first or second most powerful person in the world.

For the third straight year, Russian president Vladimir Putin was at the top of the list and this year, German chancellor Angela Merkel came in second place. How embarrassing is this reality? Consider the following facts:

The U.S. has twice the population of Russia and four times the population of Germany.
Russia is suffering through crippling economic sanctions because of their invasion of the Ukraine.
The U.S. economy as measured by GDP is four times the size of Germany’s and almost ten times the size of Russia's economy.
The U.S. spends about 14 times more on their military than Germany every year and almost ten times as much as Russia spends on its military every year.

And despite having overwhelming superiority in population, economic might, and military might, this President still could not crack the top two spots as far as being the most powerful person in the world. Pathetic performance and failure on the international stage.

2) A recent WSB Channel 2 Action News report out of Atlanta reported that the American taxpayer via the Washington political class has been sending millions of dollars to other countries around the world to help rebuild and fix up Muslim mosques. Given that this country’s infrastructure has been falling apart for decades, as an American one would hope that this was not a true statement, that those millions of dollars should be kept within our borders to help our citizens.

But apparently the report is accurate, according to the Snopes rumor website: "The WSB report mentions a "1,300-year-old Egyptian mosque that was almost flooded by contaminated sewer water that is one of many ancient Cairo mosques and churches that were saved from destruction by the U.S. taxpayers." It is true that USAID provided about $2.3 million to help protect the Saleh Talai Mosque in Cairo from rising groundwater contaminated with sewage that had been plaguing the site for decades, making the area safe for tourists and religious visitors. However, that mosque wasn't specifically targeted for preservation due to its religious significance; its restoration was part of a much larger program to revamp flood control and sewage systems throughout Cairo, a project which ran from 1984 to 2006 and encompassed the preservation of many different threatened historical structures, including an ancient Roman Tower, a Greek Orthodox Church, and the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque (the first mosque in Egypt).

The WSB report also states that "millions more dollars have been sent to places like Cyprus." USAID did spend about $5 million to preserve the Hala Sultan Tekke mosque in Cyrus, but that amount covered the initial phase of a renovation project which also included the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Apostolos Andreas and was completed back in 2002."

Maybe rather than “making the area safe for tourists and religious visitors” in Egypt, we should be making our roads and tunnels and bridges safe for Americans in this country. I am sure that the $7.5 million spent on just these two mosque renovations overseas could have helped fix a bridge or two in this country. Insanity.

3) One last piece of political class insanity. According to a washingtonpost.com article that was summarized in the October 16, 2015 issue of The Week magazine, during Obama’s first term in office, American gun manufacturers almost doubled their annual production of guns from 5.6 million to 10.9 million. Remember, this was the Presidential candidate that promised hope and change, the candidate that was going to bring us all together in peace and harmony as the first African-American President.

For whatever reasons, that hope and change thing never happened. You cannot say you are going to being the nation together when the purchase rate of firearms almost doubles within four years. Another epic fail.

That will do it for this month’s political class insanity. As we say every month, there is no end to how American politicians can waste taxpayer wealth, both in this country and around the world, how their programs and laws usually backfire and leave the original problem unresolved or even make them worse, how little regard they have for American citizens, preferring to take of themselves and their perpetual election campaign fund raisers and donors first, etc. We have been doing this monthly political class insanity theme for years and every month these people creatively come up with new ways to screw the voters, the taxpayers, our freedoms, and our futures.

And worse yet, the rate and depth in which they are doing so seems to be increasing. That is why we ask your help in getting term limits implemented in this country as soon as possible. Because, really, after reviewing the insanity, how much worse could it get if we replaced every member of Congress and the White House after one term? Find out more at:

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

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

November, 2015, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Bad Priorities In Illiniois and Wasteful Sepnding In Afghanistan

NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
The stock market is stalling.
Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) The state government of Illinois has always been a joke. At one point in time there were more living former Illinois governors who had done prison time than living former governors who had not done prison time. The state is very close to being bankrupt. Vendors have not been paid for their products and services provided to the state government for a very long time (current unpaid debts are likely to be $8.5 billion by the end of the year), and state lottery winners have not been paid despite winning the state lottery.

I would also assume that the state is not any better than other states when it comes to issues like failing public schools, crumbling infrastructure, drug abuse, crime, and other major issues affecting a large number of Illinois citizens. One would hope that state politicians in Illinois were hard at work resolving these major, major issues.

But as with our national politicians, associating hope with any American politician is usually a bad bet. Illinois is no exception. Instead of focusing on resolving the major issues affecting the state’s residents, Illinois state representative Edward Acevedo recently wrote and filed legislation that called for the national Republican Party to “denounce Donald Trump for his disgraceful behavior and to distance itself from him in the future.”

Furthermore, the legislation contends that Trump “has repeatedly made misogynistic, sexist, and derogatory comments towards women,” as well as “offensive and abhorrent comments towards people of Latino descent, Mexican immigrants, and Asians.”

Really, this is what a major state politician is spending his time on instead of saving the state from fiscal insolvency and tackling the other major problems facing the states’ citizens? Name calling and hissy fits vs. sincere and effective governing? Inane priorities, just another case of inept politicians rearranging the deckchairs on their Titanic because they have no idea how to stop the state government ship ship from sinking.

As a result of Acevedo’s bad priorities, the New York Times reported on the crises that his inaction and the inabilities of him and his peers in the state government are causing:

Social service organizations that have contracts with the state, and the low-income populations they serve, may be suffering the most. Some nonprofits have not received money from the state since July 1 and say they have been forced to deplete their cash reserves and scale back services. Mark Mathews, the executive director of the Child Abuse Council in Moline, which provides counseling and visits homes of troubled families, said he had eliminated two staff positions and reduced one program’s caseload by 40 percent.

“It’s definitely damaging the not-for-profit agencies,” he said. “We haven’t been serving as many families. At-risk families aren’t getting home visits or services. That’s the tough thing.”

The sheriff of Cook County, Thomas J. Dart, said that people who would normally be helped by nonprofits, like the homeless, have begun to show up at jail instead, in search of assistance. Nonprofits are cutting staff, and some could close if the impasse continues, he said.

“These are folks who have missions to help the disadvantaged,” Mr. Dart said. “What was already difficult is becoming impossible.”

Despicable abuse of citizens welfare, tax dollars, and needs.

2) Let’s stay in Illinois and take a brief look at how bad the state government has been run and where it is today from a financial perspective:

As mentioned in the previous point, by the end of the year, the state government might be looking at a mountain of unpaid operating expense debt that could total $8.5 billion.
This means that every Illinois household would theoretically have to write a check for almost $1,800 just to pay off this outstanding operating expense debt in addition to any other state taxes they are already paying.
With the state politicians unable to come up with a functioning state government budget, it is highly likely that the state will not be able to pay the $560 million in pensions that are due in November and December.
Until they do come up with a budget, state lottery winners will not be paid their winnings.

All of which gets them into a potential fiscal death spiral since what fool would buy state lottery tickets knowing that previous winners might not get paid for a while or ever, reducing lottery revenue, and if they start missing big payments like pension bills, the cost of the state borrowing money is highly likely to increase, increasing its interest payments and deepening a debt hole that is huge to begin with.

What a mess, what insanity. A rich state like Illinois that could go bankrupt, you cannot make this stuff up.

3) It is no secret that America’s roads, bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure are in need of serious repairs. They have been neglected as the American political class squandered trillions of dollars over the years on useless, wasteful and often crime infested programs and projects. One day a major bridge or tunnel is going to collapse and kill a bunch of Americans because of this neglect.

I wonder how many bridges or road could be repaired, in this country, for $43 million? Why $43 million? That is the amount of money that a Pentagon inspector general found that the Defense Department spent when they built a natural gas station in Afghanistan. This $43 million natural gas station was built in Sherberghan, Afghanistan to show the Afghans how natural gas could serve as a viable energy option for their country.

Not only is this a stupid idea to implement in a war zone, but the underlying numbers are incredibly insulting to the American taxpayer:

The original project plans were bid out at a cost of $3 million. Still a lot of money but nowhere near $43 million.
But somehow, between 2011 and 2014, the project costs skyrocketed from the original $3 million bid to a total cost of $42.7 billion, about a 14 fold increase.
Those involved claimed that $30 million of that nearly $43 million was nebulously called “overhead.” Others of us might call that $30 million corruption and kickbacks.
If $30 million was “overhead,” than the overhead portion of the project was two and a half times more than the construction of the project, hardly an efficient ratio.
To add insult to injury, the inspector general looking into this debacle found that as similar project that was built in Pakistan by the Defense Department cost $300,000, a fraction of what it cost to build a similar facility in neighboring Afghanistan.
More insults to the American taxpayer, according to the inspector general: “One of the most troubling aspects of this project is that the Department of Defense claims that it is unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation, or outcome.”
The final insult: the area of the station in Afghanistan is too dangerous for the inspector general to even determine if the project ever became operational.

As always, you cannot make this stuff up, the creative and original ways that the political class and the government operations it oversees find to waste our wealth on idiotic and corruption infested projects. Again, ask yourself: how many American roads, bridges and tunnels could have been repaired for $43 million and not wasted somewhere in the boondocks of Afghanistan?

The reality that this waste was not identified until years after it occurred shows just how dysfunctional the Federal government has become

Wasteful spending, bad priorities, and idiotic financial management. A typical day of insanity review from the American political class. 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:

Sunday, November 8, 2015

November, 2015, Part 4, Political Clas Insanity: The Corruption of Government Officials and The Politicians That Rule Them

It is the start of another month which means it is time for our monthly review of the latest political class insanity that continually spews forth from America’s politicians. Their actions, words, quotes, incompetency, and general ineptness continue to reinforce our theory that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of the nation.

As you read about the latest shenanigans and ineptness of the political class, keep in mind what should be their priorities in these difficult times and compare this list to what they are actually working on:

NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
The stock market is stalling.
Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
A record number of police officers have been assassinated in the past week.
45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) We have often shown that many times Federal government employees misbehave in so many different ways but no one is ever punished for abusing their jobs and taxpayer wealth. The latest insult to taxpayers was reported by an October 22, 2015 article by Kathryn Watson, writing for the Freedom Force website:

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who allegedly engaged in sex parties with prostitutes, that were likely funded by drug cartels, along with their direct supervisors who did not report the parties, still received bonus payments.
This insult came about after an inspector general report found that 10 of the 14 agents involved in the parties received their bonus payments despite it being in violation of internal DEA rules.
The bonuses were paid out despite the DEA having to testify for the scandal in front of Congress.
One DEA regional director identified in the inspector general's investigation received four performance awards, three Senior Executive Service bonus awards and one Meritorious Executive Rank worth a total of $68,600 over a four-year period.
One Congressman, Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform committee expressed his disgust, even though Congress did nothing to punish the agents’ infractions: “It is astounding that employees who should have been prosecuted, fired, or at a minimum, severely disciplined for their misconduct, were instead given undeserved promotions and bonuses. It is troubling that supervisors who looked the other way at employee misconduct received substantial bonuses. Rewarding bad apples promotes a toxic work environment.”
Keeping with the Obama administration’s habit of stonewalling any investigation into the administration’s many scandals, the DEA failed to hand over the documents requested by the inspector general investigating the scandal.

Another day, another Obama administration scandal, another investigation stonewalled, another insult to the American taxpayer.

2) Richard Pollock, writing for the Freedom Force website on November 3, 2015, brought to light another affront to Americans. Glenn Woodell, a former NASA employee who had actually pled guilty to U.S. espionage laws that involved a Chinese contractor, was fined $250 and given six months probation. Another NASA employee and co-worker of Woodell, Daniel Jobson, had his espionage charges reduced to a misdemeanor and got away without any penalties.

According to Woodell’s indictment, he allowed a Chinese national to have “complete and unrestricted access” to NASA’s Langley Research Center. Sounds pretty series and yet, this NASA employee gets only a $250 fine? Are you kidding me? Former Congressman Frank Wolf nailed it when he said: “It’s like a traffic ticket or something for littering.”

If the cost of getting cost for espionage is only $250 while the upside of selling America’s secrets to foreign agents is likely to be substantially higher, where is the incentive not to indulge in espionage? Congressman John Culberson, who succeeded Wolf as chairman of the NASA appropriations subcommittee, also deplored the plea deal and held the same view as we do: “It is intolerable that espionage is not taken more seriously by the administration.” FBI Director James Comey told Congress that foreign citizens with green cards “wander around” sensitive U.S. facilities like NASA.

Unbelievable lax security. But given that the Chinese continually hack Federal government computer systems, it should not be a surprise that the Federal government and political class that operate it to allow Chinese nationals to ”wander around” secure government facilities.

3) Let’s stay with government employees’ misdeeds and incompetence. Continuing the stonewalling of the Obama administration, two senior executives from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) pleaded the Fifth Amendment in front of a House Congressional hearing. As many people know, the Veterans Administration has been one of the most inept and corrupt Federal entities, failing to provide the needed medical care to our veterans that was promised to them.

Philadelphia and Wilmington VA regional offices director Diana Rubens and St. Paul VA regional office director Kimberly Graves took the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any of the numerous questions put forward by committee chairman Congressman Jeff Miller. The employees were forced to come before Congress because, surprise, surprise, the Obama administration did not allow the VA employees to appear to a more causal request to appear.

The driving factor behind the hearing was an inspector general report that concluded that two VA employees abused the so-called relocation program to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The two officials called before the committee were accused by the inspector general of forcing subordinates out of their current job positions and the two officials then applied for the now vacant positions so that they could receive generous accounts.

The inspector general found the infractions serious enough that he referred the situation to the DC’s U.S. Attorney General for prosecution. The two officials ended up receiving over $400,000 in improper payments. And despite these actions and findings by the inspector general, the Obama administration still tried to stonewall yet another Congressional investigation.

That will finish up today’s discussion of political class insanity. Somehow today we ended up illustrating just a small sample of government and government employee misdeeds and disrespect for taxpayer wealth. Given that a recent public opinion poll, almost 80% of Americans said that the Federal government was corrupt, it looks like that poll was right, based on the malfeasance discussed above. 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:

Friday, November 6, 2015

November, 2015, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: A $20 TRILLION Naitonal Debt, Msimanaging the Economy, and Giving The Iranians All That They Want

NBC recently reported that ISIS forces are getting larger and stronger despite the Obama administration spending billions of dollars on a failed air campaign and military strategy.
The stock market is stalling.
Job creation is barely keeping up with population growth.
Wage growth is anemic, growing just .2% in the second quarter, the lowest quarterly growth since 1982.
The labor participation rate is at the lowest level in decades because the Obama economy cannot generate enough jobs.
Thousands of veterans are still not getting the medical care they were promised by the Federal government.
45 million Americans are still receiving monthly Federal food assistance.
Our borders still leak and thousands of illegal immigrant criminals continue to walk our streets.
Major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are hurtling towards insolvency and lose hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fraud and mismanagement.
Our kids are still getting lousy public educations at most public schools.
The IRS and other government functions seem to be getting their computer systems hacked on a regular basis, exposing tens of millions of Americans to identity theft potential.
Obama Care is a failure along so many dimensions as health care costs continue to soar despite the Obama promise that they would decrease.
Annual Federal deficits, while down, are still about half a TRILLION a year meaning that even though the Federal government is collecting more in taxes than ever before, it still cannot run a balanced budget.

Again, keep these real crises in mind as you read what our politicians are actually doing, saying and wasting.

1) Since we started writing this blog, we have sounded the alarm of how dangerously high the Federal government’s debt level has grown over time. In less than seven years, from the start of the Obama Presidency, the national debt has risen about 80% from around $10 TRILLION to over $18 TRILLION.

With the enactment of the latest Federal budget that Obama signed this week, it is highly likely that the national debt will hit an amazing $20 TRILLION when he leaves office in early 2017. Consider the insanity of this $20 TRILLION debt level and the ineptness of the Obama administration that got us to this dangerous place:

$20 TRILLION has 13 zeros in it.
The $20 TRILLION debt level comes out to a per household debt burden of over $170,000.
In other words, every American family would have to write a check for $170,000 to eliminate that debt burden.
At $20 TRILLION, the Obama administration would have overspent Federal revenue levels by the same amount that EVERY President cumulatively did before him. EVERY President.
The increased spending might have made some sense if it fulfilled Obama’s economic predictions back in 2009 but his promises of returning us to robust economic growth and reducing unemployment to 5.5% by 2012 were typical Obama promises, unfulfilled.
Another fulfilled economic promise was made in February 2009 when he promised: “And that’s why today I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office. This will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges we’ve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay–and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control”
For the next four fiscal years his administration caused the national debt to grow by over $4 TRILLION when his budgets ran trillion dollars deficits for four straight years.
Federal government spending increased over 18% in the first four years of his administration, from $2.98 TRILLION in 2008 under Bush to an annual average of $3.53 TRILLION under Obama.
The national debt was 47% of the annual GDP of the country when Obama came into office to a point where the national debt will likely be a whopping 94% of the annual GDP number when he leaves office.
Despite spending so much money, incurring so much debt, Obama’s economic stewardship of the economy has left over 45 million Americans needing Federal food assistance every month, record low labor participation rates as Americans get too discouraged to find a good job, stagnant wages, stagnant household wealth levels, crippling student loan burdens, and anemic and record setting low economic growth.

As always when talking about politicians and economics, difficult to see how much worse it could be if they tried to screw up when putting $10 TRILLION onto the national debt load. Insane.

2) Obama and John Kerry have been extolling the fine work they think they did in crafting a treaty with the Iranians regarding sanctions and the Iranians' desire to get their hands on nuclear weapons. We have previously discussed the reality of how stupid this agreement is for any number of reasons, reasons we will not rehash today.

What we will review today is the insane letter that the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, sent out demanding changes to the agreement. Before reading the changes listed below, keep in mind that Obama and Kerry thought that they already had worked out the details of the agreement months ago and that the negotiating was done. Now, the Iranian leadership comes back and says to Obama and Kerry, not so fast, we have questions and demand changes to the what Obama tried to sell the country as a done deal:

The U.S. and European nations must draft a letter promising to end all possibility of "sanctions snapback."
The West must lift -- not "suspend" -- all sanctions immediately and permanently.
The International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) must issue an irreversible declaration ending any future investigation into alleged military dimensions of Iran's nuclear programs.
Iran will postpone any renovations at its heavy water (plutonium) reactor at Arak until the signatories of the JCPOA produce an alternative usage plan.
Iran will not begin shipping out of country any of its enriched uranium unless the signatories agree to deliver uranium to Iran (albeit at a lower level of enrichment).
Iran demands right to implement a phased plan of centrifuge expansion to 150,000 over a period of 15 years.
No sanctions are to be leveled against Iran because of alleged support for terrorism or human rights violations.
Iran must be free to explore all future advances in nuclear enrichment technology.
No way that Obama can claim he has an agreement with Iran when they want to make eight major, major changes to the deal. We were led to believe that the details of the agreement had already been worked out. Apparently, the Iranians do not think so.

So what does Obama do? Walk away without a deal and in his mind dent his legacy? Or buckle under and let the Iranians have everything they want? I once worked for a boss whose favorite quote was: ”Never be so in love with a deal that you cannot walk away from it.” The Iranians know that Obama is desperate for a foreign affairs legacy and will not walk away from any deal, no matter how bad it is.

Given the insanity of this Presidency, I would bet that the supreme leader gets everything he wants and then some.

3) One more small piece of insanity for today, more insanity to follow tomorrow and beyond. During the Obama Presidency, this administration had three very strong tailwinds that should have made managing to a robust economy very easy:

He spent well over $800 billion on a so-called economic stimulus program.
Record low energy costs for consumers and businesses should have diverted billions of dollars into the economy, helping its rate of growth.
The Federal Reserve pumped trillions of paper dollars into the economy.

All three of these factors should have resulted in robust economic growth. But alas, they did not. The Obama administration and the rest of Washington took these tailwinds and incredibly created one of the worst economic recoveries in the history of the country.

And the latest government estimates on economic growth confirm that this ineptness continued into the third quarter of this year. The third quarter GDP annual growth rate was estimated to be 1.5%, less than half of the average historical growth rate.

That will do it for today’s political class insanity. Mismanagement of the economy, mismanagement of the Iranian nuclear weapons deal, and mismanagement of the country’s fiscal affairs. Three strikes. More insanity tomorrow including how to work for the DEA, throw wild sex parties on the taxpayer dime, and still get bonus pay.

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:

Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

November, 2015, Part 6, Political Class Insanity: Obama Drops To Third Place, Paying For Foreign Mosque Repairs and More Bad Economic News

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

November, 2015, Part 5, Political Class Insanity: Bad Priorities In Illiniois and Wasteful Sepnding In Afghanistan

Sunday, November 8, 2015

November, 2015, Part 4, Political Clas Insanity: The Corruption of Government Officials and The Politicians That Rule Them

Friday, November 6, 2015

November, 2015, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: A $20 TRILLION Naitonal Debt, Msimanaging the Economy, and Giving The Iranians All That They Want

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