July, 2017, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Our Greedy, Bigoted, and Economically Ignorant Politicians

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:

1) Congressman Luis Gutierrez is not my favorite politician. In fact, I find him quite despicable. Kate Steinle was shot in cold blood walking down an American city street by a Hispanic man that had been deported a number of times, arrested a number of times and who was in the country illegally. In a response to the murder, the Congressman said that Ms. Steinle’s killing was “a little thing” that people who were against illegal immigration would exploit as a public relations opportunity. I cannot imagine the horror and grief Ms. Steinle family and friends experienced when a national political figure claimed that her life and killing was “a little thing.”

And now I have another reason to despise him, although his actions below are probably pretty typical of the greed and corruption of the entire Washington political class:

• According to the We The Proud Patriots website and government election filings, Gutierrez used almost half of the money he collected for his reelection campaigns and paid it out to his wife.
• She has worked on his staff and his campaign staff for at least the past seven years and was paid handsomely for her presence.
• In those seven years his campaign effort has paid his wife $385,000 out of the campaign fundraising efforts.
• She got $110,000 in 2014 and $125,856 in 2016, nice work if you can get it.
• Oh, by the way, the Congressman also routed campaign money to his daughters for whatever work they also did.

Although not illegal to enrich family members with campaign donations, it certainly is sleezy. A simple fix would be that campaign funds could not be used to pay out to family members. Simple, but too complicated for our simple and greedy politicians.

2) Liberal politicians and journalists like to think that they are so special, that they are more caring and more enlightened than the rest of us, especially when it comes to illegal immigrants. But almost always they are just as unenlightened as they think the rest of us are. Consider what a liberal writer recently tweeted out:

• Mary Beth Williams is a writer for the liberal intense media outlet Salon.
• According to the Independent Journal Review, she recently tweeted: “I wonder if the GOP has asked itself who will clean their toilets & nanny their children & drive their limos when we’re all dead & deported.”
• In other words, in the mind of this “enlightened” liberal, illegal immigrants are only good for cleaning toilets, being nannies, and mindlessly driving rich white folks around town, quite racist, no?

Nothing worse than a hypocrite in my opinion. You cannot come up with a more condescending statement to assume an entire race of people are only good for society’s lowest jobs and responsibilities.

But these are not the only enlightened liberals who hold similar views:

• Remember back in 2016 when Obama stated in the midst of the 2016 Presidential election that illegal immigrants are necessary to “pick our fruit or make our beds.”
• Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated in 2015 the following about illegal immigrants: “We clean your toilets. We clean your hotels. We build your houses’” 
• Liberal TV star Kelly Osbourne asked, “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

Hypocrites, all of them no matter how enlightened they think they are.

3) Okay, we have already covered greedy and self serving politicians and we have covered hypocritical and bigoted liberals, both in the media and the political class. Let’s continue with another shortcoming of the politicians in this country, economics. 

We have previously discussed how the sudden raising of the minimum wage level across the country usually hurts the very people a higher minimum wage is supposed to help. Hours are cut, positions are eliminated, and economic growth is stifled, all hurting those in the lower economic strata of our society.

Becket Adams, writing for the Washington Examiner on June 26, 2017, reviewed the latest economic analysis out of Seattle, a city that has an aggressive schedule for getting its local minimum wage up to $15 an hour but has raised it up to only $13 so far:

• According to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, low wage workers on average have seen their earning drop by $125 a month since the city raised the minimum wage to $13 an hour.
• In other words, workers are earning less money even though the city forced local employers to pay $13 an hour.
• This translates into an annual loss of income of $1,500.
• Not unexpected to anyone except local politicians, the study found that some employers have reduced their staff sizes either by cutting positions or cutting hours of current employees.
• The study was done by University of Washington economists Ekaterina Jardim, Mark C. Long, Robert Plotnick, Emma van Inwegen, Jacob Vigdor and Hilary Wething, who reported: "[W]e conclude that the second wage increase to $13 reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by around 9 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent." 
• So hours were reduced at three times the rate that wages were raised, which resulted in the average worker getting $125 less a month in wages.
• One of the researchers, Jacob Vigdor concluded: "The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city. You've got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help." 
• I believe it’s called price elasticity, a simple economic concept that continues to be lost on politicians.

The economic idiocy and ignorance of our politicians continues to astound us and make life tougher for those that are supposed to benefit from the actions of politicians. Combine this negative trait with their greed and bigotry and one can see how pathetic and useless our current set of politicians are.

More insanity to follow.

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

July, 2017, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Financial Idiocy In Illinois, The Final Cash For Clunkers Autopsy, and Food Stamp Savings

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:

1) We have recently discussed the reality that the state government of Illinois is very close to falling into a reality bankruptcy if not an official legal bankruptcy. They have unpaid current bills of about $15 billion, they have untold billions in unfunded liabilities, and they are about to get their bond rating downgraded to junk since they have not had a real budget for three years.

Given this dire situation, caused by unrestrained spending over the years, one would hope that the political class in Illinois learned their lesson and went on a cost and spending reduction program to get their budget under control And alas, holding out hope that is dependent on an American politicians is again foolish.

Rather than getting their out of control spending under control, the state legislation politicians think that raising income taxes by 32% is a better solution. According to Nancy Hayes, writing for the Joe For America website on July 4, 2017 the politicians have proposed raising the personal income tax from 3.75% to 4.95% and raising the corporate income tax from 5.25% to a whopping 7%. Worse than raising taxes, it does it appear that substantial spending cuts were made in the proposed budget.

And if history is any indicator what is going to happen, this tax increase will not end well. Back in 2011, Illinois passed a temporary income tax increase but did not do anything to reform or decrease spending. Thus, despite getting an incremental $32 billion in tax revenue from the tax increase over the years, the state’s unpaid bill backlog only decreased by a meager $1.3 billion while the state’s pension debt increased by $25 billion. 

Also, we have previously reported that when the state of Maryland raised the tax rate on citizens earning over $1 million a year, within a short timeframe the tax revenue coming from those earning over $1 million had decreased despite the higher tax rate. Why? State citizens left Maryland to avoid the higher taxes. The same actions likely occurred in Illinois back in 2011 and will likely occur again with a 32% increase in the income tax likely to cause citizens and businesses leaving the state for more tax friendly states.

But to expect politicians to learn from their mistakes is always a fool’s errand. As the closing paragraph of the article states, “The new budget only delays the reality of the credit downgrade everybody fears – junk! What Illinois really needs is a comprehensive five-year recovery plan. A plan that includes debt reduction and unfunded pension liabilities. There’s really only one legal solution to that – bankruptcy.”

2) Let’s revisit an oldie but goodie political classic failure. Remember Obama’s “Cash For Clunkers” program. In that program, the American taxpayer, via the Federal government, gave out massive subsidies to anyone who purchased a new car that came with relatively high gas mileage rating (e.g. big, gas guzzling cars like Hummers did not qualify). The theory was that this incentive program would spark the auto industry by producing incremental car sales and profits and create incremental jobs.

Well, according to the Self Reliance Central website on July 3, 2017, post analysis of this horrible program did indeed prove again that the program was a disaster across many dimensions:

• The latest autopsy of the program was done by three economists from MIT and Texas A&M University.
• They found that there essentially were no incremental sales during the program (failure number 1).
• All the program did was give away money to people that would have bought a car anyway during the Cash For Clunkers timeframe or gave money away to people who moved up or delayed their purchase in order to get the free incentive money during the program’s timeframe.
• From a car company perspective, the condition that the cars purchased be of higher mileage type resulted in people buying less expensive cars than they normally would have purchased which depressed the per car average revenue and profit of each Clunkers purchase.
• Thus a program that was intended to increase car maker sales and profits did the exact opposite: it depresses car maker sales and profits (failure number 2).
• The summary of the study kind of sums up the results of the program: “The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which was experiencing disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we show nearly 60 percent of the subsidies went to households who would have purchased during the two-month program anyway; the rest accelerated sales by no more than eight months. Moreover, the program’s fuel efficiency restrictions shifted purchases toward vehicles that cost on average $5,000 less. On net, Cash for Clunkers significantly reduced total new vehicle spending over the ten month period."

Bottom line: a political class program that was supposed to increase car maker revenue and profit by increasing the sales of new cars actually depressed car maker revenue and profit without increasing the number of cars sold and cost the American taxpayer millions and millions of dollars (failure number 3). Proving again that most politicians are totally ignorant when it comes to economic matters.

3) If someone gives you something for free, it is human nature to accept it, especially if there are no strings attached. This also pertains to government programs that give you something for free, people accept the free handouts, it is human nature. 

But when the government gives out something for free it is really not for free, American taxpayers pay for that handout. And usually government programs do it inefficiently and corruptly, costing American taxpayers even more.

Such is the case with the government food stamp of SNAP program, a way of providing free food access for those Americans in need (theoretically). During the Great Recession, the Obama administration allowed states to waive the requirement that SNAP recipients have a job or be looking for a job since the economy was in such horrible shape. Certainly a humane approach during difficult economic times.

But like many government programs, times changed but the program did not. The economy got better, just ask Obama, with the official unemployment rate down to 4.3% but the SNAP program did not. For the most part states still allow SNAP recipients to get free food access without the burden of having or looking for a job.

But a Fox Business article from Jennifer Hickey on July 4, 2017 showed what happens when people have to work to get something for free, i.e. they basically go away and give up the free perk:

• When the state of Alabama required able bodied adults to either find a job or get into a work training program the number of people in the state’s SNAP program dropped an amazing 85%, from 5,538 to just 831 in four short months, indicating that about 4,700 Alabama residents were soaking the program and taxpayer for free SNAP food benefits.
• When several Georgia counties did the same thing, they saw a 58% drop in SNAP enrollment.
• The Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper reported that when another 21 Georgia counties joined in they saw a 62% drop in SNAP enrollment.
• When the state of Maine reimposed the work requirement, not only did the SNAP enrollment plummet but a follow study showed that that the Maine residents who left the program actually saw their total household earnings more than double within a year, going from $3.85 million to $8.24 million, i.e. those people were no longer dependent on taxpayer handouts and their overall welfare soared as a result of finding work and getting off of food welfare.
• According to the Foundation for Government Accountability: “Kansas saw a 75 percent decline after implementing work requirements in 2013. In addition, nearly 60 percent of former beneficiaries found employment within 12 months and their incomes rose by an average of 127 percent per year.”

Everybody wins when government and the politicians that operate it do the right thing: show compassion when needed but are vigilant when it comes to taxpayer wealth and prevent free handouts to those that do not need it. The article states that nationally upwards of $8 billion a year could be saved by following the example of these states in just this single government program. 

Imagine how much taxpayer wealth could be saved if EVERY government program went through this same scrutiny. Unfortunately, given that the Washington political class has not done this scrutiny in the past leaves little hope that they will do it in the future.

That will do it for today’s insanity: how easy it is to save taxpayer money while increasing the household income of those in need, the final economic idiocy from Cash For Clunkers, and budget and spending idiocy from Illinois politicians. 

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

July, 2017, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Obama Phone Fraud, Voting Fraud, and Other Fraud

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. The members of the political never cease to amaze us with their greed, idiocy, gumption, and criminal activities. And just when we think there is no new way to disappoint us and tick us off, they manage to find a way to do it, wasting our tax dollars and destroying our freedoms in the process.

The political class has been very busy this month so let’s get right to it:

1) Nowhere has the political class been such a failure than in Chicago where the local, county, state, and Federal politicians have failed repeatedly to provide a basic government service to the citizens of Chicago, namely bodily protection. Every day people are gunned down on the streets of Chicago resulting in the maiming and death of hundreds of people every year. V. Saxena, writing for the Conservative Tribune website on July 3, 2017, updated us on the latest violence in the city:

• 46 people were shot and at least four died died in Chicago on this July 4th weekend.
• The wounded included a 13 year old teeanger who was simply walking down the street.
• There have been over 1714 shootings this year in the city, almost 300 a month, about 10 shootings a day.
• And while the Trump administration is at least taking some action to fight the crime and violence wave, something that Obama never did for his home town, I doubt that sending an additional 20 ATF agents into the city is going to make any big difference.
• “I think Barack Obama has ignored the black community for eight years, and now he’s coming to take a bow in Chicago while our neighborhoods are suffering from disinvestment and soaring unemployment. We are seeing young black men getting gunned down at a horrific rate, and he has shown no willingness to seriously address these issues,” remarked Ja’Mal Green earlier this year, referencing the then-president’s farewell speech, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune.

What a mess, a fatal mess that the political class apparently has no plan to fix.

2) We have previously discussed the corrupt and wasteful Obama cell phone program (“Obama Phones”) that was supposed to place inexpensive cellular technology in the hands of poor people in our society and help them find jobs. But according to a recent study from the Government Accountability Office:

• One out of three people taking advantage of the program are not eligible for the program.
• A whopping 10.6 million people are in the program meaning over 3 million people are getting taxpayer wealth for nothing.
• The study also found that the program has resulted in $9 billion stuck in private bank accounts.
• Over 5,500 program participants have two phones, which is not kosher, and 6,400 people who are already dead also have phones in their names.
• And despite how big and expensive the program is, there is no plan in place to see if the program is actually meeting its intended objectives.

Wasteful spending on likely a useless program, sounds about right.

3) Will Brown, recently writing for the U.S. Chronicle website, explained how a corrupt state politician was recently sentenced to hard time in jail for her crimes in the state of Pennsylvania:

• Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has been sentenced to 10-23 months in Federal prison for illegally disclosing details of a grand jury investigation in order to embarrass her political rival.
• She was also sentenced to 8 years probation after the term is served.
• The judge accused Kane of adopting an “off with your heads” mentality despite being the state’s top law enforcement officer in the state and also called Kane a political “neophyte” who never transitioned from politician to public servant after she got elected.
• And now the tattle tales have come out of the darkness about what a bad person Kane was, with Erik Olsen, former Chief Deputy Attorney General under Kane, claiming she created a “terror zone” in the office using “a pattern of systemic firings and Nixonian espionage.” Nice person.

It’s a shame that this type of corruption goes on everyday at every level of government but at least this corrupt official got her just rewards.

4) Let’s stay with political corruption. Scott Osborn, writing for the Joe For America website on July 3, 2017, told the sad story of a Hillary Clinton operative going to jail for breaking the law in the name of Clinton:

• Lead Hillary Clinton political community organizer Andrew J. Spieles, aged 21, pleaded guilty to registering multiple dead people to vote in the last Presidential election while working for Hillary.
• He could have been put in jail for up to a year as a result of an investigation of local police and the FBI but by pleading guilty he faces 100 to 120 days behind bars.
• The local TV station WTVR channel 6 reported: “A man paid to register Virginia voters prior to the 2016 Presidential Election will spend at least 100 days in prison for submitting the names of deceased individuals to the Registrar’s Office.”
• He got caught submitting voter registrations for dead people and one of those dead people was the father of a current Rockingham County judge.
• According to the government investigation: “Spieles later admitted that he prepared the false voter registration forms. He obtained the name, age, and address of individuals from ‘walk sheets’ provided to him by the Virginia Democratic Party, fabricating a birth date based on the ages listed in the walk sheet, and fabricating the social security numbers.” 

Again, this is another assault on our freedom and integrity of our democracy. Fortunately, he got caught. However, it makes you wonder if this type of behavior is going on and undetected around the country.

This is a good start to this month’s political class insanity: attorney general fraud, voting fraud, Obama Phone fraud, and still no political solution to the Chicago violence. More insanity to follow for days and days 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:

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

June, 2017, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Dragging Medicaid Down the Drain With It

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) One of the major tenets of Obama Care was to dump millions and millions of Americans onto the failing and flailing Medicaid program. Previously we have reviewed why such a strategy was a failure from day one:

• Medicaid is infested with waste, inefficiency, and criminal fraud, wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.
• Putting millions of more people on the Medicaid roles and increasing the budget to handle the increase resulted in more waste and criminal fraud.
• Less than two thirds of the country’s doctors currently serve Medicaid customers and less than fifty percent are accepting new Medicaid patients, leaving many Americans with Medicaid insurance coverage but without the ability to use that insurance to visit a doctor.
• Medicaid was designed for the nation’s poor, disabled, blind, and childless adults but Obama decided that it was a good idea to put an entirely different set of people on the program, not poor, not disabled, not blind, and not childless, a segment of the population that the program was not designed for. Thus, a bad program designed for one segment of the population got worse when it had to handle a whole different segment that it was not designed to help.
• Continually increasing Medicaid costs are killing state budgets with some states devoting over 20% of their entire tax revenue stream just to the Medicaid program.

What a disaster, made multiple times worse by Obama Care.

But now some states are fighting back and trying to get the program under control and focused on what it was supposed to do, not what Obama shoved down their throats to do. Consider a recent article by Wes Goodman, an assemblyman from the Ohio state government, writing for the Heritage Foundation website on June 30, 2017:

• Ohio realized that the Medicaid program in their state was failing and getting way too expensive besides leaving the most needy state residents behind, all as a result of Obama Care.
• As a result, the state government recently imposed a freeze on Medicaid enrollment in their state to try and finally get a handle on the problems of the program.
• The intent was to, “free up resources for those who are truly vulnerable and to ensure that our Medicaid program, and state as a whole, is financially sound for the future.”
• Currently in Ohio, there are almost 60,000 state residents who qualify for traditional Medicaid benefits including, “children and adults with developmental disabilities who need anything from specialized medical equipment to assist them with their daily lives to therapeutic intervention, to at-home medical services.”
• But Obama Care forced the states to divert Medicaid funds from these types of truly needy people to fund Medicaid coverage for middle class, working, non-disabled, childless adults.
• In the opinion of the writer, “The truly vulnerable have been forced to wait for services, while many who have the capacity to provide for themselves have been jumped to the front of the line.”

Finally, someone somewhere doing a simple set of math calculations and then applying those calculations to help the truly vulnerable in our country. We have previously reported on how the state of Maine slashed their Medicaid budget to help the truly needy in their state with wonderful results, results that did not harm anyone in the process: 

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-2017-part-2the-unfolding-disaster.html

2) An article from the National Review website on June 27, 2017 shed more light on how the Medicaid expansion under Obama Care continues to be a disaster, a disaster upon the original disaster that is Medicaid:

• Since the more that states spend on Medicaid the more they receive in financial support from the Federal government, in some cases getting three dollars for every dollar they spend, there has never been an incentive for the states and Medicaid to be cost efficient since there ineptness and wasteful spending is paid for by the nebulous “American taxpayer.”
• In 2016, improper and criminal Medicaid payments accounted for a whopping 12% of all Medicaid payments, making just the wasted/lost wealth about equivalent to the size of the whole Kenyan economy and certainly larger than the GDP of dozens and dozens of entire countries.
• Even though the people that Obama Care put on Medicaid tend to be healthier, wealthier, and able bodied, the Obama Care legislation gave them preference and better benefits over the people originally intended to be covered by Medicaid, older, poorer, disabled, etc.

What a mess. Obama Care is a disaster and Medicaid is a disaster so Obama thought it would be a good idea to put these two disasters together. Still no cure for stupid.

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