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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.loathemygovernment.com

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

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

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