This month could be one of the worst ever, given the backlog that needs to be discussed. The insanity will cover a full range of areas where today’s politicians continue to disappoint and fail us. As always, the new ways they find to screw up is never ending and always creative.
1) When the State Department built an embassy in the capital of Afghanistan it overran its budget by a whopping $150 million. That same State Department spent $40 million on a consulate building in the hinterland of Afghanistan only to abandon it when it was discovered it could not withstand a terrorist attack. The U.S. embassy being built in London might easily cost an obscene billion dollars or more. CBS News reported a year ago that one of the reasons for the London expense was that glass for the embassy was actually shopped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean to be framed.
And now that same CBS reporter, Nancy Cordes, has recently reported that the new U.S. embassy to be built in Mexico has seen its original estimate of $577 million go up by a third already, with the new estimate sitting at $939 million. This outrageous increase in the cost has happened even though not a single thing has been done to start construction on the embassy.
But this story gets even better, and worse for taxpayers. First of all, the State Department bought fifteen acres in a former Mexican industrial district at a price of….$120 million, according to the CBS reporting. This comes out to a whopping $8 MILLION PER ACRE. I dare to say that there is no acre of land in all of Mexico, or possibly the U.S., that is worth $8 million.
And apparently, these fifteen acres sit on top of an old Colgate-Palmolive factory which left the ground infested with hazardous waste. Thus, the acreage is not even good land, it is poisoned land and still the State Department paid $8 million an acre.
In a bit of an understatement, Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government reform committee stated that this situation: "It's a bit of a fiasco." Ya think????
Lydia Muniz of the State Department’s Construction Bureau is quoted in the CBS report as saying that the original plan to award the construction contract in 2016 will not hold. Thus, if construction is not likely to even begin until 2017, how high do we think that this cost estimate will go? Easily past a billion dollars no doubt.
Just when you think you have seen all of the different forms of political class insanity, our politicians come up with another: paying $8 million an acre for a polluted piece of land in an industrial site to build a billion dollar embassy. You cannot make this stuff up.
2) The IRS has been around for a long time. They have probably processed trillions of different tax returns in their history. And now in 2015 we learn again that they still do a terrible job in accomplishing that task.
According to recent news reports, the personal and confidential records of over 100,000 Americans had their information compromised when Russian hackers broke into confidential computers and files of the IRS and stole vital personal information. Most sane people would view this as a serious computer security breach, exposing 100,000 Americans to a real identity theft possibility all because of IRS incompetence.
But believe it or not, this is not the worst part of this crisis. Somehow IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has claimed the theft is “not a security breach.” After news of the hacking was made public, he held a phone call with reporters where he boldly asserted that: “This is not a security breach. Our basic information is secure.” Pretty sure that is not what 100,000 Americans would say, their information was seriously breached. I would hate to see what this guy views as a real security breach.
The Washington Times quoted Senator Orrin Hatch as claiming that the IRS had previously been warned many times that more needed to be done to protect taxpayer data and information: “That the IRS — home to highly sensitive information on every single American and every single company doing business here at home — was vulnerable to this attack is simply unacceptable.”
Unbelievable that such a highly paid government bureaucrat could be so incompetent and out of touch with reality and not be able to fix what is wrong with his organization even though its flaws had already been identified for him.
3) On of the basic tenets of any democracy is “one person, one vote.” It is the underpinning to the assumption that elections accurately represent the voices of American citizens. Take away that assumption of fairness and the whole democratic process eventually breaks down since no one knows what the true feelings of the citizens are.
Which is why I was always baffled when politicians, almost always Democrats, were so strongly against fair and easy voter id laws and regulations. Did they want to undermine our democracy by poisoning the election process? They would always justify their actions to cut or gut voter id laws with the assumption that there is very little voter fraud in America today and thus, voter id laws were solving a non-existent problem while making it harder for some people to vote.
Well like many other Democratic Party/Obama promises and statements of “fact” recently (e.g. if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor under Obama Care, we are winning the war against ISIS, the Obama administration is going to be the most transparent ever, etc.), consider the following write up of several examples of voter fraud identified by the Heritage Foundation:
- In McAllen, Texas, two campaign workers (known as politiqueras in local parlance) who bribed voters with cocaine, beer, cigarettes and cash during a 2012 school board election have been sentenced separately to serve eight and four months in prison, respectively. U.S. District Court Judge Randy Crane called this election fraud “terrible” and said that “our country requires that our voting process be clear and free of fraud for democracy to work … it’s dangerous for this to occur without consequence.”
- A couple in Le Sueur, Minn., was charged with felony voter registration fraud for lying about where they lived so they could vote in a school bond referendum in another town.
- A woman in Dothan, Ala., was sentenced to six months in prison for her part in a voter fraud scheme that got a city commissioner re-elected. She was the second of the four people charged to have been found guilty of voter fraud in the case, which may have involved more than 100 absentee ballots.
- Bronx politician Hector Ramirez has been arrested after a 242-count grand jury indictment charged him with a massive voter fraud scheme that involved tricking voters into letting Ramirez and his staff illegally vote their absentee ballots. The local prosecutor told the New York Daily News that Ramirez, who lost two prior tries at a state assembly seat, “made a decision that he was not going to lose, under any circumstance.”
- A state appeals court upheld a ruling voiding a 2013 commission election in Weslaco, Texas, in which dozens of illegal votes were cast in an election won by only 16 votes. The illegal votes included individuals falsely claiming to reside in the city and improper “assistance” that told voters who to vote for—a great example of how even a small amount of fraud can make a difference in close elections.
- In Philadelphia, the setting of the infamous 2008 New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, four local election officials have been charged with casting multiple votes in the city’s 18th Ward in a precinct in which three of them didn’t even live and were not registered to vote. This case illustrates the importance of poll watchers, because it was a local poll watcher who saw what happened and brought it to the attention of the district attorney’s office. This is the same district attorney, Democrat Seth Williams, who indicted two Democratic state legislators last year for accepting bribes in exchange for voting against a voter ID bill after the Pennsylvania attorney general, Kathleen Kane, also a Democrat, refused to prosecute the case.
- On May 7, the Board of Immigration Appeals of the Executive Office for Immigration Review held that a Peruvian citizen who illegally registered and voted could be deported for violating federal law. Margarita Del Pilar became a permanent legal resident of the U.S. in 2004. She promptly applied for an Illinois driver’s license and registered to vote at the same time, then cast a ballot in the 2006 congressional election. When she applied for naturalization in 2007, she admitted in the INS interview that she had voted in an American election. Of course, if she had not applied to become a citizen, she could have continued to illegally vote with almost no chance of being detected.
And remember, these are just some of the cases that have been caught. How many others that have not been caught is anybody’s guess but it is pretty obvious that voter fraud is a problem, regardless of what Obama, Eric Holder, and others that pooh pooh the concept think. They are the frauds that would seek to undermine our democratic processes for the sake of more illegal votes in their column in the voting machines.
That will do it for today, we are just getting warmed up with the following pieces of insanity:
- The State Department absolutely stinks when it comes to buying real estate and constructing a building on that real estate.
- The IRS stinks at just about everything they do including preventing security breaches of Americans personal information.
- Voter fraud does exist, it is widespread across every state, and any politician that says it does not exist obviously thinks the fraud is in her or his best interest even though it cuts the legs out of our democracy.
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
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