Thursday, February 28, 2019

March, 2019, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: A Mean,Nasty Senator, A Failed Railroad, and More

It is another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

Let’s get started:

1) For decades the Federal government never figured out how operate an efficient and effective railroad system (AMTRAK) in a profitable manner. Then California politicians decided they were going to build and operate a high speed train line from northern California to southern California. Then the California politicians decided that after years of effort, many, many studies and the wasting of billions of dollars, it could not be done. Then daft Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided that the U.S. airline industry needed to be destroyed at the altar of climate change.

Which brings us to the latest failure and ongoing saga of failure when it comes to politicians trying to build and operate a railroad system:
  • An AMTRAK train going from Seattle to California has been stuck for days in Oregon after it reportedly hit a tree.
  • Only a Federal government run railroad could break down because it somehow hit a tree.
  • The 180 or so customers on the train were not allowed to leave the train since there was four feet of snow in every direction and the local area was out of power.
  • As a result, the customers ran out of food, ran out of diapers forcing the riders to cut up clothes to make their own diapers, ran out of feminine products, and ran out of medicine. 
Obviously, this did not happen on the Orient Express in the middle of nowhere in Siberia. It happened in Oregon and yet the Federal government operation could not get 180 Americans stranded, in Oregon, out of harm’s way for three days. So sad.

Oh, and by the way, an Amtrak train crashed into a freight train in South Carolina early this past February. The crash resulted in two AMTRAK riders being killed and at least 70 other riders being injured. 

Oh, and by the way, in December, 2017, an Amtrak train derailed in Washington state, smashing through an overpass onto Interstate 5, killing three people and injuring dozens. 

Oh, and by the way, in early 2018, an Amtrak train carrying Republican members of Congress to a retreat in West Virginia hit a garbage truck in Virginia, killing one of the three occupants in the vehicle.

So, in a little over a year, we have at least four major AMTRAK incidents with death, injuries, and abandonment and not to mention the abandonment of a major high speed rail project after wasting billions of dollars. And politicians like Ocasio-Cortez think we need to stop flying and somehow use a nationwide, unbuilt rail system that does not exist that would be operated by the same idiots that operate the embarrassment known as AMTRAK. The height of insanity.

2) Washington politicians always act like they care about us but often their actions, and wasteful spending, show us that they only care about themselves and their own self gratification:
  • Warner Todd Huston, writing for the Godfather Politics website on February 25, 2019, discussed one of those times when Washington politicians were so self serving again.
  • Five Democrats in the House of Representatives are under pressure because of a trip they took, at no cost to themselves, to South Africa just to see a Beyonce concert.
  • The trip for the five of them cost $60,000, none of which they paid for.
  • According to the article, as reported by Fox: “ They attended the “Global Citizen Mandela 100” concert from Dec. 1-3 to celebrate the centenary birth of the late Nelson Mandela and raise awareness of global poverty. In addition to BeyoncĂ©, other musical acts included her husband Jay Z, Ed Sheeran, Pharrell Williams and Chris Martin.”
  • The trip was paid for my a so-called charity organization, the Global Citizen, a group that supposedly helps out the poor in Third World countries around the world.
  • Which raises the question: how many poor people could have been clothed, housed, and fed if Global Citizen had used that $60,000 boondoggle money on the poor and not five U.S. politicians?
  • The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, called the trip a mockery: “These members of Congress that were given an all-expense paid vacation to party with Oprah, Jay Z, and BeyoncĂ© in South Africa are claiming with a straight face this was needed to help poor children around the world live better lives. This was in fact, a mockery of House ethics rules on gifts and travel, the truly poor, and all Americans that expect members of Congress to live not only by the letter of the law but by the spirit and intentions of the rules of the House of Representatives.”
Well said. I almost guarantee you that the world’s poor are no better off because five U.S. Congress people went to a concert in South Africa. So ego satisfying and so useless, as always.

3) Let’s move from House of Representative members acting childish by allowing themselves to get treated to a concert at the expense of the world’s poor over to a childish politician in the Senate, one who actually wants to be President of the United States:
  • According to a story by Shawn, writing for the Fix This Nation website on February 24, 2019, Senator Amy Klobuchar of the Senate is possibly not one of the nicer people you will meet in Washington.
  • According to many of Klobuchar’s staff members, she is quite the tyrant when it comes to treating other human beings.
  • For example, on a trip to South Carolina several years ago, Klobuchar got crazy and blew up at an aide when the aide lost the Senator’s dining utensils in the middle of the flight.
  • It then got really bizarre when the Senator used her comb to eat her meal and then ordered the aide to clean the comb of food that had gotten on it when she used it as dining utensil.
  • She has been known to throw binders, phones, and other things at aides who did not measure up to her needs and expectations.
  • She also had aides do demeaning errands including washing her dishes or doing other cleaning for her, tasks that are quite possibly a violation of Senate ethics rules.
  • She was known to point out perceived staff screw ups that were delivered at all hours of the night and day.
  • Her nasty quotes included, “In 20 years in politics I have never seen worse prep”, “This is the hands down worse thing you have ever given me” and “This is the worst press staff I ever had.” 
Such a pleasant person. And she wants to be President of the U.S. Really cannot see such a petty, disrespectful human being becoming someone who could unite and lead the country,. Pettiness in personal dealings with people that may not be at such a high level of status would result in pettiness in dealing with anyone who has a different opinion from hers. And that is not the type of divisive behavior that this country needs today.

That is a good start for this month’s political class insanity: a childish, condescending Senator, five Congress people who needed to have scarce money spent on them rather than the Earth’s poor, and the disaster that is the Federal government’s operation of a railroad system. 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




Tuesday, February 26, 2019

The Horrors And Destruction That Donald Trump Has Imposed On America...Just Kidding! Part 20: More Good Economic News, Cracking Down on Human Trafficking, and More

Before we start today’s discussion, let’s review my voting history: 
  • I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life. 
  • Thus, I did not vote for Trump. 
  • I have rarely voted for a Republican for national office in my life. 
About 2 years ago, many liberals, Democrats, and millennials were besides themselves with grief and fear because their pre-ordained queen, Hillary Clinton, was not elected President. Instead, Donald Trump was elected, an individual that these same people despised, hated, and feared, an individual they felt would endanger and possibly destroy the country and our democracy. For the past year and a half they fretted, worried and lashed out at anything or anyone that even remotely smelled of Donald Trump.

Given that Trump has been in office for almost two years, I thought, that as someone who did not vote for him, it would be a good idea to review the horror, trauma, and terrible things that Trump has subjected the country to in just 24 month’s time. This is obviously a very sarcastic comment when you take an unbiased look at what has happened during the Trump Presidency. 

The many previous posts we did on this topic identified over 200 good things that have happened to America and Americans since Trump became President can found by entering the phrase “the horrors and destruction” in the search box above.

It has been over a month since we updated this series so let’s catch up with the latest Trump administration accomplishments:

1- In a recent Gallup, 58% of those polled thought that the U.S. is rated “very” or “somewhat favorably” by the rest of the world, a 3% increase from last year and is now at the highest level since 2003.

2-The Trump administration is launching a global effort to end the criminalization of homosexuality, a dire situation that still exists in dozens of countries around the world, concentrated mostly in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean, with U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, leading the effort.

3- In another recent Gallup poll, Trump’s approval rating in that poll has risen to 44%, the third highest level for his administration.

4- In a recent Rasmussen poll among likely voters, Trump’s approval rating has risen to 50%, higher than Obama’s approval rating at the same time in his Presidency.

5- According to a CBSNews poll, 76% of those Americans who watched Trump’s state of the union speech approved of his performance while only 24% disapproved of it, a three to one margin of difference.

6- The stock market, as measured by the Dow, is up a whopping 32% or so since Trump came into office.

7- The employment situation continues to improve month over month as almost 300,000 (296,000) new jobs were created in the month of January, 2019.

8-  Foxcomm, one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world, agreed to proceed with it's plans to build a manufacturing and research facility in Wisconsin that will make liquid crystal display screens that can be used in small electronic products.

9- Trump recently signed four pieces of legislation that will actively attack the huge problem of human trafficking including the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the Abolish Human Trafficking Act, the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

For those of you that have hated on Trump since day one, and given your obvious gross error in judgment relative to Trump given the over 200 accomplishments we have previously listed and the newest nine accomplishments listed above, let me ask that you to do us all a favor by implementing the following changes in your behavior and attitude:
  • Chill out, tamp down your TDS affliction. No matter how much you hate Trump on a sexist, personal basis, get over it. He is the legally and duly elected President, he will be around for a while so refocus your hatred on more constructive issues and matters. You will live a lot longer if you take your hatred out of your heart and soul and devote it to something positive.
  • I would really appreciate it if some of you would apologize to the Trump voters you have disrespected in some of the grossest terms possible over the past year. You have called millions of voters racists, ignorant, stupid, Nazis, KKK members, and other horrible names simply because you disagreed with their voting choice. No American should be called such disgusting names simply because they exercised their Constitutional rights to the best of their abilities. Plus, slandering over 60 million Americans is no way to unite the country and get it focused on the real issues facing us all.
  • More personally, I would like, no I am demanding, an apology from some of you for your slanderous and disgusting name calling because in doing so, you insulted and disrespected my sister, my family members, my friends, and my co-workers who simply voted their conscience. I will defend their right to vote anyway they wanted and will no put up with your childish and vicious venom and bile directed at them, very important people in my life.
  • And finally, I challenge you to read the following blog post, a post that shows quite clearly that it was hateful people like some of you and your silence during the Obama years that actually caused Trump to be elected. Thus, the people you hate for voting for Trump are actually looking back at you in the mirror:
https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-american-liberals-and-washington.html

If you were silent in the dozens of instances listed in this post then you were responsible for the very thing you hate: a Trump Presidency. Or put another way, a so far successful and productive Trump Presidency. Over 200 accomplishments in about two years is not too shabby despite many of you wanting both Trump and the country to fail.


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




Sunday, February 24, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Insanity, Part 3: Being "Morally Right" But "Factually Wrong", The Idiocy Of The New Green Deal and More

Over the past few months, New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a human gaffe machine. Her inability to do simple math, her outlandish ideas based on an alternative reality, her economic ignorance, and lack of common sense has resulted in an almost daily stream of idiocy, inane comments, and ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality.

As a result, most of our recent political class insanity posts have almost always had an Ocasio-Cortez piece of insanity. Thus, we have decided to separately track her craziness and idiotic takes on economics, business, government, and whatever else on a regular basis under its own set of posts. She deserves to have a separate effort that captures all of the ridiculousness she espouses.

The format we will do is to start with a set of her original inane ideas and just continue to build on that initial list as time goes by. If the list gets too large, which it is likely to do, we will then find a good breaking point to start another list. We will try to source the original source of all of her gaffes, trying to use her own words that were stated either orally or via her Twitter account, a source of endless inane comments and ideas.

We have already listed out eleven major gaffes from her in the following post:


Thus, we start today’s array of missteps with misstep number 12. The original eleven are listed further down the post after the “*************” line.

12- According to Ocasio-Cortez: “I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." So, according to her philosophy of life, it is better to ignore reality than to ignore what you think should be reality. 

I have trouble dealing with this type of illogical and inane thinking. You cannot resolve any problem in life without knowing the root cause of that problem. This another way of saying find out what the reality of the situation is and then apply the right solutions to that reality. She would rather ignore reality and live in some sort of fantasy world, a perception of life that will never allow here to resolve any of the problems facing the country and the reality we find ourselves in.

She obviously does not understand the reality of some of her proposed socialist programs: Medicare For All, New Green Deal, free college, free daycare, etc. As we have pointed out many times, the country is about to collapse under the crushing debt and unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. The total of the debt of the Federal and state governments and the unfunded liabilities is well over $100 TRILLION. Since the TOTAL wealth of every American is well under $100 TRILLION, there is simply not enough wealth to fund the financial hole that politicians have already dug for us as a nation.

So why in her mind it might be “morally right” to fund free college, free daycare, Medicare for All etc., the simple reality that she does not understand is that factually there is not enough wealth to fund her morally right programs.

But that is the beauty of existing in a “morally right” alternative like hers. You can get to dream up all of these wonderful ideas, unburdened by reality.

13- One of the more idiotic programs she is proposing is the New Green Deal. This is an impossible program to execute (see her “morally right” obsession above) since it involves transforming the entire country’s energy infrastructure to solar and wind within ten years. She ignores the realities that it took hundreds of years to build the country’s infrastructure up to what it is today, no way that gets replaced in ten years. I say ten years because that is about when she claims the world will end because of manmade climate change unless we listen to her.

Before we conclude why this is such an ignorant statement to make, consider some climate history:
  • In 1970, high regarded biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that "all important animal life in the sea will be extinct" in 10 years or so. 49 years later most important animal life is still with us. 
  • Also in 1970, Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard, George Wald, forecasted that: “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 49 years later we are still hanging around. 
  • Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, also said that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. 49 years later crop yields are as high as ever and the number of humans starving around has dropped significantly over the past decades. 
  • Ehrlich followed up on this starvation prediction when he claimed that, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” 49 years later people are still starving but nowhere close to the rate he predicted. 
  • In 1968 he predicted: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Good thing that he did not lay down that bet since 19 years later England is still hanging around. 
  • Noted British science writer Nigel Calder warned in a July, 1975 International Wildlife article that, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” So, as recently as about 44 years ago we were all going to die from an Ice Age, not global warming. 
  • Meteorologist C.C. Wallen claimed in 1975 in a Science News article that, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” But according to other scientists it reversed a few years later when the exact opposite climate trend became popular, global warming. 
  • In 2000, British climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that in just “a few years” snow would become a “very rare and exciting event” in Britain and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is...Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the next few years, Britain experienced some of its lowest temperatures and snowfall accumulations since records started being kept in 1914. Also, given that most of the U.S. Midwest is suffering through below zero temperatures, 19 years after Viner predicted the death of snow, I do not think they would agree with Viner either. 
  • Ecologist Kenneth Watt told a college audience in 1970: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” But those predictions never came true. 
  • In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin wrote in Look magazine: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian (Institution), believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Not even close 49 years later. 
  • In 2009, self proclaimed climate expert Al Gore predicted that there was an excellent chance that the North Pole would be melted within five years. Ten years later, the ice cap is still there, generating increment amounts of cold air as witnessed by the American living in the Midwest today. 
  • Scientist Harrison Brown predicted in 1970 that mankind would run out of copper shortly after the 2000 and that lead, zinc, gold and silver would be gone ten years earlier. 49 years later, these elements are still around and in good supply. 
So, famous scientists across many different fields, a Nobel laureate, the head of the Smithsonian,and Al Gore have predicted many catastrophic events related to climate. None of them, not a single one of their predictions came true. 

And yet 29 year old, former bartender, non-scientist Ocasio-Cortez wants to upset the entire country’s energy and financial conditions because she predicts the world will end in about a decade. Somehow we should believe her, someone who is not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, someone who does not know the simple definition of unemployment despite having an economics degree, someone who does not know the three branches of government despite being a member of Congress, and someone who denies reality and lives in a fantasy world of what she considers “morally right.” Insane.

14- Some of the published details of her New Green Deal are really too insane to believe. Consider a direct quote from the proposal: “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero."

A number of observations: 
  • She wants to get rid of cows because they fart methane and that destroys the climate. So, while we are destroying our dairy industry, China and India alone are proceeding with building about 2,400 carbon spewing coal plants that will overwhelm the reduction in cow farting that the U.S. manages to do. 
  • She wants to destroy the airline industry while the rest of the world continues to fly about using their airplanes while in the U.S. we are forced to walk, use a non-existent national train system, or just stay home. Keep in mind that California could not build a single high speed train line despite years and billions of dollars of trying so to think an inept Federal government can do it any better to replace airline travel is a “morally right” fantasy. 
  • Within ten years she wants to retrofit EVERY building in America, overhaul transportation, and overhaul agriculture. But this is a government that after hundreds of years, still cannot operate a postal system efficiently and effectively. This is a government that after decades still cannot operate a non-high speed train system (Amtrak) efficiently and effectively. To think it can do anything right of any magnitude is crazy. 
Look, let’s face a few realities: 
  • The Federal government is not capable of doing what she wants it to do, not in ten years, not in a hundred years. 
  • This plan will destroy entire industries, e.g. agriculture and airlines, and not provide a suitable replacement industries….in addition to eliminating cheese, yogurt and milk from our diets once she kills off all of the farting cows. 
  • To think the rest of the world will follow our example is a total pipe dream, the rest of the world will continue to expand and use coal, oil, airplanes, and cows to expand and improve their economies, the world’s failure to live up to the Paris Climate Agreement proves this point emphatically. 
  • The devastation caused by moving to purely renewable sources of energy will be devastating to the Earth; wind turbines kill millions of birds every year, more wind turbines will kill billions more, the mining of precious metals for solar cells is a dirty and ecologically devastating process, mining more of those metals, assuming enough of them can be found and mined, will be more devastating. 
  • The production of batteries to store the renewable energy will also be a disaster for nature and virtually impossible to implement; we have already shown that for California to get to 80% renewable energy it would have to deploy 500 million Tesla Powerwall units to store and supply constant electrical power. To do this for the entire U.S. in ten years would be impossible, would require millions of acres of land which would devastate the ecology of major parts of the country and billions of storage units, and would cost trillions of dollars to produce, deploy and operate. 
Alright, enough already. This is an Ocasio-Cortez plan that fails on so many levels in so many ways. But this is what happens when someone lives in a “morally right” fantasy world, the facts and realities listed above do not enter into their thinking. This guarantees that at some point in time reality will jump up and bite her fantasy plans where the sun does not shine, ensuring failure and devastation of our economy, our freedoms, and our safety.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.
********************************************
8-Probably most people now know that Amazon has decided not to create a mega headquarters location in Queens, New York and has pulled out of its plans there. If the plan had been executed, 25,000 very high paying jobs would have come to the city which would have resulted in even more jobs in the construction, building materials, retail, restaurant, and other industries that would have serviced the 25,000 high paying employees.

In addition, Amazon was willing to do the following additional niceties to make the deal even better: 
  • Amazon would invest $2.5 billion in developing the location for their headquarters location. 
  • This $2.5 billion would result in a load of high paying construction jobs and ancillary jobs and economic benefit to the area, e.g. food trucks to service the construction workers. 
  • Eventually Amazon would station 25,000 employees at the location, highly paid employees that would buy and renovate housing in the area, eat in local restaurants, go to local movie theaters, buy clothes from local merchants, buy furniture to furnish their new homes, spend money on local transportation, etc. 
  • Amazon promised to provide computer science course to 130 area high schools. 
  • Amazon promised to hire at least 30 people from a nearby housing complex to work in its call center. 
  • Amazon would help fund local infrastructure improvements. 
  • Amazon would help fund a new 600 seat public school 
  • Amazon would create a 3.5 acre waterfront park open to the public. 
  • Amazon would set aside 25,000 square feet for a “community facility use/artist workspace.” 
  • Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for an art and tech accelerator. 
  • Amazon would set aside 263,000 square feet for light manufacturing space. 
  • Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for workforce development and training space. 
  • Amazon would set up internships for high school students. 
  • Amazon, starting in 2020, would host semi-annual job fairs and resume workshops at the local housing complex for at least three years. 
In return, local New York government entities promised Amazon a $3 billion tax break down the road. We estimated that the local government entities would have reached a breakeven on that $3 billion incentive in less than 8 years and after that, the increased taxes from the Amazon effort would have all been incremental tax revenue.

But leave it to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and several of her other socialist friends, to screw up a great deal for the citizens of New York City. Their constant complaining about the $3 billion finally caused Amazon management to say this effort is not worth hassles.

Even worse, Ocasio-Cortez showed her total ignorance when she said that the $3 billion could be better spent on local infrastructure needs, better schools, better subways, etc. What she failed to understand is that there is no $3 billion pot of money sitting around that was going to be given to Amazon. Amazon would have paid less in taxes to the tune of $3 billion over time. Local city government entities would have gotten a little less in tax money from Amazon initially, the $3 billion does not exist as of today.

Even MSNBC, a news outlet that hates everything Trump and freedom and loves everything Democrat and socialism stepped up to show how ignorant she was: “What’s shocking to me is once again she shows how little she understands not just economics but even unemployment. She’s the one who said the reason unemployment is so low is because a lot of people have two jobs. She needs to learn basic things about what it is to be a representative … Just because she has a progressive agenda, which some people like, does not mean she has the city’s best interest. She showed me she only cares about herself and not about her colleagues ... and not about the people she represents because those people would be getting jobs themselves.”

If MSNBC thinks a Democrat show little understanding about basic concepts and cares only about herself, you know that it is that bad.

9- But being ignorant about the $3 billion, thinking that it is a pot of money that was just going to be handed over to Amazon, was not her only gaffe in this area. Consider this piece of insanity from her: “So I firmly believe that if we want to take that $3 billion dollars that we were willing to give to Amazon and invest it in our local community, we can do that. We can make those jobs. We can make 25,000 jobs. But we don’t have to give away and allow our subway system to crumble so that Amazon essentially owns a part of New York City. We can create 25,000 jobs with Mom-and-Pops.”

So much wrong with this ignorance:
  • There is no $3 billion that can be invested in the local community. 
  • Why would you want to make jobs, when Amazon as willing to hand you 25,000 high paying jobs without any effort on your part? 
  • I can almost guarantee that the 25,000 jobs that you might be able to make with “Mom and Pops’ would on average pay nowhere near $150,000 a year. 
  • And again, there is no $3 billion pot of money that she could use to fix a crumbling subway system. 
As a result of her stupidity on the subject, her constituents will not see the incredible opportunity that Ocasio-Cortez helped scare away because of her idiocy when it comes to the incentive program, a simple concept that most people would understand with little trouble….except her.

10- Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently arrested a very dangerous MS-13 gang member Ramiro Gutierrez, 26 who allegedly murdered someone in Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional district. According to the Daily Wire: “Gutierrez was arrested by authorities on Monday and charged on Tuesday with second-degree murder, gang assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim has been identified as Abel Mosso, a 20-year-old reported member of the 18th Street Gang, a rival gang of MS-13. The brutal video shows a group of men wrestling on the ground. The shooter, allegedly Gutierrez, then unloads six shots, reportedly at the victim’s face. As chaos ensues from horrified passersby, the suspect flees the scene, leaving his victim’s lifeless body.”

Gutierrez had been arrested 12 prior times and was free on bail on an attempted murder charge. Nice guy. One would have thought that the Congressional member representing that district would have had some sympathy for someone murdered in her district. Instead, she showed her lack of caring by not attacking the murderer but by attacking the government’s immigration officers: “This is one of the most urgent moral issues and crises that we have in America right now. This is not a political issue. Children dying in detention centers should not be a partisan concern. It should be a universal concern for every American in the United States. ICE operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States. We’re here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime.”

So many issues with this stupidity:
  • ICE is accountable to the laws of the country, it is not operating like some sort of Gestapo agency. 
  • My “friends and neighbors” are law abiding U.S. citizens, not illegal immigrants, a group that includes violent MS-13 gang members, violent drug cartel agents, human traffickers, and ordinary criminals. 
  • Obviously, Ocasio-Cortez thinks that this latter group of people are her friends and neighbors, people who came here illegally, many of whom intend to do some nasty things to Americans once here. 
  • And “children dying in detention centers” is a incredibly inflammatory and wrong-headed thing to say; to my knowledge no child has died when in ICE custody and shame on her for implying that many illegal immigrant kids have died. 
  • Much like she does not care who gets murdered in her district by illegal criminal elements, she obviously does not care about the thousands of U.S. kids that are killed, abused, and attacked every year in this country. 
She is just another one of the new brand of Democrats in this country that care more about foreigners than U.S. citizens, espousing lies to make that point.

11- And finally for today, it looks like it not take her long to get into the swing of unethical behavior in Washington: 
  • She could be in violation of the House ethics rules. 
  • Ocasio-Cortez received campaign served and support from a millionaire donor. 
  • But the campaign could not afford his services and rather than having the campaign take out a loan, she likely paid the donor directly out of her pocket. 
  • In turn, the donor then hired Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend which means that the donor was getting paid directly by the Congresswoman while at the same time paying her boyfriend, a little nepotism. 
  • This could be interpreted as donating indirectly to her campaign. 
  • Ocasio-Cortez subsequently hired the donor to be her chief of staff, possibly rewarding him for hiring her boyfriend. 
  • When it then became apparent that she had hired her boyfriend to be on her staff, she tried to deny that reality out of existence. 
  • All of this from a Congressional candidate that raged against this type of nepotism and cronyism. 
More insanity from Ocasio-Cortez: too ignorant to understand tax incentives and rebates which has cost her Congressional district billions and billions of dollars in benefits, turning her back on 25,000 highly paid taxpayers, lying about our brave immigration officers, caring more about illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens, and hypocritically raging against nepotism while wasting no time to be what she claimed to despise.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.

1- Despite supposedly having an economics degree, she made an initial fool of herself when she claimed that the reason the unemployment rate was so low was because so many Americans had to work more than one job to get by. Any halfway smart high school economics class student could probably tell her that the unemployment rate calculation does not care how many jobs a person is working, just whether or not they are working. And yet this college graduate had no idea.

2- She compounded this lack of knowledge on the unemployment rate by claiming that the number of people in this country holding multiple jobs was large and growing. However, a simple check of government statistics would show her that the number of people holding multiple jobs is actually quite small and shrinking, the exact opposite of what she claimed. Thus, she was either lying or making up a reality not based on actual data.

3- Despite being an elected member of Congress, she erroneously claimed that the structure of our government process included three branches: the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Pretty sure that the Supreme Court justices were surprised to find out that they were no longer a branch of the government.

4- A financial audit of the Pentagon found that over a twenty year period, about $21 TRILLION in budget dollars was mishandled, misclassified, or not accounted for properly. Rather than understand the audit, she immediately and incorrectly assumed that the Pentagon had misspent and wastefully spent $21 TRILLION.

However, if she had done a simple math and logic calculation based on history and actual data, she would have found out that the ENTIRE Pentagon budget over that twenty year period was only about $12 TRILLION, making it impossible to waste $21 TRILLION when the budget was about 40% less than that. This idiocy earned the highest level of lying from the Washington Post, the dreaded four Pinocchios: ”Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said ‘66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.’ That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.”

5- As a socialist and/or communist, Ocasio-Cortez wants to impose massive socialism/communism programs on the country. One of her favorite pipe dreams is the so-called “Medicare For All” program that would put people like her and the Federal government in charge of every aspect of every American’s health care. A generally accepted cost estimate for this disaster is $32 TRILLION over the first ten years or about $3.2 TRILLION a year. She proposed funding this program by raising the marginal tax rate to a whopping 70% on every dollar over $10 million that any American earned. 

However, a simple calculation using public IRS data easily shows that such a plan would raise only about $50 billion a year at most, or about only 1.5% of the amount needed for the Medicare for All program. Thus, she has really, really bad math skills (highly likely given the gaffes we discussed above), she is lazy and did not do this simple calculation, or she is a liar, claiming that the rich would fund the entire program.

6- Prior to being sworn in to Congress but after being elected, she railed against Congressional members for still drawing a salary even though 800,000 Federal employees were not being paid during the government shutdown. However, once elected, she refused to not draw a salary, ducking press questions about her massive hypocrisy on the matter of berating those that took a salary in December but refusing to not draw a salary after she was sworn in in late January.

7- In a Twitter spat she had with a healthcare expert, she put forth the following tweet: ““Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine.” 

As always, she is talking about a subject she knows nothing about and has not done the research for. For starters, anyone with an ObamaCare insurance policy has to have critical procedures and medicine covered. Second, According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: “There are more than 1,900 such statutes [statutes that guarantee medical coverage/treatment] among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”

Do we have a health care issue and overall health insurance issue in this country? We certainly do, for a minority of citizens, but there is nothing close to being a set of death panels in this country being operated by greedy corporations, there are loads of safeguards to prevent death panels, safeguards that obviously do not exist in her world or mind.

Okay seven major faux pas and she has only be in office for about a month. Unfortunately, we have a whole folder of other bouts of idiocy and bad math that we will present over the coming weeks and months.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.


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



Friday, February 22, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Insanity, Part 2: Total Ignorance On the Amazon NYC Deal, Immigration Lies, And More

Over the past few months, New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a human gaffe machine. Her inability to do simple math, her outlandish ideas based on an alternative reality, her economic ignorance, and lack of common sense has resulted in an almost daily stream of idiocy, inane comments, and ridiculous ideas that have no basis in reality.

As a result, most of our recent political class insanity posts have almost always had an Ocasio-Cortez piece of insanity. Thus, we have decided to separately track her craziness and idiotic takes on economics, business, government, and whatever else on a regular basis under its own set of posts. She deserves to have a separate effort that captures all of the ridiculousness she espouses.

The format we will do is to start with a set of her original inane ideas and just continue to build on that initial list as time goes by. If the list gets too large, which it is likely to do, we will then find a good breaking point to start another list. We will try to source the original source of all of her gaffes, trying to use her own words that were stated either orally or via her Twitter account, a source of endless inane comments and ideas.

We have already listed out seven major gaffes from her in the following post:


Thus, we start today’s array of missteps with misstep number 8. The original seven are listed further down the post after the “*************” line.

8-Probably most people now know that Amazon has decided not to create a mega headquarters location in Queens, New York and has pulled out of its plans there. If the plan had been executed, 25,000 very high paying jobs would have come to the city which would have resulted in even more jobs in the construction, building materials, retail, restaurant, and other industries that would have serviced the 25,000 high paying employees.

In addition, Amazon was willing to do the following additional niceties to make the deal even better:
  • Amazon would invest $2.5 billion in developing the location for their headquarters location.
  • This $2.5 billion would result in a load of high paying construction jobs and ancillary jobs and economic benefit to the area, e.g. food trucks to service the construction workers.
  • Eventually Amazon would station 25,000 employees at the location, highly paid employees that would buy and renovate housing in the area, eat in local restaurants, go to local movie theaters, buy clothes from local merchants, buy furniture to furnish their new homes, spend money on local transportation, etc.
  • Amazon promised to provide computer science course to 130 area high schools.
  • Amazon promised to hire at least 30 people from a nearby housing complex to work in its call center.
  • Amazon would help fund local infrastructure improvements.
  • Amazon would help fund a new 600 seat public school
  • Amazon would create a 3.5 acre waterfront park open to the public.
  • Amazon would set aside 25,000 square feet for a “community facility use/artist workspace.”
  • Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for an art and tech accelerator.
  • Amazon would set aside 263,000 square feet for light manufacturing space.
  • Amazon would set aside 10,000 square feet for workforce development and training space.
  • Amazon would set up internships for high school students.
  • Amazon, starting in 2020, would host semi-annual job fairs and resume workshops at the local housing complex for at least three years.
In return, local New York government entities promised Amazon a $3 billion tax break down the road. We estimated that the local government entities would have reached a breakeven on that $3 billion incentive in less than 8 years and after that, the increased taxes from the Amazon effort would have all been incremental tax revenue.

But leave it to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and several of her other socialist friends, to screw up a great deal for the citizens of New York City. Their constant complaining about the $3 billion finally caused Amazon management to say this effort is not worth hassles.

Even worse, Ocasio-Cortez showed her total ignorance when she said that the $3 billion could be better spent on local infrastructure needs, better schools, better subways, etc. What she failed to understand is that there is no $3 billion pot of money sitting around that was going to be given to Amazon. Amazon would have paid less in taxes to the tune of $3 billion over time. Local city government entities would have gotten a little less in tax money from Amazon initially, the $3 billion does not exist as of today.

Even MSNBC, a news outlet that hates everything Trump and freedom and loves everything Democrat and socialism stepped up to show how ignorant she was: “What’s shocking to me is once again she shows how little she understands not just economics but even unemployment. She’s the one who said the reason unemployment is so low is because a lot of people have two jobs. She needs to learn basic things about what it is to be a representative … Just because she has a progressive agenda, which some people like, does not mean she has the city’s best interest. She showed me she only cares about herself and not about her colleagues ... and not about the people she represents because those people would be getting jobs themselves.”

If MSNBC thinks a Democrat show little understanding about basic concepts and cares only about herself, you know that it is that bad.

9-But being ignorant about the $3 billion, thinking that it is a pot of money that was just going to be handed over to Amazon, was not her only gaffe in this area. Consider this piece of insanity from her: “So I firmly believe that if we want to take that $3 billion dollars that we were willing to give to Amazon and invest it in our local community, we can do that. We can make those jobs. We can make 25,000 jobs. But we don’t have to give away and allow our subway system to crumble so that Amazon essentially owns a part of New York City. We can create 25,000 jobs with Mom-and-Pops.” 

So much wrong with this ignorance:
  • There is no $3 billion that can be invested in the local community.
  • Why would you want to work to make 25,000 jobs, when Amazon as willing to hand you 25,000 high paying jobs without any effort on your part?
  • I can almost guarantee that the 25,000 jobs that you might be able to make with “Mom and Pops" would on average pay nowhere near $150,000 a year.
  • And again, there is no $3 billion pot of money that she could use to fix a crumbling subway system.
As a result of her stupidity on the subject, her constituents will not see the incredible opportunity that Ocasio-Cortez helped scare away because of her idiocy when it comes to the incentive program, a simple concept that most people would understand with little trouble….except her.

10-Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently arrested a very dangerous MS-13 gang member Ramiro Gutierrez, 26 who allegedly murdered someone in Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional district. According to the Daily Wire: “Gutierrez was arrested by authorities on Monday and charged on Tuesday with second-degree murder, gang assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. The victim has been identified as Abel Mosso, a 20-year-old reported member of the 18th Street Gang, a rival gang of MS-13. The brutal video shows a group of men wrestling on the ground. The shooter, allegedly Gutierrez, then unloads six shots, reportedly at the victim’s face. As chaos ensues from horrified passersby, the suspect flees the scene, leaving his victim’s lifeless body.”

Gutierrez had been arrested 12 prior times and was free on bail on an attempted murder charge. Nice guy. One would have thought that the Congressional member representing that district would have had some sympathy for someone murdered in her district. Instead, she showed her lack of caring by not attacking the murderer but by attacking the government’s immigration officers: “This is one of the most urgent moral issues and crises that we have in America right now. This is not a political issue. Children dying in detention centers should not be a partisan concern. It should be a universal concern for every American in the United States. ICE operates with virtually no accountability, ripping apart families and holding our friends and neighbors indefinitely in inhumane detention centers scattered across the United States. We’re here to say that an agency like ICE, which repeatedly and systematically violates human rights, does not deserve a dime.”

So many issues with this stupidity:
  • ICE is accountable to the laws of the country, it is not operating like some sort of Gestapo agency.
  • My “friends and neighbors” are law abiding U.S. citizens, not illegal immigrants, a group that includes violent MS-13 gang members, violent drug cartel agents, human traffickers, and ordinary criminals.
  • Obviously, Ocasio-Cortez thinks that this latter group of people are her friends and neighbors, people who came here illegally, many of whom intend to do some nasty things to Americans once here.
  • And “children dying in detention centers” is a incredibly inflammatory and wrong-headed thing to say; to my knowledge no child has died when in ICE custody due to abuse by ICE and shame on her for implying that many illegal immigrant kids have died.
Much like she does not care who gets murdered in her district by illegal criminal elements, she obviously does not care about the thousands of U.S. kids that are killed, abused, and attacked every year in this country.

She is just another one of the new brand of Democrats in this country that care more about foreigners than U.S. citizens, espousing lies to make that point.

11-And finally for today, it looks like it not take her long to get into the swing of unethical behavior in Washington:
  • She could be in violation of the House ethics rules.
  • Ocasio-Cortez received campaign services and support from a millionaire donor.
  • But the campaign could not afford his services and rather than having the campaign take out a loan, she likely paid the donor directly out of her pocket.
  • In turn, the donor then hired Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend which means that the donor was getting paid directly by the Congresswoman while at the same time paying her boyfriend, a little nepotism.
  • This could be interpreted as donating indirectly to her campaign.
  • Ocasio-Cortez subsequently hired the donor to be her chief of staff, possibly rewarding him for hiring her boyfriend.
  • When it then became apparent that she had hired her boyfriend to be on her staff, she tried to deny that reality out of existence.
  • All of this from a Congressional candidate that raged against this type of nepotism and cronyism. 
More insanity from Ocasio-Cortez: too ignorant to understand tax incentives and rebates which has cost her Congressional district billions and billions of dollars in benefits, turning her back on 25,000 highly paid taxpayers, lying about our brave immigration officers, caring more about illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens, and hypocritically raging against nepotism while wasting no time to be what she claimed to despise.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.

*****************************************************

1-Despite supposedly having an economics degree, she made an initial fool of herself when she claimed that the reason the unemployment rate was so low was because so many Americans had to work more than one job to get by. Any halfway smart high school economics class student could probably tell her that the unemployment rate calculation does not care how many jobs a person is working, just whether or not they are working. And yet this college graduate had no idea.

2- She compounded this lack of knowledge on the unemployment rate by claiming that the number of people in this country holding multiple jobs was large and growing. However, a simple check of government statistics would show her that the number of people holding multiple jobs is actually quite small and shrinking, the exact opposite of what she claimed. Thus, she was either lying or making up a reality not based on actual data.

3-Despite being an elected member of Congress, she erroneously claimed that the structure of our government process included three branches: the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Pretty sure that the Supreme Court justices were surprised to find out that they were no longer a branch of the government.

4-A financial audit of the Pentagon found that over a twenty year period, about $21 TRILLION in budget dollars was mishandled, misclassified, or not accounted for properly. Rather than understand the audit, she immediately and incorrectly assumed that the Pentagon had misspent and wastefully spent $21 TRILLION.

However, if she had done a simple math and logic calculation based on history and actual data, she would have found out that the ENTIRE Pentagon budget over that twenty year period was only about $12 TRILLION, making it impossible to waste $21 TRILLION when the budget was about 40% less than that. This idiocy earned the highest level of lying from the Washington Post, the dreaded four Pinocchios: ”Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said ‘66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.’ That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.”

5-As a socialist and/or communist, Ocasio-Cortez wants to impose massive socialism/communism programs on the country. One of her favorite pipe dreams is the so-called “Medicare For All” program that would put people like her and the Federal government in charge of every aspect of every American’s health care. A generally accepted cost estimate for this disaster is $32 TRILLION over the first ten years or about $3.2 TRILLION a year. She proposed funding this program by raising the marginal tax rate to a whopping 70% on every dollar over $10 million that any American earned. 

However, a simple calculation using public IRS data easily shows that such a plan would raise only about $50 billion a year at most, or about only 1.5% of the amount needed for the Medicare for All program. Thus, she has really, really bad math skills (highly likely given the gaffes we discussed above), she is lazy and did not do this simple calculation, or she is a liar, claiming that the rich would fund the entire program.

6-Prior to being sworn in to Congress but after being elected, she railed against Congressional members for still drawing a salary even though 800,000 Federal employees were not being paid during the government shutdown. However, once elected, she refused to not draw a salary, ducking press questions about her massive hypocrisy on the matter of berating those that took a salary in December but refusing to not draw a salary after she was sworn in in late January.

7-In a Twitter spat she had with a healthcare expert, she put forth the following tweet: ““Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine.” 

As always, she is talking about a subject she knows nothing about and has not done the research for. For starters, anyone with an ObamaCare insurance policy has to have critical procedures and medicine covered. Second, According to the National Conference of State Legislatures: “There are more than 1,900 such statutes [statutes that guarantee medical coverage/treatment] among all 50 states; another analysis tallies more than 2,200 individual statute provisions, adopted over a 30+ year period.”

Do we have a health care issue and overall health insurance issue in this country? We certainly do, for a minority of citizens, but there is nothing close to being a set of death panels in this country being operated by greedy corporations, there are loads of safeguards to prevent death panels, safeguards that obviously do not exist in her world or mind.

Okay seven major faux pas and she has only be in office for about a month. Unfortunately, we have a whole folder of other bouts of idiocy and bad math that we will present over the coming weeks and months.

And while her gaffes may make us smile, given how out of touch she is with reality, sadly remember that she helps write and vote on legislation that affects all of us.

Never forget: M.A.B.A. - Make Alexandria a Bartender Again which would allow her to screw up a drink or two but not screw up the country or our freedoms.


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