July, 2019, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Guilty Of Doxxing IN D.C., Guilty Of Spending a Lot For Little In California, And Idaho Drops Every Government Regulation

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) We start off this post on political class insanity talking about a major doxxing scandal that has rightfully put a former Senate employee in jail. But first, what is doxxing: searching for and publishing private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.

The keywords in the definition are “with malicious intent” which brings us to the sad and pathetic case of former Democratic Congressional aide Jackson Cosko:

• Cosko committed what some people are calling the “largest data theft in Senate history.”
• His intent was to find embarrassing, illegal, or nasty information about Republican Senators during the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings with the intent to blackmail them or force them to oppose the nomination.
• Fortunately, Cosko was eventually caught and was recently sentenced to four years in prison.
• One of his doxxing misadventures included getting hold of a Republican Senator’s personal data and then publishing the Senator’s home addresses and phone numbers.
• Given the hatred and passions that were flying high during the Senate hearings for Kavanaugh, this type of information once made public could have endangered the Senator’s family safety in case some nut case decided to take action against that Senator.
• Numerous screw ups by Capital police investigators allowed this data theft to go on way longer than it should have, including the fact that Cosko actually broke into a Senator’s office to steal the data: “The Capitol Police, when they executed the search warrant on his home, they missed what we consider the most significant tranche of data. And we told the Capitol Police to go back and check the oven,” defense attorney Brian Stolarz said in court, highlighting the extent of Cosko’s cooperation with police after being caught. 
• Yes, despite the fact that Capital Police had search warrant for Cosko’s home, they failed to look in the oven which is where he was hiding some of his information.
• Despite having previous felony run-ins with law enforcement related to drug addiction, he was still hired by a Senator and given access to the Senate’s computer systems.
• The Senator eventually fired Cosko for issues unrelated to the eventually computer hacking which should have ended his Congressional career before any doxxing began.
• “Should have ended” his career but it did not since our old friend Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee put Cosko on her staff despite the felony drug run-ins and the fact he had just been fired by a sitting U.S. Senator.
• This allowed him to gather and publish personal information on Senators supporting Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, computer work he did using Jackson Lee’s office computers.
• According to the judge who sentenced Cosko, Judge Thomas Hogan, Cosko’ substance abuse addiction was so bad that “the probation office indicated they’re surprised he wasn’t dead.” 

There are other tawdry details but you get the picture. A drug addict with previous police and law enforcement encounters for his very serious drug addiction, serious enough to rise to felony levels, gets hired, obviously without not much of a background check, for a sitting U.S. Senator, gets fired by the Senator but hired almost immediately by a Congresswoman, accesses and publishes huge amounts of private information about Congressional members with the intent to blackmail them relative to a hot issue while police bungle along, actually needing the perp to tell them to go back to his apartment and search his oven which they did not do doing their search of his premises. 

You cannot make this insanity up, talk about incompetence.

2) Speaking of insanity, let’s go out to California for the latest insanity from those politicians. Since politicians have no idea how to reform healthcare in this country and make it more affordable, their constant “solution” is to throw money at the issue without fixing the underlying problems of high medical costs in this country. 

As we have pointed out dozens and dozens of times under our recurring theme in this post, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care,” throwing money at the problem like Obama Care did was an utter failure. Health care costs continued to rise, actually accelerating in many aspects as a result of Obama Care, the exact opposite of what was promised, and the national debt is likely going to be two trillion dollars higher as a result of the law.

But that did not stop California politicians for throwing more tens of millions of dollars at the problem in their state:

• One of the major problems that state Medicaid programs have is that many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients because the payments they get for serving such patients is relatively low.
• Logically, if doctors can fill their days with non-Medicaid patients, they reap higher revenues.
• As a result, many Medicaid patients have problems accessing doctor services.
• To counteract this shortage of access problem, the state’s politicians decided to give 247 California doctors $58.6 million to pay off their student loans in exchange for promising to have at least 30% of their customer base be comprised of Medicaid patients for five years.

I understand their intent but my goodness there has to be a better way if you look at a few numbers:

• Given there are about 56,000 doctors in the state of California, this program, costing $58.6 million dollars will impact .4% of doctors living in the state, not 4%, .4%.
• Given there are almost 40,000,000 people living in California, difficult to see how giving .4% of doctors almost a quarter of millions each is going to move the needle on improving health care.
• Yes, almost a quarter of a million dollars, $58.6 million divided by 247 doctors comes out to about $240,000 each.
• Let’s play a numbers game: assuming that a doctor on average has 1,000 patients, now 30% of them will have to be Medicaid patients, and there are 247 doctors involved, then we are looking at this program getting better medical care to about 74,100 Californians (1,000 times 30% times 247 doctors).
• Given there are 13 million Medicaid patients in the state, this program, best case since it assumes that those 247 doctors currently have no Medicaid patients, will positively impact less than .6% of state Medicaid patients, .6%, best case.

And this does not even begin to account for the hassle, bureaucracy, and expense of tracking this program. What happens after five years and the state determines that a doctor only had 29% of his patients being Medicaid patients? Does he have to repay all of the money, a part of the money, etc.? Will the state even be able to track doctors’ compliance with the program or is it on the honor system? What if a doctor practices in area where there are not that many Medicaid patients, does he still get to keep the money since it was not this fault he fell below the 30% threshold? All kinds of logistics questions arise for a lot of money being spent.

Again, I understand the problem but obviously throwing almost $60 million at the problem to affect far less than 1% of those in the target market seems foolish. But foolish is the business as usual mode of American politicians. Rather than understand the root causes of a problem, let’s just throw money at the problem. At least then it looks like we are doing something even though the underlying numbers show how stupid it is.

3) Obviously most political class insanity we cover is of a negative nature. Politicians screwing up, saying stupid stuff, coming up with the wrong solutions for existing problems and worst of all, over taxation and over regulation. But sometimes political class insanity can be positive, as recently witnessed with the state government in Idaho:

• Idaho apparently is a little strange in that every year its entire set of state regulations has to be renewed.
• If not renewed, the sunset provisions of the regulations cause all state government regulations to simply vanish and no longer apply.
• According to a recent article by the Mercatus organizations, this process is usually automatically done every year with no problem, leaving the state’s residents and businesses to cope with over 8,000 pages of government regulations.
• But apparently, the state legislature and its politicians are so dysfunctional that this year they never got around to rubber stamping the whole regulation package and as a result, those regulations have gone poof!
• The governor of the state had wanted to pare down the number of unnecessary regulations and had some initial success but each and every regulation he wanted to cut had to be reviewed and approved by the legislature, an onerous process.
• But this sunset action now switches the whole playing field: rather than the legislature holding the power and keeping the regulations in place, the legislature now has to come back to the governor and plead with him to reinstate regulations that now no longer exist, giving him the hammer to only allow back in regulations that make a lot of sense rather than regulations that make no sense, no longer serve a purpose, or only serve special interest entities.
• Thus, as of July 1, 2019, 8,200 pages of state government regulations no longer exist.
• Now the governor came implement so-called emergency regulations as he sees fit with the legislature getting to consider whether to make them permanent when they reconvene in January.

For those of us that see government at all levels getting bigger and bigger, more and more expensive, more and intrusive into our lives, the Idaho governor has a unique opportunity to show the rest of the country that minimal regulation is best for citizens, businesses, and freedoms. It should be interesting to see if he can take advantage of this unique opportunity to reign in runaway government.

Enough insanity for now: good insanity from Idaho (caused by political dysfunction), throwing good money after small solutions in California, and a low life government employee goes to jail...finally. More insanity to follow.

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