Thursday, November 4, 2021

November, 2021, Politicial Class Insanity: Part 1: A Congressman Parties For Free, NYC Declines Across the Board, and Trying To Buy A Virginia Election

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

1) As Americans continue to struggle with rising food prices, rising gas prices, and rising prices for just about everything, at least one member of Congress seems to be immune to the economic pressures facing ordinary Americans:
  • Congressman Eric Swalwell, spent thousands and thousands of dollars recently, and in a short amount of time, on a variety of expenses that had nothing to do with his Congressional duties.
  • The money he spent was not from his private assets but from campaign funds and included expenses such as meals at expense steak house restaurants, sporting events, alcohol at bars, limo services, a liquor delivery service, a luxury plane flight, a beer garden and at a casino.
  • These expenses came to light via Federal Election Commission (FEC) reporting.
  • The FEC report covers the third quarter, 2021 expenses and covers dozens and dozens of instances where he used campaign funds for a variety of the above listed expenses.
  • These third quarter expenses follow his spending of $21,200.75 in six separate instances last April at the high end Ritz-Carlton hotel in California where his wife was the director of sales.
Must be good being a member of Congress when expenses and experiences for private jet flights, alcohol, sporting events, luxury hotels, etc, are free to you while Americans struggle just getting by day to day. Nice work if you can get it.

2) We have often debated which big city in the country has the worst mayor. The top candidates usually include the mayors of Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York City. It is our opinion that Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has in general been the worst, but NYC’s Bill de Blasio is not out of the running for being the worst mayor these days.

As he has gutted and demeaned the NYPD, crime and violence has skyrocketed throughout the city. His inept advice early in the pandemic probably caused an unknown number of city residents to unnecessarily die or get ill from the covid virus. The declining quality of city life has caused many, many residents, particularly the richer city residents, to get out of the city in search of a better quality of life.

And his ineptness continues as he is trying to force all city employees to get the covid vaccine, often against their will and principles, or be fired. This is going to have potentially dire and fatal results as many first line responders refuse to comply with his dictatorial edict:
  • Earlier this week a massive number of firefighters called in sick, likely not because of an actual sickness but to protest the mayor’s vaccine edict.
  • There are reports that the city has closed down over two dozen firehouses because of the shortage of personnel to operate those firehouses, either because of the fake sick out or because the mayor will fire those firefighters who do not get the vaccine.
  • Obviously closing down so many firehouses will eventually result in a fire crisis that causes undue damage and injury to city residents.
  • But the mayor's ineptness is not confined to the fire department since sanitation workers are also balking at the vaccine mandate and possibly have gone into a work slowdown mode to protest, causing massive amounts of garbage to build up on the city streets.
  • Another self imposed disaster from a horrible leader and politician. A city resident, Vinnie Agro summed up the current situation quite nicely: “We’re f***ked. We are going to toast like marshmallows.” All for a failed and stupid covid policy.
3) In our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” one of the basic tenets was that campaign finance laws should be structured so that only those people affected by an election can contribute to a politician's election campaign. For example, in a city's mayor race, only residents and businesses in that city should be allowed to contribute to that person’s mayoral campaign since he should be serving them and only them. In a state governor race, only residents and businesses in that state should be able to contribute to that election race. In a US. Senate race, only state residents should be able to contribute, again, the reason being that those people running for that office should be serving only those that can legally vote for them.

Otherwise, as we have seen so many times, big money organizations swoop into a local race and overwhelm the rights and needs of citizens to get what they want, voters be damned. This disgusting abuse of election campaign financing was recently found in the Virginia governor race:
  • According to government campaign financial reports, anti-Second Amendment groups aligned with billionaire Michael Bloomberg gave Democrat Terry McAuliffe almost half a million dollars in support of his campaign for governor.
  • The money mostly came from the Everytown For Gun Safety organization in late September.
  • McAuliffe is a staunch anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment advocate.
Another example where people’s votes could get overwhelmed by outside money and influence. If Virginia residents want to destroy their Second Amendment rights, then it is their choice, not a choice that could be overwhelmed by outsiders like Micheal Bloomberg.

Note: as of this writing, it appears that McAuliffe has suffered an upset defeat in his bid to become Virginia governor so the people have spoken and overcome the half a million dollars that Bloomberg and his associates spent in a vain attempt to undercut democracy.

4) Getting back to New York City and its inept mayor. Independent of the covid work slowdown and sick outs, the city was having serious troubles with rising crime and the declining quality of life that goes with it:
  • As we have discussed many times, de Blasio jumped on the stupid “defund the police movement” and not only stripped budget and resources from the NYPD but also continued to unduly criticize the police officers that protect New Yorkers every day.
  • Now it appears that NYC police detectives are currently struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing crime in the city.
  • Twenty years ago the city had 7,200 detectives working on criminal cases but today, with much higher crime rates, the city is down to about 5,000 detectives.
  • The reduction in detectives and the increase in crime have resulted in single decttives handling as many as 100 criminal cases at a time.
  • That kind of workload probably does not result in a lot of criminal cases being successfully resolved which then feeds the increase in crime in the city since criminals eventually find out that the chances of being punished for being a criminal are growing less and less.
As we've said so many times, a very, very basic function of government is to protect the lives and property of law abiding citizens. De Blasio and the NYC political class have failed miserably in providing that very basic government service with fatal and criminal results, as summed up by recent comment by a police union official: “If the next mayor, whoever it may be, doesn’t fix the crime epidemic in the city of New York, the economic machine of the city will come to a halt, and the city will fall. It’ll go back to days that you don’t want to see, and that we haven’t seen in many, many years.”

A Congressman parties for free, NYC is in a death spiral from a police, fire department and sanitation perspective and trying to buy an election in Virginia, the insanity continues.

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:

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