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) All too often, especially lately, we have reviewed the total failure of the local political class in Chicago to curtail the ever growing violence, homicides, and crime rates in the city. Every year, Chicago leads the country in total murders and 2021 and early 2022 do not show any reason why that despicable distinction should not continue:
In a single, recent weekend, 77 people were shot in Chicago.
Five of those shot died from their wounds.
At least seven of those shot were under the age of 17.
In one situation, a mass shooting occurred when eight people were shot in a short time at the same location.
Local pastor, Donovan Price, of Street Pastors neatly summarized the situation: “Hundreds of people looking around, onlookers, family members, people who are injured. Just another night of mayhem in Chicago, summer night. It shouldn’t be like this, it shouldn’t be like this, but unfortunately, it looks like this may be our summer, definitely going to be our Fourth of July.”
As we have said so many times, a very, very basic function of government is to protect the lives and property of the citizens it serves. Failure to do that basic function means the politicians in charge have failed miserably regardless of how well they perform their other duties. And the situation will not get much better in Chicago in the near future for three reasons:
The current mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has no clue how to fix the problem or she would have done it already.
Her and other local city politicians were big fans of defunding the Chicago police so the police force has fewer resources to handle an ever escalating crime rate.
And finally, the governor is about to sign legislation that strips individual police officers of legal protection which means more police officers will be leaving the force in order to not be put in such a vulnerable legal position and fewer people will join the police force.
Failures of the Illinois and local political class all around.
2) Remember early in the Obama administration when Obama bragged how easy it was going to be to order Obama Care insurance policies on an easy to use government website? Remember what a disaster it was when it was launched:
People could not get access to the site.
People couldn't easily order the insurance they wanted on the site.
The site was so bad from a data security perspective that it exposed millions of Americans to the real danger of identity theft.
The Obama administration had to hire a whole new data systems company to fix the problem after wasting millions and millions of tax dollars on the original company who set up the horrible website.
And remember that was not a difficult website to build, untold thousands of companies around the world were able to easily and effectively set up a similar website to sell services and products. Only the Federal government and the politicians that operate it could screw it up so bad.
But it appears that things have not gotten any better from a computer competency perspective under the Biden administration:
A covid priority of the Biden administration has been to distribute free covid testing kits to every American household that wants them.
Thus, the administration decided they needed a really simple ordering website since they were hawking only one, single product: a free covid test product.
In theory, all a citizen had to do was go to the government website, enter their name and address information, and the website would arrange for a free covid test kit to be sent to their address.
Simple, right, a 12 year old computer nerd could probably set this up in a couple of hours: enter name and address, send file with a name and address to a fulfillment location who picks up a single product, drops it in a package, and takes it to the Post Office to be shipped.
But somehow the Federal government screwed up this simple process.
You see it did not take into account an address with multiple families living at it like an apartment building or a condo.
The system was set up to not send more than one test kit to an address, a good thought so that people would hoard the test kits.
But in an apartment building, many families have the same address but just a different apartment number.
So, for example, if an apartment building was at “10 Main Street'' but had 40 different apartments at that street address, only the first apartment family to order would get their kit.
The government website would ban anyone else from 10 Main Street address from getting a kit even though they lived at a different apartment number but had the same street address.
The simplest of processes and the government could not even get that right. A teenage geek could have developed the same website process in a very short amount of time and gotten it right but not the government and the bureaucrats and politicians that operate. Insane.
3) Many times over the past few years we covered how effective and idiotic many of Bill de Blasio’s actions and plans were when he was the mayor of New York City. The bottom line is that his administration caused many New York residents and businesses to leave the city and crime, especially violent crime and homicides skyrocketed. Garbage wasn’t collected in a timely manner, schools under performed, and other city quality of life factors suffered.
But the violent crime increases were the most troublesome. De Blasio is no longer mayor and a new mayor, Eric Adams, is in charge. In the first few weeks of his administration, he bragged about how safe the NYC subway was and that he traveled to work using the safe subway system. But apparently he now has a different view of how dangerous the city and the subway are:
In a recent press meeting, Adams admitted that he had “trepidations about riding the NYC subway” relative to his personal safety.
His comments come three days after Michelle Go, a NYC subway rider, was pushed into the path of an oncoming train by a homeless man and was killed.
All of a sudden, Adams realizes the dream world he was living in: “Day One, January 1, when I took the train, I saw the homelessness, the yelling, the screaming early in the morning, crimes right outside the platform. We know we have a job to do — and we’re going to do both. We’re going to drive down crime, and we’re going to make sure New Yorkers feel safe in our subway system. And they don’t feel that way now. I don’t feel that way when I take the train every day, or when I’m moving throughout our transportation system.”
Having worked and lived in NYC for a very long time, how was it possible for this new mayor to be that out of touch with the crime reality in the city? Seriously, how do you not know what is going on in the subways, on the streets, in the alleys of the city you just got elected to run? So out of touch.
4) Probably hundreds of times in this blog over the years we have shown how careless and reckless the American political class is with the tax dollars they take from us all. And a recent disclosure in Oregon continues to reinforce this view of incompetence:
A man in Oregon is going to jail for legally obtaining covid relief government funds and using those ill gotten funds to invest in Tesla stock.
He is being forced to repay more than $4 million and forfeit 25 properties and more than 15,000 shares of Tesla stock, stock that is worth about $16 million.
He scammed not one but three government agencies, the Small Business Administration, the Economic Injury Disaster Loans organization, and the Paycheck Protection Program.
He submitted numerous loan applications using the business names and personal identity information of relatives and business associates without their knowledge.
He also submitted false IRS forms.
He submitted for nine government loans of which six were approved which got him over $3.5 million in taxpayer wealth.
He pleaded guilty to bank fraud, money laundering, and identity theft which got him four years in prison, five years probation, and the restitution discussed above.
The good news is that this taxpayer scammer got caught and taxpayer money was recovered. But how many others did the same thing and did not get caught? How many others took the U.S. taxpayer for millions of dollars and then had the good sense to get themselves and their loot out of the country before they got caught? I can guarantee you this Oregon gentleman was not the only scammer and probably balloons of dollars were lost, never to be recovered, by the continued government incompetence.
The political class incompetence rolls on, unimpeded by competence, common sense, and integrity of operation: Chicago continues to be a war zone, the Feds cannot build even a simple procurement website, the new NYC mayor is so out of touch with his own city, and fraud and criminal activity continue to steal hard earned taxpayer wealth via government ineptness.
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