The incompetence and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and government programs, be it Covid, voting, or over staffing continue to waste taxpayer dollars while never resolving any major issue facing the country. We call it political class insanity so here is today's dose of recent insanity:
1)As we have said so often, the appearance of conflict of interest when it comes to politicians is often just as bad as actual conflict of interest, as we see in this latest example from the state government of New York City:
Kathy Hochul is the governor of the state of New York.
Delaware North is a large gambling and hospitality company.
Apparently Delaware North has donated a lot of political campaign funds and favors to both Hochul and top Democrats in the state assembly.
According to New York Post reporting, Hochul’s husband has recently collected almost $200,000 in “deferred compensation” from Delaware North.
Apparently Delaware North recently received an $18 million state government tax break.
However, Hochul had previously promised that her husband would “have no financial connection to Delaware North following his departure” from the company.
In 2023 she issued a memo claiming that her husband “will not receive payment of any kind from Delaware North or its subsidiary entities” or “any other thing of value.”
I guess her definition of “no financial connection ($200,000)” is different from my definition of no financial connection.
Delaware North's owners. including a Jeremy Jacobs, have donated $17,000 to Hochul’s election campaign fund.
A few weeks after the company got the tax break, additional funds from Delaware North funneled into her campaign to the tune of $2,500 and another $10,000 went to the state's Democratic party.
And now for maybe the best part of all, Hochul’s excuse from her spokesperson: “Campaign contributions have no impact on government decisions.”
But Hochhul was not the only entity involved with Delaware North money and favors
News reports say that Assembly Speaker, Carl Heastie, and his staff got almost $14,000 worth of luxury suite tickets for a Boston Celtics basketball game.
This perk happened three months before the tax break got approved.
When confronted by a NewYork Post reporter about this potential conflict of interest, he fled the reporter without responding to the question.
His office and press people refused to answer any questions about the incident and donation when asked.
Just slimy, no other word for it. We have always maintained that the only entities that should be able to contribute to any politician or political party are individual citizens; companies, unions, PACs, etc. should never be allowed to contribute. And this situation in New York is just another example of how money talks when it comes to politics and individual voters get screwed while companies get multi million dollar tax breaks, tax breaks funded by the ordinary taxpayer.
2)Every parent wants their sons and daughters to succeed in life. And, often to succeed, a good, solid educational background is required especially in our high tech world. But apparently getting that solid education may not be working in New York City. A mom from Queens, New York recently realized that her son, a so-called math whiz, was not the math whiz that was claimed by his teachers and school.
Let the mom explain (note: the following quote comes from an article on the Blabberbuzz website): “The tears in my son’s eyes told me more about the state of New York City’s public schools than a decade’s worth of glowing report cards ever did. For years, my boy’s academic record suggested he was a standout in mathematics, a “numbers whiz” whose report cards were lined with A’s and the occasional B-plus. According to The New York Post, his grades at PS 221Q, the North Hills Elementary School, and later at MS 67Q Louis Pasteur Middle School in Little Neck, painted the picture of a student firmly on track for success, especially in math.
Yet when he entered one of the city’s top high schools in Queens this fall and brought home a 78 on his first exam, I decided to sit down with him to prepare for the next test — and discovered just how hollow those grades really were. I will never forget the moment I watched my son, a teenager who rarely shows emotion, stare at a math review worksheet and manage to answer only the first couple of questions before his composure cracked.
He could not solve basic algebra, could not handle geometry, and could not compute elementary-school fractions, even though his official record suggested he had mastered all of it. At PS 221Q, he had routinely received the highest marks in math, and at MS 67Q his lowest end-of-term math grade was an 89 in seventh grade, with a 92 in sixth and a 93 in eighth — all solid As by any standard.
When he was admitted to his first-choice high school, one of New York’s top-rated institutions, my husband and I had every reason to believe he would continue to excel.
What I saw when I finally sat down with him to study did not just surprise me; it shook me to my core and exposed a system that prefers to protect its own image rather than tell parents the truth. He stared blankly at the page, utterly confused by material that should have been well within his grasp after years of supposed high performance. Equations that contained fractions — the kind of problems a competent middle-schooler should be able to tackle — completely threw him off and left him feeling defeated.
My initial shock quickly gave way to heartbreak, and then to anger, as I realized that the confident narrative we had been fed about his progress was a fiction. My son is a mature, intelligent, hard-working young man who runs his own online apparel business and rarely lets others see when he is struggling.
As I watched tears fill his eyes, I told him plainly that this was not his fault, that “the system failed him, and we would do whatever it takes to get him caught up.” That night, I did not speak to anyone about what had happened, not even my husband, because I was still processing the magnitude of the betrayal.
When his teacher called after the test results came in, I already knew why she was on the line. She explained that he had answered correctly only two of ten multi-part questions and had scored a 10 out of 100, a devastating result for a child who had been led to believe he was excelling in math for years.
Now his high school is forced to provide him with the foundational math education he should have received in elementary and middle school, stretching its resources to remediate what the earlier grades failed to deliver. In desperation, I began buying math review books designed for first- through fourth-graders, just to determine how far back his gaps went and at what point the learning had effectively stopped.
My son now gives up his lunch period every Tuesday through Friday to attend tutoring sessions, and once baseball season ends, he will spend his Saturdays in additional tutoring as well, sacrificing his free time to make up for what the system never properly taught him. As the child of Colombian immigrants, I grew up in a home where education was treated as a sacred obligation, not a bureaucratic talking point.
My mother constantly reminded my sisters and me of the importance of school, stayed on top of our assignments, and drilled into us that a high school diploma was non-negotiable. That ethic of hard work and personal responsibility helped me become an NYPD police officer, and I have tried to pass those same values on to my own children.
When I married my husband, who is also an NYPD officer, in 2005, I insisted that we move to District 26 in Douglaston because it has long been considered one of the best school districts in New York City. We did what responsible parents are told to do: we chose a strong district, stayed engaged, and trusted the professionals.
Had my son’s teachers simply told me he was struggling, we would have gotten him help early on; he would have done the work, and we would have supported him every step of the way. But we were never told that he was behind, and his report cards never gave us the slightest clue that anything was wrong.
Only later did I learn that teachers grade according to a rubric and that the Department of Education manipulates the numbers in ways that obscure reality. “The NYC education system had betrayed my son to make itself look better,” I realized, and that betrayal stung all the more because I had spent years working closely with the very people and institutions that failed him.
I am not a distant or disengaged parent; I am a longtime parent leader who has served as PTA president, Community Education Council president, and now sits on the Citywide Council on High Schools. I have built close relationships with teachers and administrators at every stage of my children’s education and became deeply involved precisely because I believed that the only way to be truly informed was to be present and engaged. I thought I knew exactly how my son was doing in school. I was so wrong.
My son was not in advanced classes; he was in general education and did not take the Regents exams in middle school. I relied on his teachers to be honest with me about his progress and to alert me if he was falling behind.
I failed in my own way as well, because I did not scrutinize his work as closely as I should have or check his performance on state tests, assuming that strong report cards meant everything was fine. Only after I realized how far behind he truly was did I go back and examine his state test results.
That was when I discovered that he had been rated “not proficient” in math on a seventh-grade state exam, a glaring red flag that had never been communicated to us in any meaningful way. How, I asked myself, “can he not be proficient in math but was receiving As?”
Why did his middle school never provide additional resources or interventions when the state data clearly showed he was struggling? Why did no one pick up the phone, send an email, or schedule a meeting to discuss his deficiencies and work with us to address them?”
This poor mom goes on about how lax the teachers apparently were in communications, teaching rigor and discipline around assignments, devastated by how the system failed her son. She goes on to explain that many other parents she talked to in the same school system had encountered the same gross failure in the education of their kids.
According to my Internet search, NYC had a public education budget of about $45 million in 2026. There are 884,644 kids in the NYC public education system. Thus, simple math shows that the city is spending,on average, about $50,000 for each kid. And the above results is what parents, kids, and society are getting for their money. A truly pathetic return on investment. In a perfect world the kids would have been better off taking the $50,000 and hiring full-time private tutors.
And yet, every year, teachers’ unions take union dues and spend millions and millions of dollars lobbying for their own selfish good. That money could have been much better used for these poor kids getting a pathetic education.
Which may explain why New York City politicians allow such an educational travesty to happen: they do not want to lose the good graces or the donor millions from the teachers’ unions. Horrible priorities.
3)New Jersey has always been one of the top states that we feel are a leading candidate to go bankrupt: high taxes, high business regulation, unfunded future financial liabilities, out migration of residents and businesses who are taking their tax dollars with them. Also, consider some of the current crises that New Jersey residents are facing:
The state has almost 14,000 homeless residents which is an 8% increase over last year and the 14,000 is a 10 year high.
Almost 2,000 residents overdose on drugs each year and over 300,000 state residents are fighting addiction problems.
1.2 million state residents, about 13% of the state population, are often fighting food insecurity.
369 state residents were murdered in a recent calendar year.
The state government has over $90 billion in unfunded future liabilities and overall, the total future liabilities are funded at only 56.7%, one of the worst funding levels in the country, comparable to the low levels in Illinois, another of our prime candidates to go bankrupt.
Given all of these problems that affect hundreds of thousands of state residents, get a load of what travesty some state politicians are focusing on:
Two state politicians in the New Jersey legislature are working on a proposal to ban chewing gum sales in the state.
They feel that there are too many “microplastics” in chewing gum and other everyday consumer products such as tea bags, plastic plates, plastic cutlery, cleaning products and cosmetics.
The proposal would give the state's environmental department $3 million to build a chewing gum ban enforcement process.
In the first two years of the proposal, chewing gum manufacturers would have to label that their products contain microplastics.
After two years, any chewing gum with microplastics could not be sold in the state.
Any smuggler who sells the banned chewing gum products after two years could face up to a $25,000 fine.
One of the co-sponsors insists that the intention is not to deny people basic and traditional products: “This bill is focused entirely on public health. It is my hope that by starting with a label requirement, the bill will give manufacturers the opportunity to remove microplastics before it gets to the point of prohibiting sales.”
One social media commentator summed up this insanity quite nicely: “With everything else going on, this is what we’re focusing on. How about we work on actual problems?”
Are microplastics a large problem? I don't know, I'm not a scientist. Apparently, the research has not reached a consensus on if and how much microplastics are a health problem. But a lot of New Jerseyans are dying, hungry, and homeless today, And they need attention and focus today on real problems, not on how to eliminate chewing gum and then fight bootleg chewing gum criminals. Insanity.
That will do it for today: chewing gum crisis in New Jersey, the education crisis in New York City, and the conflict of interest crisis in the New York governor's office.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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