The American Political Class: "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:" Today The Ugly, Part 2

This week we have been using the old Clint Eastwood movie, “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” to describe politics in America today. We started off with “The Good,” a post meant to get us in a better mood before we looked at the Bad and the Ugly. The Good post focused on the good things that individual Americans are doing for the country, other people, and the environment since the American political class and the government it operates are certainly not doing those things. That post of Good can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-american-political-class-good-bad_15.html

Unfortunately, we had to follow up that good feeling post with two posts that covered The Bad about the politicians in this country. The wasteful spending of taxpayer money with no societal benefit in return, the inefficient and ineffective government programs that often make a problem worse, etc. The first Bad post can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-american-political-class-good-bad.html

Yesterday and today we are looking at “The Ugly” side of American politicians. This does not mean that what they have done to the country is not ugly:

• Record high unemployment numbers for a record length of time.
• Economic programs that are expensive and useless.
• Government programs that are fraught with fraud and which lose well over $100 billion a year.
• A health care reform piece of legislation that is increasing the cost and decreasing the health insurance coverage of Americans, the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.
• Downgrading of the country’s credit rating for the first time in our history.
• A tax burden that forces Americans to work over half of the year just to pay for taxes at all levels of government.
• A regulatory burden that stifles the economy and job creation.
• A national debt approaching an unfathomable $18 TRILLION, well above $50,000 for every person in the country including our kids.
• A foreign policy that is in tatters and useless besides endangering the national security of the country.

We could go on and on but you get the idea. Our politicians are bad at problem definition and resolution, they have no idea how to run an efficient and crime free government, and they are killing freedom and liberty in this country. But yesterday and today we go beyond these dismal results.

Today we continue to look at their attitude and how their selfishness and personal greed are likely major contributing factors to the dismal results they seem to always end up producing. It is their attitude, as much as their non-success in resolving major issues, that cause the majority of us to loathe them so much. 

Remember, recent and credible public opinion surveys put our approval rating of Congress at levels far less than 10%. Obama’s approval rating has been in free fall for a while now with far more Americans disapproving of his performance than those that approve his performance. We despise them and yesterday and today we look at several reasons while that spite goes beyond their inability to effectively govern.

3) Much like the same behavior that the Washington political class used to gut the STOCK Act (see yesterday’s post) and make it easier for them to do insider trading and personal enrichment, they were up to the same secrecy and shenanigans on another topic recently. Our Washington political types recently made it more difficult to identify which members of Congress, and their spouses and other family members, are lavished with all-expenses-paid trips around the world by non-government entities.

House of Representatives rules have quietly been changed and the Washington political class has stripped away the requirement that privately sponsored and paid for travel be included on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms. Such disclosures made it very easy to track what companies, unions, and other entities were treating sitting politicians to special favors and travels, in all likelihood hoping for political and financial favors in return. 

As with the neutering of the STOCK Act, this move was also made secretly behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee. This move undoes more than three decades of reporting on gifts of travel to politicians. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal.

The only reason anyone outside of the inner circle of Congress knows about this trickery is that the National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when it analyzed the most recent batch of yearly filings: "This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "There's no legitimate reason. There's no good reason for it. The more you can hide, the less accountable you can be. It's clear these forms are useful for reporters and watchdogs, and obviously a little too useful."

I would disagree with Ms. Sloan is that there is a no legitimate and good reason for the deletion of the requirement: it makes it easier to bribe sitting Congressional representatives without their constituents finding out. It may not be a good reason from a voter perspective but from a self enriching sitting politician’s view point, it makes perfectly good sense.

Free trips paid for by private groups must still be reported separately to the House's Office of the Clerk and disclosed there. But they will now be absent from the chief document that reporters, watchdogs, and members of the public have used for decades to review, analyze, and report on lawmakers' finances.

Not unexpectedly:

1. News reports claim that House Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, did not return reporters’ calls for comment.
2. Ranking minority member Linda Sanchez, of the same committee, referred questions to committee staff. 
3. In turn, the committee staff declined to comment.

In 2013, members of Congress and their aides took more free trips than in any year since the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison back in the middle of the Bush Presidency. Nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million last year, according to Legistorm, which compiles travel records. As a result of this secrecy and the change that enused, now none of those trips must be included on the annual disclosures of lawmakers or their aides.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the consumer group Public Citizen which tracks the international travels of lawmakers and the actions of the Ethics Committee, was as surprised and shocked as Ms. Sloan: "There's seems to be no reason I could imagine why the Ethics Committee would minimize the amount of information that gets reported. It's always good to have more disclosure than less. It just seems a little odd that the Ethics Committee would pass such a rule change."

Not odd, just typical and greedy. And in a way, cowardly. If you have to do something secretly and behind close doors that has life style and financial benefits to you, than there has to be an unethical strain running down the middle of your conscious. Be a man and stand up front of your voters and tell them that you are taking everything you can get from being elected, don’t hide behind the bureaucracy.

4) Historically, earmarks have been little goodies and favors that are tucked away and partially hidden in legislative bills in Congress that make a sitting member of Congress look good to his or her voters back home. They may include anything from a special grant of money to a hometown university to the funding of a bike path in a town back home to special consideration to a home town company to other types of political favors, possibly in response to having a trip financed by a non-government entity as we discussed above.

We have talked about the uselessness and wastefulness of earmarks many times in this blog. They are nothing more than taxpayer funded public relations events for a sitting politician to help him stay in office. They do not improve the education of our kids, they do not help in the losing war on drugs battles, they do not help ailing veterans get the medical attention they desperately need, they do not seal the border, they do not reduce the ever rising cost of health care, or resolve any major issue facing the country today.

The money, that historically has annually run into the billions and billions of dollars, resolves none of these problems. It is like candy for voters, empty calories that make no real progress in helping taxpayers.

Fortunately, mostly at the urging of Tea Party candidates and principles, the amount and cost of earmarks has gone down recently. However, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently went on a rant to bring them back: “I have been a fan of earmarks since I got here the first day. Keep in mind that’s what the country has done for more than 200 years, except for the brief period of time in recent years that we haven’t done these.”

Obviously, doing something for 200 years does not make it right. Slavery probably existed in this country for two hundred years. That does not mean it should be reinstituted because Harry Reid points to tradition.

But Reid is not alone. Other Senators, especially those who have served on appropriations committees, are beginning to advocate for a reconstitution of earmarks. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin recently called earmarks the “glue” that held together each transportation bill, to which earmark hater, Senator Tom Coburn, replied via a Wall Street Journal editorial that “restoring earmarks in today’s Congress would be like opening a bar tab for a bunch of recovering alcoholics.”

We do not need earmarks, which are also used not only to pacify the voters back home but are also used to bribe for votes on legislation. Remember how a Nebraska Senator got a so-called “Cornhusker Exemption” for his voters back home in the Obama Care legislation to garner his vote of support? If you have to bribe to get legislation votes, maybe you either need:

• Better, smarter people writing better pieces of legislation that can stand on its own merits.
• Better, higher integrity people that can develop and debate legislation for the good of the entire country, not just for their state or their Congressional district.
• Allow the current set of Washington politicians run their own bar tab and activate term limits to give them the time to run that tab.

Using taxpayer earmark money to serve their careers, sneaking around in the dead of the night to hide their insider trading and outsider financed lavish travels and vacations from taxpayers, and taking lavish vacations at $12 million vacation homes while lecturing the country on “income inequality. Just four more Ugly reasons why most of us find the current set of politicians in this country not just incompetent but totally loathsome at the same time.

And there you have it. Five days of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” with the Bad and the ugly doing far more damage than the good that individual Americans are doing for each other.

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:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

How About More Hate Control Before More Gun Control, Part 4 - Protecing Our Kids, Protecting The Second Amendment, No Tax Increases, it Can Be Done

This is the final post in our series on how to protect ourselves and our families from violence and gun play without shredding the Second Amendment in the process. We have discussed how the political class is again not looking for the root causes of the violence that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last month, instead focusing on the “what” of the incident, guns were used to kill innocents, rather than the “why” of the incident, why and how could someone become so irrespective of life and humanity. As a result, we will end up with less freedom via more government control without solving the root causes.

We have discussed several real life examples of how Americans and their legally owned weapons defended themselves, their families, and their assets from violent criminals, an option that some politicians would like to see eliminated via more draconian gun control laws.

We discussed the fact that more stringent gun control laws do not reduce violence. We reviewed examples of where higher legal gun ownership resulted in less crime but lower gun ownership, more restrictive gun control laws resulted in higher rates of violent crime (e.g. Chicago). We reviewed scientific studies that proved this point and other studies that pointed to the legal overmedication of Americans as a high potential cause for mass slayings like Newtown, not the availability of guns.

We concluded from all of this discussion that outlawing or severely restricting the ownership of guns by responsible Americans will result in more violence, will not cause violent criminals to turn in or register their guns, or solve the problems like what happened in Newtown.

But there is a simple, better way to protect our kids without endangering the rest of the population, without shredding the Second Amendment, and without viciously dividing the country again along political lines. On December 24, 2013, we proposed a way to protect our kids in while in school from violence and gun play without raising the taxes on any American:

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Thus, the Independent Journal Review’s vote for the worst Federal spending in 2012:

• Tax loopholes for the National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) – professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits pay nothing in Federal income taxes($91 million worth of taxes)
• Moroccan pottery classes (part of a $27 million grant from U.S. Agency for International Development)
• Efforts to promote caviar consumption and production ($300,000)
• The building of a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel”- part of a $325,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
• Promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs ($505,000)
• Corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc. ($1.3 million)
• Government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination, envisioning the hole is bigger than it actually is ($350,000)
• “Prom Week,” a video game that allows taxpayers to relive prom night ($516,000)
• Oklahoma’s layover boondoggle, a scarcely used airport in Oklahoma receiving nearly half-a-million in taxpayer dollars only to transfer funds elsewhere in the state ($450,000)
• The 2012 Alabama Watermelon Queen tour, paid for in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “to promote the consumption of Alabama’s watermelon through appearances of the Alabama Watermelon Queen at various events and locations” ($25,000)
• Out-of-this-world Martian – $947,000 – NASA is studying what food astronauts could eat on Mars by simulating a Mars outpost at a barren location in Hawaii
• ObamaPhones’ – $1.5 billion. Enrollment in the Lifeline program has skyrocketed as people sign up to get free cell phone for which they qualify if they are on federal tested programs
• Speed reading faces – $30,000. NSF funds used to study whether people can determine a person’s sexual orientation with just a glance.
• Fighting obesity with giant graffiti carrots – $13,000. Anti-obesity funds pay for a giant graffiti mural focused on sustainability.
• Another bridge to nowhere – $520,000. A covered bridge in Ohio that is not used by cars or tied to any walking or bike trail will be rehabilitated with federal funds
• Free bus rides for Super Bowl attendees – $142,419. A Department of Transportation grant paid for free bus rides during the 2012 Super Bowl in Indianapolis. Average prices for Super Bowl tickets are around $3,000
• Movie theater field trip to see “Red Tails” – $57,000. Federal education funds were misused in Texas to send fifth-grade boys to a movie theater to see “Red Tails” (girls were left behind).
• Self-reflection video game using Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 writings – $40,000. National Endowment for the Humanities funding pays for video game simulating Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond.
• U.S. Iraqi police State Department training program burns through hundreds of millions, crashes in flames – $400.2 million. State Dept’s Iraq police training program has failed miserably, according the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. No objectives were created, and classes did not help Iraqis at all. The State Department will hand over to the Iraqis several building projects that ended up being unnecessary
• The streetcar named No Desire – $35.6 million. Federal transportation money will help build a trolley in St. Louis that has been called the “Streetcar Named No Desire” by one local. It duplicates existing light rail and public transportation, some say.
• Sidewalks to nowhere anger local citizens – $1.1 million. Department of Transportation funds are used for “sidewalks to nowhere” in Florida and Michigan that have local citizens angered. In Florida, the sidewalk was a “safe route to school” that was still unsafe. In Michigan, Federal requirements forced a county to make sidewalk ramps at an intersection without sidewalks.
• Congressional salaries total almost $100 million. Seems like they should be able to get something done for that much money? Especially since these people will work only 13 Fridays in 2012 and worked less than three weeks in the three months leading up to the November elections.

These 22 wasteful spending expenses total $2,160,420,419. Let’s
do some simple math, in light of the Connecticut school shootings:

• According to the Federal government, there 132,183 private and public schools in this country up through high school. (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average police officer in this country earns about $55,000 a year.
• If we decided to place an armed, trained police officer in every school in America, the annual cost would be about $7.3 billion a year.
• If we could somehow magically redirect the above wasteful spending away from these trivial expenses to funding protection for our kids in school, we would be able to put a trained, armed police officer in 30% of the nation’s schools. ($7.3 billion in police officer costs divided into the $2.16 billion in spending on the 22 projects/program listed above.)
• Thus, if we could find another 50 or so other, similarly wasteful Federal government spending instances (something that would be extremely easy to do), we could annually put a trained, armed police officer in EVERY U.S. school, without raising taxes on any American.
• Another approach would be to magically redirect the $2.16 billion to protecting 30% of our schools and charge every American household just $.85 a month in taxes to cover the other 70% of schools.
• Still another approach is to consider the fact that the U.S. has needlessly deployed over 130,000 troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Rather than using taxpayer money to defend Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, maybe it is time to maybe it is time to use that taxpayer money to defend our kids within the confines of this country.

The bottom line is that, as nation, we have the wealth and ability today to more fully protect our kids in their schools without killing any vital Federal program or project, without going through the fruitless and divisive political debate of gun control, and without raising taxes on any American.

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Since this blog post and the solution it proposed, we found out that:

1. President Obama signed legislation that will guarantee that he and his family, along with former Presidents, will have armed, Secret Service protection for life.
2. The school that President Obama’s kids attend is protected by 11 armed guards everyday in addition to the Secret Service detail assigned to protect his kids.

If the President can provide trained, professional armed guards for his kids in their schools, why can’t we do the same for every American kid while in school? The above math indicates it is possible if we just cleaned up wasteful government spending a little bit.

But there is another way to finance such a program, without raising taxes on any American, if we only could force the political class in Washington to stop spending and wasting taxpayer wealth on themselves and start spending it on our KIDS.

In our January 6, 2013 post, we revealed excessive and useless wasting examples of politicians spending our money on themselves. A few examples include the following disgraces:

1. Georgia Senator Isakson - Arranged a $4 million earmark for Northrop Gruman in exchange for a $7,000 donation and arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Scientific Research Corp. in exchange for a $2,900 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
2. Hawaiian Senator Inouye - Secured a $135 million taxpayer financed bailout after intervening on behalf of a poorly managed, non-qualifying bank. Why? Inouye had most of his net worth invested in that bank. (Source: Hawaii Free Press)
3. Illinois Senator Durbin - Arranged a $1.6 million earmark for Gentex in exchange for a $2,000 donation and arranged another $1.6 million earmark for Epir Technologies in exchange for a $2,700 donation. (Source: Seattle Times)
4. Rep. Corrine Brown (D - Fla.) - Between 2005 and 2010, Brown helped secure $21.9 million for six clients of a lobbying firm where her daughter works.
5. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D - NC) - Butterfield has helped obtain $817,500 over the past few years toward revitalizing buildings in Wilson, N.C. The lawmaker owns 19 properties within three-quarters of a mile of the project.
6. Rep. Norm Dicks (D - Wash.) - In 2008, Dicks, as an appropriations chairman, secured a $1.82 million earmark for a Washington state environmental agency where his son worked as executive director.

These are just six random examples of politicians wasting our money on their families and their careers, money that could be spent protecting OUR kids. You can visit the dozens and dozens of other examples of similar waste at that January 6th post.

If you did read that post and added up the amount of waste that the political class in Washington dispenses for its own goals every year you would find it sums to $711.6 million. Since, on average, it costs about $55,000 a year to staff a police officer throughout the country, if the political class had used $711.6 million in taxpayer wealth to put an armed police officer in schools rather, than divert the taxpayer money to their financial backers or their friends and family, as outlined in detail in our January 6, 2013 post, we could have armed protection in another 13,000 schools protecting our kids.

Since we have already calculated above that terminating just 22 wasteful government projects would allow us to staff armed officers in about 39,300 schools, this additional savings would put armed police officers in 52,300 schools or about 40% of our schools. No taxes raised, no Second Amendment shredding, just good solid trained protection in over 50,000 schools FOR OUR KIDS! It is that simple.

All it requires is for the Federal government to stop spending over $2 billion a year on stupid, inane, useless projects and programs and stop the political class from using taxpayer money to grease their reelection campaigns and the personal wealth of themselves and their family members. You decide what are the better spending priorities, I know what my answer is.

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.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

An ACORN Grows In Chicago

Earlier today the House of Representatives overwhelming voted to also defund the ACORN organization, following the lead of the Senate from a few days ago. The two votes now need to be reconciled and passed on to President Obama for signing into law. From what I can see, most Americans were appalled by videos that have been created at several ACORN offices that portrayed ACORN personnel advising a fake pimp and prostitute on how to get around government regulations and how to get government funding for their child prostitution rings. A few observations:

• The first videotapes showed up in the media before the latter tapes were taken. One would have thought that the ACORN leadership would have notified all of their offices that a fake pimp and prostitute were running a sting to see if they could get ACORN personnel to help them with their illegal prostitution idea. Not notifying their offices of the situation and allowing subsequent operations to become entangled is just plain stupid. Stupid organizations should not get taxpayer funding.
• An AP report today mentioned that 11 ex-ACORN employees were arrested in the Miami area this week for falsifying voter registration records. This comes on the heels of last year's Ohio problem with ACORN and accusations from ex-ACORN employees that they falsified voter registration records. Why has their been no Federal investigation of ACORN since they may have been in violation of a basic American right, the right to have every vote treated fairly and accurately and not count less because of fake registrations? Maybe the House should be investigating this treason-level act and let the Joe Wilson thing die.
• Seven US Senators voted not to defund ACORN and two of them, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris, are from Illinois. Apparently ACORN is very, very big in parts of Illinois, so much so that both state Senators voted not to defund them (and tick them off) even though it was pretty obvious from multiple videotapes that ACORN behavior's was highly unethical and possibly illegal. Pretty sad when a private organization supported with taxpayer funds can intimidate sitting US Senators. Which raises the age old question: which state has the worst politicians, New Jersey or Illinois? New Jersey recently had 44 local politicians arrested for kickbacks and other crimes. Three of the past five Illinois governors are either in jail or under indictment. And now Illinois US Senators voting in a distinct minority to continue business as usual with ACORN. It is probably a question for the ages (or until the next round of indictments).