Even The President's Friends Think ISIS is More Important Than an Exhibition Baseball Game....And Tango Lessons...And Golf

In the past month or so, ISIS has unleashed a number of deadly attacks across the world: 

• In late February, two ISIS bombs killed over 100 Iraqis.
• Dozens of people died in two ISIS-related suicide bombers attacks over the past couple of months in Turkey.
• And this past week, ISIS struck in the heart of Europe in Brussels, with two bombs going off at the airport and one going off in a train car, killing dozens and wounding over a hundred including Americans.

ISIS is on the move, spreading their violent wrath of terror and death across the Middle East and Europe. Innocent people are dying, fear is being spread, ISIS’s influence is growing in multiple countries and this week, President Obama:

• Attended a meaningless baseball game in Cuba immediately after hearing of the death and carnage in Brussels.
• In a political speech in Cuba, spent less than one minute discussing the major terror attacks in Brussels.
• Flew to Argentina where he spent some time learning how to dance the tango as body parts were being cleaned up in Brussels.
• He eventually returned to Washington DC where he decided going golfing would be a good thing to do.

I know I feel like many other Americans when I say that I was disgusted by this lack of compassion and concern of this President. Rather than showing any sympathy and concern immediately after the attacks, he was sitting in a baseball stadium doing the wave and laughing it up with Cuba’s Communist dictator. Despite having the information on the attack, he still allowed himself to be seen learning to dance the tango. Heartless behavior of a human being in my opinion, never mind the President of the United States.

But it is just not me that seems to have a problem with this behavior. His usually loyal political allies in the media and news industry also called him out for his cold heartedness:

- Veteran NBC newsboradcaster Tom Brokaw: “So much of politics and national security is a combination of symbolism and reality,” Brokaw said Wednesday. “The reality is that we did have that attack yesterday. It was unnerving to us, it was devastating in Europe.”

“But at the same time, the symbolism is that the president stayed at the baseball game all day long where you would have thought he would have said, ‘Look, we’ve got more business that I have to deal with, I wish you well,’ get on the phone. We’ve got to put together some kind of a bulletproof syndicate to deal with all this.”

“There’s a real urgency about it, and he has got to convey that, not just to the American people but to the world. I think it was Mike Hayden who said he is the leader of the free world, and this is the time to be the leader because this kind of attack can occur again and again and again.”

“This is the time to be the leader.”

- Democratic strategist David Gergen, speaking on CNN: “I think people now, after all the attacks, we’ve had an attack a day around the world for the last 12 days, but after San Bernardino and Paris and Brussels and Ankara and Istanbul, people are looking for more forceful action to actually drive back ISIS and right now, we’re not winning against ISIS.” 

“When you go to a baseball game, it looks a little frivolous.” When you’re dancing like that. I — I even think the hard call, he should have thought about coming back and gathering — people are looking for leadership here. I thinks that’s a critical issue for him. Restraint does not equal leadership when you’re under attack like this.”

- Co-host of the TV show, “The View,” Jedediah Bila (keep in mind that “the View” is usually a lovefest when it comes to President Obama): “He’s the leader of the free world … I want my president front and saying ‘Islamic extremism is at the root of this. ISIS claimed credit for this, and we are not going to take this. We are going to fight back.'” 

- Co-host of the TV show, “The View,” and CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin: “Jed and I love each other and we don’t always agree. But when I saw President Obama … I didn’t not like seeing him do the wave in Cuba at a baseball game when Americans were injured and over thirty people were killed. You have to be a little more presidential acting than that because optics really matter.”

- MSNBC (keep in mind that MSNBC has also been an Obama cheerleader since day one of this administration) show host and commentator Chris Matthews: "I grew up in a big city, Philadelphia ... when there was a big fire, you want to see the mayor on the other curb, watching it. You want to see the police chief, standing there, the fire chief, you want to see them standing on the curb. You don't want to hear they phoned it in. The president was off base. He wasn't there. What could he have done better by taking a minute away from a baseball game? He had to do something."

- President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, speaking on MSNBC: “It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work. But you have to be careful of these, these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tangos, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day.” 

When you long term political allies are saying you are not a leader, you are not Presidential, you are not serious, you are frivolous, etc, you know that you really screwed up. 

Maybe the best summary of this less than stellar performance comes from Fox News and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, never a fan of Obama, who probably summed up many Americans’ feelings best: “The increasing tempo and sophistication of its operations suggest that it may be poised for a continent-wide guerrilla campaign. In the face of this, Obama remains inert, unmoved, displaying a neglect and insouciance that borders on denial. His non-reaction to the Belgian massacre — his 34-minute speech in Havana devoted 51 seconds to Brussels — left the world as stunned as it was after the Paris massacre, when Obama did nothing.” 

Inert, unmoved, neglectful, non-reactionary, not Presidential. Unfortunately, we have a President who is either uncaring or one who has checked out already in the final year of his term. In either case, the world and the rest of us, including many of his political allies, are constantly disappointed by this President’s lack of compassion and inability to recognize “bad optics.” And in this world of a growing terrorist threat, our safety in his dispassionate or disinterested hands, a very scary proposition.

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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Janaury, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Failure In Economics, Failure In World Peace, Failure In Tax Policy and More

This is our third post this month that will be covering yet more political class insanity, idiocy, and ineptness. It is a shame that these people do not work in the private sector because if they did, they would have been jobless long ago. But alas, they work for the government, where failure is accepted, tolerated, and often rewarded at the expense of our wealth and liberty.

1) The first piece of insanity if both as good news and bad news story. Good news in that the Washington political class has finally gotten around to terminating a number of stupid, special interest tax breaks and credits. The bad news is twofold: why were these tax breaks ever created in the first place and why were they allowed to go on so long?

The following idiotic, wasteful spending examples that have finally expired come from the January 5, 2013 issue of the Tampa Bay Times:

• At an annual taxpayer cost of $50 million, the first tax break, labeled the NASCAR loophole, allowed anyone who builds a racetrack to receive a tax benefit through accelerated depreciation. Supposedly it was put into place to give NASCAR a better chance of competing with theme parks. But why should NASCAR get a tax break and theme parks not get the benefit at the expense of the American taxpayer? Stupid, narrow, and unneeded tax stupidity, given the billions and billions of dollars NASCAR generates by itself.
• At an annual taxpayer cost of $75 million, Hollywood studios will longer be able to deduct up to a whopping $15 million of their movie production if more than 75% of the movie’s production work took place in the United States. They could get 80% of they produced the film in low income communities.
• At an annual cost of $9 billion, large banks and other financial giants will longer be able to take advantage of a tax break called the “Active Financing Exception To Subpart F.” This tax break, in effect since 1997, allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas income when they use special types of financing. Critics of the tax break probably are correct when they point out that this tax break actually encouraged U.S. companies to invest overseas rather than domestically. Still, the banking and financial giants are howling about losing the tax break, claiming it allowed them to better compete overseas. As an American taxpayer, I would suggest they take that tax break money form their shareholders, the ones that truly benefit form competing overseas, not the American taxpayer.. At $9 billion a year over 17 years, we are probably looking at a ghastly $150 billion that the American taxpayers used to subsidize companies like JP Morgan, General Electric, and others.
• At an annual taxpayer cost of $240 million, American rum drinkers will no longer have to pay for the $13.50 Federal tax per gallon that was levied on all rum made in or imported into the country. That tax money was then given to the rum companies in Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands to support their competitiveness. This tax has been hassling rum drinkers since 1917, meaning that it probably cost American citizens billions of dollars in corporate welfare over the past 97 years it was in effect.

A few other tax beaks expired but these above are the most inane. Why American citizens should have to subsidize banks, financial institutions, NASCAR racetracks, rum producers, etc. is idiotic. In a capitalistic society, these companies should survive, thrive, or die on the merits of their own intelligence, work ethics, and business decisions. Taxpayers should not be responsible for their success.

Unfortunately, there are probably thousands of other such corporate welfare programs and tax breaks that still exist, mostly as a result of campaign donations to incumbent politicians.

2) We already have reported that the Federal government has spent upwards of a billions on a substandard website for Obama Care. We have already reported that well over 90% of large Federal government information systems efforts over the past few years have either collapsed under their own failure or came nowhere close to fulfilling their initial objectives. 

Thus, given this heritage of massive spending for minimal results as it relates to data systems management and development, it should come as no surprise that the Department of Justice is about to spend well over half a million dollars to enhance its brand image and positioning on the Linkedin business networking system. This outrageous expense was reported on January 2, 3014 by the Washington Free Beacon.

And this expense is not even for the whole Justice Department, if for only the criminal division which has less than one thousand employees. Supposedly this expense will help the division recruit highly talented professionals and interns.

The actual development cost of the Linkedin presence is $544,388 but there is also an monthly, ongoing cost of $719.95 a month. Doing some math, over the first five years, the cost of the presence would be about $587,000. If the division hired 100 people over that timeframe, not unreasonable since the Federal government sees very little turnover in their employee base, each one of those hire would have cost at least $58,700 each just to cover the Linkedin expense. Does not seem like a very efficient way to get candidates for a very small division within the Federal government.

And given the history of Federal government systems management, want to bet those costs go much higher before all is said and done? Remembers, user access to Linkedin is free, why the government has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to access a free site is certainly questionable.

3) An interesting economic study was recently reported by Dean Stansel, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, and Fred McMahon of the Fraser Institute. They conducted an analysis where they measured a variety of components to determine economic freedom levels by North American jurisdiction.

These components included the size of government, discriminatory taxation, regulation, the legal system and property rights, sound money policy, and freedom to trade internationally. They found via their methodology that the province of Alberta, Canada, ranks highest for economic freedom, followed by the province of Saskatchewan iin North America. The state of Delaware is third, followed by Texas and Nevada. Other U.S. states in the top 10 states and provinces are Wyoming, South Dakota, and Colorado. 

New Mexico was determined to be least economically free entity, followed by West Virginia. Other U.S states in the bottom 10 are Mississippi, Vermont, Maine, Kentucky, Montana, Arkansas, Hawaii, and Rhode Island. 

But what is really the big news from their study is that these ten states, the ones with the lowest economic freedom, have an average per-capita GDP of $40,014. That GDP measure is nearly $10,000 less than the other 40 states: $40,014 compared to $49,355. Imagine how much lower it would be if compared just to the top states that are the most economically free such as Delaware, Texas, Nevada, etc. The GDP gap would be much wider.

Conclusion: the less taxes, the fewer regulations, the least government interference in citizens' economic freedom results in greater prosperity for those citizens. However, the Washington political class seem to think and act just the opposite, especially those within the Obama White House since their actions lead to more taxation, more regulations, more interference and as we have seen, less and less prosperity for all Americans. Insanity.

4) There was great hope for world peace when President Obama took office. He had a sky high approval rating both domestically and across the world. He gave a hopeful, peace themed speech to university students in Cairo. His brand was “hope and change.” He won a Nobel Peace prize for simply breathing. He was going to be the breakout world leader who settled things down and brought peace in our time.

Five years later, not so much. Maybe it was his inability to wind down the Afghanistan war. Maybe it was his indiscriminate killing of civilians, adults and children with drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Maybe it was his assertion that he could assassinate American citizens without putting them on trial first. Maybe it was his dangerous and stupid intervention in the Libyan civil war. Maybe it was his threat to send armed forces into Syria as a result of a purported chemical attack by government forces. Maybe it was his alleged assertion that he “was very good at killing people.” Maybe it was his stationing of U.S. Marines in Australia.

Whatever the reasons or reasons, a recent survey by pollster Win/Gallup International across 65 nations found that the United States was viewed as the most dangerous nation the face of the earth. Not China, not Russia, not Iran, not North Korea, the United States. Detailed results from the survey include the following depressing findings:

• The U.S. topped the list of the most dangerous country in the world with an aggregate of 24% of respondents.
• The runner-up threat country, Pakistan, was way behind at eight percent, one third the perceived threat as the U.S., China was third at six percent, followed by North Korea, Iran and Israel at five percent each.
• In Russia, 54% of respondents said the U.S. was the greatest threat to peace and in China 49% of respondents said the U.S. was the greatest threat to peace.
• But our allies were not quite happy with us either since NATO partners Greece and Turkey (45% each), and Pakistan (44%), which is also a top recipient of U.S. aid were also sure that we were the top threat to world peace.
• In Latin America, Argentina (46%), Mexico (37%), Brazil (26 percent) and Peru (24%) also viewed the U.S. as the top threat to world peace.

The list and findings go on but you get the idea. The Obama administration has failed miserably in actions, words and promises to bring about a world political and military environment that is compatible for world peace. In fact, we are still viewed as the biggest threat to world peace. 

So much for hope and change on the international front from this version of the Washington political class. Maybe the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of troops stationed around the world and spend more on military forces than the rest of the world combined might also have a bearing on the hostility towards us.

Whatever the reason, certainly a failure of leadership from Washington in general and the White Hose specifically.

Failure on the world stage, failure to rein in stupid tax breaks, failure to efficiently spend information systems dollars, and failure to understand economic freedom concepts. Sounds about right for this set of political class members. More buffoonery tomorrow.

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

United States' Leaders Vs. The World's Leaders - Who Wins This Smackdown?

It can get pretty depressing talking about the American political class. Problems such as the failed war on drugs, public schools that do not educate, lack of a national energy program, escalating health care costs, skyrocketing national debt, annually increasing budget deficits, higher and higher taxes, unacceptably high unemployment numbers, trivial partisan bickering and sniping, continuous political ethics violations, of which the alleged Charles Rangel and Maxine Walters scandals are just the two latest in a long series of ethics lapses, moral lapses such as those committed by Clinton, Spitzer, Foley, Ensign, MacGreevey, Sanford and others can really bring you down. And we as taxpayers, pay for this shoddy behavior to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars over the past few decades.

But are we the only country that suffers these types of politicians or do other countries have real leaders instead of real politicians? Are other countries moving forward on the major issues of the time or are they also bogged down in mud slinging re-election campaigns and working on trivial issues that never positively impact a significant portion of their populations? In a non-scientific survey of what other nations are doing on major issues of our time, I came up with the following areas where foreign politicians actually display leadership traits and actually get things done on issues that matter:

• Portugal's leaders took the courageous step a few years ago and decriminalized possession of illegal drugs. As a result, drug usage actually went down when possession was decriminalized, more users went into rehab programs, and drug enforcement costs went down. In the United States, nothing has been done to address our failed war on drugs, resulting in increasingly large prison populations based on illegal drugs and the development of a violent, almost narco state just south of our border with northern Mexico. Over forty years after Nixon declared war on drugs, we are no closer to having a sane drug policy in this country that is enforceable, logical, and compassionate.
• Argentina's leaders recently passed legislation that legalized gay marriage. They recognized that we are all humans with distinct values and tastes which should not be isolated and condemned but should be recognized and given the full benefits of other citizens. In the United States, the Federal government maintains the ant-gay marriage law, Defense Of Marriage Act, and refuses to repeal the discriminatory "don't' ask, don't tell" policy of the armed forces. We are all Americans, we should all be treated equally in all aspects of life. Unless of course, acting against homosexuals, or any piece of our culture and society, can get politicians some cheap, discriminatory votes.
• We have known that our public school system was a failure relative to educating most of America's kids back in the early 1980s when a Reagan commission issued the landmark report, "A Nation At Risk." Despite the warning, almost thirty years later, public schools continue to eat up large chunks of taxpayer money while turning out mediocre students. The National Center For Educational Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, tracks how well 4th and 8th graders are doing in math and science education around the world. Their website contains the latest results of country by country comparisons and the results for the U.S. are not good. In science, we ranked 8th for fourth graders and 11th for eighth graders. In math, we ranked 11th for fourth graders and 9th for eighth graders. In all four categories we trailed Russia, England, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan and in some of the categories we also trailed Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and South Korea. Thus, some countries' leaders have been able to put together higher quality education systems than the United States, despite our spending the most money on education than any of those nations ahead of us.
• In the 1970s, we as a nation became painfully aware of how dependent we are on foreign sources of energy as a result of the oil embargoes. Since then, our political class has done virtually nothing in developing a national energy policy and strategy that would result in less expensive and less vulnerable sources of energy. While our politicians did nothing, what have foreign leaders done in the area of solar power? According to the website, http://www.pvresources.com/, which tracks large scale solar electricity facilities around the world, the United States is soundly beaten in the area of generating electricity from the sun. According to the website, 52 of the largest, top one hundred world wide facilities generating electricity from the sun are in Spain, 24 of the top one hundred facilities are in Germany and only 5 of the largest facilities are in the United States. The Spanish solar facilities generate over 800 megawatts of electricity a year or 17.3 megawatts per million Spaniards, the German solar facilities generate almost 500 megawatts of electricity a year or 5.9 megawatts per million Germans, and the United States solar facilities generate only 91 megawatts of electricity or .29 megawatts per million Americans. From another view, these numbers show that on a per person basis, Spain gets almost 60 times more energy from solar than the U.S. while Germany gets over 20 times more energy from solar than the U.S. Clearly, some nations' leaders have been able to accomplish energy independence much better than our political class.
• Moving from solar to wind energy, consider a Time magazine article from February 25, 2009 about wind energy in Denmark. In the late 1970s, right after the oil embargo shocks, the Danish government implemented a program to take advantage of their winds. As a result, the Danes now get almost 20% of their electricity from wind turbines (Spain also scores a success story here, getting 10% of their electricity from wind), the Danes have reduced their carbon emissions over 13% from 1990 as a result of their wind energy, and they are the market leaders in wind technology and manufacturing. We get very little of our energy needs from wind technology. Oops, our politicians lose again relative to having a long term vision in both the wind and solar world relative to other world leaders. Imagine if our politicians had the strategic and long term energy vision of the Germans, Danes, and Spaniards. Imagine if we were getting 20-30% of our energy from wind and solar, numbers that seem very realistic given what other countries have accomplished. Do we think that our failed invasion of Iraq would have happened and the TRILLION dollars or so we incurred as a result of the invasion could have been used to offset our deficit or lower our taxes? Would we have stationed U.S. troops throughout the Mideast, deployments which inspired bin Laden to launch the 9-11 attacks? So much good could have happened if our politicians had acted intelligently and with urgency over the past four decades in this area like other nations did.
• An article in the September issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine reviewed the economic situation in Brazil. Economists expect the Brazilian economy will grow over 7% this year while the U.S. economy will struggle to grow 3%. Credit rating agencies have raised the credit rating for Brazil based on the growth policies instituted by Brazil's leaders and their ability to keep their national debt levels under control, unlike the politicians in the United States who have run up dangerously high debt levels. As a side note, the top income tax rate in Brazil is only 27.5%, 7.5% less than the U.S. top tax rate. Do we think that Brazil figured out that high taxes stifle growth while our politicians have not yet figure that out? the article goes onto explain how many economies in South America are looking stronger and stronger as we go forward, based on how well their leaders have managed their respective financial affairs.

I am not an international expert, much more scientific work would have to be done to accurately figure out who has the most functional leaders in the world. But consider just the following small set of examples. If we had leaders that had the illegal drug foresight of Portugal, the compassion of Argentina, the energy strategy of Spain, Denmark and Germany, the educational wherewithal of the Far Eastern nations, Russia, England, Latvia, and other countries, and the economic skills of some South American nations, we would have it pretty good in the United States.

Also, with these skills and results, I doubt Congress would still have its current dismal approval rating of only 20% since they would have actually accomplished something to benefit the country and it's citizens, and not just themselves. Reading the news reports and listening to the news shows, one is left with the impression that American politicians see getting elected as the end game. It used to be that getting elected was the means to the end, you got into office to make noble changes. Now you get into office to enrich yourself. As a result, the world moves ahead of us in so many areas while our politicians look inward for their own benefit and not outward for our well being. Can anyone say term limits?


Our new 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.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/