August, 2020, Part 15,Political Class Insanity: From Sea To Shining Sea, Political Class Insanity Reigns

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) There has been a lot of insanity coming out of New York City lately. The mayor, Bill de Blasio, has had to deal with a botched coronavirus handling of his own doing, his defunding of the police department in the presence of an ever increasing violent crime wave and a growing and dangerous homeless problem. He really has to qualify as one of the worst mayors currently in office in the country today. In fact, a Congressman from his own party recently declared him the worst mayor in the history of the country regardless of city.

Well, it seems his wife is not much better when it comes to being efficient and effective with taxpayer money:

• His wife, Chirlane McCray, heads up some sort of organization that does work for the city and is funded with city tax dollars.
• She has a staff of 14 people.
• So far, so good.
• Unfortunately, her staff’s salary expense on an annual basis is about $2 million a year, well over $100,000 per employee on average.
• This is allowed to go on despite her whiny husband’s lament that he may have to fire important people on the city payroll like police officers, firemen, and EMTs while her group sucks down $2 million a year just in salaries.
• One member of her staff is a videographer who makes a whopping $70,000 a year.
• She also has a $117,000 speech writer on her staff and a $150,000 senior advisor.
• A spokesperson for the mayor defended his wife and her high salaried employees: “The First Lady manages a robust portfolio and her team works tirelessly to carry out goals and priorities on issues like mental health and domestic violence that will improve the lives of New Yorkers.” 

So the first lady of NYC has a high priced staff of 14 employees. The First Lady of the United States has a smaller staff than 14. I think that maybe the mayor’s wife has an oversized opinion of herself, given the size of her staff and the amount of money she makes off of the NYC taxpayer.

2) While NYC has been mentioned in a lot of our posts, San Francisco is probably not too far behind as regards to bad news. And most of that bad news is due to the mismanagement and inane rules and laws the city’s political class has passed over the years. We have covered the reality any number of times that it is not illegal to defecate, urinate, or shoot up illegal drugs in public inside the city.

This has led to a continually deteriorating set of living conditions and an ever growing homeless population. What once was one of the most exciting, cool, and intriguing cities in the country has been turned into a cesspool of dirt, filth and unsanitary living conditions as outlined in the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI

Of course, some local politicians would blame Donald Trump although these conditions existed in the city, possibly less intensely, long before Trump came into office. Plus, it is the local politicians’ laws that have made the situation so bad, not anything coming out of Washington. The politicians in the city apparently have no idea how to fix what they obviously have broke.

3) Most politicians get insanely rich off of their so-called public service. We have previously covered the reality that Barack Obama owns three homes worth tens of millions of dollars despite never having worked in a lucrative part of the private sector and never having made more than $400,000 a year in salary. Nancy Pelosi is also insanely rich despite never having earned more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year as a member of Congress. The list of enriched Washington politicians could go on for a long time.

But possibly two former city managers in Texas are better at this political self enrichment scheme than any of the crooks in Washington:

• The city manager in Laredo, Texas received over $880,000 when he left his position in 2019.
• And obviously Laredo is no big time American city or not close to being the richest city either with only 261,000 residents whose average salary is only $15,127 a year.
• In May, 2017, the Laredo city council decided to promote Horacio De Leon, Jr. to be interim city manager.
• The following August he was made the permanent city manager and he earned a whopping $314,556 as an annual salary in 2018.
• De Leon had been a long term city employee with a good track record of performance.
• But in 2019, just 20 months after appointing him to be the Lardeo city manager, the town council got rid of him at a cost of $880,486, according to the Open The Books anti-corruption organization.
• Of that $880,486, almost $570,000 of that was a severance payment, vacation and sick leave pay was almost $193,000, his regular salary which was over $76,000, and other payments.
• But this was not the first expensive screw up by the city council’s politicians since in 2017 they fired the previous city manager, Jesus Olivares who got a whopping $651,867 when he was booted out of office.
• Both men will also receive lifetime taxpayer funded health insurance coverage.

The news articles about this corruption did not discuss why both men were forced out. In any case, the city council obviously screwed up royally by either picking the wrong men for the job or giving them a contract that was ridiculously expensive for Laredo taxpayers.

Seems the city council politicians are the ones that should be forced out of their positions, given how they have so mismanaged the taxpayers’ tax dollars. But for De Leon and Olivares, nicely and profitably done.

4) The hypocrisy of many politicians across the country and their “do as I say, not as I do” attitude as been disgustedly display during the coronavirus crisis:

• The mayor of Chicago had her hair salon open so she could get a haircut although she prohibited her city residents and hair salons from doing the same.
• The mayor of Beaumont, Texas had her nail salon open up to get her nails done even though she prohibited her city residents and nail salons from doing the same.
• The mayor of NYC had his gym open up so he could work out even though he prohibited his city residents and gyms from doing the same.
• The governor of Oregon was recently spotted out on a hiking trail without a mask on even though she required all of her residents to have a mask on when they are outside.

You get the idea, you must obey my commands even if I do not. And it looks like the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is guilty of the same type of hypocrisy:

• Cuomo has a hit list of about three dozen states that he says have virus infection rates that are too high for his state and NYC.
• As a result, anyone coming into his state from those other states must quarantine themselves for two weeks in order to not infect New Yorkers and increase that state’s virus infection rate.
• This is pretty ironic and hypocritical of him since early in the virus crisis, when New Yorkers were scramming out of the state to their Rhode Island vacation homes Cuomo got really upset when the Rhode Island governor did the same thing to New Yorkers coming into her state but that is a story for another time.
• More recently, Cuomo decided that he would exempt famous musicians from this mandatory 14 day quarantine restriction so that they could travel to New York City for the annual MTV Video Music Awards show.
• So if you or I travel to New York City and disobey the 14 day quarantine rule, we get fined and maybe go to jail.
• Famous people go to New York City and they don't have to follow the same restrictions that get us fined and jailed, sounds about right.
• A spokesperson for the governor tried to whitewash this hypocrisy, saying that these famous rock stars and musicians can “participate in the production of the show, but they will only interact with other members of the cast and crew and will quarantine when not working.”
• The spokesperson went to say that these people will police themselves with “rigorous safety protocols including testing and screening and compliance checks by a special compliance officer.”

Can you imagine the reaction you would get if you told Cuomo that you would police yourself with “rigorous safety protocols” and thus did not have to abide by the state’s quarantine rules? I doubt that he would let you get by with that promise.

But he allows famous people to bypass the safety protocols that he applies to everyone else. Famous people can pass on the virus just as easily as the rest of us, being a good musician has nothing to do with being less contagious. But hey, this is an American politician doing what they do best, “do as I say, not as I do.”

Wasting taxpayer money in NYC, wasting a city in San Francisco, wasting taxpayer money in Laredo, and special rules for special people in New York, political class insanity comes in many different forms.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

August, Part 10, Political Class In Insanity: Fudging The Coronavirus Numbers, Miscounting the Coroanvirus Numbers and Making Money Off Of Fake Coronavirus Numbers

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) It's no secret that Bill de Blasio, the mayor of NYC, and Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, handled the whole coronavirus crisis in the most inept and dangerous way possible. Their incompetence caused the city and state to be the worst locations from a virus perspective relative to the number of cases and number of deaths of anywhere else in the country.

One of the most fatal and dangerous decisions that Cuomo made was to force nursing homes and long term care facilities in the state to take in and house suspected or real elderly coronavirus patients. This mixing of virus patients with elderly healthy patients likely caused a significant increase in the number of confirmed virus cases and deaths.

The state led the country in nursing home deaths attributed to the virus but according to an Associated Press report, the situation is worse than Cuomo and his statistic show:

• Apparently, Cuomo and the state government health resources people fudged the number of nursing home deaths that occurred after he declared that long term care facilities and nursing homes had to take potential and real coronavirus patients.
• You see, he made sure that the number of nursing homes deaths that were caused by the virus only included those people who physically died in the nursing homes or long term care centers.
• If a nursing home patient came down with the virus when residing in a nursing home but died after being shipped out to a hospital when they became sick, the death was incorrectly not counted as a nursing home death.
• So if someone got infected because they were in a nursing home and that nursing home was forced to bring in sick patients, Cuomo’s counting method ignored them if they eventually died in a hospital regardless of where they got infected.
• New York apparently was the only state that counted this way.
• For example, New York’s official virus deaths for the Riverdale Nursing home is listed at 4 deaths of that facility’s residents.
• In reality 21 people died as a result of being in that nursing home, 4 on site and 17 who were transferred to a hospital after they became sick.
• Thus, there are about 6,600 New Yorkers who “officially” died in the state’s long term care and nursing homes, in reality the death toll, because of his idiocy of forcing sick people into nursing homes, is likely much higher, making his atrocious decisions even more despicable.
• As an add on, apparently his bogus counting method was also in violation of Federal law.

Another reason to not believe the virus numbers in any which way possible since politicians manipulated the numbers, either intentionally or because of incompetence. And another reason to not trust anything a politician ever says at first blush, they are always more interested in protecting their political careers than the truth and the safety of their citizens.

2) So, while Cuomo was fudging numbers to make his bad decisions not look as bad as they actually were, down in North Carolina, in another strike against the validity of the virus statistics accuracy, North Carolina had a different counting problem:

• North Carolina officials recently announced that they had been counting their coronavirus cases wrong.
• Apparently their inability to count accurately overstated the number of virus cases in the state by a whopping 200,000.
• They caused this mishap a “counting error” and blamed it on the lab that did the tests.
• The state blamed LabCorp Diagnostics for giving the state two different daily test count numbers.
• According to Mandy Cohen of the state's Department of Health: “The positive cases are reported electronically. Those continue to be accurate. The number that we are correcting today is just the total cumulative lab tests. Our team found this as we were doing process improvement. I certainly wish we would’ve done that process improvement earlier, right? And then we would’ve caught this earlier. I think we own that in not catching this as soon as we could. Certainly LabCorp owns some of this for sending us the wrong data, but we own some of it for not catching it on our end.”
• LabCorp acknowledged their screw up and confessed that the North Carolina numbers they gave the state included virus testing results that occurred in other states.

Just another reason not to believe anything or anyone in any form of government is telling us about the virus, these people do not know how to count and every day it seems we are faced with some state official confessing that numbers are wrong, too high, too low, purposely fudged (in the case of New York), etc. Such incompetence.

3) Looks like it is going to be a coronavirus day in total. Consider these finding regarding virus counting from the United Patriots News website:

• Michael Thau, writing for the Red State website has looked at and analyzed a lot of virus data from across the country.
• After looking at the counting processes that vary everywhere relative to the virus and the reports and stats these processes produce, he has concluded there are three reasons why the virus data is grossly overcounted.
• The first factor relative to over counting the virus’s effects is people who tested positive for the virus and who then passed away were classified as dying because they had the virus, not because they died of cancer, for example, and just happened to have the virus which had nothing to do with their cancer death.
• Somehow, this was the official Federal government way of counting as put forth by Dr. Deborah Brix in April.
• Dr. Brix was a critical member of Trump’s virus task force back at the beginning of all of this. 
• Thus, people who died for non-virus reasons were classified as virus deaths if they tested positive for the virus, i.e.they had the virus but the virus did not kill them.
• The second overcount factor was the reality that the CDC told doctors to issue death certificates that the virus was the cause of the death even if the cause of death is uncertain, i.e. the virus got credit in all cases where the cause of death was unknown.
• And the final factor, and this one should tick off every taxpayer, the government system for reimbursing hospitals for patient care relative to the virus gave more Medicare money to the hospital if the patient was classified as having the virus.
• Thus, the virus probably became an enhanced revenue source for hospitals once it was known that Medicare would pay more for treatment if the patient was classified as a coronavirus person even if they were not infected with the virus.
• Obviously, Medicare is funded with taxpayer money and Medicare was very generous with that money relative to reimbursing hospitals.

Thus, there is a very good case to be made that the number of deaths and the number of people who tested positive for the virus is highly inflated. Bad instructions from the Federal government on how and who to count, perverted financial incentives that made it attractive for hospitals to falsely classify non-virus patients as virus patients, bad lab testing and just plain bad, inept counting practices, the list goes on and on. 

All because of government and political incompetence and greed. There is a very good chance that we shut down the economy and threw millions of people onto the unemployment line because Washington, state houses, hospitals, and nursing homes did not know how to count or counted with other, personal motives and greed in mind. What a disaster for the country and those that suffered the brunt of possibly an unnecessary shutdown.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


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

April, 2020, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: A Senator Lies, A Mayor Hates, and A Congressman Is Useless In Time Of Crisis

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) Obviously, the country is going through some rough times caused by the Chinese coronavirus crisis. Initially, shortages of ventilators, masks, and other supplies were widespread across the country. But various efforts by various government and private sources have helped narrow if not close the supply shortages.

One of the major perceived shortages initially in the crisis was for breathing ventilators in New York city, a city that has been, by far, the worst hit region in the country, accounting for about a third of all cases and deaths. New York politicians realized early on that they probably did not have enough ventilators if things went really bad and asked the Federal government for help in getting more ventilators.

The request resulted in more ventilators being shipped to New York City to relieve the shortfall, many of these ventilators ended unneeded and in storage, and after the virus started to subside in NYC, New York politicians shipped 100 unused ventilators to New Jersey and another 150 unused ventilators to other states where they actually were needed. Bottom line, according to experts in the Trump organization, no one who caught the coronavirus did not have access to a ventilator if they needed one.

But this reality and timeline did not stop Washington Senator Tammy Duckworth from putting out a major falsehood about Trump and ventilators: “As he watches Americans die by the thousands, Trump remains incapable of showing empathy or leadership. He *could* have saved lives by sending more ventilators, but he didn’t. That’s true regardless of who Donald ‘I don’t take responsibility at all’ Trump tries to blame.”

Total tripe. If New York was in such dire needs for more ventilators then why did they ship 100 ventilators to New Jersey and another 150 to other states? Of course, Duckworth provided no proof to her lie, just blather to not only disparage Trump but adding nothing to the solution for the bigger problem.

Three people with knowledge of the situation proved that she was lying:

• During a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing this week, Adam Boehler, a former HHS official who is now CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and who has been tapped to help with the coronavirus response, said, “There’s been no American that has needed a ventilator that has not received one.”
• Even the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, stated that Duckworth was lying: “Have we saved everyone? No. But have we lost anyone because we didn’t have a bed, or we didn’t have a ventilator, or we didn’t have health care staff? No. People we lost are the people we couldn’t save.”
• White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that there was no evidence that there were any shortages of ventilators around the U.S. “We were reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York there are still ICU beds remaining and there’s still significant, over a thousand or 2,000 ventilators that have not been used yet.”

Never let the truth get in the way of Washington politicians playing politics.

2) In a sane and perfect world, politicians would actually be leaders, uniters, and not political and vengeful hacks. Unfortunately, we don't live in that kind of world. This reality was recently driven home by a hateful, vindictive politician out in California:

• William Kirby was the mayor of Auburn, California until recently.
• He is now out of a job after residents were appalled when he posted some very hateful messages about citizens on social media.
• On social media he compared Trump supporters to be like members of the racist Ku Klux Klan even though many of his constituents were Trump supporters.
• Rightfully so, he came under attack for being such a hateful, loathsome public official and ended up rightfully resigning his post as mayor.
• One of his most hateful posts is when he posted a photo of a hooded KKK member with the caption: “Good news for Trump supporters is that most of them already have masks."
• But his most hateful post went as follows: “If Hitler and everyone who supported him was removed from the face of the earth in 1939 the world would be a much better place. The same is more true of Trump and his supporters today.”
• This is a public official who is supposed to respect and protect the rights, lives, and property of all of his constituents, not wish about half of them to die.

Tough not to live in a hate filled country when many of those in public office are leading the hate brigade.

3) Let’s stay with hate for another incident:

• According to the Washington Examiner, Democrat Congressman Harley Rouda of California recently verbally attacked his Republican challenger.
• His challenger is Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steele.
• Roud’s words: “You can’t make this up: @MichelleSteelCA and her colleagues are standing in masks…refusing to create workplace safety provisions that would give masks to our brave essential workers. This isn’t leadership — it’s reserving the lifeboat for yourself.” 
• Apparently, Mr. Rouda did not understand the reality of the situation and just went off on a political falsehood since Steele had to set him straight: “No, @HarleyRouda What’s shameful is your continued efforts to politicize this pandemic. This is a picture of me accepting 2,000 face masks for the county’s emergency health workers.”

So, Steele is 1) doing her job and getting medical supplies to the workers she supports and 2) she is taking the necessary pandemic precautions as laid out by the CDC by wearing a mask during the pandemic.

And somehow Rouda had to politicize all of her behavior for cheap headlines under false pretenses. 

More despicable behavior and lack of leadership in a time of crisis. By the way Mr. Rouda, if you want to talk about leadership, how about you call your boss, Nancy Pelosi, and have you and her and the rest of Congress get off your vacations and back to Washington and actually do something productive?

A Senator lies, a mayor hates, and a Congressman looks for cheap publicity in the midst of a crisis, which he is doing nothing to help resolve while on vacation. The insanity and pettiness that dominates American politicians today.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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