April, 2015, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: Bad Congressional Parking Skills, Spending Money For Nohting, and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that has cropped up over the past 30 days or so. As regular readers of this blog know, political class insanity comes in many different forms including, but not limited to, the following craziness:

• Spending taxpayer wealth on idiotic programs and projects.
• Wasting taxpayer wealth on their own selfish financial and political needs.
• Implementing legislation to resolve problems that make the original problems worse or which created unintended bad consequences as a result of their legislation.
• Implementing legislation that supports their political donors and financial backers rather than the typical American citizen.
• Issuing idiotic and stupid comments.
• Overseeing government organizations that are incompetent, inefficient, ineffective, and wasteful of taxpayer wealth.

As always, it is highly likely we will identify new forms of insanity over the next few days as we review the past ineptness coming out of Washington and other bastions of American politicians.

1) Let’s start today with a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. According to various news reports including Howie Carr from the Boston Herald:

• The Edward Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate is about to open in his home state of Massachusetts.
• Carr specifically wrote that the Institute was supposed to be paid for with private funds and donations.
• But the political class in Washington decided that Federal government taxpayers across the country should chip in $38 million to help built the Institute which was also helped along with a $5 million contribution by the state of Massachusetts.
• Fortunately, when then Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts tried to stick the American taxpayer with another $28.9 million to subsidize the Institute his efforts failed.

Sad and pathetic and insane. I do not remember being asked if I wanted some of my tax money to be used to fund a grandiose tribute to a Senator that had so many scandals in his career in a state far away that I will likely never visit, never mind visiting the Institute.

And it is not as if this effort needed my tax dollars. First, I am sure the Kennedy clan could have financed the whole effort out of their checking accounts without taxpayer support. Second, at the grand opening, the Institute charged people $250,000 who wanted to be members of the “chairman’s circle” and charged thousands of dollars to attend the opening, the cheapest ticket of which was $2,500.

Just this single fund raising event gathered in a whopping $50 million for the endowment of the Institute. If there was justice in this world and people of integrity and dignity serving in Washington, part of that $50 million would be used to repay the $38 million that American taxpayers were held up for to fund the Institute. 

That $38 million could be refunded to the taxpayers or could be used to serve the ailing veterans that the Federal government under serves today, train the long term unemployed, treat the drug addicted in our society, train and deploy more teachers, etc. Instead, we are stuck with a $38 million expense to glorify a politician. Pathetic.

2) We are supposed to be government of the people, by the people, and for the people. However, very few would probably disagree that today we are government of the political donations, by the political donations and for the political donations. We still vote but more and more those that pay the political class and political machine in this country get the benefits.

Consider the case of Google, one of the biggest and richest companies in the world and how they work the political process, according to recent reporting by NewsMax:

• Google was the second largest donor to Obama’s political campaigns.
• Obama’s technology advisor is Megan Smith who used to be a Google executive.
• Google lobbyists have officially visited the White House 230 times despite the President’s promise that the role of lobbyists would be minimized in his administration.
• A major business rival of Google, Comcast, registered only 20 official White House visits by its lobbyists.
• Google employees gave the most money to Obama’s re-election campaign than any other set of employees except Microsoft’s.
• Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, was in Obama's Chicago campaign office on election day 2012 working on a voter turnout system for Obama’s campaign.

All of this is perfectly legal, if repugnant to those who think that crony capitalism trumps the needs of American citizens. But Google executives are not stupid people. What did the Obama administration do for Google over the past few years:

• Although the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had accused Google of abusive trade practices by burying the results for competitors' websites in search results, in 2012 the FTC ignored its own staff's recommendation of a lawsuit, and dropped its investigation.
• Google apparently also made out well on the recent FCC net neutrality rules even though Chairman Tom Wheeler opposed the "Title II" rules that benefit Google but he was overruled by the White House.
• The FCC also pulled out 15 pages from its net neutrality report that Google didn't like.
• Google recently announced that its page rankings in the future will be based on how “truthful” the site is. 

Two main problems here. First, as we have often said, political cronies pay out millions to government entities and politicians in order to get billions back in value, whether it is favorable legislation or favorable regulation. It is a deal that cannot be beat, financially, market wise, or personal wealth wise, get the American taxpayer to fund your needs via blackmailing politicians with political advice and money.

Second, even more troubling, is the last point above. Who is to decide what “truthful” is? Will an unbiased third party decide what truthful is or does truthful depend on who is holding political office? Given the whole crony capitalism cancer that exists in Washington today, unbiased does not stand a chance. If we are not careful, Google could become the new Pravda for the American political class.

3) Nothing says I am an American politician and I am above law than not caring what you do to other ordinary people. Consider the pathetic car parking job Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton recently did in Washington, a parking hatchet job that was caught on video. 

Not only does the Congresswoman leave her car in an idiotically parked position, she apparently has already struck the car properly parked next to her number of times and than has left the scene without notifying authorities or leaving a note. If you or I did that, we could be fined, arrested, and jailed for leaving the scene of an accident. Want to bet there were no repercussion from her behavior? And to think that this person votes on legislation that affects us all when she has no compassion or integrity for everyday life. Pathetic.

The parking job can be viewed at:

http://joeforamerica.com/2015/03/ttv-congressional-parking/#

4) Wasting money is often an art form for Washington. One common way to waste taxpayer money is to have a government entity purchase something and then never use it. Our most popular blog post ever described how the Navy had spent $300 million to build two ships almost to completion and then decided to junk them for $10 million while never using them.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent $40 million building a consulate building in the Afghanistan countryside and then abandoned it before ever using it when the found out it could not be defended in case of a Taliban attack. The TSA spent millions of dollars on airport security equipment that was never taken out of its packing material before it was stored in a warehouse, never to be used. 

According to Sarah Westwood, recently writing for the Washington Examiner, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) recently continued this horrid tradition of spending taxpayer wealth on things that are never used, this time with a costly twist. Days after one part of ATF had dumped $600,000 worth of aerial drones that it had never flown or used, another part of ATF spent another $15,000 on more aerial drones that have also remained grounded and unused.

Excuses for the dumping included:

• One of the drones had a battery that lasted just 20 minutes, making it "unsuitable for surveillance." 
• Another of the drones model, costing taxpayers $315,000, "was never operable due to multiple technical defects."
• A $90,000 drone was deemed "too difficult to use reliably in operations" after testing.
• ATF suspended its drone program and donated all six of its drones to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service free of charge in June 2014.

There are two obvious questions here:

1. Before purchasing the drones, shouldn’t someone at ATF have checked out the specs on these machines before wasting so much taxpayer money on a drone fleet that was so obviously doomed from the start?
2. And if the drones did not work according to the specs agreed to, shouldn’t ATF demanded and received their money back from the drone sellers for deceptive sales?

Most consumers would have taken these simple steps to guarantee they protected their money and wealth before finalizing major purchases like these. But obviously ATF did neither of these two steps to get taxpayer money back in return for non-performance.

The organization then repeated the same mistake when less than a week after the first drone fleet was given away, ATF's National Response Team bought five more drones for $15,000 "to help document fire and explosion crime scenes." But ATF officials told their inspector general that besides a single short flight in July 2014 to survey the aftermath of a Louisiana apartment fire, the rest of the drones were never used again after discovering they needed certifications to legally operate the drones. Maybe someone should have investigated this requirement problem BEFORE the new drones were purchased.

In an understatement, the inspector general said he was "troubled" by the contracting process that allowed ATF to spend more than half a million dollars on three different types of drones without realizing that none of them could be used for the intended purposes.

That will do it for now. Taxpayers paying for tributes to passed away politicians, Google spending a lot of time and money influencing policies rather focusing on the market needs of its customers, politicians who cannot even park a car or take responsibility for their errant driving skills, and spending money on purchases that are never used. Sounds about right for one day of political class insanity. More insanity 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

The Failed Presidency of Barack Obama, Part 7: Previously Identified 61 Examples of Failure

Over the past week or so we have been reviewing the many ways and perspectives on how the Obama Presidency has been an abject failure:

• We reviewed the many, many lies and deceptions of this administration and this President, from cutting the annual budget deficit in half to promising that you could keep your doctors under Obama Care to many others.
• We reviewed the many high ranking Obama administration officials that have illegally and immorally conducted government business, and likely government shenanigans, using personal, unofficial computers and email accounts, undermining the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and Obama's own promise to operate the most transparent administration ever
• We reviewed the many instances where this administration has either allowed government functions and departments to continue to overspend but under deliver or allowed them to get even worse than when he took office.
• We also reviewed some past posts that we had done previously that laid out numerous reasons and actions that should have already led to the impeachment of this Presidency, based on violations of existing law, judicial rulings, and the Constitution.

Despite all of these analyses across different aspect of being President, we are still nowhere close to being done. Over the next two days we will review some previous posts from January, 2014 where we laid out over 60 reasons why this Presidency is a failure.

While these are not necessarily grounds for impeachment, they certainly are grounds for failure, with many of these failures using Obama’s own words to show how far short his administration has fallen of being even somewhat effective. Afterwards, we will update that original list with many other examples of failure that have occurred since that early 2014 analysis.

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TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2014

Part 1: The First Twenty Failures of The Obama Administration That Are NOT Grounds For Impeachment and Removal From OfficeLet’s face it, the country is not in great shape these days. We have a government that cannot even develop a website despite spending well over $600 million to do so. We have a political class that is more concerned with their own welfare and perpetual reelection than the general welfare of Americans. We have a skyrocketing national debt that will burden Americans for generations to come. We have anemic economic growth. We have a President who claims he has no knowledge of the multitude of scandals erupting around him. Major safety nets such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are lunging towards insolvency. We have lost the war on drugs. The list seems endless some days.

In these desperate times, a person typically wants to find a culprit and make them accountable. The most obvious culprit is the leader of the country, President Obama. Unfortunately, there is a difference between incompetence vs. high crimes and misdemeanors that would allow the country to impeach and remove a sitting President from office.

Having stupid policies and programs, and mismanaging them to boot, is not grounds for removal from office. Maybe it should be, it would save the country a lot of suffering, but that is not allowed under our current legal system. The voting booth is supposed to be for that purpose. In order to remove someone from office, they must violate any of the tenets of the Constitution and Bill of Rights or existing laws under which they should have been operating.

We will try to make the distinction over the next few days. While many of us feel that the Obama administration has been the worse one in the history of our country, sinking even below the disaster that was the Carter administration, there are a load of failures that cannot be used for impeachment and removal from office. We will cover those failures and disasters in the next few days.

After we go through the myriad of reasons that can not be used for impeachment and removal from office, we will go through a still substantial list of reasons while President Obama should be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. Consider that list to be the list of charges that would be read at a potential lawbreaker’s arraignment. 

That list of charges would then go to a grand jury, i.e. the House of Representatives, where they would decide which charges, i.e. indictments, if any, would be brought forth. Those indictments would then be debated and voted on for conviction or non-conviction in the Senate. 

That is the process: arraignment based on likely criminal charges, grand jury-like action in the House to lock down substantial and provable violations of the law, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, leading to a formal indictment, and then onto the Senate for trial, based on the House indictments. 

But first, lets go through the many disasters and failures that cannot be put on the list of charges that are reviewed for indictments that are then part of a Senate impeachment proceeding. Keep in mind that you cannot remove a President from office:

• For having ineffective and/or stupid policies. 
• For being ineffective in executing his duties of office. 
• For being arrogant, narcissistic, and pompous.
• For waging class warfare and dividing the nation into voting blocs.
• For lying about his past or his promises.

That is the reason that the following failures are not grounds for impeachment and removal from office, they may be despicable, they may be embarrassing, they may be wasteful, they may be outright deceptions, but they are not grounds for removal under the Constitution.

[Note: associated with many of the failures listed we have attached notable quotes from the President and other reputable sources to show how far and how quickly his promises and assertions degenerated into lies, deceptions, and failures]

In no particular order, President Obama cannot be impeached and removed from office because…

1) He promised to quickly shut down the oppressive detention center at Guantanamo Bay shortly after being elected but failed to do. This has resulted in the American taxpayer paying out almost half a billion dollars a year to keep the detention facility up and running.

Relevant Obama quote: "We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years." 

2) He promised to cut the annual deficit in half but instead ran up record setting TRILLION dollar deficits for four years in a row.

Relevant Obama quote: “What my budget does is…by the middle of this decade our annual spending will match our annual revenues. We will not be adding more to the national debt.”

Relevant Obama quote: “When George Bush came into office, our debt—national debt—was around $5 trillion. It’s now over $10 trillion. We’ve almost doubled it… But actually I’m cutting more than I’m spending, so it will be a net spending cut.” 

3) He promised that if his economic stimulus program was not implemented, unemployment could go as high as 8%. The program was implemented and unemployment skyrocketed well beyond 8% and stayed there for a record number of consecutive months.

4) He promised that economic programs such as Cash For Clunkers would stimulate the economy but subsequent analysis has shown that all those programs did was waste billions of dollars for no economic benefit. The latest analysis by the Brookings Institute shows conclusively that Cash For Clunkers involved about 380,000 vehicles, none of which were incremental, economic stimulating sales, they were sales that would have happened anyway but without taxpayer support.

Relevant Obama quote: “Now, more American consumers will have the chance to purchase newer, more fuel efficient cars and the American economy will continue to get a much-needed boost."

5) He has abused and disrespected our armed forces’ veterans by allowing veterans’ benefits requests turnaround time to skyrocket to over a year, coldly and unnecessarily shutting down veteran memorials during the sequester, and legislation that reduces veterans’ benefits.

Relevant Obama quote: “When you take off the uniform, we will serve you as well as you've served us - because no one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they need when they come home.”

6) He has presided over economic polices that has seen about a 50% increase in the number of Americans that are receiving government food assistance, a total of about 47 million Americans.

7) He has presided over economic polices that have left well over 20 million Americans either unemployed or under employed.

Relevant Obama quote (Associated Press, July, 2013): "Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream." 

8) He has presided over economic policies that have resulted in large numbers of college graduates unable to land a job in their preferred profession, assuming they can find a job at all.

9) He presided over economic polices that have kept minority unemployment levels substantially higher than the overall unemployment rates in America.

10) He has presided over an $833 billion economic stimulus program that was so inefficient that it conservatively cost over $300,000 per job created or saved, an unsustainable and failed economic policy.

11) He has failed to rein in wasteful spending in the Medicare program which loses about $70-90 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

Relevant Obama quote: “It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.”

12) He has failed to rein in wasteful spending in the Medicaid program which loses about $30-40 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

13) He has failed to rein wasteful spending in the Social Security program which loses over $100 billion a year through waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

14) He has failed to eliminate the tens of billions of dollars lost every year via unemployment insurance, disability programs, food assistance programs, Obama phones, and government housing programs to waste, inefficiencies, and outright criminal fraud.

15) He has failed to operate an efficient IRS process, an organization which readily admits that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.

16) His health care reform legislation has proven to be nothing more than a Rube Goldberg-like insurance scheme that is causing millions of Americans to lose their current health care insurance coverage, to lose access to their preferred doctors, to spend much money more for both their insurance premiums and deductibles, is adding substantially to the national debt, is causing a doctor shortage as more and more doctors retire early to avoid the trauma and nonsense of the legislation, and never addressed the real root causes of escalating health care costs, dooming his approach to failure.

Relevant Obama quote: “And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

17) He has taken extravagant and expensive vacations around the world, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, while Americans sit by and watch as their chances for a good job and good future go unrealized.

18) He has played more golf and attended more campaign fund raisers than any other President, time that might have been better spent fixing the problems facing the country and its citizens.

19) He has done nothing to improve the scholastic performance of American kids who badly trail many other countries along all measurements of educational excellence and who spend far less per student than the Federal government and the Obama administration do.

20) Despite promising to operate the most transparent Presidential administration ever, he has decided that White House visitor logs will no longer be made public, breaking a long tradition of allowing Americans to know who is visiting the White House.

Relevant Obama quote: "For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city. Information will not be withheld just because I say so. It will be withheld because a separate authority believes it is well-grounded in the Constitution." 

These are the first 20 reasons that regardless of how bad the performance was, no matter how badly these actions did not resolve a national issue, no matter how much taxpayer wealth was wasted, none of these reasons probably is sufficient to become an indictable offense and impeachable offense.

And despite how bad and embarrassing and expensive these failures are, there are still more failures to come tomorrow.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2014

Part 2: The Next Twenty Failures Of The Obama Administration That Are NOT Grounds For Impeachment and Removal From Office

21) He has done nothing to develop and implement a long term and strategic energy policy for the country, instead wasting tens of billions of dollars given away to his political contacts’ and cronies’ failed alternative energy programs and shutting down the coal industry with no viable energy replacement source to fill the gap.

22) He presided over economic polices that have seen median U.S. household income decline for five years in a row.

Relevant Obama quote: “I'm a warrior for the middle class.”

23) He intruded into the auto industry bailouts that still resulted in the city of Detroit having to file for bankruptcy and for General Motors to probably never pay back the $9.7 billion still owed to the American taxpayer, contrary to the President’s reelection campaign themes.

24) His failed foreign policies have allowed North Korea to get five years closer to having substantial nuclear weapon and delivery capability.

25) His failed foreign policies have allowed Iran to get five years closer to having substantial nuclear weapon and delivery capability.

26) His failed foreign policies have caused a significant loss of prestige and honor relative to the U.S. in both our allies and enemies’ eyes. A loss compounded by the unfathomable spying on the governments and leaders of our allies.

27) He has presided over economic polices that have seen the average price of gas go up about 70% since the day he took office.

28) He has remained silent and allowed political allies to call his political opponents and ordinary citizens all types of slanderous and foul names despite his promise to unite the country. Those slurs include but are not limited to, a__h____s, terrorists, barbarians, Taliban, racists, Ku Klux Klan members, knuckle dragging Neanderthals, sluts, whores, among others.

Relevant Obama quote: “There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.”

Relevant Obama quote: “We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it's not just my way or the highway."

Relevant Obama quote: “It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

29) He has failed to improve the tense situation in the Middle East, specifically the ongoing conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians.

30) He had no plan and not a lot of interest in quickly resolving the Gulf Coast/BP oil spill, given the number of rounds of golf, the number of vacations and the number of political fund raisers he attended as the crisis was destroying nature and jobs along the Gulf coats.

31) He has no plan for fixing the mess that is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who together have already gobbled up almost $200 billion in taxpayer bailout dollars, and he has no plan for the latest government housing entity in need of an almost $2 billion taxpayer bailout, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

32) He promised to run the most transparent administration of all time and ended up running the most opaque and paranoid administration since at least the Nixon administration, implementing executive privilege too often, hiding witnesses called to testify in front of Congress, persecuting more government whistle blowers than all previous Presidential administrations combined, hunting down legitimate whistle blowers and dodging legal Freedom of Information Act requests.

Relevant Obama quote: "My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." 

Relevant Obama quote: "Often the best source about waste, fraud and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism . . . should be encouraged rather than stifled." 

33) He has failed to fix the massively expensive and stupid redundancy in the Federal government: 

• The Federal government has 15 different agencies overseeing food safety laws
• More than 20 independent Federal programs help the homeless
• 80 different Federal programs to help economic development
• 82 different government agencies work on improving teacher quality
• 47 different government agencies work on job training
• 18 different programs working on food and nutrition assistance

34) He takes all the credit but never the blame, placing blame on his failed policies and programs on everyone and everything from Bush to ATMs to the Japanese tsunami to Bush to the European fiscal crisis to Bush to Republicans to Bush, etc.

35) He has ignored the fighting going on Afghanistan and has not implemented a strategy that will withstand the withdrawal of Western troops in 2014, likely resulting in the Taliban taking over again and negating the blood and money the country has spent there over the past decade or so.

36) He has angered civilians all over the Arab world with his drone attacks on terrorist suspects that have ended up killing hundreds, if no thousands of civilians, including hundreds of innocent children. These drone attacks have not slowed down the growth of Al Qaeda and other terror groups while it has embittered civilian populations from Yemen to Pakistan.

Relevant Obama quote (from Pew research): "At the end of his first term, the level of confidence those nations [Middle Eastern countries‘ citizens] feel for Obama fell from 33% to 24%. When it comes to Obama’s policies, as opposed to his personality, the drop is even greater, falling from a high of 34% to a dismal low of 15%."

37) He has constantly reinforced his masculinity by staging dozens of photo ops with professional and college athletic teams but has had minimal photo ops with outstanding teachers, heroic soldiers, or other outstanding American citizens.

38) He embarrassed the country and his administration by not sending a high level representative to represent the country at Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral, just another in a long line of snubs against our allies around the world.

39) His failure to come up with a sane and compassionate drug program, continuing the long failing war on drugs, has lead to the continued enlargement and enrichment of foreign drug cartels who have now established themselves firmly throughout the country, peddling their drugs and getting richer.

40) His failure to live up to his campaign promise of not having high powered lobbyists in positions of power in his administration, a campaign promise that he promptly broke when he placed many high level lobbyists in his administration.

Relevant Obama quote (Anthony Holm): “More than forty former lobbyists work in senior positions in the Obama administration, including three cabinet secretaries and the CIA director.” 

Over the past two days we have come up with forty instances of Presidential neglect, corruption, lying, and wasteful spending, none of which are likely grounds for impeachment. They are only likely grounds for one of the worst Presidencies of all time. And the bad news: we are not done yet. We have another 21 despicable embarrassments from the Obama administration for you tomorrow, none of which are grounds for impeachment.

However, after that, we will lay out the actual grounds for impeachment and removal from office, where this President knowingly violated actual laws and the tenets of the Constitution.

*************************

The final twenty one reasons from last year will be listed 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

October, 2014, Part 7 Political Class Insanity: Rich But Ineffective Politicians, The Transparent Administration That Isn't, Hawaii Going Bankrupt and More

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time to check in with the American political class to see what insanity they have wrought over the past month or so. It is always amazing to follow the exploits, quotes, and actions of our politicians and the government entities they operate to see how often idiocy, incompetence, and heartbreak are almost always the output from their actions.

We started dong these updates several years ago, usually taking one or two days every month to get all of their insanity covered. Unfortunately, over time, the insanity has seemed to accelerate almost exponentially, causing us to now have to take six or seven posts each month to get it all in. This month will be no different. As our foreign policy implodes, the economy stagnates, and the midtem elections approach, the insanity levels are intensifying daily.

To check out past instances of political class insanity in this post, simply go to the first week of each month and check out the posts that begin, “Political class Insanity.” This is the seventh entry in this series for this month, with the first six posts appearing over the past few days.

For the latest insanity, read on:

1) Fiscal and economic insanity is not restricted to Washington. Many times we have discussed the financial abyss in front of states like California and cities like Chicago. We can now add the state of Hawaii to that list of poorly run state governments.

Senate Minority Leader Sam Slom recently warned his fellow Hawaiian lawmakers he has serious concerns about the state’s economic future because of the following financial numbers and realities:

• “Hawaii is set to go bust in 2016 unless the new governor and the state legislature make some serious cuts,” Slom said.
• Since he claims that Hawaii is already one of the highest taxing states in the union already, raising taxes even more will have the least desirable financial benefits to the state and its residents.
• He cites work done by the state Council on Revenues, an appointed Hawaiian entity that forecasts economic trends in Hawaii from which lawmakers create their budget, which predicts that the state will have $76 million less revenue than anticipated to work with in 2014 and $188 million less in 2015. 
• That is a $264 million deficit in just one two-year budget cycle.
• Even though the governor has told state government departments to cut their budgets by 10% over the next two years, those reductions, if they occur, will reduce government spending by only $14 million within the overall state budget of $6 billion.
• This will force the state to go into an emergency reserve budget to cover the shortfall, but which does not resolve the long term budget and spending crisis.

Looks like Detroit and Stockton, California and other government entities that have spent themselves into insolvency will soon have another member of their dubious club, the state of Hawaii.

2) In the recent past we discussed the good news that the state of California was moving to enact legislation that would limit the amount of spying law enforcement could do in California via drone operations. Their effort would have made it illegal to use drones to spy on California citizens without first showing probable cause and obtaining a search warrant from a judge. This is great news from a freedom and liberty perspective since it would have respected the privacy of innocent citizens while preserving all of our rights under the Fourth Amendment.

Good news accept for the fact that for some daft reason, Jerry brown, the governor of California, vetoed the bill, at least temporarily preserving the right of the government and law enforcement to spy on you in the state as it sees fit, without judicial oversight. He did this even though the legislation left plenty of flexibility for exceptions that don’t entail secret, uncontrolled drone use such as disaster assessment, traffic accidents, “hot pursuit” situations involving threats to public safety, and wildfire surveillance.

Many observers n this area reacted appropriately by criticizing the veto action: 

• Slate’s Margot E. Kaminski: “A warrant requirement does not prevent law enforcement from using drones, which are cheap and useful technology; it checks the scope of drone surveillance by involving legal standards and a judge. California’s drone bill is not draconian. It includes exceptions for emergency situations, search-and-rescue efforts, traffic first responders, and inspection of wildfires. It allows other public agencies to use drones for other purposes — just not law enforcement.”
• California Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, a Republican from Camarillo and the bill’s sponsor, said that Brown had sided with the wrong side in the area of electronic privacy law: “We’re increasingly living in a surveillance society as the government uses new technology to track and watch the activities of Americans. It’s disappointing that the governor decided to side with law enforcement in this case over the privacy interests of California.” 

Brown apparently is also in the minority vs. other governors according to Ars Technica. Ten other states already deny police the authority to conduct warrantless drone surveillance: Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin. Just when you think the political class will actually do something right, they screw it up again.

3) According to an article in the September 19, 2014 issue of The Week magazine by Carolyn O’Hara:

• For the first time ever, more than 50% of the members of Congress are millionaires.
• Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently left Congress, where he was earning about $175,000 a year, to take a job with a wall Street lobbying firm where he will make over $3 million a year.
• The Clintons are now worth far more than $100 million as a couple. Heck, their daughter is worth over $7 million.
• Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are millionaires.
• The President of the United States is a millionaire many times over.

Ask yourself this: do you really think that these millionaires, and a few instances have any idea what it is like living in America today and what the daily struggles are of feeding a family, educating a family, keeping a family safe, etc.? Do really think they have our best interests in place when economically and wealth wise they are so far different than us? 

I think not but that is just me ….and the fact that over the past five decades these wealthy and getting wealthier Washington types of been unable or unwilling to resolve a single major issue facing this country.

4) One of the biggest lies and deceptions of the Obama administration was that it was going to be the most “transparent’ Presidential administration of all time. Well, it did not take long for that promise to go poof in so man ways:

• Freedom of Information Act requests were routinely ignored, partially filled, illegally delayed beyond the time frames prescribed by law, or redacted so much as to be useless.
• The administration tried to illegally charge those who submitted Freedom of Information Act requests in order to have their request fulfilled, often at exorbitant rates.
• Journalists were tailed, bugged, or had their computers hacked.
• Administration members failed to produce documents requested by Congress, either by ignoring them or claiming executive privilege, such as in the Fast and Furious Congressional investigation.
• The administration oversaw the intentional destruction of documents, hard drives, back up copies, etc. in order to avoid fulfilling Congressional investigation request, such as in the IRS targeting of innocent Americans and EPA actions.

As you can see, this insanity shows that the Obama administration could not be any further away from being a “transparent’ administration. This reality was recently succinctly and easily summarized by recent writing by the Associated Press’ Washington bureau chief, Sally Buzzbee, who became the latest journalist to criticize the Obama administration for failing to live up to its promise of transparency” “Bush was not fantastic. The [Obama] administration is significantly worse than previous administrations.”

To prove her point, Buzbee described eight ways the Obama administration is restricting access to information at a recent joint meeting of the American Society of News Editors, the Associated Press Media Editors and the Associated Press Photo Managers, as recently outlined in a Heritage Foundation summary:

A) Journalists Can’t See the Fight Against Islamic Militants: Buzbee contends Americans are being kept in the dark about recent military action, noting that journalists aren’t allowed to take photos or record video of bombers when they take off. This is unlike the Bush administration which embedded journalists right with our fighting forces.

B) Journalists Often Are Barred From Obama’s Meetings With World Leaders: Buzbee says previous administrations advocated for journalists to be present during the president’s meetings with world leaders when he is abroad. This change, she says, sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.

C) Access to Upcoming 9/11 Trial Is Restricted: Journalists do not have access to court filings in real time, Buzbee says, and even access to nonclassified information about the trial has been blocked or delayed.

D) Coverage of Guantanamo Is ‘Virtually Nonexistent’: Information normally released by the previous administration is now nearly impossible to come by. “The military won’t release the number of prisoners on hunger strike or the number of assaults on guards,” Buzbee says.

E) Sources Are Being Intimidated: Sources have told Associated Press reporters they could be fired for talking to the media. Buzbee called the intimidation tactics “chilling,” adding: “Government press officials say their orders are to squelch anything controversial or that makes the administration look bad.”

F) The Freedom of Information Act Is ‘Under Siege’: FOIA requests have become so expensive and delayed that many organizations are forced to sue federal agencies to get a response at all.

G) The White House Uses FOIA Requests to Monitor What News Organizations Will Cover: Political appointees use FOIA requests as a “tip service” to gain insight into upcoming stories, Buzbee says. At the agency overseeing Obamacare, political appointees have been put in charge of FOIA requests.

H) State and Local Governments Release Less Information: The Obama administration has tried to dictate to state and local governments what they can and cannot reveal, particularly when it comes to surveillance programs.

Another promise, an other lie, another hit to freedom and liberty from a seasoned journalist.

5) And finally for today, what or who do we really think has a chance it eliminating all of the insanity we have been discussing over the past week or so and actually put the country on the right track? If you believe the results of a Gallup poll from this past July, that is a very difficult challenge for the country. According to the poll results, only 30% of those surveyed had any confidence in the Supreme Court, only 29% had confidence in the Presidency, and a dismal 7% had any confidence in Congress. 

All the more reason to impose term limits on all Washington politicians and court appointees. If we got rid of everyone in Washington in all three branches of government, how much worse could it get than these Gallup results? You can help move that effort along at the following site:

www.howmuchworsecoudlitget.com

To do anything else or to live with the status quo is a true definition of insanity.

Seven days into this political class insanity view and we are still not done, more idiocy and such 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

Will The Center Hold, Part 1: Americans and States Fight Back Against An Overreaching Federal Government

I am 60 years old. I have seen the debacle and divisions in the country caused by the Vietnam war and the resultant anti-war violence and activities during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. I lived through the lifeless and ineffective Carter administration. Since Reagan, I have seen numerous and useless U.S. military invasions and economic hardships that have tried the country’s patience.

However, throughout the needless wars, the protests, the economic downturns, the lackluster, corrupt, and criminal leadership in Washington, I do not recall us ever being so close to a severe Constitutional crisis. This crisis threatens to substantially divide the country along the lines of state rights and individual freedom vs. overreaching Federal government power, an overreach that often and lately has crossed over the line of Constitutionality.

A number of factors are contributing to this fissure between the people and their state governments on one side versus the political class in Washington on the other side:

1. Washington has tried to dictate to the states how a national health care program is to be run even though about two thirds of the states have opted out of the national program by not establishing their own state health care exchanges as stipulated by Osama Care’s tenets.
2. Washington, via Obama Care, has violated the First Amendment’s freedom of religion protection.
3. Washington has spied on every American and continues to do so, causing some states to rise up against this violation of the Fourth Amendment.
4. Washington has tried to squash Second Amendment rights with a blitz of actual and proposed gun control laws and edicts that do not sit well with many states and with a vast number of citizens.
5. Washington is trying to force every state, every school, and every citizen to adhere to a national Federal government mandated education curriculum called Common Core even though it has proven to be deficient in actually improving the education attainment in this country and has little flexibility regarding different needs of different students and states.

Washington is trying to force its control into states' areas of responsibility, as laid out in the Constitution, and into the states’ citizens’ lives. This is resulting in the following unique, severe, and aggressive actions being taken up by those states to protect their Constitutional rights and the rights and privacy of their citizens, a push back I have never seen in my lifetime:

1) The Education Action Group reported on January 29, 2014 that a Colorado state senator, Vick Marble, has introduced legislation that would push back the implementation of Washington’s Common Core education programs for one year. The purpose of the delay is create time so that a state task force would be able to study implementation of the Colorado academic standards, including the Common Core. The state task force would report its findings and make recommendations to state lawmakers and the Colorado State Board of Education by December, 2015.

Marble’s bill would also identify an outside group “to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of implementing the new standards and new tests.” What was Marble‘s reasoning behind creating the delay: “The bill is intended to give Colorado the time it needs to explore Common Core in all aspects instead of handing over our children to an experimental education program with no proven track record of success.”

Additionally, a member of the house of representatives in the state government is introducing similar legislation. Whether either effort gets anywhere remains to be seen but at least some people and citizens in Colorado are saying “slow down” before they blindly accept a program forced upon them by the Federal government.

2) In late January, Oklahoma state government Representative Mike Ritze introduced state legislation that would be similar to that of South Carolina's Obama Care’s “nullify” legislation. Both states’ legislation would essentially gut the Affordable Care Act in their state.

Ritze’s bill, HB2421, states that:

• "An agency, officer, or employee of the state [Oklahoma] shall not…engage in an activity that aids any person in the enforcement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. [I.e. Obama Care]" 
• The legislation bars Oklahoma from setting up a state-run Obama Care health insurance exchange to support Obama Care.
• It prohibits the purchase of insurance from an exchange set up by a non-profit. 
• It also blocks any state agency or personnel from conducting involuntary home inspections as provided for in the Obama Care legislation.

This attempt to “nullify” this Federal law is being done under the auspices of the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution:

The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, and not prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The purpose of this amendment was to do prevent exactly what the Federal government and the Obama administration are doing now in so many ways, intruding into the rights and lives of states and citizens. This is Oklahoma’s way of pushing back along Constitutional lines and openly defying a national law passed in Washington.

What is interesting is that Oklahoma is not a solitary “renegade” state. News sources identify other states including South Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, and Georgia having also put forth their own efforts to nullify Obama Care.

Which raises an interesting question: what if the Federal government enacted a law and no one, state governments and citizens alike, ignored it? Or nullified it? 

3) News reports out of South Carolina in late January, 2014 reported on another worthy state effort to protect its citizens and Constitutional rights. It is no secret that the Obama administration has shredded the Fourth Amendment rights and privacy rights of every U.S. citizen by blatantly collecting and storing information on every conceivable electronic communication that every American creates.

These collection and storage processes are done without probable cause and without a properly obtained warrant from a proper court of law. It is a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment no matter how viewed. Saying this massive data collection is needed for national security is a farce, the data and information collected is far more likely to be used for political gain and revenge.

Which brings us to another uncharted frontier regarding invasion of our privacy. The U.S. has been a major user of unmanned drone aircraft around the war, using them extensively to bomb suspected terrorist havens around the world. Which has given rise to an new fear and threat to the Fourth Amendment: what if this same government decides to deploy drones to spy on Americans?

Well, in another attempt to nullify Federal interference in our lives, the South Carolina state senate late last month began considering a bill to virtually ban the use of drones without a warrant in its airspace. A similar proposal (HR3514) recently passed the South Carolina state house unanimously, with a vote of 100-0.

Details behind this worthwhile effort includes the following:

• House bill 3514 (H3514) would prohibit the operation of drones by any government agency unless it is “pursuant to a criminal warrant issued by a court of competent jurisdiction.”
• Although all of the sponsors of the legislation were Republicans, the unanimous support shows a strong bipartisan effort to block the Obama administration’s drone program. The The ACLU has weighed in on this domestic drone issue on a national level as well, warning that “unregulated drone use could pose serious threats to our privacy.”
• The South Carolina legislation does include some narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement to reduce the trepidations of state law enforcement entities who want to be able to act in emergency situations when a drone’s use might mean the difference between life or death.
• Even so, the bill still retains strict standards governing the use of a drone when authorized. 
• For one thing, the law would ban any sort of weapon from ever being mounted on a drone in South Carolina.
• Once a drone was used, law enforcement would have to keep records on the results of their surveillance. 
• Other sections of the bill would prevent law enforcement from retaining any drone-obtained personal information not relevant to a criminal investigation. 
• Amanda Bowers of Tenth Amendment Center was quoted in news articles stating that South Carolina could join a growing number of states putting strict limited on drone usage within their state borders: “Already, a number of states have passed similar bills into law, and we are expecting more in the coming weeks and months. From California to Washington State, and from New York to Missouri, legislators and the general public from left to right want to see a dangerous future stopped before it happens.”
• Similar laws apparently were signed into law in 2013 in Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Interesting, dynamic stuff. States and citizens telling the overreaching Federal government to pound sand when it comes to dictating education standards, dictating health care standards and operations, and potentially violating the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens with the new technology of drones. All seemingly legal and above board according to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

One has to wonder if Common Core had been a decent program, if Obama Care actually had a chance to work (it doesn't), and if the Federal government was not already grossly violating the Fourth Amendment and privacy rights of citizens if the state governments and leadership would have done anything as drastic as to invoke its Tenth Amendment rights.

Given that such action has not occurred to my knowledge over the past 60 years, I have to conclude that Common Core, Obama Care, and drone intrusions are really as bad as these states think they are.

Which gets us back to the basic question we proposed above: what if the Federal government enacted a law and everyone, state governments and citizens alike, ignored it? Do the ties that bind us together as one nation, as dictated by the Constitution, become the loosened and if so, to what degree? More on the rebellion 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

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