June, 2023, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: DC Homicides, California Politicians Steal Parental Rights, and The Rich In Norway Move To Low Tax Switzerland

  Every month we devote posts to just general political class insanity that is running rampant through the country. The members of the American political class continue to show that they are incapable of operating any level of government in this country. 

Even their best efforts are almost always inefficient and ineffective at resolving any problem facing Americans. They spend a great amount of time not trying to improve the lives of their citizens but continually ensuring their reelection and enriching themselves, their families, and their friends in the process, all at taxpayer expense.

Lately it seems like the insanity is getting more frequent and more intense as politicians continue to fail us all. Let’s look at just for of the latest examples of political class insanity:

1)We have often  talked about the shooting gallery that is the city of Chicago, where dozens of people are shot every week in an endless stream of violence. And the local political class has no idea how to stop the crime, stop the violence, and stop the homicides.

But Chicago is not the only major U.S. city, almost all of which are run by liberals and Democrats, with a violence problem and which has a local political class which has no idea how to stop it:

• Washington D.C. recently hosted its 100th homicide of the year, less than half way through the year.

• It has been 20 years since this many murders happened this quickly in the District.

• According to a D.C. police press release: “In 2022, the 100th homicide was recorded on June 24. In 2021, the date was July 10. Over the past 10 years, the average date that we have reached this grim marker is October 25.”

• According to Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton: “This increase in crime is due to D.C. Council’s implementation of misguided ‘police reform’ legislation. The Council’s actions have had a chilling effect on professional and responsible policing and caused over 1,200 police officers to leave the agency.”

• And yet in light of this violence, the D.C. town council actually put forth legislation to weaken criminal penalties for carjacking and homicide, indicating that they still do not have a clue to what is going on and how they are endangering their citizens’ lives.

• Fortunately, Congress overruled and struck down the legislation, something they have the power to do.

• All  of which has resulted in police resignations, which are outpacing  retirements, and recruiting new police officers has been very very difficult.

• The fact that the U.S. District Attorney for D.C. declined to prosecute 67% of the people arrested by police in the District may account for the police staffing crisis: why bother arresting perps when the chances they will be prosecuted is so low?

As we have said so many times before, a basic, basic function of any government entity is to protect the lives and property of the people they govern. No matter how well they execute other functions, if they cannot protect their citizens they are failures as political leaders. And much like Chicago, the politicians in D.C. continue to be abject failures.

2)We have often discussed and have been tracking the migration patterns of residents and businesses in the country. It has become quite obvious, and is becoming more and more obvious every day, that people are leaving high tax, high crime, and low quality of life cities and states and heading towards other areas of the country where they enjoy much more freedom to live their lives they way the want: lower taxation, lower government regulations, lower crime, etc.

The cities that are losing residents and business at an ever increasing rate include Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and a few others. Their home states,  including California, New York. Illinois, and New Jersey, are in the same boat. This out migration causes the city and state tax bases to  shrink which results in lower tax revenue for the government which raises tax rates to make up the difference which causes more residents and businesses to leave and the financial death spiral is in place.

And this situation is not helped when a member of the local  political class actually comes out and encourages citizens to flee their state, given the oppression and idiocy they see happening:

• A California politician who is a senator in the state legislature is actually encouraging Californians to “flee” the state based on recent legislation that was passed by the state government.

• The legislation would hold parents guilty of child abuse if they did not “affirm” their kid’s personal gender identity.

• In other words, politicians in the state now feel they have the power to dictate to parents how to raise their kids.

• Senator Scott Wilk issued the warning relative to Assembly Bill 957 which says “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.”

• In other words, child abuse now includes a parent not supporting a kid’s gender preference, and not doing so would be a violation of a kid’s health, safety, and welfare.

• This issue could also help sway custody rights in a divorce if one parent decides to affirm their child’s gender preference while the other does not, a dangerous criteria for determining the best interests of a child.

• According to Wilk: “In the past, when we’ve had these discussions, and I’ve seen parental rights atrophy, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting. I’ve changed my mind on that — if you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee.”

• Amd Wilk plans to take his own advice: “I love this state. I’m not going to stay in this state because it’s just too oppressive. I believe in freedom, and so I’m going to move to America when I leave the legislature.”

As we have always said, people naturally want to be free. Free to keep their hard earned wages, free of government regulation and now we can include the matter of being free from the government and its politicians dictating the gender of our kids. This so smacks of 1984 and the Communist Manifesto, two instances where the government overrules parental rights. Insanity.

3) Apparently it is not just sensible Americans that are moving out of high priced, high taxed government entities to places where they are free to keep their hard earned wages. Consider what the idiots in the Norwegian political class have done to their citizens from an over taxation perspective:

• Apparently Norwegians who earn over the equivalent of $135,000 a year are classified as “rich” by the government.

• Thus, they not only incur high income tax rates on their current year income but they are also assessed another tax, a wealth tax, of .85% on top of that current year income tax rate.

• For example, if a “rich” Norwegian has a net worth of say $1 million, they would pay an  additional tax of $8,500 on that wealth they have accumulated.

• That is bad enough but the Norwegian political class is going to hike that wealth tax to 1.1% later this year.

• And citizens that earn over $1.8 million are assessed an additional wealth tax of 1.3%.

• Not unexpectedly, the rich Norwegians really do not like such heavy taxation.

• According to news reports, 30 of the wealthiest Norwegians have simply packed up and fled the country to places where they will get to keep a much higher percentage of not only their income but also their accumulated wealth.

• These 30 total more than  the number of rich folk who have left the country in total over the past 13 years.

• Thus, it appears the Norwegian government will end up with LESS tax revenue despite the higher tax rates since they now have a smaller tax base of rich people to lean on.

• Most of the wealthy leaving Norway are settling in low tax Switzerland.

• Norway’s richest man, Kjell Inge Røkke, recently moved to Lugano, Italy to escape his home country’s wealth tax increases. 

• As a result, Norway lost $16 million in taxes a year just from him: “This was not what I wanted, but the toughened and increased tax rules of the current government means that I, as the founder and responsible owner, have no choice.”

People just want to be free, whether it is here in  the U.S. or in Norway. A few years ago the state government in Maryland decided to further stick it to their citizens that were earning over a million dollars a year via a higher state income tax rates. Within a few short years they were getting less tax revenue from the state’s millionaires even  though they were assessing those millionaires at a higher tax rate. Many of the state's millionaires just moved to a lower taxed state, Maryland’s higher tax rates be damned.

In California, a state that we believe is one of the most likely states to go bankrupt first, an amazing 1% of the population accounts for a whopping 50% of the state’s income tax stream, making the state government very vulnerable to out-migration of the wealthiest state residents. And that is exactly what is happening as businesses and residents leave the state for more freedom with a strong migration out of Hollywood leading the way to less taxed environments (e.g. Mark Wahlberg, Scott Baio, Matthew McConaughey, Rob Schneider, etc.). 

In almost all cases, the government does not have an under taxation problem, they always seem to have an overspending problem. And rather than fix their overspending problem, they continue to raise taxes which continues to erode their tax base which continues to reduce their revenue stream and eventually their financial house of cards collapses into bankruptcy.

That is enough insanity for today: high taxation rates make people move, whether in California or Norway, California politicians seize control of parents rights, and another liberal city and its politicians continue to fail at protecting their citizens’ lives.

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/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

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

 

August, 2019, Part 5, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Payer Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives. 
• Americans smoke too much. 
• Americans do not exercise enough. 
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform. 
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down. 
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control. 
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives. 
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases. 

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

Two posts ago we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly. 

In our previous two posts, we showed the numbers and realities around the world of how single payer healthcare systems always fail to provide effective and efficient health care to its citizens. Despite these realities, many Democratic candidates for President want to implement a failed system like this in this country. Today we will continue that discussion of failed single payer healthcare systems from other countries, further proof that this approach to healthcare is a bad, bad idea.

We continue that discussion today, the failures of the single payer healthcare model:

1) Again, let’s start up Canada , today with an example of how bad wait times are in that country under their single payer healthcare system, as described in a Reason magazine article:

• Joy Hataley, a doctor up in Ontario, Canada, recently had to refer a patient to a neurologist at Kingston General Hospital.
• Obviously a referral to a neurologist likely represents a potentially grave and dangerous situation. 
• When the patient went to make the appointment on the doctor’s referral he was told it would be four and half YEARS before he could even get an appointment, never mind whatever treatment might be necessary. 
• The doctor was told that if this inane four and a half year waiting period was not acceptable the hospital would try to get their patient in to see a neurologist in another city altogether. 
• But if the wait time was four and half years Kingston General Hospital, what are the odds that the wait time in a different city would be much shorter? 

Single payer systems always result in the rationing and the delaying of receiving medical attention. If someone needs to see a neurologist, it is doubtful that a four and a half year wait is an acceptable time frame to wait from a life and death perspective. The more government intervenes in the healthcare industry, be it Obama Care or a single payer system, the worse the health care that will be provided becomes.

2) People like Bernie Sanders who advocate for a single payer system like to point to Nordic countries who Sanders claims has found the single payer health care model to be the best thing ever. However, people in Finland might have a problem with this false assertion:

• The Washington Free Beacon recently reported: The government of Finland collapsed Friday “due to the rising cost of universal health care and the prime minister’s failure to enact reforms to the system.”
• This caused Prime Minister Juha Sipila and his entire cabinet to resign after his governing coalition could pass the necessary laws to reform the government’s single payer health care system.Much like the U.S., Finland has an aging population with 26% of its citizens expected to be over the age of 65 by 2030.An aging population almost always means higher and higher healthcare costs. 
• To head off financial disaster, Finland has tried to cut costs and boost health care efficiency for years but has been unsuccessful in doing so, resulting in more and more financial distress for the government. 
• And according to Reuters, Finland is not alone in this crisis: “Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.” 
• Other Nordic countries with single payer systems such as Sweden and Norway are facing similar health care financial stress. 

Nasty stuff, people getting older and their government likely not going to be able to fulfill its commitment of health care. And yet, liberals and Democrats in Washington continue to champion a losing approach to healthcare with a recent tweet by Bernie Sanders showing just how ignorant he is of reality and finance: “In the United States it costs on average $12,000 to have a baby. In Finland it costs $60.”

So Sanders thinks that for $60 you can give birth to a baby in Finland and that $60 will cover hospital, doctor, nurse, and medicine costs for the birth. It does not cost $60, Bernie. It costs much more, it is just that the couple having the baby pay less while the rest of Finland society and taxpayers pay much more than $60.

Are you that ignorant of finance or are you just a flat out liar? In either case, single payer systems are not efficient, effective, or healthy for sick citizens. Obama Care proved that and the Scandinavian countries, along with England and Canada, prove that every day.

That will do it for today’s single payer failure review: single payer failures in places where it was promised not to fail such as Finland and Sweden and another example where vital healthcare treatment is delayed for years, not days, under the Canadian single payer system. More failures to come.

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

April, 2016, Part 3, By The Numbers: Obama's Expensive Vacations, Hillary's Lies About Guns, Bernie's Lies About Denmark, and More

On a periodic basis we do some posts that fall under the theme of “by the numbers.” Rather than trust what the American political tells us about reality, we like to examine the real numbers and the real reality in the world to understand what is actually going on. Relying on politicians, and their cohorts in the media, to tell us what is reality is always a sucker bet. They have their own agendas and goals, usually centering around their needs and self-enrichment. So we need to look at the reality of the numbers to determine what is really going on.

Previous analyses of “by the numbers” can be accessed by entering the phrase in the search box above. This is the third and final post this month where we look at the numbers to truly find out how good, not likely, or bad, most likely, the American political class is doing in managing our tax dollars, protecting our freedoms, and resolving major issues that affect all of us. 

1) As Americans file their income taxes this week, consider what a good chunk of those taxes are being used for. According to dogged Freedom of Information Act action by the Judicial Watch organization, they have finally gotten some of the missing information they had been requesting for a long time from the Federal government, namely how much did the 2013-2014 Obama family Hawaiian Christmas vacation cost the American taxpayer. According to Judicial Watch: “This week we received expense records from the Department of Homeland Security revealing that Secret Service expenses for the Obama family vacation to Honolulu during December 2013-January 2014 cost taxpayers at least $316,698.03. These new expense records bring the total for the Hawaii Christmas vacation trip to $8,098,060.33.”

Yes, over $8 million for ONE Obama vacation. How did you do with your bottom line tax bill this year? I bet you are not taking an $8 million vacation anytime soon.

2) Any rational human being wishes there were no nuclear weapons in the world. However, if there are going to be nuclear weapons, it is best that the U.S. have a large enough nuclear arsenal to deter any other nuclear weapons possessor from doing anything with theirs. Given all of this, consider the following nuclear weapons numbers that are occurring today, as reported by Stan Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon:

• The State Department recently announced that while Russia was adding 153 nuclear warheads to its nuclear arsenal in the past year, the U.S. was cutting its arsenal by 57 warheads.
• In addition, the Defense Department recently stated that Russia is doubling the number of strategic nuclear warheads it has and is still over the 1,550 warhead limit that was established by the START treaty in 2010.
• Many of Russia’s new nuclear weapons are modern, multiple-warhead road mobile missiles and submarine launched ballistic missiles.
• By treaty, both the U.S.and Russia are supposed to get their arsenal down to no more than 1,550 warheads by February, 2018.
• Russia now has 198 MORE nuclear warheads than when it signed off on the latest START nuclear reduction treaty, i.e., they are going in the wrong direction.
• Experts in this field are expecting Russia to not fulfill its promise to get down to 1,550 nuclear warheads by 2018, with Russian government press reports already estimating that country’s long term warhead levels to be around 2,100, 40% higher than the what the treaty allows, and a U.S. think tank believes the results will be even worse, with deployed Russian nuclear warheads topping out at around 2,500 by 2015, a whopping 67% higher than allowed by the treaty.

Given the total lack of respect that Putin seems to have for Obama and the ratcheting up of the number of Russian nuclear warhead totals, the numbers would tend to support the hypothesis that the START treaty’s targets are pretty worthless at this point in time and going forward.

3) Hillary Clinton recently renewed her hatred for the Second Amendment by calling American gun owners terrorists. I will not go into an in-depth discussion of how wrong she is about the Second Amendment and how it keeps Americans safer from all types of dangers in life, but I would like to do point out to her that gun owners in this country do not burn others alive like real terrorists do, they do not behead people like real terrorists do, they do not enslave women and young girls like real terrorists do, they do not throw gay men and women off high buildings like real terrorists do, they do not commit suicide bombings amongst innocent people like real terrorists do. 

But this post is about the numbers, let’s leave the above reasons of her idiocy on the Second Amendment and look at the numbers in the following two charts from the Heritage Foundation, numbers which prove that increasing gun ownership is strongly correlated with decreasing violent crime (double click on the graphs for a larger view):


No matter how hard Clinton and her types try, the numbers in these charts prove that you cannot say that increasing gun ownership increases violent crime, the numbers do not lie. 4) Bernie Sanders wants the U.S. to be more like countries like Denmark. The illusion and myth is that these countries have people that get a lot of free stuff and could not be more happy. The fact that these citizens in countries like Denmark pay very, very high income taxes (at least 40%), that there is a value added/sales tax of 25% on EVERY item purchased, and that the cost of gasoline and cars are much, much higher than in the U.S. seems to get lost on people like Bernie. Still, Bernie and his types want to claim that people living in Denmark have a better economic deal.Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has put together a set of numbers to test Bernie’s theory. He compared the cost of living in every U.S. state with a whole range of countries including those like Denmark. He put together a method to compare a nation’s GDP per person across the world and states based on publicly available data including the World Bank (double click on table for larger view):



A couple of obvious conclusions jump out:

• If we were like Denmark, our economic worth per citizen would be about 20%, $44,916 vs. $54,629, less than it is today and would make our average economic worth comparable to New Mexico.
• New Mexico GDP per person is about 40% less than the high levels of income in North Dakota and Alaska.
• This would make us worse off than 38 states in this country.

Not quite the economic dream world people like Bernie lead us to believe.5) Let’s continue with another set of numbers that follow up with previous point, namely that life is pretty good, economically in this country. These numbers come from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They show the “average individual consumption” for countries across the world.  The numbers are indexed with the average country having a value of 100. An index value greater than 100 means that the country’s economic well being is better than the world’s average. An index value less than 100 means that the country’s economic well being is worse than the world’s average:

The numbers show the following realities:

• The wealth position of those living in the United States is 47% better than the world average.
• The wealth position of those living in the United States is about 40% better than those living in Bernie’s Denmark.
• The wealth position of those living in the United States is about 20% better than the second and third most prosperous countries, Luxembourg and Norway.

Bottom line from the two sets of numbers: life is pretty good in the United States from an economic numbers perspective ...despite those like Bernie, the numbers do not lie.That will do it for this month’s numbers review. As usual, the numbers are not good despite what our politicians try to tell us. What did today’s numbers tell us:

• The Obama’s like to spend our tax money on very expensive family vacations.
• Russia is getting stronger and stronger from a nuclear weapons perspective.
• Hillary Clinton lied about gun owners being terrorists and causing violent crime to increase.
• Economically speaking, life in the U.S. is much better than anywhere else in the world. 

The numbers do not lie.

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 3: Rubber Duck Races In Wisconsin, Ambassadorships For Sale, The Would-Be Terrorist Nun, and More

This is our third post in this month’s series of political class insanity. Every month we review the latest lunacy, idiocy, disrespect, and wasteful spending of the American political class in all facets of their incompetence. Unfortunately, their level of incompetence seems to be getting worse as it takes longer and longer each month to cover how damaging they are to our wealth and our freedom.

Let’s see what insanity we uncovered today:

1) Tax time is approaching so it was timely to read some words from Sandra Block of Dailyfinance.com that appeared in the January 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. According to her research, in 2013 the IRS was able to only answer 61% of calls from taxpayers. This appears to be just picking up the telephone, where they failed 39% of the time. Ut does not include the number of times they answered the phone and gave out the wrong information.

Additionally, the average wait time for a call that was actually answered by the IRS was a disgraceful 18 minutes. And this is the same government agency that is supposed to be the hub in implementing the 2,000 plus page Obama Care legislation. If the IRS cannot do the job they were originally set up to do and have been doing poorly for decades, it is highly unlikely they will do any better handling the Obama Care complexities and bureaucracy.

2) Former U.S. Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from Congress in 1995 after being convicted of statutory rape, something that you really do not want a standing U.S. Congressman to be convicted of. While serving in prison for that conviction, he was also convicted of bank fraud. Yes, that is correct, WHILE IN PRISON he was convicted of a serious financial crime.

Recently, he was back in the news when he was arrested in Zimbabwe on pornography charges for allegedly taking lewd photos and videos of models and prostitutes. Again, this was a U.S. Congressman at one time, which is insane in itself. Even worse, though, despite the conviction on rape and the conviction on bank fraud, a political peer, Bill Clinton, took care of him by commuting his original prison sentence in 2001.

How many ordinary Americans do you think Clinton would have pardoned if they had been convicted of both statutory rape and bank fraud? I would bet none since they are not part of the political class inner sanctum where insanity and felony convictions are inconveniences more than anything.

3) One of the major budget items in the Federal government across many Federal departments is to protect the country from terrorists. I do not now the exact numbers but I would venture a guess that annually we allow the Federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect us from attack.

For those hundreds of billions of dollars you would expect us to have the absolute best terrorism and security protection in the world, in the history of the world. That would probably be a gross inaccurate assumption, however, based on an article that appeared in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine:

• According to the article, an 84 year old nun was recently convicted for breaking into one of the supposedly “most secure” nuclear facilities in the country.
• Note, that I did not say “tried to break in,” she actually made it inside the facility.
• Once inside, she threw around human blood in protest of nuclear technology besides hanging banners and spray painting peace signs.
• She was one of three people who got in after cutting through a chain link fence around the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
• Not only did they get through the fence, they actually got inside the uranium processing and storage facility.
• Although she was sentenced to 35 months in jail, she pleaded with the judge to put her away for life to honor her protest and principles.

So let me get this right. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to protect ourselves, our families and our country from terrorist attacks and an 84 year old nun with two accomplices, one 64 years old and one 58 years old, can cut a chain link fence and get close to the uranium in a government facility. Does not seem like we are getting good value for our money in this government area.

The really terrifying thought is if an 84 nun can do this, imagine what a determined terrorist or terrorists could do inside a domestic nuclear facility, who did not want to just hang banners or spray paint some walls. That is the true insanity of what a farce the Federal government’s anti-terrorism efforts are.

4) We have often made the case that government in America is like Jabba The Hutt from Star Wars, a gross, obese entity that cannot get out of its own way. Often, one part of the government does not know what another part is doing or how one part of the government passes a law or regulation that makes no sense to another part of government.

The first Jabba example this month comes from the political class in the state government of Wisconsin, as explained in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. One part of the state government in Wisconsin, the state legislature, passed a bill that legalized rubber duck races in the state. A rubber duck race is defined to be when participants throw hundreds of plastic duck toys into a river and watch them race to a finish line. The fact that the state legislature is working on such nonsense is a piece of insanity in itself.

However, another part of the state government in Wisconsin, the Justice department, warned that the legislation might be breaking state gambling laws. Thus, budget shortfalls, failing schools, and other state issues are being neglected while at least two parts of the state government try to decide if rubber duck races are legal. Pathetic.

5) The other Jabba The Hutt issue is going on in New Jersey. That state, along with a host of other northern states, are suffering through one of the coldest and snowiest winters in a long time. This is causing state and local governments to run out of rock salt that is needed to keep their roads clear of snow and ice. There has just been too much needed this year to keep up with the high snowfall levels.

The problem could be easily solved if a non-U.S. ship containing 40,000 tons of rock salt that was being shipped from Maine to other areas would be allowed to dock and unload. This is obviously the simple, needed remedy to keep the roads clean and protect Americans from accidents.

But obvious and simple are not two traits of the American political class, as witnessed by this situation.. It appears that a 1920 Federal law allows only U.S. ships to move goods from one U.S. port to another. Since the rock salt, all 40,000 tons of it were loaded on a non-U.S. ship, that ship is not allowed to dock in an American port and unload, even it means saving lives and protecting the health and welfare of Americans.

You cannot make this nonsense up. Local and state politicians are asking for an obvious waiver to this 94 year old law in order to do their jobs and keep the roads clean this winter. However, according to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week magazine, Federal government authorities say that the waiver is unlikely to be granted, safety of Americans be damned. Lunacy of the utmost degree.

6) We have covered this issue already but additional information is now available so it is worth reviewing again. We had previously reported that 53% of President Obama’s nominees to be foreign ambassadors for the United States were either political allies or people who had raised at least a half a million dollars for the President’s election campaigns. According to an article in the February 28, 2014 issue of The Week, this is almost twice the rate of previous administrations.

Thus, the President was more interested in rewarding his political allies and election financers than putting experienced State Department career diplomats into important government positions overseas. Better to take of one’s friends than to put the best people in the right places to optimize U.S. interests. 

The additional information on this travesty came out when many of these nominees went before Congressional committees for review and approval:

• The nominee to be ambassador to Norway admitted he had never been there, did not speak the language and ended up insulting the current government in that country in a number of ways. He mistakenly referred to the prime minister of Norway as the president and mistakenly called the existing majority party in the Norwegian government an extremist “fringe political entity" which it is not.
• The nominee to be ambassador to Argentina cannot speak Spanish, a nice asset to have as ambassador to a Spanish speaking country.
• A television soap opera producer, with no foreign service experience, was named as the potential ambassador to Hungary.
• Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post correctly stated that such a practice “is a grave insult to competent foreign service officers.”
• Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the National Interest correctly stated that sending wealthy campaign fund raisers to foreign lands as ambassadors is not optimal since “it signals to the host country that the U.S. doesn’t take it very seriously.”

How embarrassing for our country and how disappointing for this Presidency. We are sending amateurs overseas as rewards for winning an election and we are doing it at unheard of levels. So much for “hope and change,” it is just politics as usual or even worse, not better.

That will do it for today. Amateur hour in the State Department, rock salt held captive by a 94 year old law, the importance of rubber duck races in Wisconsin, a nun that foiled the Federal government’s entire anti-terror effort, and more. More insanity tomorrow if you dare. In the meantime, please join our term limits effort at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because if rubber duck races are the priorities of our current politicians, how much worse could it get if we replace them all and see what happens?

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