August, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Bonus Post: Incredibly Stupid Political Quotes, Spying On The Senate, and Paying More For Prisons Than Schools

Just when we think we have corralled and documented all of the political class insanity from the previous month, by the time the posts are run, more insanity pops up. The latest insanity is requiring us to do this bonus post on the subject even though we promised yesterday would be the last insanity post for this month.

The following gems from the American political class cannot wait until next month. They are perfect illustrations of how wasteful, out of touch, and inept the current set of American politicians have become and how inefficient and ineffective the government operations they oversee have become.

1) The Washington Times recently wrote an article that again exposed the reality that many Federal government employees across many government agencies spend a lot of their time and taxpayer wealth looking at pornography on their government issued computers on government work time:

• The latest scandal of government employees viewing pornography on work time is centered at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
• But investigation records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the problem is widespread.
• One FCC employee is quoted in the Times article that the reason government employees view porn on the job is that “things were slow, he told investigators, so he perused it “out of boredom.” 
• One FCC employee was found to be accessing porngraphy on the Internet about eight hours a week during work hours.

You know that government has grown too large when even government employees admit that there are too many Federal workers chasing too little work to do that watching pornography is how they fill their days. And politicians like Nancy Pelosi continue to shout there is no place to cut government spending. Pathetic on both counts. 

A more detailed description of the problem can be seen at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/08/164037-wait-hear-federal-workers-excuses-surfing-porn-8-hours-week-job/

2) Quotes from people like Nancy Pelosi are what keep many bloggers knee deep in rich material. Another great place for idiotic quotes is from Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. She recently, and I think unintentionally, said the President Obama does less than work than any other President since Grover Cleveland. Huh? Why would you call the leader of your political party lazy and why Grover Cleveland, what data suggest that Obama and Cleveland are that lazy? 

You decide what she was saying with the following quote:

“… by voting for the first time in American history to sue the President of the United States for doing his job. And doing his job actually, less often and at a rate that is lower than any President since Grover Cleveland…”

When Democrats are saying that the President is lazy than something must really be wrong at the White House, which may explain the sad shape of the country. More details and her actually speaking the quote can be seen at:

http://eaglerising.com/7704/awesome-democrat-leader-say-obama-never-works/#BbjmViXxEotbEJGd.99

3) While Wasserman-Schultz’s comment is pretty funny political class insanity, the following insanity is not. The Central Intelligence Agency admitted illegally and immorally hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, contrary to what CIA Director Saxby Chambliss vehemently denied of doing so earlier this year. Thus, even though government agencies like the CIA and the NSA were formed to spy on and protect us from foreign threats, it appears that they have now gone rogue and are focusing taxpayer wealth and resources on spying on anyone in the country, from the lowest citizen to U.S. Senators.

The Washington Times reported, based on an internal CIA audit, that CIA personnel did indeed illegally search a Senate computer system, trying to find a damaging document that the agency believed had been stolen, but which Senators said the CIA had voluntarily turned over to Congress. Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who initiated a Senate probe of the snooping, said the CIA’s behavior was “appalling and deeply threatening to our system of checks and balances” and that agency leaders need to take steps to restore trust.

Great, now the politicians know how it feels to be spied on for no reason and having their Constitutional protections ripped away in secrecy.

4) Okay, back to political silliness. Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has also been a great source for insanity and inane comments. Her most famous quote is when she publicly wondered if the Mars Rover was going to go past the site where Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. You cannot make this stuff up.

Recently she got all up and crazy when discussing the fact that House Republicans have initiated a formal law suit against the President for his continual overstepping of Constitutional bounds.

According to various news reports, Lee not only claimed that the law suit was little more than a forerunner to impeaching Obama, but that she and her Democrat colleagues never considered impeaching George W. Bush: 

“I ask my colleagues to oppose this resolution for it is in fact a veiled attempt at impeachment and it undermines the law that allows a President to do his job. A historical fact: President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority.”

Unfortunately for Lee, not only did the House Democrats actually did introduce a resolution in 2008 to impeach Bush but…..Sheila Jackson Lee co-sponsored it. 

Liar, forgetful, or senile? You decide.

5) Let’s keep going with the silliness. Congresswoman Maxine Walters' history of saying outrageous and often insulting things is well known. A few years ago in public she actually said that all supporters of the Tea Party should go to hell. Nice language from a supposed leader of the country, telling ordinary citizens to go to hell for simply having a different opinion than hers.

News reports say that Congresswoman Waters recently gave a speech at the Islamic Society of Orange County, California, where she called those who oppose Islamic Sharia law implementation “bigots” and “fear mongers.”

For those of you that do not know what Sharia law is, beware. It is a most intolerant form of religious justice that is barbaric and intolerant of women, gays, and just about everything else. But according to Ms. Walters, those that oppose this type of man-focused harsh rules and judgments are the bigots. Unbelievable.

6) And finally consider this analysis from the Heritage Foundation that shows how screwed up this country is from a priority perspective. We recently looked at a report that showed the prison incarceration rate by country. Unfortunately and embarrassingly, the United States had both the highest number of citizens in prison and the highest per capita imprisonment rate.

Very, very sad that a country with our heritage of freedom and liberty would lock up so many of its citizens. I would bet that a large percentage of those imprisoned are for non-violent drug usage but the discussion on our lost war on drugs is for another day.

The damning research from the Heritage Foundation found the following bad priorities:

• The research shows nearly all states spend more on prisons than on our kids' public education in their states.
• In some states the difference is amazing, e.g. in New York, that state spends about $60,076 per prison inmate annually but only $20,639 per pubic school student annually.
• Which raises the question: if the political class actually knew how to operate successful schools and education, would there be less need to spend money on incarcerating citizens later down the road? Are the two connected?
• Heritage raises the same question: Would you rather have your taxpayer dollars going to an increase in school funding per K-12 student if that helped reduce the cost imposed by poorly educated offenders thanks to the high current outflow of funding prisoners?

How did we get this screwed up by our politicians that we spend so much more putting and keeping people behind bars vs. educating our kids for a better future for themselves and their families? And ask yourself this disturbing question: do you really think that people like Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson Lee, Maxine Walters, Harry Reid and the rest of the do-nothings in Washington have any chance or any ability or desire to fix this situation? 

Given their complete lack of evidence of any problem solving or strategic planning ability, I see no way that they have the courage or the smarts to fix this situation. Einstein once said: “We cannot expect to fix our problems using the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.” Replace the word “thinking” with the words “incumbent politicians” and you will see what I mean.

To see how your individual state’s expenses for prison matches up to you state’s spending on education, go to the following website:

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/02/state-funding-go-school-books-orange-jumpsuits/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

That will definitely do it for this month’s insanity, I just cannot take it any more. I am sure the quotes will keep coming, the porn will keep flowing, and the dollars will still be wasted when we check back in next month on the antics and silliness of our political class.

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

July, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Farm Agents Get Submachine Guns, USDA Loses Money Via Fraud, Goats Invade Detroit, and More

Yesterday kicked off this month’s series on political class insanity, the ineptness, and the lack of problem solving skills of the current set of politicians in this country at all levels of government. Their inability to resolve any major problem facing Americans in any kind of efficient and effective way continues to waste our wealth and shred our freedom every day of the year with no societal benefit in return.

1) Congressman Chris Stewart of Utah and other House Republicans are proposing steps to take heavy weaponry out of the hands of Federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose Office of Inspector General has put out a bid to buy submachine guns. Yes, the Department of Agriculture seems to think it needs to have some of its employees armed to the teeth with .40 caliber submachine guns.

This is funny on one level and very scary from a freedom perspective on another level. First, the funny part, maybe they are worried about mad cow disease and they need to protect themselves from wacked out bovines in the course of their work. 

But seriously, this is a waste of taxpayer money as well as a threat to freedom. Why do we need agricultural agents prancing around our farmland with submachine guns? A waste of taxpayer money and a danger to citizens from ag agents who probably will not be highly trained like law enforcement personnel are regarding firearms safety and the law. Somebody is going to get hurt with this much firepower in the hands of untrained government workers.

And what about the freedom and oppressive government angle? Congressman Stewart’s Regulatory Agency De-militarization Act wants to scale back a 2002 law that gave most Federal government Offices of Inspector General the authority to carry weapons and arrest people. But Stewart said that is prompting agencies to develop “SWAT-like” teams to handle situations that should be reserved for law enforcement agencies: “I understand that federal agents must be capable of protecting themselves. But what we have observed goes far beyond providing necessary protection.”

Stewart noted that the Food and Drug Agency and the Department of Education also have law enforcement teams to conduct raids, and said this shows the government has gone too far. In 2010, armed FDA officers raided a grocery store suspected of using raw milk. Yes, selling raw milk was enough to have a police-like raid by armed FDA people into a privately owned building. In 2011, the Department of Education’s SWAT equivalent forcibly entered the home of a man suspected of student aid fraud.

The militarization of the Federal government bureaucracy cannot end well from both a wasteful spending perspective or the eventual death of an American over unpasteurized milk or a late student loan payment. Insanity.

2) Yesterday we discussed the reality that Medicaid lost about $14 billion last year due to criminal fraud, incompetency and inefficiency due to just one of their programs. But Medicaid is not the only Federal government bureaucracy that cannot manage taxpayer wealth according to their own standards.

A new Federal report from the Government Accountability Office shows that that the Federal government program that funds school lunches for low-income families nationwide misspent about $996 million, or 8% of its budget, in the last fiscal year. And this level is still attained even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has tried in recent years to prevent ineligible families from receiving free and reduced prices in the lunch line. But according to the new report, much more can be done, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

The GAO report found the USDA made an estimated $996 million in errors in 2013 while certifying families for the program, which offers free and reduced lunch prices to students whose families live near or below federal poverty levels. In nearly half the cases inspected in the report, households were not actually eligible for the free or reduced-price meals they were receiving. Families had excluded the income of a parent, lied about their household size and understated their income. 

I am betting nobody got fired or reprimanded or demoted for wasting 8% of their government budget despite the fact they have known for years the fraud was present and rampant. But in just two days we have identified at least $15 billion a year that the Federal government wastes away in a variety of different ways including criminal fraud. 

That is the equivalent of giving every U.S. household, just from these two wasteful programs, a tax rebate of about $130 a year. How many hungry Americans could be fed, how many homeless Americans could be given shelter, how many ailing veterans could finally get the medical care they need if we had that $15 billion to spend on them vs. losing it via government incompetence? That is truly the most insane part of our wasteful government spending.

3) It is no secret that Detroit is one big mess. Population loss, housing loss, crime out of control, the city government in bankruptcy, high unemployment, useless schools, urban blight, you name it and from a bad perspective Detroit probably has it. It also has a very bad case of political class insanity, at least as it applies to goats.

Yes, goats. Consider what one good hearted and concerned citizen tried to do for the city of Detroit and how the political class in Detroit, showing no creativity or sense of pride, did right back at him:

• Mark Spitznagel recently brought 18 baby goats to inner city Detroit to try and clean up the nation's largest bankrupt city by eating the overgrown foliage on some of Detroit’s abandoned home lots
• This is not a far fetched idea since the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates there are about a billion goats around the world that serve as some of nature's friendliest weed wackers, lawn mowers, and garbage disposals.
• Mr. Spitznagel wanted his goats to be part of the solution to the urban blight in Detroit that is overrun with large tracts of overgrown and unsightly shrubbery. Within the city itself there is an estimated 114,000 city land patches loaded with trash and with weeds.
• According to local news reports, the first use of the goats were an instant hit with the neighbors, who welcomed the animals and their large appetites.
• But leave it to the local politicians, the same type of people that drove Detroit into the ground and into bankruptcy, to ruin the worthwhile attempt to fix what they broke, shutting down the goat operation since it violated a local ordinance that makes it "unlawful to own, harbor, keep, maintain, sell or transfer farm or wild animals."

Spitznagel was not allowing thousands of goat run wild in the city. They apparently were not a safety concern relative to injuring local residents. He was not displacing city or union workers who were obviously not working at keeping the parcels clear of overgrown brush. This was a good hearted, well intentioned and likely successful attempt by a private citizen to do good things for his fellow human beings. But none of that apparently was taken into consideration by a broken and useless local government and political class.

Einstein once said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Obviously, the Detroit politicians never heard this saying or do not believe it since they are using the same logic and flawed government approach with regards to 18 goats that they used to drive the city of Detroit into the ground. You know it is bad when goats have a better chance of doing good in the local neighborhood than the elected politicians do.

4) We have reviewed the lost “war on drugs” being waged by the Federal government many times in this blog. For over four decades, the Federal government has spent trillions of dollars in a vain attempt to get illegal drug usage under control in this country and has failed miserably at doing so. All the ‘war” has done is waste vast amounts of taxpayer wealth, imprisoned millions of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, and created super violent drug cartels in other countries.

A previous chart we have used showed how much our prison population has grown due to the lost war on drugs:






And a now a recent article from the Independent Journal Review (IJR) further reinforced how our political class has failed miserably in the areas of imprisoning Americans, most likely due to our failed war on drugs. About 2.2 million American adults, one out of every hundred Americans, are currently living behind bars. That’s far and away higher than the next highest country, Cuba, in both absolute numbers and per capita.

According to the IJR, the Prison Policy Initiative completed an interesting analysis on how individual states would line up if they were treated like actual countries. They found that not only is the U.S. as a whole the most imprisoned population in the world but that 36 states have a higher incarceration rate than every other country in the world. 

For a country that has long considered itself the “freest” country in the world, it is difficult to believe we are still the freest in the world when our imprisonment rate is the highest in the world. As more and more parts of the government arm themselves with high powered weaponry for jobs that require nothing of the sort, as more and more taxes are collected to cover up the wasteful and criminal activities of the political class, as government grows to such absurd levels that good hearted efforts of an individual citizen to help out fellow citizens is threatened with arrest, the political class gets stronger, our prisons get larger, and our freedoms get weaker. And that is the purest insanity of it all.

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