November, 2014, Part 3, Will The Center Hold: More School Lunch Horrors, Starving The Homeless, and Protecting The Second Amendment

We are going to spend a few days visiting an occasional and recurring topic in this blog, namely whether or not the country can hang together, given the growing resistance around the nation to an overreaching and increasingly repressive Federal government. Previous discussions on this topic can be accessed by typing in the phrase, “will the center hold” in the search box above.

The growing grass roots resistance against the Federal government covers a wide range of topics including gun control, Obama Care, Common Core, warrantless spying on citizens, and other topics important to the American people. The resistance ranges from individual citizens to state legislations and really raises a basic question: what happens to the country if Washington issues a decree or law and the rest of the country simply ignores it or aggressively resists it? Will the center hold?

This is our third update to this topic this week. The latest resistance efforts start below:

1) This week and in previous installments in this series we have shown how the new Federal government school lunch guidelines, driven by Michelle Obama, have been an utter failure. Unappetizing and insufficient food offerings have resulted in kids not eating anything, teachers noticing that learning is suffering from inadequate eating, and school budgets getting killed by falling lunch revenues.

This last point was recently driven home when the School Nutrition Association (SNA) reported that the new, stricter school lunch standards and regulations have caused lunch program costs to explode, tripling in some cases, as compared to last year’s costs:
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that the new school meal standards will force local school districts and states to absorb $1.22 billion in new food, labor and administrative costs in Fiscal Year 2015 alone, up from $362 million in additional costs in FY 2014,” the association notes.

To put this number in perspective, the additional school budget costs from the food requirements could have resulted in hiring an additional 23,000 high school teachers, a scenario that would have certainly improved our dismal public education results. The increased costs is driven by a combination of more expensive food supplies, fewer students buying lunches, and increased waste from unwanted fruits and vegetables being thrown away.

These increased costs are adding about 10 cents to every lunch, and nearly 27 cents for breakfasts. Unfortunately, school districts are only being reimbursed about 6 cents per meal by the Federal lunch program.

The SNA is not only pushing back against this Washington decree and calling for Congress to take action, they are also offering a few common sense ideas to relieve the crisis but also make school lunches more nutritious:

* Maintain the 2012 requirement that half of grains offered be whole grain rich, instead of requiring that all grains be whole grain rich.

* Maintain Target 1 sodium levels, and suspend further reductions until scientific research supports them.

* To avoid food waste, offer, but do not require students to take a fruit or vegetable.

* Allow healthy items permitted on the meal line to be sold a la carte as well.

Another failed Federal program in the real world outside of the Beltway. Kids are eating less, food is being wasted more, and the costs for this non-progress is staggering.

2) But citizens are not just fighting back against Federal politicians' insanity but are also fighting back against local and state politicians’ insanity. The clearest and most inane situation of this type is taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Recently, in that city, 90 year old Arnold Abbott was arrested for the heinous crime of….feeding the homeless. He ran afoul of a recent Fort Lauderdale town ordinance which requires people or organizations to obtain permission from the city in order to feed others. If the city agrees to the request, those preparing the food would have to provide a portable toilet, hand washing stations and meet local food safety requirements.

Such requirements, while possibly well intentioned, inhibit good people like Mr. Abbott from serving those in the community that are struggling just to get a meal. If enforced, people would go hungry as a result of politicians' actions, something that should be contrary to any government’s intentions. Mr. Abbott and others like him that just want to do good by their fellow human beings, face fines and up to 60 days in jail for simply feeding the hungry and homeless.

However, local people are fighting back. The Libertarian Party of Palm Beach county have stepped up and are joining Mr. Abbott in his crusade to help those that are less fortunate than most of us. They will be joining him in feeding the poor in defiance of the ordinance and seeing what the local political class will do about it. Doing the right thing does not always mean doing the legal, government ordered thing.

The local government does have an obligation to protect its citizens. But sending police officers out to publicly arrest a 90 year old good Samaritan and depriving hungry people of a well prepared and good meal is government overreach and stupidity of the first degree. Local politicians should have found a peaceful, negotiated way that would have leveraged Mr. Abbott’s kind heart and giving attitude for the betterment of all, not the arrest and hunger of some.

3) Gun control is one of the many major areas that local and state governments are pushing back on the Federal government’s overreach on gun control. The state of Texas moved to the front of that push back with the recent introduction of legislation that would prevent the enforcement of virtually all federal gun control measures within the state’s borders: “With this bill, Texas could help lead the country forward,” said Scott Landreth, campaign lead for ShallNot.org, a project of the Tenth Amendment Center that advocates for states to protect their citizens from federal overreach. “Passage would have serious impact on the federal government’s ability to carry out its unconstitutional gun control measures already on the books.”

Texas State Representative Tim Kleinschmidt introduced Texas House Bill 176 which declares all Federal restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms to be “invalid” and “not enforceable” within the state of Texas: A federal law, including a statute, an executive, administrative, or court order, or a rule, that infringes on a law-abiding citizen’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution or Section 23, Article I, Texas Constitution, is invalid and not enforceable in this state.

If passed into law, what would it look like in the real world? Basically, all Texas government agencies and employees within Texas would be banned from enforcing any Federal law in violation of the act. The prohibition on enforcement specifically includes any Federal legislation that:

(1) imposes a tax, fee, or stamp on a firearm, firearm accessory, or firearm ammunition that is not common to all other goods and services and may be reasonably expected to create a chilling effect on the purchase or ownership of those items by a law-abiding citizen;

(2) requires the registration or tracking of a firearm, firearm accessory, or firearm ammunition or the owners of those items that may be reasonably expected to create a chilling effect on the purchase or ownership of those items by a law-abiding citizen;

(3) prohibits the possession, ownership, use, or transfer of a firearm, firearm accessory, or firearm ammunition by a law-abiding citizen;

(4) orders the confiscation of a firearm, firearm accessory, or firearm ammunition from a law-abiding citizen.

State employees who knowingly violate the act would risk a suit for damages for assisting the Federal government violate an individual’s right to keep and bear arms in Texas.

Such civil disobedience was recognized and condoned by Founding Father James Madison who, writing in Federalist #46, proclaimed that state “legislative devices” and a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union” as a valid and moral strategy to push back against Federal government overreaching, unConstitutional actions, or merely unpopular federal acts. More recent Supreme Court rulings put this type of state action on solid Constitutional grounds.

Which gets us back again to our core question in this matter: if a large number of majority of states follow the this Texas example, assuming the proposed legislation becomes law, what would the Federal government do? Arrest state government officials? Invade states to force their will upon citizens who voted for the legislation to resist the federal government? Interesting times.

4) The state of Alabama moved forward with similar actions in the recent elections, according to the Washington Post. By an overwhelming majority of 72% to 28%, the citizens of Alabama strengthened their already defiant state constitution wording against the Federal government’s intent to impose more and more gun control bonds on citizens. The new wording goes as follows:

(a) Every citizen has a fundamental right to bear arms in defense of himself or herself and the state. Any restriction on this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.

(b) No citizen shall be compelled by any international treaty or international law to take an action that prohibits, limits, or otherwise interferes with his or her fundamental right to keep and bear arms in defense of himself or herself and the state, if such treaty or law, or its adoption, violates the United States Constitution.

The original, weaker wording read as follows: “that every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.” More push back on gun control, protecting the Second Amendment in the process.

That will do it for today. Pushing back against Washington politicians is getting more and more widespread on more and more topics and issues. From protecting the Second Amendment in Texas and Alabama to common sense vs. Washington sense on school lunches, people are getting tired of what to do, how to do it, and getting no benefit as a result of bossy politicians.

Which gets us back to our basic question of what happens if the Federal government, or government at any level (see Fort Lauderdale screw up above), passes a law or ordinance and the rest of the country simply says no thanks and ignores what the political class has wrought? Will the center hold? One more post tomorrow to sum up the rebellion against an overreaching Federal government and American 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

November, 2014 Part 2, Will The Center Hold: More Common Core Rebellions, School Lunch Debacles Continue, And Arizona Asserts Its Independence

We are going to spend a few days visiting an occasional and recurring topic in this blog, namely whether or not the country can hang together, given the growing resistance around the nation to an overreaching and increasingly repressive Federal government. Previous discussions on this topic can be Accessed by typing in the phrase, “will the center hold” in the search box above.

The growing grass roots resistance against the Federal government covers a wide range of topics including gun control, Obama Care, Common Core, warrantless spying on citizens, and other topics important to the American people. The resistance ranges from individual citizens to state legislatures and really raises a basic question: what happens to the country if Washington issues a decree or law and the rest of the country simply ignores it or aggressively resists it? Will the center hold?

The latest resistance efforts start below and will likely go on for a few days after:

1) In the recent elections, the state of Arizona and its voters took a giant step towards formally reasserting the rights of the state and its citizens. Arizona voters approved Proposition 122, an amendment to the state constitution that enshrines nullification, or anti-commandeering. Specifically, the amendment permits the state to “exercise its sovereign authority to restrict the actions of its personnel and the use of its financial resources to purposes that are consistent with the Constitution.”

In other words, Arizona citizens can now more easily tell the Federal government to pound sand when the state and its citizens in Arizona feel the Federal government is overstepping its Constitutional limits. It will allow Arizonans to refuse to enforce Federal laws by allowing voters to hold and vote on referendums on such issues as withholding state resources from enforcing Obamacare, Federal impingement on American’s Second Amendment rights, NSA spying programs, and other measures, according to the Tenth Amendment Center.

While Arizona citizens could have held such referendums at any time in the past, adding this new language to the state’s constitution means that such referendums will now be statutory, rather than constitutional, making it easier and far less expensive to get on the ballot for the people to decide.

Apparently there is legal precedent for this type of action. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld previous efforts by states to refuse to implement federal programs. These efforts include: Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), New York v. US (1992), Printz v. US (1997) and National Federation of Businesses v. Sebelius (2012).

Thus, it appears that the Arizona not only is a slap against Washington’s infringement on state rights and citizens’ personal freedoms but it also has a strong legal underpinning. Which again raises the central question we have been asking: what happens when Washington tells the state government and state citizens in Arizona to implement a Federal program and Arizona says, “thanks but no thanks?”

2) Yesterday, we discussed the bravery and initiative of a Wisconsin high school senior that was battling against the idiocy of the latest Washington school lunch guidelines. But it seems that not only are kids resisting Michelle Obama’s food dictates, but teachers across the country are also getting in on the food rebellion.

According to an article written by Kyle Olson for the Education Action Group that appeared on November 7, 2014, many teachers aren’t happy with how the new Federal school snack rules, e.g. banning birthday cakes in classrooms, have impacted their classrooms. They are so unhappy that “Nearly every teacher” at Tyler’s Bonner Elementary School are turning their noses up at the new rules, according to TV station KLTV: “Ridiculous,” Debbie Oliver, a 5th grade teacher, says. “To me, it might be saying, let’s not have any kind of fun in school anymore. It would be one thing if teachers were constantly bombarding the kids with treats and candy and cokes and stuff like that, but that’s not realistic. That’s not even happening.”

While the Washington nutrition rules are supposedly to curb childhood obesity, the teachers think they’re missing their mark.
“A lot of us are obese. That’s true,” teacher Camille Moore said. “But I don’t think we’re getting obese in the classroom.”

Meanwhile, the lunch rules aren’t going over much better in Michigan’s Pinckney school district, which has seen a dramatic drop in school lunch purchases as a result of the nutrition guidelines: “It’s frustrating because we want to serve these kids, but there are less students in the lunch line,” Linda Moskalik, the district’s assistant superintendent of finances and operations.

As with other school districts around the country, because of the new rules, kids in Pinckney are going hungry rather than eat the new food, a very bad unintended consequence of the Michelle Obama push. Before the “healthy” rules were implemented, food sales at Pinckney schools during the 2011-2012 school year were roughly $400,443.

The next school year, the district’s lunch sales dropped to $377,200, or 5.8%. During the 2013-2014 school year, they dropped an another 4%. In order to get the Federal government financial support, schools are required to give students the prescribed servings of fruits and vegetables.

But what is the reality of the new lunch guidelines? Not good: “As soon as they leave the lunch line, they will throw the food right in the garbage, which is a waste of food,” according to a teacher quoted in the article.

“I have a particular thing with frozen foods, and I kind of feel like some of the lunch foods taste like they’re frozen,” Lewis Tate, an eighth-grader at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Buford Middle School, tells Charlottesville Tomorrow. “One of the reasons I pack my lunch so often is because if I don’t know where my food came from I don’t like eating it.”

“Most of the food is just defrosted,” adds Maggie Vidal, a sophomore at Western Albemarle High School.

What good is having a so-called healthy lunch menu if kids do not eat it, especially if the food is unappetizing, recently defrosted, and insufficient for kids to learn and be active with? Unintended consequences of another bad Federal program.

No sane person could deny that we have an obesity problem in this country. But you do not solve this problem by denying a birthday cake in the classroom every once in a awhile, serving recently defrosted tasteless food in school cafeterias, or penalizing schools financially. You launch a nationwide, long term public health strategy and program to educate and change underlying behaviors, starting in the home, not in the school cafeteria line.

3) Common Core is getting rebutted across the country, with the state of Maine being the latest to join the surge of taking back control of heir kids’ education.

Maine Governor Paul LePage recently stated he was convinced that his state needed to get out from under Common Core and find another education solution for Maine’s kids. The impetus for his decision and awakening occurred after he observed that Massachusetts fell from being first in the country for education to seventh place after adopting Common Core standards.

LePage recent told WABI in Maine: “First of all, there is always a better way. And I no longer support Common Core, and I say that because we have been in Common Core for several years here in Maine. But after seeing what has happened to Massachusetts—they were the number one education system in America prior to adopting Common Core. That tells me that we need to take a hard look, maybe it would be better going back to what they had before.”

If that is not a slap across the face of the Federal government. After all of the effort, all of the expense, and all of the promotion, this governor has reached the conclusion that doing nothing is better than enacting Common Core principles. Another failed Federal government program that the rest of America is starting to reject.

4) Resistance to the Federal government takes many forms but probably not many are as forceful as the recent line in the sand that newly elected Texas governor Greg Abbott drew. In a recent television interview, Abbott said Texas will sue the Obama administration if the President tries to overstep the bounds of his executive power and interfere in immigration and naturalization issues and existing immigration laws: “If the president crosses the line he’s going to see an overwhelming rejection of what he’s trying to do, so he better not overstep. If he does, for one of course we’ll be involved with another lawsuit against him but [for] another you can expect quite a strong pushback [from the people].”

It does not look like Washington will get much help from the state of Texas if it decides to ignore existing immigration laws and may well find itself in front of a judge as Texas dares the Feds to disobey standing laws.

I can think of no time in our past where states were willing to pass amendments to the state constitution to inhibit Federal government overreach or sue Federal government for disobeying its own laws or tell Washington bureaucrats that we will ignore your nutrition and education guidelines and do what is best for our kids. Never before have I observed Americans actively taking back their liberties and freedoms that the Federal government has eroded over time.

At what point to Federal actions and initiatives become mere suggestions to the rest of the country? And at that time, when we ignore what is usually expensive and ineffective Federal laws and acts, does the center hold? More rebellions against the center 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 4, Political Class Insanity: Gambling Government Employees, Our Kids Going Hungry, Losing Track of Illegal Immigrants, 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 fourth entry in this series for this month, with the first three posts appearing over the past few days. 

For the latest insanity, read on:

1) Given that the Federal government routinely spends more money than it takes in, running up a national debt level of an amazing $18 TRILLION, one would at least hope that minimal standards are in place so that government employees do not waste taxpayer wealth. You could hope, but based on employee behavior, at least at the Federal Department of Transportation (DOT) you would be wrong.

It seems that an audit of DOT employee credit card usage found that those employees have been using government credit cards for cash advances at casinos and racetracks and for other unauthorized spending, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG). The misuse of the government issued travel credit cards amounted to $2.1 million in charges for personal items in fiscal year of 2012, besides being used for cash advances at casinos and race tracks. This total did not include the $180,000 that the employees used in unauthorized cash advances while they were not on business trips.

The audit found that over two hundred cash advances were taken at casinos and that the department did not have effective policies to prevent the government credit cards from being misused: “While reviewing cash advance transactions, we identified cash advances collected at casinos,” the Inspector General said. “While DOT’s Travel Card Policy does not preclude cardholders from taking cash advances at casinos, this presents another opportunity for abuse to occur.”

Among the offenses:

• The audit examined 218 cash advances that were taken at casinos, and found 27 were made by employees not on official travel.
• A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employee collected $492 in cash advances from his government credit card at a casino in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
• A former Inspector General DOT employee was also able to use his travel card, despite leaving the agency more than two years before. 
• The cards are also used at racetracks: “Between October 2011 and June 2012, an FAA cardholder collected seven cash advances totaling $719 while not on Government travel,” the Inspector General said. “On one occasion, this employee obtained a $104 cash advance on a race day at an Alabama Superspeedway.”
• The audit also found that government credit cards are used on personal items, such as groceries.

In the real world, outside of government employment, these would all be grounds for dismissal and potentially criminal prosecution. In the world of government, I doubt anything was done, to the detriment of the American taxpayer and our ever rising government debt.

2) As we have pointed out probably hundreds of times in this blog, the Federal government does a lot of things but does none of them well:

• Social Security - wasteful and going bankrupt
• Medicare and Medicaid - wasteful and going bankrupt
• IRS - inefficient and destroying the freedom of Americans
• Military Spending - out of control and extremely wasteful
• TSA - transportation safety that exists in name only …besides the degradation of being groped while in public.

You get the idea, I dare you to name one program, one operation, one anything that the Federal government does efficiently and effectively.

Apparently, those government agencies charged with handling our immigration crisis on our southern border or no better, effective, or efficient than any other dysfunctional government entity:

• According to a recent Associated Press (AP) report, a whopping 7 of every 10 families released by the Obama administration this year, after entering the country illegally, failed to show up for follow-up appointments with immigration authorities.
• The AP got their hands on an audio recording of a confidential meeting held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during which one ICE official said thousands of families caught crossing the border this year, 70 percent of the total, subsequently failed to meet as instructed with federal immigration agents.
• At that same meeting, the ICE official also said final deportation had been ordered for at least 860 persons traveling as families and caught at the border since May but of those, only 140 had reported for deportation, a success rate of a meager 16%.
• More than 66,000 immigrants traveling as families, mostly mothers and children, have been caught for illegally crossing the border since October.

I would make anyone a bet that the vast majority of those seven out of those ten delinquents will never be seen by the Federal government’s immigration people again. And as you see, we have another government entity that is a total failure with a success rate, depending on how you measure it ranging from 16% to 30% (i.e. seven out of ten disappear). 

Imagine how long you would keep your job if you were successful only 16% of the time. But in government work, apparently 16% success rate is actually acceptable. Pathetic.

3) It is no secret that the Federal government drive to get kids to eat healthy meals in schools has turned into a wasteful, expensive, and failed effort. As with most government directed dictates, you cannot force a nation to do what a small group thinks is best in Washington. 

Yes, our kids probably do not eat healthy enough, resulting in high overweight and obesity rates. But this is a public health issue, not a government law making issue. A long term public health program needs to be put in place to get all of America to eat healthier. You cannot change these deeply entrenched, bad eating habits by passing a piece of legislation.

As a result of this misdirected government effort, often associated with Michelle Obama, kids are rebelling against tasteless healthy foot options around the country. As a result, schools' food lunch budgets are getting decimated by kids not paying for and eating cafeteria food, resulting in food being thrown out every day and kids going hungry. Recent news reports point to further unintended consequences of Michelle Obama’s efforts and the Federal law it spawned:

• Some experts estimate that a whopping $4 million worth of perfectly good but tasteless food is being tossed in the trash each day as a result of Michelle’s school lunch program.
• To date, almost 600 school districts have already dropped out of the First Lady’s lunch program, Fort Thomas Independent Schools in Northern Kentucky being one of them.
• Fort Thomas School Superintendent Gene Kirchner stated out that since the program is resulting in so much waste, then it is not very effective. “I have to think that across the country, it has to be a staggering amount of food going to waste, and I think there are people out there who could really use that food.” 
• According to one government study, over one million kids across the country have stopped eating lunch altogether after the new standards were imposed on their schools, depriving school budgets of lunch money revenue and causing economic hardships for those schools’ budgets.

Another remedy from the political class that causes more problems than it solves. In this case, this school lunch legislation solved no problems but caused millions of kids to go hungry, wasted millions of dollars of food every day, and never came close to getting obesity rates down. 

Again, this is a long term public health issue that the Washington political class tried, and failed, to solve with a short term legislative action. Can you say “Obama Care in school lunches?”

4) More times than not, when a group of American politicians enact a law or undertake any major action, they end up making the initial situation worse. Obama Care was supposed to bring down health care costs, it has caused and will continue to cause health care costs to rise. The Patriot Act was supposed to protect us from terrorism but ended up costing us a lot of our freedom and constitutional protection without protecting us from the numerous terrorist attacks we have suffered over the past few years.

The politicians in Minnesota lived up to this heritage of failure when they enacted a law that banned texting while driving in a vain attempt to cut down on car accidents caused by be texting distracted while driving. According to a study published in the May, 2014 issue of Journal of Adolescent Health, a Minnesota law that banned texting while driving did indeed reduce the number of minor traffic accidents. However, it apparently increased the number of serious car accidents.

How could this be? It is now against the law to text and drive. Well, texters decided that it was okay to text in Minnesota as long as no one, including the police, saw you texting. This resulted in texters putting their cell phones in less conspicuous places while texting and driving, places that required them to be further out of touch with their surroundings. This likely resulted in an increase in more serious and dangerous road accidents. Unintended consequences of politicians not thinking through what their actions might cause.

So lets review: we have at least one government operation, the DOT, whose accounting controls are broken or non-existent, allowing their employees to use government/taxpayer funds at casinos and racetracks. 

We have an immigration operation that loses 70% of the people it is supposed to be tracking. 

We have a Federally mandated school lunch program that is breaking school budgets, making our kids go hungry, and not resolving the original problem. 

And we have political class insanity in Minnesota that is making driving a car more dangerous even though the legislation was supposed to do just the opposite. 

More insanity, more wasted taxpayer money, less positive results. And more insanity for 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, October, 2014 Update, Part 1: Telling Obama Care, School Lunches, and Statehoold To Hit the Road

Every month or so we revisit the theme and interesting question of whether or not “the center will hold?” In other words, given the rebellion and push back that state and local governments along with individual citizens have been giving to Federal government dictates and laws, do we get to at point in this country where the Washington political class and machine issue a law or edict and the rest of the country simply ignores it?

It certainly seems like we have never seen so much objection and hostility to Washington. As Washington and its politicians overreach and over demand relative to Constitutional limitations, the rest of the country has pushed back on a number of major issues:

• Obama Care
• Medicaid Expansion
• Gun Control
• Common Core
• Spying on Citizens

These are just a few of the various issues that have the rest of the country looking for ways to escape out from under Federal mandates and laws. To see past examples of how extensive this push back has become, enter the search term “will the center hold” in the search box above.

Let’s take an inventory of the latest rebellious acts underway around the country:

1) We have often cited opinion poll numbers that show the country’s citizens regards for Congressional politicians is at a historic low and the approval rating for the Obama administration has been steadily dropping over the past year or so. 

Thus, it should come as no surprise when a recent Reuters news report cited a reputable polling organizations finding that about 25% of the nation’s citizens supporting the concept of their state seceding from the union. Details of the poll include the following:

• The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted from August 23 through September 16.
• 23.9% of those polled said they either strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away.
• 53.3% of almost 9,000 respondents strongly opposed or tended to oppose the notion.
• The desire to get out from under Washington generally cut across party lines and regions, though Republicans and residents of rural Western states are generally warmer to the idea than Democrats and Northeasterners with more than a third of Western area poll respondents supporting the concept.
• The poll found anger with Obama's handling of issues ranging from healthcare reform to the rise of Islamic State militants driving some of the feeling along with the childish and long term Washington gridlock also being a major driver of the 23.9%: "I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference anymore which political party is running things. Nothing gets done," said Roy Gustafson, 61, of Camden, South Carolina, who lives on disability payments. "The state would be better off handling things on its own."
• From North Carolina: "That [Obama care] has really hurt a lot of people here, myself included. My insurance went from $40 a week for a family of four up to over $600 a month for a family of four," said Brittany Royal. "The North Carolina government itself is sustainable. Governor (Pat) McCrory, I think he has a better healthcare plan than President Obama."
• From Texas: "Texas has everything we need. We have the manufacturing, we have the oil, and we don't need them," said Mark Denny, a 59-year-old retiree living outside of Dallas.
• As the national debt gets more and more out of control due to wasteful Washington spending, as economic conditions continue to languish at historical lows, as no major issues ever get resolved by Washington, at what point does the center not hold and we go from 23.9% to a majority of Americans saying enough is enough, we want to go it alone. 

When does the majority conclude that it could not get any worse under a different course, a course that we are more likely control vs. dictates from far away that suppress freedom and economic vitality? Will the center hold?

2) An issue that we have not discussed much at all in this series but one that is growing in aggravation and agitation is the imposition of new school food guidelines by the Federal government, an imposition and legislation that is supposedly driven by First Lady Michelle Obama. 

Let me say upfront, that healthier eating habits should be a national priority. The country and many, many of its kids are overweight or obese, leading to higher incidences of ill health and higher health care costs to treat the obesity problem. This is a public health care crisis that should be addressed by a public health care initiative to instill healthy eating habits in American families over time.

Having said that, the wrong way to do it is to have the Washington political class pass and enact a law that mandates instant changes in the way the country eats. Just because a Washington bureaucrat dictates that a kid in a far away state can only consume so much fat, salt, and sugar at their school’s lunch table does not mean it is going to happen.

And it is not happening. School districts across the country are rebelling against this new Washington dictate and dumping the guidelines that the law put forth. The schools are finding that kids are not eating what Washington wants them to eat, resulting in millions of dollars in food being scrapped every day, kids not getting enough nourishment at lunch, and school districts running into serious financial troubles since the revenue from selling school lunches is way down.

The situation has gotten so bad that a recent article by Victor Skinner, writing for the Education Action Group, showed that schools in Missouri and Alabama have already bowed out of the Federal school lunch program despite losing Federal dollars to stay in it. The article found that: “Those schools and numerous others across the country are ditching the federal regulations and the funding that comes with them to save their cafeteria programs, which have experienced a nose-dive in sales and skyrocketing waste since the new rules were implemented in 2012.”

A large high school in Missouri, Norte Dame High School, saw lunch participation rate drop by half. They turned to local restaurants to provide healthy food that actually tasted good, as opposed to the healthy but badly tasting Federally mandate food to make sure kids actually ate lunch.

Saxony Lutheran High school also did the same thing: “We want to make sure we’re serving a well-rounded, healthy, balanced meal,” Saxony principal Mark Ruark told SEMissourian.com. “We don’t think the current federal guidelines give kids enough calories to sustain (them), especially those in extracurricular activities. Kids will not eat what doesn’t taste good.”

At Cleburne County Schools in Alabama, lunch participation dropped by 29 percent under Michelle Obama’s and Washington’s edicts. A local mom, Maria Gilbert, is quoted in the article saying that her children will no longer eat school food. Her 11th grader says it’s “nasty” and has opted to bring microwave food from home. at least until the school removed the appliance from the cafeteria. Gilbert said she’s often forced to find a quick meal for her famished kids after school, AnnisonStar.com reports. 

In Ohio, it’s the same problem: “We are seeing a trend where meal counts are going down just because students aren’t accepting all the changes that are taking place,” Ohio School Nutrition Association member Jeni Lange told ABC.

A National School Nutrition Association survey found food waste is up in 81.2 percent of schools nationwide, and a study by Cornell and Brigham Young universities estimates the waste at $4 million per day. Students in Los Angeles schools alone are throwing away $100,000 in food per day, ABC reports.

In a Vermont school district, school employees devised a plan to “repurpose” their lunch waste as feed for about 3,000 hogs at a local pig farm. In Medina, Ohio, volunteer parent Marcie Henning is taking advantage of the massive waste in her district to feed the homeless and less fortunate.

You get the idea. Again, Washington never understood the root causes of a problem, the need to educate parents, families and kids about the need to eat better under a public health approach. Instead, Washington tried to fix a problem they did not understand and the unforeseen consequences by dictating a top down solution that, like Obama Care, has no chance of working.

As result, kids are eating less and going hungry, school district financials and revenues are being devastated, and the country’s unhealthy food chain is unchanged. When we see our kids going hungry and our tax dollars being fed to hogs, how long will the center hold?

3) One more quickie for today, we will conclude this update to our "will the center hold” series tomorrow. The Washington Examiner recently did a piece on this concept and how the relationship between the Washington elite and bureaucrats and the rest of the country has probably never gotten this dicey. 

The article points to Obama Care as one of many drivers in this resistance to Washington. It cites the reality that 36 states said no to the Obama administration relative to setting up Obama Care health insurance exchanges, forcing the Federal government to do it by itself in those three dozen states. Another 20 or so states decided not to expand Medicaid within their borders as they were allowed to do under Obama Care.

I could be wrong, but from my history classes I do not remember any state that said they were not going to participate in Social Security or Medicare or any other major Federal initiative. This recent resistance seems to be a new phenomena. And according to
Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a Texas public policy think tank, it seems I am correct: “This is the biggest push back that I’ve seen in my lifetime, even more so than, I think, you had in the Civil Rights era. There’s this growing sense out there, that there are areas that are the purview of states, and the states ought to be allowed to do that.”

So I am not alone in wondering if the center will hold. From Obama Care to secession to something as simple as school lunches, the center in Washington is dictating and the rest of the country is saying hold up or something worse. More rebellion and resistance tomorrow as we try to figure out "if the center will hold."

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