Snoopy and The Financial Downfall of America, Part 3: The Federal Government as a typical U.S. Household...Going Bankrupt

Over the past few days we have been reviewing the reality that all issues in this country pale in comparison to the horrendous, worsening, and ultimately fatal fiscal condition that the American class has created in this country. Our national government debt is soaring so much that if we do not do something drastic about it soon, then the collapse of our economy, our future, and our freedom is a fact, not just a theoretical possibility. In the face of that collapse, gay rights, a lost war on drugs, escalating health care costs, and other issues become moot points.

The first post in this series focused on the fact that the Social Security system is already in a negative cash flow situation and from a time value of money perspective, is facing a funding deficit well over $20 TRILLION. Thus, Social Security alone, if no changes are made to the program, is probably enough to bankrupt the country.

Yesterday, we expanded our view and looked at the entire debt situation of the entire Federal government. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if spending trends continue as is, the national debt will soar by almost $10 TRILLION in the next ten years, bringing it up to around $28 TRILLION. 

If we make it that far, than every American would owe almost $90,000 to pay off that debt. A family of four would owe about $350,000 to pay it off. The good news, if you want to call it that, is the country and the economy could collapse from the debt load long before that ten year timeframe is complete.

Dire times that require courageous actions and sacrifices in Washington. But courage and sacrifices have never been hallmarks of this political class. They are the ones that got us into this fiscal mess, it is highly unlikely they we will be ones to get us out.

How out of control is Federal government spending? Consider the following analogy of government spending to an American household’s budget. The national budget numbers listed below are the official White House estimates of what the Federal government’s bottom line income statement will look like next year:

- Total Federal government expense budget for 2015 = $3,900,989,000,000

- Total Federal government expected income for 2015 = $3,337,425,000,000

- Federal government debt accumulation expected for just fiscal 2015 = $563,564,000,000

- Total Federal government expected national debt by 2015 = $18,500000,000,000

Now, let’s take this mega level, mind numbing trillion dollar levels down to a household level to see how ridiculous this spending is relative to an American household. Let’s take the Federal government expected income in 2015 and divide it by about 67 million, coming up with a household income of $50,000. This is about the current median income level for an average American household.

Let’s take that same deflator and divide it into the total government expense stream for 2015, yielding $58,442. Thus, putting the government into a typical American household scenario, this household earned about $50,000 in a year but spent over $58,000. Another way to look at the numbers is that this household’s expenses were 16% above its earnings in this annual scenario. 

You may be able to do that with borrowed money at the household level for a little while but very soon, that kind of debt spending will force you into bankruptcy and force you to lose everything you own.

And these calculations do not include the national debt that has already been accumulated. If we deflate the national debt by the same deflator, 67 million, than our theoretically household has already run up a previous debt load of over $276,000. Thus, this example house hold exceeded its means by 16%, or over $8,000, which would be added onto the existing debt load of $276,000 in 2015. This household is about to enter bankruptcy.

Which means at the macro, Federal government level, so is the country. You cannot keep running up 16% deficits, year in and year out, and expect that no bad things will happen. At some point the rubber band snaps and we are getting very close to the snapping point.

Oh, and by the way, if you are thinking of taxing the wealthy in this country to an even greater extent to fix this problem, forget about it. To show you how idiotic that notion is, let’s take it to the extreme and assume rather than tax the wealth’s income more, let’s magically confiscate all of their wealth and liquidate it into cash. Since Forbes has just released the estimated wealth of the wealthiest people in the country, the timing could not be better for this math exercise.

The math goes as follows: 

• In 2015, the Federal government will spend about $10.7 Billion a DAY!
• If we take the Forbes estimate of the ten wealthiest people in America, and add up their total wealth, and divide it by the 2015 Federal government daily spending rate, we see that the total wealth of the richest ten people in this country could operate the Federal government for….45 days, less than two months.
• If we include the next ten wealthiest Americans, added up and confiscated their total wealth, the wealthiest twenty people in the country could fund the Federal government in 2015 for a grand total of … 70 days, about ten weeks or just into March.
• If we include the wealthiest fifty Americans, added up and confiscated their total wealth, the wealthiest fifty people in the country could fund the Federal government in 2015 for a grand total of…107 days, or just beyond the April 15 tax filing deadline.
• The total wealth of the wealthiest twenty Americans could pay off about 4% of the national debt, the wealthiest fifty could pay off only about 10% of the national debt.

You get the idea, you cannot fix this national debt problem by just taxing the rich. As we just showed, taking EVERYTHING they own, not just increasing taxes on their annual income, gets us nowhere close to resolving the overwhelming debt hole the politicians have dug for us. 

And remember, we are talking wealth, not income. You could only do this theoretical confiscation once, next year there would be nothing left to confiscate. And given you stole these folks’ wealth, every year going forward the rest of us would have to make up the taxes the wealthy pay every year since it is highly doubtful they would try and get rich again just to have their hard earned wealth taken away.

Even if you just took 10% of their wealth, you could fund the Federal government for 10% of 107 days, or just under 11 days, a week and a half. You cannot get there from here.

We go through all this to prove a point: unless we get real serious real soon about fixing the ever growing and out of control spending of the Washington political class, even if we could magically take and apply all of the wealth of the wealthiest Americans against the problem, we would come nowhere close to erasing annual deficits, erasing the overall national debt, and finally getting the country on a solid fiscal footing.

Spending reductions and eliminating waste and unnecessary government programs is the only real solution. We have already shown how to take trillions of dollars out of the problem without negatively affecting most Americans. That detailed plan can be reviewed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/12/part-8-eight-days-of-logic-and-sanity.html

However, that plan requires that Washington politicians take the courageous steps of saying no to lobbyists and voting blocs, finally rolling their sleeves up to clean up what is now a broken and dysfunctional Federal government bureaucracy, and focusing primarily on this problem, leaving other issues like the name of the Washington Redskins football team, how much soda we should drink, etc. for another time. Because really, if the country financially collapses, does anyone really care what the name of the Washington DC NFL team nickname is? 

However, saying no, rolling up their sleeves, and focusing are three skills that constantly elude those in Washington. That is why term limits may be the only way to fix what the incumbents have broken. You can do so at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 5: Redundant Government Agencies and So Much Wasteful Afghan Spending

This is our fifth and likely last post this month in our monthly series nonpolitical class insanity. Our previous four posts again illustrated that the American political class is inept, wasteful, and unable to provide even basic services and good value for our taxpayer dollars. Insanity is the best word to describe why we as voters keep putting up with such nonsense.

Today’s insanity examples will be a hodgepodge of waste and ineffectiveness from a wide variety of government entities that are operated and led by the worse set of politicians to ever sit in the White house and Congress:

1) According to the Spendopedia website, in July 2013 the U.S. State Department Inspector General (IG) issued a damning audit report of the Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) Office of Information Assurance. The overall conclusion is that the bureau, which is supposed to address information security, was wasteful, redundant and needed strict oversight. Specifically:

• The bureau failed to adequately track its $79 million in contracts. 
• The bureau failed to monitor its contracts and provide oversight on its purchases. 
• The bureau’s lacked a mission statement and overall purpose, as well as the fact that other offices within the State Department carried out similar functions. 
• But still, given the overlapping of its function and no defined purpose, it still spent $79 million a year for little added value.
• The agency's leadership and workforce includes 22 full-time employees and 36 contract employees. 
• The report said the agency was “not overseeing contracts effectively” and that “responsibilities…are assigned to individuals without the technical expertise to review the work." 
• The report and analysis offered 32 formal and four informal recommendations for how the agency could improve. 

$79 million wasted for an unneeded and ineffective government bureaucracy. Seems like that $79 million could feed, shelter, and clothe a lot of homeless or suffering Americans, far better uses than what the political class is using it for today.

2) Afghanistan has always been a rich area for government waste and incompetence. According to another Spendopedia report, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has financially worked with the Afghan Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) since 2008. The cost of this partnership is valued at $236 million USAID and MoPH which was budgeted under the "Partnership Contracts for Health" (PCH) contract. 

The objective of the contract was to deliver healthcare to local Afghan clinics and hospitals in Afghanistan's 18 provinces. This supports the Ministry's mission is to "improve the health and nutritional status of the people of Afghanistan in an equitable and sustainable manner through quality health services provision[s], advocating for the development of healthy environments and living conditions; and the promotion of healthy lifestyles." 

Nice mission and words, bad implementation. A report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has revealed rampant fraud and abuse within the program. Specifically:

• The $236 million figure was chosen based on a cost estimate developed by MoPH. The actual projected cost was never validated by USAID and documentation of the calculations were not provided by MoPH. 
• According to USAID internal control standards, a proper assessment should have been made to provide assurance that federal funds would be used as intended. 
• Although there were two assessments made in 2007 and 2008, a review by USAID's IG revealed in November 2010 that these two assessments were not adequate. 
• SIGAR also made the judgment that the two assessments did not meet the standards required by a formal assessment. 
• The report concludes USAID had not verified whether MoPH had taken any steps to remedy these problems or whether PCH was still a responsible program.
• SIGAR recommended the following: 1) USAID cut off funding until the cost estimates could be validated. 2) USAID work with MoPH to develop an action plan to address unaccounted funds. 3) USAID and MoPH return any excess funds to the U.S. Treasury. 

Just another typical government program. Suspicious cost estimates and budgeting, lousy follow up tracking and analysis, and another had scratching instance of why we are spending $236 million in a country that we will soon be leaving and which will revert back to Taliban control when there are tens of millions of Americans without health insurance that could have used the $236 million for their own medical needs.

3) Staying with Spendopedia and Afghanistan, on June 17, 2013, the Pentagon announced it planned to spend more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to buy helicopters and other aircraft for the Afghan Specials Mission Wing. Sounds like a sound military purchase on the surface until you find out that the Afghan aviation team and military had neither the skills nor the number of troops necessary to maintain the equipment. 

The Huffington Post commented on this idiotic use of taxpayer money: "These shortcomings mean the helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft destined for the Afghan Special Mission Wing 'could be left sitting on runways in Afghanistan, rather than supporting critical missions, resulting in waste of U.S. funds.'" The really sad part of the whole affair is that the Pentagon knew that the Afghan military was incapable of maintaining and using the aircraft but the Pentagon went forward with the purchase anyway. Insanity.

SIGAR also got involved in this Afghan spending disaster. Their findings conclude:

• SIGAR’s report concluded that the Afghanistan Special Mission Wing (SMW) lacked the capacity and skills to operate and maintain the existing and planned SMW fleets. 
• The SMW had less than one-fourth of the trained personnel needed to service the aircrafts. 
• SIGAR concluded that even if the Afghans were operating at full strength, NATO had no plan that identified how the SMV would achieve their goals and how they would address problems achieving those goals. 
• The purchases were made before the Afghan Ministry of Defense (MOD) and the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) had agreed on the way the SMW group should be controlled or structured. 
• The Inspector General determined the Pentagon had not developed a plan to transfer the maintenance instructions over to the Afghans and, still performed 50 percent of the maintenance of the helicopters.
• The report noted only seven of the group's 47 pilots were qualified to fly with night vision goggles, a skilled necessary to complete counterterrorism missions.

What a mess. Spending millions of dollars on stuff that could never be used by personnel that were not trained to use it. And knowing ahead of time that was the case makes it even worse.

But lets add insult to injury. The helicopters being bought that were never to be used did not come from an American manufacturer. At least if that was the case you could justify the spending to some degree in that it stayed in country and employed some American workers. But, alas, not true. The money was spent to buy RUSSIAN helicopters from a RUSSIAM manufacturer, Rosoboronexport. 

When the Congress found out about the Russian connection they passed a bill forbidding the purchase. However, the Pentagon went out of its way to do some accounting shenanigans to bypass the Congressional mandate to complete the Russian purchase anyway. Outrageous behavior that I would bet no one got fired over.

That's enough for today and for this month. We are sure to be back next month to continue our review of government insanity in all its forms. Today we found out that we spend tens of millions of dollars on a government agency that is unneeded and unprepared to do its redundant job, we found out how to waste medical resources in a country because the government has not accountability in assessing its own programs, and found that the Pentagon buys military equipment to be used in a foreign land by people untrained and incapable of using the equipment that we bought from Russian sources that will never be used.

Insane, wasteful, and plain stupid behavior by the American political class and the government it operates.

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

March, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Defense Budgets Out of Control, Government Real Estate Out of Control and Government Partying Out Of Control

It’s the beginning of the month which means it is time for another dose of political class insanity, idiocy, screw ups, and wasteful spending. Every month we need to take a week or so of posts to cover all of the many inane acts that politicians all over the country impose on ordinary Americans, acts that almost always cost us money or freedom. Previous discussions of political class insanity can be accessed by looking at the early posts of previous months from the list of dates on the right side of this screen.

Unfortunately, when we started doing this feature four years ago, we could usually cover a month’s worth of insanity in a day or so. Over the years, we have needed more and more time each month to get our insanity reviews done, indicating that our political class decision making and actions are getting worse over time. There is little doubt that the trend will continue this month also.

1) We have often discussed the reality that the U.S. continues to needlessly deploy over a hundred thousand troops just in South Korea, Japan, Europe, and other parts of the world, at a cost of billions and billions of dollars a year. These deployments may have served a purpose at one point in our history but now are unnecessary relics from our military past. 

More recently, the current Presidential administration has involved U.S. military resources in an illegal and ill fated military conflict in Libya, has stationed 2,500 U.S. Marines in Australia, and now has placed U.S. troops, or “advisors,” in upwards of a half dozen African nations. In addition, in the past six months, the President has threatened to militarily intervene in Syria and his Secretary of State has floated the idea of having U.S. troops serve as peacekeepers in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

All of this costs money, as the following chart shows, U.S. military spending vs. major all countries around the world (double click on graph for a larger view):



As you see:

• The U.S. spends almost $600 billion a year on defense, a cost that is equivalent to well over $5,000 a year per U.S. household.
• This is four times more than what China spends on defense despite China having orders of magnitude more people than us.
• This is about eight times what Russia spends on defense.
• In fact, the U.S. probably spends more than most of the nations on this chart COMBINED.

This chart proves that we really need to find a way to rein in the insane defense spending by substantially cutting the deployment of U.S. military resources around the world along with reducing other other excessive and wasteful defense spending. We simply cannot afford the cost of what the political class is spending in this budget item, getting very little in return. 

2) Let’s look at another chart, a chart which partly explains why the military industrial complex in this country spends almost $600 billion dollars a year:

This chart comes from a recent Cato analysis and report which counted up the number of physical buildings that the Federal government currently owns. Cato and the chart point out:

• The top three occupants of Federal buildings are the Army, Air Force, and Navy who in total occupy at least a whopping 180,000 buildings.
• This comes out to an almost incomprehensible 3,600 defense related buildings in every state on average. Another possible reason for an annual defense budget of almost $600 billion a year?
• In total, the Feds own over 300,000 buildings.
• But it gets worse. The government also leases 55,000 buildings, for a total of 361,000 buildings.
• But there is still more insanity. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of buildings that it owns AND leases, the Federal government owns and leases another remarkable 486,00 pieces of real estate such as parking lots. 
• The General Services Administration reports that the annual operating costs for all the buildings and structures is $33 billion. 
• Although the current market value of the buildings is unknown, a government report estimated the replacement value in 2007 at $1.5 trillion.
• The Federal government even admits that at least 77,000 of the assets are under used or unneeded.
• Some of them have been ignored for so long that they are in what Cato calls an “alarming state of deterioration.”

Obviously the Federal government needs to do a good spring cleaning of its real estate holdings. Selling these assets to private investors would 1) put them to better use than the non use they are receiving today, 2) would save American taxpayers billions of dollars a year in annual maintenance, administrative, security, and repair costs, 3) would reduce Federal government energy costs in keeping these facilities with power, and 4) would not contribute to our already outlandish national debt in the long run.

One problem is that the government does not know exactly what it owns, what condition those assets are in, and what real estate assets are excessive or unused. The GAO says that the government has a “lack of accurate and useful data to support decision making” on its vast property holdings. 

How insane is that, the Federal government has gotten so large and unwieldy that it does not even know what it owns? If a private business ran itself like that, not knowing what assets it owned or where those assets were located, it would soon be out of business. When government does it, the problem goes unattended for decades and the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill for the political and bureaucratic incompetence.

Nevertheless, it is time for Washington to clean up this mess that it has been causing for decades, spring clean and bank the savings regardless of how unglamorous the clean up is. Anything else is just plain insane.

3) The political class spends and wastes our money is so many ways, not the least of which is how politicians and government bureaucrats party. Consider some of the party expenditures the Washington political class has treated themselves to over the past few years using our tax money:

• The White House staff currently has five chefs on staff at a cost of over $550,000 a year. Why five chefs, do they all prepare one part of every meal? Too excessive even for the President, especially when over 20 million Americans are unemployed or under employed, almost fifty million Americans receive food assistance, and our national debt is now over $17 TRILLION. Cut it down to two chefs and show at least a little empathy for the rest of America.
• In 2013, Joe Biden went to Europe for just two days where he and his staff rang up two nights of hotel expenses that exceeded $1 million. $1 million just in hotel expenses. I would not expect the Vice President to stay in a Motel 6 but I also do not think that $1 million for just two nights of lodging is respectful of taxpayers either.
• In the past few years the IRS has spent about $50 million on its conferences, often held in very nice surroundings outside of DC. A 2013 conference in Anaheim, California cost the American taxpayer $4 million and included some hotel rooms that went for $1,500 a night. Expenses also included $17,000 just for conference speakers one of which spoke about “Leadership In Art,” a topic that has nothing to do with tax collection and tax law.

Other such nonsense and cases of taxpayer wealth can be seen at:

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2014/02/22/video-party-time-on-the-taxpayer-dime/

That will do it for today, just day one of this month’s political class insanity. A defense budget out of control, government real estate out of control, and politicians and bureaucrats partying out of control. All paid for by the American taxpayer who gets virtually nothing in return for these expenditures.

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

Grounds For Impeachment, Part 4: Don't Take My Word For It, Listen To What Prominent Liberals Also Think

The past week has been some pretty heavy stuff as we first spent three posts discussing the 61 reasons, lies, deceptions, incompetence, and failures that cannot be used to impeach President Obama and remove him from office. The first post in that three part series can be found at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/01/part-1-first-twenty-failures-of-obama.html

Then we spent another three days finding 59 examples of illegal behavior, lawlessness, and anti-Constitution behavior that are grounds for impeachment and removal from office. The first part in that three part series can be found at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/01/grounds-for-impeachment-part-1-obama.html

As I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life and I have been of voting age since the 1970s. Until 2010, I had never voted for a Republican for national office in my life. Thus, I do not think anyone could honestly accuse me of being a conservative or a Republican whose writing this past week is just a hatchet job, a politically motivated attempt to smear this President.

Regardless of what you think of myself, my views, and my writings relative to the disaster that I feel is the Obama Presidency, consider some views of citizens who certainly would not fall into the conservative/Republican political spectrum and how distressed they are about the Obama Presidency:

Nat Hentoff was a journalist and columnist for “The Village Voice,” for over five decades. The Village Voice has been around for a very long time, it is a New York City periodical that tends to lean liberal and left in its writing and tone. The article I read about Mr. Hentoff stated that he is often portrayed as the “conscious” of liberalism. Mr. Hentoff is also portrayed as an authority on the Bill of Rights and Supreme Court cases

Apparently, Mr. Hentoff, despite his long time liberal credentials and leanings, did not like Obama from the start, writing a column shortly after Obama’s first election where he warned us of the impending damage Obama might to do to the nation. He said the President “was going to be the most destructive, dangerous president we’ve ever had.” 

Five years later, this liberal seems to have hit the nail right on the head, believing that Obama is the most dangerous and destructive president America has ever had:

• “He’s [Obama] in a position now where he feels he can do whatever he wants to do.” 
• “He’s the boss and hardly anybody cares enough to stop him.”
• “He doesn’t seem to think to give one damn about the separation of powers.”
• “This is the worst state, I think, that our country has ever been in.” 
• “Never before in our history has a president done these things.”
• “Even worse [the state of the country today] than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.”
• “What Obama is doing now is about as un-American as you can get.”

Needless to say, Mr. Hentoff appears to support the impeachment of President Obama despite his liberal background and leanings.

Wikipeida says Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and political activist. He has been a long time critic of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. military forays, and generally has been considered a left/liberal leaning citizen and political activist. 

In a recent interview published on the Alternet website, he also comes down hard on the danger and lawlessness of Obama:

• “I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated.”
• “What it is is the same kind of commitment to expanding executive power that Cheney and Rumsfeld had. He kind of puts it in mellifluous terms and there's a little difference in his tone. It's not as crude and brutal as they were, but it's pretty hard to see much of a difference.”
• “It's an enormous expansion of executive power [NSA spying on citizens]. I doubt that they can do much with this information that's being stored.”
• “It's interesting to see the way in which due process is being reinterpreted by Obama's Justice Department in regards to the drone killings. Attorney General Eric Holder was asked why the administration was killing people without due process. Well, there was due process, he said, because they discuss it within the executive branch. King John in the 13th century would have loved that.”
• “Obama's Attack on Civil Liberties Has Gone Way Beyond Imagination.”
• “President Obama promised to have the most “transparent administration” in the history of our nation. Methinks this should go down as another one of Obama’s famed lies — and there are many. As ESPN college football commentator Lee Corso would say, ‘Not so fast my friend.’” 

Mr. Chomsky will never be mistaken for a neo-con Republican or anything close to that politically. However, he also recognizes the danger and illegality of the Obama administration.

According to a recent report in Politico, the left leaning, Obama cheerleading liberal New York Times apparently has at least one executive who is also upset and very concerned about the anti-Constitutional behavior of Obama. New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson is quoted by Politico that President Obama’s White House is the “most secretive White House” that she’s covered during her long tenure as a political journalist:

• “I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush’s first term.” 
• “The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It’s on a scale never seen before. This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with.”
• “I would think that it [“it” being did Obama know the massive government spoying was going on] would have to. I don’t know that, but certainly enough attention has been focused on this issue that, if he departed from the policies of his government, I think we’d know that at this point.” 

In support of Ms. Abramson’s observations, the Politico article also dug up an older quote from the Times Editorial Board that was published earlier in 2013:

The Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.

So even if you do not believe me and my 59 reasons why there are more than sufficient grounds for the impeachment and removal from office of President Obama, consider that the “conscious of liberalism,” a famous long time left leaning political activist, and some high ranking executives of the New York Times are pretty much in alignment with my conclusions:

“Never before in our history has a president done these things.”

“Obama's Attack on Civil Liberties Has Gone Way Beyond Imagination.”

“It’s on a scale never seen before. This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with.”

“The Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.”

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

The Week The Obama Admiinistration Entered Lame Duck Status, Part 1: the Benghazi Coverup and Obama Care Deceptions

It's all about humanity, humility, and integrity. Debra Wilson

It is not often when you can pinpoint the exact time that a U.S. President becomes a lame duck. The evidence usually builds slowly over time until one day you realize that the approaching end of a term means that the ability of a President to champion, convince, cajole, and lead has ebbed away into the sunset of their term.

That may not be the case of the Obama Presidency. In a rapid succession of events, we may have just seen this administration lose its humanity, its humility, and its integrity in a very short time, and with it, thevery quick dawning of the Obama Presidency lame duck era. You cannot lead a country when all traces of humanity, humility, and integrity have left your administration.

The scandals of this Presidency had been percolating under the surface of the nation’s attention for some time. The mainstream press and the administration had done all it could to keep them under the surface.

However, that effort proved inadequate over the past week when any number of scandals erupted into the public space. And the amazing thing about the eruptions, they were not caused by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or other right wing/conservative news outlets. Most of the damage to the integrity and morals of this administration came from members of the mainstream press who had either been overly protective of this Presidency or overly blinded by this President’s charms and false integrity.

It started on a Sunday night in a CBS “60 Minutes” story which had culminated almost a year of investigative reporting. The main story line was that as the consulate attack at Benghazi was underway, members onsite at the consulate were in direct communication with the outside world, telling them that Al Qaeda terrorists were attacking and they needed immediate help and protection. 

Thus, during the attack, both at the actual consulate building and at the annex a mile away, we already knew that this was not a street demonstration that got out of hand. This was a highly coordinated, well thought out terrorist attack on American sovereignty and personnel. We also now know that this attack had already been predicted months in advance.

However, from a humanity perspective, those twenty plus Americans calling out for help in Benghazi were left to their own devices when someone, somewhere in the administration called off the military rescue parties that were geared up and ready to go. 
The heartless inaction of those decision makers resulted in a high ranking military leader to be yanked from leading the rescue mission and directly led to the deaths of four brave Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stephens.

Despite knowing months in advance that the consulate and Americans would likely be a target of terrorists, that the Red Cross and British consulate had already been attacked by terrorists, that there had been security warnings from many security experts including British personnel, U.S. armed forces, and local Libyans contacts, and despite the fact that the ambassador had already told Washington that the Al Qaeda flag could been clearly seen flying over Libyan government buildings, nothing was done ahead of time to prevent the attack.

But the real lack of humanity and integrity comes after the attack. Jay Carney insists at a press briefing that there were no forewarnings that an attack was imminent. 

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., goes on  five Sunday television news to insist that the attack was not from Al Qaeda and was not pre planned, that it was a spontaneous eruption of emotions from a YouTube video. 

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton repeat the same lie and deception at the U.N. and elsewhere, despite the fact that the ambassador made the outgoing call DURING the attack that it was a planned terrorist attack, not a YouTube video reaction.

Four Americans die, another twenty or so were intentionally left in mortal danger and Hillary Clinton testifies in front of Congress, “What difference does it make?” Heartless, callow, and lacking of humanity, humility, and integrity. 

Outright lies and deceptions to promote the President’s reelection and protect his campaign position/boast that Al Qaeda was on the run and no longer a factor in the world. For that protection and the deceptions attached to it, four Americans unnecessarily died.

The sobering entire “60 Minutes: report can be viewed at:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50157981n

But the Benghazi scandal and death was just one of the exploding disgraces this week. NBC News, another mainstream media outlet that has been overly soft on the administration, released a very embarrassing investigative report relative to Obama Care. The NBC report maintains that the White House, the President, and others involved in pushing through the Obama Care legislation were well aware for the past several years that millions of Americans were likely to lose their current health insurance policy and coverages as a result of Obama Care. 

How do we know this? NBC News senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers found buried in the 2010 Obamacare regulation language predicting, “A reasonable range for the percentage of individual policies that would terminate is forty percent to sixty-seven percent.”

  Why is this such a big deal? Well, from an integrity perspective, the President had been claiming numerous times over those years that NO American would lose their current insurance policy or access to their favorite doctors as a result of Obama Care:

“If you got health insurance, it does not mean a government take over, you keep your own insurance, you keep your own doctor.”

“If you like your [health insurance plan], you can keep your plan.”

“Here is a guarantee that I make. If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you have a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.  Nobody is trying to change what works in the system.’

“If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you will not have to do a thing…we are not going to mess with it.”

But this was all a charade, according to NBC News. Those in the White House knew three years ago that millions of Americans (45% to 67%) were going to lose their access to their current plans and their favorite doctors but said nothing about that reality. Instead, the President keep coming forward in different venues with the same message: You will not lose access to the insurance plans and doctors that you want access to.

But millions of Americans will lose access. If you adhere to the definition of integrity that integrity it is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, than this escapade of the Obama administration could not be further from the reality of this definition.

Not only is there a gross lack of integrity on this issue and scandal but there is no humility or humanity either. From a humility perspective, the President is not coming forward to apologize for the deception or misspeaking, no one on his staff or in his press corps are owning up to the lie and deception. They could have at least apologized for the deception and asked for some sort of forgiveness going forward but no, humility is apparently non-existent in this administration.

And neither is a sense of humanity. If the Washington politicians and administration bureaucrats knew of this impending and dire situation years ago, any of them with a sense of humanity or compassion should have come forward then and told the American people that this catastrophe was coming and to make plans. Given a few years warning, most people could have adapted to the disaster of losing their insurance policy and doctors. 

But nothing was said to cushion the blow until just months before millions of Americans were to lose their current, favored insurance policies and doctor access. And if NBC had not done their investigative job, those months might have turned into just weeks for Americans to scramble for new coverage and new doctor access.

Some of the original video clips of the President deceptively stating that happy Americans would not have their health insurance disrupted and the NBC news report can be accessed at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90588-watch-nbc-news-drops-bombshell-president-obama-knowingly-lied-obamacare-years/

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/10/90531-watch-white-houses-truth-video-turns-complete-sham/

And the sad thing, these are not the only two issues that exploded this week and put this administration’s lack of humanity, humility and integrity on full, naked display. We will cover them tomorrow.

If you lose all sense of humanity, humility, and integrity, you cannot lead, you cannot rule. No one will ever believe anything you say. If you make up stories and deceptions to cover up American deaths to protect your reelection campaign, how can we ever trust you on any issue going forward? If you constantly tell us one thing when you know the exact opposite is the reality, how can we ever believe you an any issue going forward? 

And that is the real definition of a lame duck: a leader that cannot lead. A leader that does not tell the truth. A leader that has no sense of humility or compassion. A leader that puts himself before humanity. It is going to be a long three years.

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

Government Gone Wild, Part 9: Three More NSA Whistleblowers Come Forward, Part 2 Of Their Tale Of Bravery

This is the second half of a story we started yesterday where we reviewed the revelations now coming out from three new NSA whistler blowers regarding the intrusive and unprecedented government snooping into all forms of electronic communications of all Americans. This is also the ninth in a series of posts regarding the overall Naitonal Security Agency spying and snooping on Americans, without just cause or due process, and the shredding of the Fourth Amednment of the Constitution.

This second half continues the review of the noteworthy quotes from the three whistleblowers and their USA Today interview:
Radack: “I consider this to be an unlawful order. While I am glad that we finally have something tangible to look at, this order came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They have no jurisdiction to authorize domestic-to-domestic surveillance.” Comment: As we have already asserted, secret warrants from secret judges sitting in secret courts with aoo facets breaking the law.

Drake: “For me, it was material evidence of an institutional crime that we now claim is criminal.”

Radack: ‘Congress has been a rubber stamp, basically, and the judicial branch has been basically shut down from hearing these lawsuits because every time they do they are told that the people who are challenging these programs either have no standing or (are covered by) the state secrets privilege, and the government says that they can't go forward. So the idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.” Comment: checks and balances is a myth, could not agree more regardless of what the President and his surrogates say.

Radack: “The proof is in the pudding. Last year alone, in 2012, they approved 1,856 applications and they denied none. And that is typical from everything that has happened in previous years. ... I know the government has been asserting that all of this is kosher and legitimate because the FISA court signed off on it. The FISA court is a secret court — operates in secret. There is only one side and has rarely disapproved anything.”

Radack: “Even for people in the know, I feel like Congress is being misled.”

Drake: “But see, I am Exhibit No. 1. ...You know, I was charged with 10 felony counts. I was facing 35 years in prison. This is how far the state will go to punish you out of retaliation and reprisal and retribution. ... My life has been changed. It's been turned inside, upside down. I lived on the blunt end of the surveillance bubble. ... When you are faced essentially with the rest of your life in prison, you really begin to understand and appreciate more so than I ever have — in terms of four times I took the oath to support the Constitution — what those rights and freedoms really mean. ... “

Drake: “Well, I feel extraordinary kinship with him [Snowden], given what I experienced at the hands of the government.”

Radack: “I would thank him for taking such a huge personal risk and giving up so much of his life and possibly facing the loss of his life or spending it in jail. Thank him for doing that to try to help our country save it from itself in terms of exposing dark, illegal, unethical, unconstitutional conduct that is being done against millions and millions of people.”

Binney: “Two basic principles you have to use. [to collect data on potential terrorists and protect the Fourth Amednment] ... One is what I call the two-degree principle. If you have a terrorist talking to somebody in the United States — that's the first degree away from the terrorist. And that could apply to any country in the world. And then the second degree would be who that person in the United States talked to. So that becomes your zone of suspicion. And the other one (principle) is you watch all the jihadi sites on the Web and who's visiting those jihadi sites, who has an interest in the philosophy being expressed there. And then you add those to your zone of suspicion. Everybody else is innocent — I mean, you know, of terrorism, anyway.” Comment: reasonable approach to keeping freedom intact and the citizens secure in this age of terrorism which we do not want to morph into the age of liberty destruction.

Drake: “It's been within our capabilities [to operate with these liberty safeguards] for well over 12 years.” Comment: which raises the obvious question: why were these safeguard capabilities not used?

Drake: ‘This (kind of surveillance) is all unnecessary. It is important to note that the very best of American ingenuity and inventiveness, creativity, had solved the major challenge problem the NSA faced: How do you make sense of vast amounts of data, provide the information you need to protect the nation, while also protecting the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution?” Comment: which gets us back to the old saying: just because you can does not mean you should. Just because you can collect and store EVERY piece of electronic communications from every American, the vast, vast amount are innocent of any wrongdoing does not mean you should, especially when more effective and targeted approaches are available.

Binney: “But when it comes to these data, the massive data information collecting on U.S. citizens and everything in the world they can, I guess the real problem comes with trust. That's really the issue. The government is asking for us to trust them.“

Binney: “It's not just the trust that you have to have in the government. It's the trust you have to have in the government employees, (that) they won't go in the database — they can see if their wife is cheating with the neighbor or something like that.” Comment: that this is the second major flaw in this strategy of secretly tracking everyone: not only is it unnecessary but the potential for abuse by government employees and government politicians is immense with very little positive benefit back to society.

Wow, scary and fascinating stuff. I applaud these newly identified whistle blowers and the others, Edward Snowden, Maxine Walters, and  Shia LaBeouf who also have done their part in exposing the massive attack on privacy and Fourth Amendment rights in this country. They have sacrificed personal and professional safety and careers to do the right thing.

There is a way to do this electronic surveillance without persecuting, tracking, and spying on every Americans’ communications like Big Brother would do in an Orwellian world. These experts have shown how to do it. Do we want to allow the non-experts in Congress and the White House to convince us that their creepy and all surveillance all the time approach is the only effective way to fight terrorism?

I for one would trust these brave whistleblower experts way before I would trust a Washington politician, given their recent and historical tendency to just plain out lie to our faces. That is why we continue to focus on the need for term limits for Washington politicians. They have gotten use into this liberty sapping situation for reasons that we now know from these data systems experts is totally unnecessary.

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:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Fun With Math, Part 2 - How Bad Could Life Get With A $16 TRILLION National Debt?

Last week we dedicated a post to doing some simple math to try and get our hands around how big our $16 TRILLION national debt really is. We calculated how many times we could circle the globe if we laid 16 trillion one dollar bills end-to-end (60,000), how far out into space we could go if we laid those same bills end-to-end (back and forth to Mars about 2,100 times), etc. The other examples and subsequent discussion can be found at:

 http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/09/fun-with-math-making-our-16-trillion.html.

Although having a debt of $16 TRILLION is really, really bad, saddling each American family with about $140,000 each, it could get much worse before it gets better. We started doing that calculation last week when we used Obama's White House budget website, which shows that the $16 TRILLION is expected to grow another $3.4 TRILLION by 2017 under Obama's current budget assumptions. This would bring the total national debt to just under a whopping $20 TRILLION.

However, Obama's budget calls for some unbelievably aggressive growth rates in government tax revenue in each of the next five years, growth rates that have never been sustained over a five year period in the history of the country. Thus, we found the $3.4 TRILLION increase to be unfounded and highly unlikely not to happen. Using the long term average growth rate of the U.S. economy, around 3%, we recalculated the next five years' worth of tax revenue, keeping Obama's government spending assumptions unchanged. This results in another $7 TRILLION being added to our burdensome national debt, not his overly optimistic $3.4 TRILLION increase.

An additional $7 TRILLION in national debt theoretically adds another $61,000 or so to each American household's share of the Federal government debt. This would bring the total household debt responsibility to $200,000, a level that would never be sustained.

But it gets worse. Fortunately, for the political class and the country, the U.S. Treasury is paying record low interest rates to finance this ongoing and growing debt load. This is caused by what I call the "queen of the pigs" theory.

As most people know, many, many countries in Europe are economic basket cases. Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, etc. are having severe economic problems and their own outsized national debt difficulties, which has made their sovereign debt riskier. Riskier investments make it harder to get investors to buy your bonds and those that do buy, want higher returns for their risk. This has pushed the interest for some European sovereign bonds up into the 6-7% range.

The Chinese economy is slowing, the Japanese economy is still in a twenty year funk, the U.S. stock market has been volatile and generally providing low returns, and the U.S. housing market is still in the ditch. With so much economic uncertainty in the world, many investors are looking to park their wealth and money somewhere safe in order to not lose their principle.

The best place to do that recently has been with U.S. Treasury bonds. Basic economic theory prevails: high demand for a limited supply keeps your costs down. In this case, the demand is high for T-bills, the supply is limited, which pushes down the interest rates.

Thus, while we do have historically high national debt levels, the cost to service that debt is historically low. If you go to the official White House budget website and its EXCEL spreadsheets, you will find that the interest expected to be paid (about $224 billion) on the expected 2012 year end national debt level (about $16.3 TRILLION) is about 1.4%. Not a bad interest rate to be paying for such a large debt load.

Let's look at Obama's own numbers. By 2017, our national debt should be about $20 TRILLION according to the White House website. The cost of servicing that debt load in 2017, again, according to Obama's numbers, would be about $565 billion. This comes out to an overall interest rate of about 2.9%. Thus, our debt cost under this base case scenario will go from about $224 billion a year at a 1.4% interest rate to $565 billion a year at a 2.9% interest rate. Thus, Obama is planning to more than double the amount of taxpayer wealth diverted solely to interest payments and the interest rate we pay to service that debt in the next five years.

Hang in there, we are almost there from a math perspective. If you take Obama's 2012 expected tax revenue estimate and divide it into his expected interest payment budget line for 2012 you will calculate a number of 9.1%, i.e. about nine percent of Federal tax revenues will be used to pay interest. By 2017, he expects that number to increase by about 50% with about 14.4% of 2017 tax revenues to be used to pay for interest payments. All bad trends.

However, that debt load will have to be constantly serviced over time as the existing bonds are sold and new bonds issued. The very real concern is that at some point in time, the rest of the world's economic opportunities begin to improve. Let's say that somehow Europe struggles through its economic problems and gets itself on solid financial footing. Investors will start to look to Europe to increase their return on their wealth.

Let's assume that China gets out of its doldrums and with its large population starts humming again, from an economic perspective. An improving U.S. housing market and stock market may be better options for investors than getting 1.4% or so on its investment in Treasury bonds.

Thus, as the world's economy improves, including our economy, and the rating agencies, investors, and the rest of the world get more and more antsy about our ever escalating debt load, there is an excellent chance that there will be fewer and fewer investors willing to give the U.S. Treasury Department some of their wealth to invest. This will require that Treasury interest rates increase just to get money for servicing the debt and our deficit spending. Thus, those 1.4% and 2.9%interest rates may very soon be a pipe dream.

Let's assume that we start to look like Greece and Spain by 2017, given our ever rising debt load. Our interest rate would certainly no longer be so low. Let's assume that the 2.9% rate in 2017 is a more Greece-like 6%. Simple math would say that we would no longer be paying $565 billion a year to service our debt. At 6%, a $20 TRILLION debt financing cost would increase to $1.2 TRILLION a year, more than double up from $565 billion.

Under this scenario over 30% of the Federal government's tax revenue would go solely to servicing the $20 TRILLION debt.

If we assume that we are up to about 120 million households by 2017, on average every American household would have to pay $10,000 each just in 2017 just to pay for the debt servicing. Obviously, more taxes would then have to be collected to cover Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, and every other government function. Scary, scary numbers.

But we can make it worse without stretching the bounds of reasonability. We do not believe that Obama's revenue numbers are realistic, they are much too high. Let's assume that government revenue only grows around 3% a year for the next five years. Then, by 2017, the Federal government revenue stream is not $3.92 TRILLION, it is closer to $2.86 TRILLION. In this scenario, about 42% of every Federal tax dollar goes to debt servicing.

The good news, which is really really bad news, is that this may never happen. We may see an economic collapse long before we get to these 2017 numbers. If we get another recession within the next five years, highly likely, we may have such a suppression in government tax revenue that it cannot service the debt, leading to default. In that situation, any saving bonds or Treasury bonds that any American holds could be worthless, leading to economic hardship for many American families but especially elderly Americans who may have counted on those government securities for their retirement.

Going back to Obama's numbers, a 2017 best case scenario says that expected government spending, $4.5 TRILLION would quickly be reduced by $612 billion or 13% in order for actual tax revenue to equal actual expenditures, no more financing spending and deficit spending. Thus, best case in a default is that every government function, every Social Security check, every Medicare payment, every Federal employee salary, etc. would immediately be reduced by 13%. And I believe that the 13% is best case, it would likely be far worse.

There would be no immediate change/improvement in our economic situation after a default since no one would be willing to lend the Federal government any money. We would have to live only on what the government could tax collect with no deficit spending.

And these calculations do not even bring into account the likelihood of high or even runaway inflation. The Federal Reserve has done two rounds of "quantitative easing," which is nothing more than printing money and injecting it into the financial systems in the hope that it will eventually lead to economic growth.

The first two rounds of easing resulting in the printing of $2.3 TRILLION, money that is sitting somewhere in the banking system waiting for the right opportunity to be invested. If the Fed is not careful, if that investing comes all at once, inflation is likely to skyrocket, putting further pressure on the Federal government, raising interest rates dramatically, raising interest rates, and crushing individual household budgets and savings.

Not a pretty sight. But this is the path we are on. You may dispute some of my numbers, assumptions and calculations since I am not a financial or economics expert. I am just doing some simple, logical math with official government statistics and forecasts.

But I doubt anyone would arrive at a substantially different overall conclusion using any other approach. Using Obama's own numbers, we are heading for a fiscal meltdown that could happen within just a few years, taking our economic well being and our democracy with it. Using more realistic numbers than the official Federal government.White House view results in a much worse economic scenario.

Study Germany in the 1920s and Argentina a few decades ago to see what an economic meltdown and default looks like. Observe what happens to Greece and Spain in the next six months or so to see what is in store for us.

But there might still be time to get our outrageous Federal government spending habits under control. Tomorrow we will go through a detailed plan that will remove $9 TRILLION from our debt load. And best of all, it does that without raising taxes and with minimal impact to most American families.

It can be done. The question is whether it can be done by those sitting in the White House and Congress today. Their lack of courage track record says they cannot and thus, they need to all be removed from office on November 6, 2012 if we are to have any chance of avoiding what I have laid out above.

Note: for those of you who want to tinker with the Obama numbers we used above, go to the following web page for the original numbers and forecasts:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

http://www.unitedstatesofpurple.com/

The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment