Rant For The Week!!

Here is a little rant on a Tuesday evening for everyone to enjoy.

1. With all the commotion about the Duggar family scandal, I find it ironic that the press is giving Republican Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee a hard time for his friendship with this family when Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton has been married to an accused sexual predator for 40 years…….HMMMMM!!

2. Sad anniversary as today marks one year since the JV….err…..ISIS took control of Iraqi city of Mosul.

     

3. In case you were counting, this year the Senate has already voted on 31 bills. That’s impressive since last year, under the supreme rule of Harry Reid; the Senate was only able to complete votes on 12 pieces of legislation.

        

4. Before Hillary is crowned the Democrat’s successor to Obama, take a look at a recent Wisconsin straw pool which Hillary barely won 49% to 41% over Bernie Sanders.

        

5. Remember last month when everyone in DC was going crazy about Amtrak funding? Wonder what happened to that?      OH YEAH…that Caitlyn chick…….

       

6. This week a Pakistani Court acquitted 8 of the 10 men who took part in the attack on 14 year old Malala Yousafzai. You remember her; she wrote a women’s rights blog and was shot in the face by this group of adult men while sitting on her school bus. Yeah….Pakistan….They’re our friends!

     

7. By the way, when President Obama starts to give President Putin advice about how to make his people happy he might want to check on that. Putin’s approval ratings by Russian voters are in the 80% range as polled by third party sources and not by the Russian media. Just to get an idea of how big that is, it’s twice as high as Obama’s own approval rating by American voters.

       

8. Lastly, today I was in a conversation discussing the rough handling of the disrespectful young lady who caused much of the problem in McKinney, Texas. I was asked how I would have reacted had that been my child? I simply smiled and let them know that my child would have had enough respect for the authorities and themselves to NOT be there.

Phew…..eight items and they’re short enough to read quickly….Just some things to think about.

Later

Bill

Congress vs. The People

With the loss of some incumbents in this year’s primary and the squeakers by some of the other incumbents, it is important to understand how the influence over these races is handled by the incumbents in office. It is said in politics that the hardest thing to do is beat an incumbent so I thought I might shine some light on this. There are three basic advantages the incumbents have; the ability to keep their campaign accounts open, send out free mailers while in office, and the biggest advantage is to have congressional campaign committees to work for them.

Firstly, each congressman can go ahead and keep campaign fundraising and create the traditional “War Chest.” That means that during their term of service a congressman can continue to fundraise for the upcoming election while their opponents will be limited to only fundraising after the date they can file their appropriate state paperwork for office. Not really fair, but hey, it’s the incumbents making those rules.

Secondly, each congressman can continue to send out mailers to their constituency via their congressional “updates” which are essentially propaganda packets similar to the mailers you will be getting from them during the election with one exception…..they don’t make harsh mention of their opponents. By the way, these aren’t free; they’re usually paid for with tax money (Your Money) and/or possibly with that aforementioned War Chest we talked about.

Lastly, the one that really cries of the cronyism we all confess to despise, congressional campaign committees. Both the senate and the House have them as do both parties as well. These committees are supposed to help each party build majorities in their respective chamber; however, in recent times they have become an incumbent protection syndicate. Money is raised by these entities and rather than sit out of the primaries, as they should, these committees use their money and influence to protect their incumbent brethren.

A few weeks ago in the race for the 7^th Congressional District of Virginia, incumbent Eric Cantor, who also serves as the House Majority Leader, was beaten by a political novice in the form of College Professor named Dave Brat. Following his defeat by a Republican in the Republican Primary, the House GOP Congressional Committee’s leaders said that had they known Cantor was in jeopardy they would have offered more support in the primary – WHAT!!!!!

Sounds crazy……But that’s the norm.

Let’s look at two other recent cases for examples of this self-protectionism.

In 2011, with redistricting up for debate and legal action in Texas, there was much confusion over who would run in which district. In the newly drawn Texas 35^th District, Democrat Joaquin Castro was preparing to run for office; however, Rep. Steve Israel, leader of the DCCC, or the House Democratic Campaign Committee, said they would support sitting Representative Lloyd Doggett who had also been drawn into that new District. Israel said, “We have a theocracy at the DCCC that we support sitting incumbents, across the board, in every case, we support sitting incumbents.” It’s okay, Joaquin just ran for office in another District where the Democrat incumbent was retiring – Problem Solved.

Before you think I am going off against the Democrats, let me provide another example in order to show you that this is not a “Democrat vs. Republican” issue, but it’s an “us against the entrenched incumbents” sort of issue. Just this last week we saw the same sort of protectionist agenda in the case of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. Following a pretty healthy, or unhealthy, loss to State Senator Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi GOP Primary and the aforementioned loss of Eric Cantor in Virginia, the National Republican Senatorial Committee injected the Cochran Campaign with fundraisers and influence in order to secure a victory for a career politician who first went to Washington in 1973 – think about that! That’s a lot of protection!!

In the last few years most people, Democrat and Republican, have been clamoring for the replacement of congressmen all over the United States, BUT HOW? There has been a small amount of incumbents beat in the last few years, but not enough to force the change America needs. Now I’m not saying they all need to be removed (maybe 90%), but there does need to be some serious change in order for America to progress forward. Unfortunately, with incumbents holding the aces with War Chests, Free Mailers, and Campaign Committees in their pockets, there doesn’t seem like much for the rest of us to do.

BUT THERE IS!

We must let these cats out of the bag. Question our Congressman, both at the state and national level. Be active in the political scene. Years ago it was said politics was one of those subjects a person didn’t bring up in civilized conversation – NOT ANYMORE! If you’re comfortable with the direction of where your state and country are headed then do nothing. But if you believe things must change then all of us, each and every one of us, Republican or Democrat, must step forward and make our voices heard. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it requires you to step out of your comfort box. But unless you are comfortable with mediocrity, and possibly losing the very country we hold dear, then we must all stand and make a difference.

Remember, Congress is counting on you not getting involved!!

Batter Up!

Bill

Harry Reid again earns the “Idiot of the Senate” Award

I have mostly never thought much of Harry Reid as a Senator, an organizer, or a leader; but I think Louisiana Senator David Vitter hit the nail on the head when he said, “Sadly, Harry Reid has again revealed himself to be an idiot, this time gravely insulting Gulf Coast residents.”

What did good old Harry DO?

Well here is Harry Reid’s statement: and remember, this is the majority leader of the United States Senate. His comments in support of the aid package for Hurricane Sandy Relief went as follows, “The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey.”

WHAT??

Now before we go too much farther I want to first acknowledge that both of these hurricanes left a path of destruction and grief that can never be defined for those who were and are affected and we should never politicize the suffering of our fellow Americans. So with that said let’s look at how the stats back Harry’s statement.

Just looking at the two stats that are generally considered the watershed numbers for a disaster let’s look at dollars of damage and deaths.

Deaths

125 – Sandy
1833 – Katrina

Damage in Dollars

$62 billion – Sandy
$108 billion – Katrina

I give these figures not in an attempt to trivialize the issue, but to explain how once again Harry Reid has chosen to lie for the sake of making a point and to make someone else seem less caring than he and his precious Democrat partisans. That’s very sad, especially on an issue that needs to be taken care of in a responsible manner and not subjected to traditional party politics or to the addition of trivial pork as was done by many in the Senate – also allowed, and passed, by Harry.

Out of habit Harry later apologized saying he simply misspoke, just like all the rest of the times he has lied, or fudged the truth or in his words misspoke on the floor of the senate in order to make or create a point. Of course then he blamed the Republicans by saying he wouldn’t have felt the pressure to misspeak if he hadn’t had to face GOP opposition.

But let’s give Harry some slack; this is hardly the first time he has misspoken. Think of this, if we listen to Harry, Ford would be out of business without the auto bailout (GM and Chrysler took that money) and Mitt Romney never paid taxes (Um except like the $2+ million he paid in 2011). I guess we should all pay a little more attention to what Harry says and does. After all, thanks to those gamblers in Nevada we have another four years of Harry’s intelligence!!

Ante Up,

Bill

CBO Scoring

Just a quick note on the Federal Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and their scoring process – OK, quick for me.

As designed, the CBO was set up to be a non-partisan federal agency inside the federal legislature that among other things would score, or project, the future efficiency of a bill before debating and voting on a bill. This organization has worked well in the past, but has been little noticed up until the beginning of the Obama Administration. Suddenly, the CBO has become big news over and over as we try and determine just how much damage the actions taken by the country’s Democrat leadership will actually do to our country.

Now, before making the next two points, it is important to remember that this organization was established with the best of intentions. It would be good to believe that it was awesome forethought and a desire for true public introspection by the federal legislature to create an organization such as the CBO; however, without truthfulness in reporting by the legislature, the CBO can only do so much. So with that said, let’s look at the two things that need to be pointed out.

First thing is that the CBO looks at budget, tax, and revenue figures for proposed legislature and makes projections only as far out as the next ten years. This is significant when looking at the proposed federal healthcare bill and the seemingly positive scoring that the CBO has given it. While the projections for the next ten years are positive, many on the CBO have publically estimated that the projections become gravely worse in the second decade of this healthcare bill. We won’t even discuss beyond that.

Second thing to remember is that the CBO scores bills via the vacuum of variables contained within the bill for scoring. A simple (and yes cheesy) example of this would be id a bill were presented with an explanation of funding that would show how the bill should be funded by a leprechaun with a pot of gold behind the rainbow. Yes that is simplistic, and fantasy-laden, but it explains how the CBO Scores within a vacuum. This is how the CBO can score the healthcare bill positively when the same healthcare bill states that much of the funding comes from money saved from Medicare cuts and that those cuts will be spent twice later in the healthcare plan.

Opposing the CBO’s official report in the case of the current healthcare bill, some members of the CBO privately leaked to the press that they believe the healthcare bill will not reduce the deficit as reported, but instead will drive even deeper the hole created for our grandchildren. This private acknowledgement is based on the fact that the healthcare bill provides flawed figures (the variables) used to show how the bill will be funded and not factual evidence.

Basically, when created in 1974, the CBO was a needed agency for use by the federal legislature; however, in today’s world of information manipulation and tragically partisan politics, the CBO’s use is not directed as it was intended and is not utilized to the benefit of America as it should be.

Did anyone see my calculator?
Bill