IRS: “No Evidence Of Criminal Wrongdoing”

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“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” – Sophocles

This week’s House Oversight Committee hearings on IRS targeting provided a unique visual spectacle at just how insular, defiant and confident the agency is in riding out the targeting scandal.

The agency’s star witness, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, smugly detailed how the agency “accidentally” lost two years of Lois Lerner and six other IRS employees’ emails.

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Click on the image for a larger view.

The same emails that in March the Commissioner testified he would provide; emails sent by Lerner and team during the same period the political targeting of conservative non-profits and at least one U.S. Senator was well underway.

One particularly contentious exchange between Rep. Trey Gowdy and Commissioner Koskinen, highlighted what it is like for the American people when forced to deal with the IRS. After Commissioner Koskinen repeatedly states that he has found “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing” within the agency, Rep. Gowdy demands to know which criminal statutes he has examined to come to his conclusion. The Commissioner confidently answers none, yet boldly asserts that no criminal wrongdoing has taken place.

It is clear that as far as he is concerned, he and he alone has the final say as to what constitutes criminal wrongdoing within the IRS.   

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how an agency that Congress has allowed to operate with total and complete impunity condemns American taxpayers. If the IRS, for any reason, targets you they will act as your sole judge, jury and executioner as they met out their unchecked brand of enforcement justice.

Congress created this problem and Congress needs to now fix it. And fix it they can. There is a solution before them with 75 co-sponsors in the U.S. House – more than any other tax reform legislation. It is the FairTax® Plan. By replacing the current income tax system with the FairTax, the Congress can defund and eliminate the IRS and the systemic corruption that has plagued our nation and her people for 100 years.

The IRS cannot be fixed, repaired or rehabilitated. It is like a cancer upon this nation. Unless you eliminate every single cancer cell everywhere in the body, it will slowly destroy what it has invaded.

The FairTax is the only tax replacement plan that defunds, disbands and eliminates the IRS – in its entirety.

Now is the time for you to share the good news with the American people about the FairTax Plan. Recent polls show they are not buying what the IRS is saying about Lerner’s “lost” emails.

Don’t delay. Don’t loose this opportunity. Don’t wait another day to share this great news.

  • Contact everyone that you can think of – your friends, work associates, neighbors and social media contacts. Tell them how there is an alternative tax system before Congress that eliminates the IRS.
  • Contact your local newspaper. Share your thoughts on how the IRS failed to follow federal law in securing employee emails. Discuss what would happen if you did not secure your yearly filing documentation. Then tell them why you support the FairTax.
  • Bake a cake and invite 5 or 6 friends for dessert. Share the FairTax, Flat Tax, income taxcomparison sheet or give them a FairTax pocket card.  Invite them to join you in the greatest tax revolution of our lifetime.
  • Give a FairTax pocket card to everyone you meet, everywhere you go! Leave a few in the doctor’s office. You can order 1,000 pocket cards for $40 at the FairTax store.
  • Send your most generous donation of $5, $10, $20, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford. Please make sure that your grassroots leaders know that YOU are standing with them!

It is a great time for the FairTax movement! Just this week another member of Congress came out in support of the FairTax. Representative Scott DesJarlais (TN-4) became the record 75th co-sponsor of H.R. 25, tweeting @DesJarlaisTJN04, “Proud to co-sponsor FairTax legislation”.

He added in his announcement, “The Internal Revenue Service has shown itself to be corrupt, inept and unworthy of the responsibility the agency has been entrusted with….”

Finally, your new grassroots board of directors is hard at work defining a sweeping new strategic plan. Included in this plan is a new and commanding FairTax presence in Washington, D.C., expanded membership opportunities, enhanced fundraising capabilities and aggressive communication and marketing strategies.

Stay tuned, lots of good things are happening with the FairTax campaign.

Okaloosa County, FL Tourist Development Council: A Progressive Slush fund

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Does your county or parish or borough have a TDC or Tourist Development Council?

The Okaloosa County Tourist Development Council (TDC) collects money in the form of a bed tax which is nothing more than another “progressive slush fund.” A redistribution hub for wealth taken from folks who stay at hotels. Its yet another tax burden on the local hotels, and another layer of regulation and control placed upon the hospitality services industry.

The time has come for the Okaloosa County Florida Commissioners to shut down and disband the TDC, which practices crony capitalism, and redistributes wealth. If you want to increase tourism then abolish the bed tax. Repealing the bed tax will make hotel rooms in Okaloosa County more competitive. Why does eliminating the the bed tax and with it the TDC make for good public policy? Well lets look at the 2013 audit of the Okaloosa County TDC. Here is what the audit found:

GENERAL FINDINGS

Finding No. 1: The Board of County Commissioners (BCC) did not establish annual budgets for expenditures from restricted resources at the level the resources were restricted, or project budgets for each advertising project and marketing campaign, to ensure that available resources were not overspent.

Finding No. 2: The Tourist Development Council (TDC) and TDC subcommittees performed duties that were not of an advisory nature, contrary to law.

Finding No. 3: The TDC did not continuously review all expenditures of tourist development taxes, contrary to law.

Finding No. 4: The County purchased goods and services from companies or organizations that were affiliated with members of the BCC, TDC, or a TDC subcommittee, contrary to law.

Finding No. 5: The BCC had not adopted a fraud response plan, and the County did not perform periodic fraud risk assessments or establish action plans to implement and monitor fraud controls.

Finding No. 6: The County did not perform and document periodic control risk assessments over the activities of collecting, accounting for, and disbursing restricted resources to identify and respond to identified control risks.

Finding No. 7: The County did not consistently follow prescribed policies and procedures relating to the competitive procurement of goods and services, including the selection of two advertising and marketing firms.

Finding No. 8: The County negotiated and entered into contracts that did not contain adequate provisions to effectively protect the County’s interests.

Finding No. 9: The County did not perform an adequate review or pre-audit of invoices submitted by two advertising and marketing firms, including a comparison of payment requests to the provisions of contracts. As a result, the County paid two advertising and marketing firms $12.1 million without obtaining adequate documentation supporting the goods or services received, including payments of several invoices that incorrectly or inadequately described the actual goods or services purchased.

Finding No. 10: The County did not ensure that goods or services acquired through two advertising and marketing firms were competitively procured.

Finding No. 11: The County paid for certain goods and services in advance of their receipt, including certain goods and services acquired through two advertising and marketing firms, contrary to law and the State Constitution. Some services for which the County paid in advance were not subsequently provided.

Finding No. 12: The County did not consistently follow prescribed policies and procedures relating to the approval of purchases, including purchases made through two advertising and marketing firms.

Finding No. 13: The County did not consistently follow prescribed policies and procedures relating to the use of purchasing cards (p-cards), document the receipt of goods and services purchased with p-cards that were not immediately provided to the purchaser, or document the public purpose served by the p-card expenditures.

TRAVEL

Finding No. 14: The County needed to enhance its policies and procedures to ensure that travel expenditures were preapproved and adequately documented.

SPECIAL EVENTS GRANTS AND SPONSORSHIPS

Finding No. 15: The BCC had not adopted written policies and procedures relating to special events grants, and the County did not document that the special events grants were used for allowable purposes or were effective in increasing tourism and the use of lodging facilities.

Finding No. 16: The BCC had not adopted written policies and procedures relating to sponsorships of organizations or events. In addition, the County did not consistently document the purpose for which the sponsorships were provided, that the sponsorships were used for allowable purposes, or that the sponsorships were effective in achieving the purposes for which they were provided.

Finding No. 17: The County paid $2.5 million from tourist development taxes for life-guarding, beach patrol, and beach shuttle services that were not expressly authorized by law.

Finding No. 18: The County paid $117,994 for various goods and services from British Petroleum (BP) grant funds that were, in the past, paid from tourist development taxes, contrary to grant provisions.

Finding No. 19: As part of the Emerald Coast Money Debit Card Program, the County used $207,730 of BP grant funds for purposes that County records did not evidence were allowed by grant provisions.

Finding No. 20: The County overcharged BP $27,063 in connection with medical support services provided, and County records did not adequately support the allow-ability of $385,185 in reimbursements received from BP.

MOTOR VEHICLES

Finding No. 21: The County had not established adequate controls over the use of fuel cards.

ACCOUNTING CONTROLS

Finding No. 22: The County incorrectly classified and recorded certain expenditures in the accounting records, contrary to guidance provided by the Florida Department of Financial Services.

ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFERS

Finding No. 23: The BCC had not adopted written policies and procedures, and the County had not established adequate controls, over the authorization and processing of electronic funds transfers.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CONTROLS

Finding No. 24: The County had not established adequate controls over employee access privileges to data and information technology resources.

PUBLIC RECORDS

Finding No. 25: The County did not record minutes of a TDC and TDC subcommittee meeting, contrary to law. In addition, the minutes of the remaining meetings were not signed or otherwise designated to indicate the minutes were the official minutes approved by the TDC or TDC subcommittees. Who was running this redistribution of wealth slush fund when these problems were identified?

TOURIST DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL EXPENDITURES

A review or test of 45 purchases, totaling $1.2 million and funded from tourist development taxes or BP grant funds, disclosed 3 purchases (6.7 percent), totaling $53,730, that were not approved by one or more required employees, contrary to County purchasing policies and procedures. These payments included a $49,500 payment for production services at beach concerts, a $2,430 payment for promotional golf caps, and an $1,800 payment for two tables of ten people at a dinner and silent auction for a charitable organization.

What we have is a government controlled slush fund used to redistribute the taxpayers hard earned cash. The above listed 25 reasons should be enough to abolish the TDC, which was created in 1986.

I moved to Florida in 1982 and I learned all I needed to know about Florida from friends and by word of mouth. I did not need a TDC to bring me to Florida.

Its time to disband the TDC, abolish the bed tax and get rid of these incredulous burden’s of paper work and wealth redistribution. Lets turn Florida into an example of lower taxes, less government and ever more growth. As for the TDC, it needs to take a long walk off a short turtle protected pier.

TOLD YOU SO!

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On June 25, 2014, I spent an hour on the phone with our client and Medicare to get Medicare to correct its erroneous records about our client.  The client is from Valparaiso, Indiana.  We spoke to three Medicare representatives at three offices.

The client is a victim of the Obamacare law (a.k.a. “Affordable Care Act”).  Her employer cancelled the group health insurance plan for all the employees.  This forced them to obtain insurance through other Obamacare approved insurance plans.  Our client had another option.  The client worked past age 65.  So, she could go on Medicare and obtain a Medicare supplement insurance policy with a rather low monthly premium.

She (and all her co-workers) lost her employer’s group health plan coverage on February 28, 2014.  Her Medicare and Medicare supplement coverage started March 1, 2014.

But, when the client and I phoned Medicare on June 25, it had not yet updated the records.  Medicare records still showed that our client was on an employer provided group health insurance plan.  Medicare had not changed our client’s records for about four months.  During that time, the doctors who gave her service were not being paid anything by Medicare and Medicare was not forwarding claims information to the client’s Medicare supplement insurance company.  This tardiness by Medicare was a problem even before Obamacare.

During the Obamacare law debates, I repeatedly warned in my articles that there are problems with both Medicare and the Veterans Administration (VA) health systems.  I knew that because for years I had helped senior citizens who had problems with both of those federal health care systems.  I warned that if a national health care system was modeled on Medicare or the VA, then ALL AMERICANS WOULD START HAVING THE SAME KINDS OF PROBLEMS THAT SENIOR CITIZENS HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCING FOR YEARS UNDER MEDICARE AND THE VA.

Since then, Obamacare became law.  Now, we have learned that the VA was letting senior veterans DIE rather than give them medical service, that VA officials were keeping “off-record” books about the veterans who were not getting medical attention in order for some high level VA officials to claim and get bonuses that they did not deserve for good management.  Also, Medicare still does not have a system for quick changes to records so that medical claims are processed correctly for senior citizens who just start Medicare.

I told you so!  One of the reasons that the Obamacare law is bad is because it just increases and spreads problems that were already in the Medicare and VA health care systems.

If Obamacare remains the law, I expect that in the future the Obamacare law will be amended to allow the federal government to order seniors to die to save the federal government money rather than just recommend that seniors die as is the current law.

EDITORS NOTE: Note: Woodrow Wilcox is the senior medical bill case worker at a major insurance agency in northwest Indiana.  Wilcox has helped senior clients of that agency save over one million by correcting medical bill errors that were caused by mistakes in the Medicare system.  He wrote the book SOLVING MEDICARE PROBLEM$ (www.solvingmedicareproblems.com) to teach others how to help senior citizens with Medicare related medical bill problems.  To educate the public, Wilcox recently launched the website www.ObamacareHurtsSeniors.com.

© 2014 Woodrow Wilcox

A Heartbreaking Unspoken Consequence of Obama

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Decades of socialist/progressive indoctrination in our schools, media and culture, plus six years of Obama, has yielded a devastating unspoken consequence. It is the loss of who we use to be as Americans.

In his 1961 Inaugural Address, President John F. Kennedy said, “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Democrats have perverted Kennedy’s inspiring challenge. Their dispiriting goal is to have as many Americans as possible controlled by and dependent on government, even for life itself, which is at the root of Obamacare.

I mourn the loss of the independent self-reliant mindset which made our parents great; and the pride and dignity it generated within them. Welfare (government assistance) was a last resort and for the truly needy.

Today, far too many Americans see no shame in living on government assistance or scamming the system. The Left’s campaign led by the Obama Administration to instill an entitlement mindset in many has proven successful. The Administration even campaigned targeting minorities, discouraging their instinct to be self-reliant. Even worse, the Administration portrays getting on welfare as the honorable thing to do. Dear Lord, what kind of nation are we becoming?

An unprecedented 47 million Americans are on food stamps which is riddled with fraud. The Obama Administration has added over 10,000 new oppressive job-killing regulations. Consequently, 90 million are unemployed and on unemployment which is also riddled with fraud. Here’s another first for America, over 11 million are receiving disability benefits; riddled with fraud. Clearly, many believe working is for suckers when the government is handing out freebies.

In his War on Achievers, Obama used his bully pulpit to deflate business owners by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Obama and his operatives use compassionate sounding terms such as “social justice” and “income inequality” to justify the government confiscating the earnings of achievers and redistributing it to non-achievers to win their votes. Despicable.

My heart aches for my America when character, excellence and hard work were rewarded, celebrated and respected.

At 9 or 10 years old, I worked part-time for my neighbor Mr Buddy Roy. I pulled the copper out of old motors for him to sell. I still remember the pride I felt making my own money.

In the early 1950s, blacks were allowed to take the entrance test for the Baltimore City Fire Dept. My dad applied and mom helped. My parents sought opportunity not handouts. Talk about a strong black woman, though compassionate and loving, mom could be a tough no nonsense person.

I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table, a glass turned upside down between them with mom tapping on the glass with a spoon. She was simulating the different bell sounds which alerted the firefighters to various situations. She would yell at my dad, “No, that’s wrong, stupid! Listen and get it right!” Thanks to my drill sergeant mom, dad was among a hand full of blacks who became Baltimore City’s first black firefighters.

Being a pioneer is never easy. Dad endured humiliating work conditions and blatant racism. Still, dad relished the opportunity. Thanks to his Christian faith, dad won admiration and respect by fighting racism and hate with excellence. He won “Firefighter of the Year” two times.

That mindset of putting ones best foot forward and striving for loftier standards is what I fear we are rapidly losing as Americans. Apparently, character is no longer expected in our leaders. President Obama is caught repeatedly lying to the American people and the response is ho-hum, let’s move on.

The trend is to celebrate deadbeats, entitlement junkies, haters of achievers and assorted low life. For example. The Democrats and mainstream media loved the Occupy Wall Street mobs. People were assaulted and even raped at their angry mob gatherings. Severely infected with an entitlement mindset, Occupiers dumped feces in a public building demanding the government redistribute wealth to them.

Meanwhile, the Left continues their shameful relentless demonizing and slandering the Tea Party with unfounded allegations of racism. The Obama Administration has plotted to criminalize free speech (the Tea Party). Folks, we are talking decent hard-working Americans who are simply pushing back against Obama’s shock and awe assault on our freedoms, liberty and culture.

Tax cheat Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel compared the Tea Party to Hamas terrorists. Either Mr Rangel is a loudmouth clueless idiot or a despicable evil human being. Leftists like Rangel who throw unfounded irresponsible “hate” grenades at millions of Americans should be called on it. Inciting racial division is extremely serious.

Amidst the unbelievably long list of scandals, crimes and misdemeanors of the Obama regime, the damage that this evil man and his minions have done to the internal make-up of many Americans is extremely disturbing and heartbreaking.

Please view me performing my song, “We Are Americans” which I wrote to remind us of who we use to be and I believe a majority still are as Americans. I have faith that the liberal’s, socialist’s and progressive’s toxic disease of entitlement thinking has not reached critical mass.

My fellow Americans, we are exceptional, a chosen people. We are Americans!

James Madison: The Indispensable Founder

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“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. … If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one. …

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. … The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general.

Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. … There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

– James Madison

When people are asked to name the Founding Fathers of the nation, they usually reel off Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the first, second and third Presidents in addition to their earlier role in guiding the Revolution to success.

Occasionally, someone who, like myself, loves history will add Madison, the fourth President, but Lynne Cheney’s new biography of Madison rightly identifies him as the man most responsible “for creating the United States of America in the form we know it today.” It was Madison who guided the process by which the Founders arrived at the Constitution, contributing the fundamental principles it incorporated and writing the Bill of Rights, amendments that ensured its ratification by the original states.

Cover - James MadisonCheney’s biography, “James Madison: A Life Considered” ($36.00, Viking) benefits not only from her scholarship, but from her facility with the written word, making it a continual pleasure to read for a book of 563 pages, including its notes, bibliography, and index. If you were to set aside the summer to read just one book, this would be the one I would recommend.

If Cheney’s name rings a bell, it is because she is the wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, but she is also a Ph.D. who has been studying Madison since 1987 when she was a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. These days she is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Cheney’s reside in Wilson, Wyoming. She is making the rounds of radio and television shows to promote her book and, most notably, interviewers tend to ignore her book in order to pry an opinion out of her about current events and politics. One gets the feeling that most did not read her book.

Those short in stature and, compared to the other Founders, quite young, all who came to know him swiftly developed a profound respect for his intellect and his knowledge of how governments were structured with some succeeding while others failed. When Madison spoke, they listened. There were in those days “factions” (which today we call political parties) that opposed his and the other Founder’s views.

“Jefferson,” wrote Cheney, “would later say that it was a wonder that Madison accomplished so much as he had, given that he faced ‘the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers’” and Madison himself was often struck “by the way that ‘important bills prepared at leisure by skillful hands’ were treated to ‘crudeness and tedious discussion’, and he had seen legislative tricks of the most blatant sort.” So the politics of Madison’s time was not unlike much of today’s.

After the Constitution was written to replace the failed Articles of Confederation it needed to be vigorously defended. America benefited greatly from the fact that its population was highly literate and it was the Federalist papers, a series of essays mostly written by Madison was the way its principles and protections were explained to the public. Chaney notes that the Federalist essay that would eventually become most famous was the first one Madison wrote.

“In Federalist 10, published November 22,1787, he set forth the failures of ‘our governments’ (rather than ‘our states’ where, after all, the Constitution would be ratified), noting the instability and injustices that had caused good citizens across the country to increasingly distrust those governments and feel ‘alarm for private rights.’”

These alarms are reflected in our times by concerns that the President is bypassing Congress to govern by executive orders, is failing to enforce laws with which he disagrees, and that we have a Department of Justice and an IRS that cannot be trusted to apply laws fairly, acting against groups and individuals with whom they disagree such as the Tea Party movement and other conservative organizations. A rogue agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency is so out of control that Congress must at some point exert powerful restraints on it.

What is remarkable about Madison’s time was the fact that he, Jefferson is lifelong friend, and Adams, all lived long lives unlike the bulk of the population. Madison would devote his life to the creation of our extraordinary government and, throughout the early presidencies including his own, to ensuring the existence of the new nation, challenged as it was by Great Britain, first during the Revolution and then in the War of 1812.

On his last day as President, Madison vetoed an improvements bill, “arguing as he had since the days of The Federalist that the general government did not have general powers. It had specified powers, and recognizing its limits was essential to ‘the permanent success of the Constitution.’”

Chaney wrote that Madison understood that “if the limits the Constitution imposed on government were unrecognized, ‘the parchment had better be thrown into the fire at once.”, but Madison was all about protecting the Constitution and the new nation. For that he is owed the gratitude of all the generations that have followed him.

It is now our responsibility to protect it because freedom and liberty always have domestic and foreign enemies

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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A Train Wreck You Can’t Look Away From: A government agency gets creative with arts funding by Bruce Edward Walker

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There’s a new patron in the arts world, one without a name as lofty as The American Arts Council or National Council on the Arts. In fact, it’s a one-word synonym for missed connections, interminable delays, stale candy bars, filthy restrooms, and stained seats. That’s right: Amtrak has decided it’s going to become a veritable Louvre.

Amtrak’s gameplan involves deftly blending individual donations and foundation grants with money from the National Endowment for the Arts and in-kind contributions of its own (tax-funded, for-profit) services.

True, trains are a significant part of the American culture, featuring prominently in ethnic folk songs, country music, and early rock; Buster Keaton, Western oaters, and Thin Man-franchise film classics; and even Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. However, the trains were one subject of the art created rather than the progenitor. In other words, Woody Guthrie, Junior Parker, and Hank Williams wrote songs and Jack Kerouac authored a novel (partially) about riding the rails or hearing the “high, lonesome sound” of the train whistle as both metaphorical and real. In each instance, the train provided some unbidden inspiration for enduring art rather than seducing artists with handouts.

Aggression (modified by opulent sensuality)

Today, though, Amtrak provides something a lot closer to commissions than inspiration. It even shelled out for a painter to blast neon paint on buildngs alongside the tracks. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Amtrak, in tandem with the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, commissioned German artist Katharina Grosse to subject her “psychylustro” form of art to 34,000 daily riders exposed to seven sites along the Philadelphia-New Jersey railway corridor.

Art in America described Grosse’s artistic abilities thusly:

Unlike the Action Painters or Expressionists, with their convulsive brushwork and gestures, Grosse never comes into direct contact with the surfaces. Her physical if not psychological detachment seems related to Conceptual art. However, her technique involves a machismo stance, with aggression modified by a kind of opulent sensuality.

The project is expected to cost just under $300,000. Funding comes from a variety of sources, several of them public. Regardless of what one thinks of Grosse’s art, an unprofitable transportation company reliant on public dollars is in no position to patronize something as subjective as artwork.

Training artists and bureaucrats

As I’ve argued in the past, no government or even quasi-government agencies governed by those employed in the arts can predict whether commissioned pieces may or may not present anything of merit. Nor should public monies be spent on exercises appealing to only a few, arbitrated by committees composed of a narrow cross-section of contemporary aesthetics. And what of the artists who toil incessantly without government largesse?

“I can’t remember the last time public art turned out to be a good idea,” Larry Kaufmann told me. Kaufmann is president of The Liberty21 Institute, a new think tank dedicated to promoting a culture of liberty.

“Artists seem inevitably to go for shock value and transgression, and these qualities were already in ample supply the last time I visited an Amtrak station,” Kaufmann said. “I suppose it would be nice if they commissioned something that captured the glory of train travel in the past—but even that would be romantic nostalgia, not anything that captures the reality of today’s Amtrak.”

Kaufmann continued: “Fundamentally, I don’t understand why we’re spending federal funds we don’t have to beautify a transportation service that no one uses outside the Acela corridor. The arts budget would clearly be put to better use elsewhere.”

Even if Grosse’s effort is of merit, it won’t last long. The WSJ reports the installation has a shelf life of only three weeks, as the work involves coloring the outdoors. “After that, the piece will be subject to elements, both human and natural—from erosion to possible gentrification. Its lifespan may vary from a matter of weeks to several months or, potentially, years.”

Not included in the $300,000 price tag are the salaries of the Amtrak engineers who “are overseeing the action at every site during the artwork’s installation.” Further: “For the next six months, the Mural Arts Program and the City of Philadelphia’s Graffiti Abatement Team have pledged to maintain ‘psychylustro’ and protect it from defacement.”

“Fuel your sense of adventure!”

Writers can also get into the act with the Amtrak Residency. The program, according to the website,

Will allow for up to 24 writers to take long-distance trains to work on their projects. Each writer’s round-trip journey will include accommodations on board a sleeper car equipped with a bed, a desk and outlets. We hope this experience will inspire creativity and most importantly fuel your sense of adventure!

Oh, goodie. The New Republic’s Adam Kirsch writes:

As it happens, right around now is the time poets across America are wrestling with the unbelievably complicated online application process for NEA grants. By contrast, the ease and speed with which Amtrak decided to dispense its largesse feels positively humane. There is a certain PR benefit for the railroad company, of course—this is probably the first time in ages that Amtrak has made the news without the words “accident,” “delay,” or “cost overruns” in the headline. But there is also a sense that the people running the railroad actually responded to the idea that, somewhere in America, there are passengers for whom the idea of riding Amtrak is a dream, not a chore.

But, of course: Solipsism is the artist’s stock-in-trade, is it not? Or, at least it is at Amtrak and The New Republic. And, it seems, at The Paris Review, which published an essay from the program’s first free rider, Jessica Gross, featuring the following bout of navel-gazing:

I’ve always been a claustrophile, and I think that explains some of the appeal—the train is bounded, compartmentalized, and cozily small, like a carrel in a college library. Everything has its place. The towel goes on the ledge beneath the mirror; the sink goes into its hole in the wall; during the day, the bed, which slides down from overhead, slides up into a high pocket of space. There is comfort in the certainty of these arrangements. The journey is bounded, too: I know when it will end. Train time is found time. My main job is to be transported; any reading or writing is extracurricular. The looming pressure of expectation dissolves. And the movement of a train conjures the ultimate sense of protection—being a baby, rocked in a bassinet.

All in all, not bad, and, in fact, close to the woolgathering works I commissioned from authors as editor of several high-minded, small-circulation magazines back in the day. Keep in mind the magazines I edited relied on subscriptions and advertising revenue to stay afloat, and my small stable of writers and their expenses were paid from those proceeds rather than from government handouts. Remarkably, these magazines recognized a profit for their shareholders, to whom I was accountable.

Amtrak, seemingly, is accountable to no one.

So what will taxpayers get for their $300,000? For three weeks, a few Amtrak riders will soak in all the color, verve, and perplexity that comes with Grosse’s pink pigments on old fences and rail yard walls. Then it’ll all be washed away in an ocean of red ink.

ABOUT BRUCE EDWARD WALKER

Bruce Edward Walker writes on the arts and other topics from his home in Midland, Mich.

The EPA: A Pattern of Waste, Fraud and Abuse

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epa-abuse-thmb1bA new website EPAAbuse.com has launched dedicated to exposing the “dictatorial” mandates of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has morphed from a small government agency established by President Richard M. Nixon on December 4, 1970 designed to reduce air, water and solid waste pollution into a powerful tool used by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama to impose draconian political agendas in a the “quixotic” mission to control the earth’s climate.

The preferred tools are EPA rules and regulations. The EPA now can control entire industries including agriculture, energy, automotive, manufacturing and even public education in its efforts to control mankind in the name of saving the planet. It’s attempts have become so pervasive so as to impact every level of government, every business and the life of every American.

Every level of the federal government has been negatively impacted by the EPA’s effort to “go green”. From the US Navy’s requirement to purchase bio-diesel at a cost of $26 a gallon versus $3 for regular diesel fuel, to the US Army’s 15-year and $100 million dollar effort to take the lead out of bullets, making the bullets less accurate and lethal, to the Veterans Administration putting greater emphasis on “going green” than taking care of America’s wounded warriors and veterans.

The pattern is clear: “going green” has a higher priority than protecting this nation’s economy, individual property rights and American workers.

According to Paul Driessen from CFACT, “Last year [2013], Congress enacted 72 new laws; and federal agencies promulgated 3,659 new rules, imposing $1.86 trillion in annual regulatory compliance costs on American businesses and families. It’s hardly surprising that America’s economy shrank by 1% the first quarter of 2014, our labor participation rate is a miserable 63%, and real unemployment stands at 12-23% (and even worse for blacks and Hispanics).”

“Even worse, in the case of climate change, this process is buttressed by secrecy, highly questionable research, contrived peer reviews, outright dishonesty, and an absence of accountability… Mr. Obama and EPA chief Gina McCarthy are nevertheless determined to slash reliance on coal, even in 20 states that rely on this fuel for half to 95% of their electricity, potentially crippling their economies… The EPA also channels vast sums to its ‘independent’ Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which likewise rubberstamps the agency’s pollution claims and regulations: $180.8 million  to 15 CASAC members since 2000. Imagine the outrage and credibility gap if Big Oil gave that kind of money to scientists who question the ‘dangerous manmade climate change’ mantra,” notes Driessen.

Today EPA regulations directly impact every family, primarily in their pocket books. From filling up the family car’s gas tanks (ethanol), to their electric bill (war on coal) to purchasing commodities (restrictive land and water usage), every American family is increasingly feeling the pinch.

This short video of one family feeling the EPA pain, with little gain, is provided by EPAAbuse.com:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/aFUoHUKtJkc[/youtube]

 

RELATED ARTICLES:

  1. Supreme Court limits greenhouse gas regulations
  2. New EPA Regs Issued Under Obama Are 38 Times as Long as Bible
  3. Sky-high Electric Bills Courtesy of Obama EPA’s War on Coal
  4. EPA regulations will raise your electric bills, threaten the grid
  5. The War on Affordable Energy Claims More Victims
  6. EPA’s war on consumers, affordable electricity, and jobs
  7. Sen. Jon Tester’s War on Affordable Energy
  8. The scandal of fiddled global warming data: The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record

RELATED VIDEO: Remember when the president said that under his plan, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket?” Well, that could soon become a reality.  Not only do we need to stop his scheme, we also need to maximize America’s energy abundance to help deliver more jobs, lower costs, and long-term stability.

Enough! They MUST Be Stopped!

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It has become a daily frightening occurrence, hearing politicians, commentators, pundits and stunned Americans say, “That’s outrageous!” “He can’t do that!” “No way!” “It’s against federal law!” “They have no legal authority to force us to do that!” These comments are in response to the daily unprecedented out-of-control tyranny handed down by Obama and his operatives. We are talking arrogance with a capital “A” coming out of the Obama Administration.

For example. The GOP was moving too slow in caving to Obama’s amnesty scheme, so Obama said, screw it, I’ll bypass everyone and make it happen. Obama sent a clarion call interpreted around the world to mean if you can get your kids to the U.S., the kids can stay. In essence, Obama has made illegal aliens winners of his Open Borders Lottery; free food, health care, legal assistance and education – winning more free goodies than are available to American kids. Like a game show announcer, I expect an Administration official to enthusiastically say to illegals, “But wait, there’s more….A NEW CARRRR!!!”

Around one thousand illegals arrive daily. Over 47 thousand have arrived thus far, an estimated 90 thousand to arrive by September 30th. Everyone and anyone (gang members, drug dealers and other criminals) are illegally moving to America greeted with open arms by the Obama Administration. Americans who are paying attention are well aware of the impending devastatingly negative impact Obama’s “y’all come” policy will have on our structure as a nation, economy and national security.

Like every other extremely arrogant action by Obama from blatantly lying about Obamacare to releasing the Taliban five, while everyone expresses disbelief, outrage and concern, nothing happens. The same is the case concerning the disaster happening at our border. Despite bipartisan outrage, the tsunami of illegals continues.

Then, there is the absurd lie from the IRS that Lerner’s emails related to the targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups were lost due to a computer crash. Does this Administration believe they can say and do anything they please and get away with it? The answer is yes. As I stated, the remarkable arrogance of this Administration is becoming legendary.

However, what I find most extraordinarily arrogant and insidious is this Administration’s relentlessly focused efforts to mandate political correctness and implement their socialist/progressive agenda via government overreach. The feds have stepped in to try to force the Washington Redskins to change their name; talk about focusing on the minor while ignoring the major.

Think about that folks. Iraq is falling apart. A gazillion illegals are invading our country. Terrorism is back on the rise. Food prizes are through the roof. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Ninety million Americans are unemployed. Obamacare is a job killing and health care disaster. And what does the Obama Administration focus on; taking extraordinary measures to force the Redskins to change their name. Unbelievable.

My fellow Americans, when is enough enough from this horrifyingly deceitful, conniving, anti-American and evil bunch in DC who are holding our great nation hostage? The mainstream media will never place the best interest of America above Obama. The first black president is their best hope for ramming their dreamed socialist/progressive agenda down the throats of the American people. I get that.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the GOP, Democrats and the MSM are in solidarity with the concept of an ever-increasing big government America.

Obama and his operatives are so emboldened to lie and do whatever they please because there has been no major push back or effective effort to politically stop them.

Therefore, the last hope for America as founded is us; you, me, the Tea Party. We MUST vote out GOP traitors and Obama operatives and replace them with conservatives. Period!

And another thing — along with supporting conservatives such as Chris McDaniel in his June 24th runoff in Mississippi, we MUST continue rallying around, supporting and encouraging our hand full of fighters in DC, Sen Ted Cruz, Sen Mike Lee, Congressman Trey Gowdy and others.

Mary and I are driving from Florida to Biloxi Mississippi to meet up with our Conservative Campaign Committee team. We will help push Chris McDaniel over the top.

Folks, together, we can do this.

Obama Talks Climate Change While Iraq Implodes

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Photo of armed Iraqi boy courtesy of  AFP and Atlas Shrugs.

It is depressing beyond words that we will have to endure two and a half more years of an endless stream of lies about climate change from President Obama.

On June 14 he gave a commencement speech to graduates of the University of California at Irvine, using it to tell Big Fat Lies, not the least of which was that the Earth’s temperatures were rising when in fact they have been falling for nearly eighteen years.

It is an endless source of wonder to me that no part of the mainstream media disputes him when he says things like this. For years now they have been reporting the evidence of increasingly cold weather worldwide.

On the same day the President was lying about warming, eight inches of snow fell in Rize, Turkey. It has fallen as well in South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia while closer to home snow fell on several cities in Idaho with cold freezes extending into Oregon. In June!

Cartoon - Climate Change Red LineObama used the speech to demand that politicians take steps to acknowledge climate change which used to be called global warming until it became undeniable to everyone except the charlatans lining their pockets with utterly bogus “research” that underwrites the source of the lies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Obama continues to listen to his White House advisor, Dr. John Holdren, whose contempt for the human race is such he would happily see large parts of it disappear. In February, Holdren told reporters that all weather is impacted by climate change, but that is what climate change has done for 4.5 billion years. Not mentioned was that climate cycles are measured in centuries while weather is a short-term event. The most recent mini-ice age lasted from 1300 to 1850.

Holdren alluded to droughts affecting parts of the nation, claiming they were getting longer and drying. Two leading climate scientists, former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer and University of Colorado climate scientists, Roger Pielke, Jr, called Holdren’s assertions “pseudo-science rambling.” “The idea that any of the weather we are seeing is in any significant way due to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions verges on irrationality,” said Spencer. Pielke called Holdren’s assertions “zombie science.”

While Holdren is warning about droughts that could cause famines, James M. Taylor, the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s monthly, Environment & Climate News, took aim at the IPCC claims, noting that U.S. and global crop production, especially the most important staple food crops, corn, rice, and wheat, “have more than tripled since 1970. During the past few years, the United States has set crop production records for alfalfa, cotton, beans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, canola, corn, flaxseed, hops, rice sorghum, soybeans, sunflowers, peanuts and wheat, to name just a few.”

The worst part of Obama’s lies about the so-called “greenhouse gases” that we’ve been told for decades are warming the Earth is the way those lies are translated into government policies. The Obama administration, via the Environmental Protection Agency, has launched a war on coal-fired plants that produce 40% of the nation’s electricity claiming that their emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing a warming that is not happening. What is happening is a deliberate effort to drive up the cost of electricity for everyone.

America runs on electricity and 68% of it is generated by fossil fuels, 20% by nuclear, and 7% by hydropower. So called “clean energy”, wind and solar, provides about 4% at far higher costs than the others and exists largely due to government subsidies and mandates.

Claims about increased severe storms, heat waves, and hurricanes simply have no basis in fact. In recent years there has been a record low in the numbers of tornadoes, hurricanes, no change in the rise of sea levels, but record gains in Arctic and Antarctic ice. None of this is reported by the mainstream media.

Yet Obama told graduates that rising temperatures and sea levels, as well as intensifying storm patterns represent “one of the most significant long-term challenges that our country and our planet face.” He said this even though his administration’s recent National Climate Assessment acknowledged that “There has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S. since 1900.” The report, however, is being used to justify carbon-related regulations.

While the world’s attention is on one of the greatest threats facing it, the takeover of northern Iraq by a barbaric Islamist group—one from which even al Qaeda disassociated itself—Obama is talking about non-existent climate threats to further policies that kill jobs in the U.S. and harm its struggling recovery of our economy.

While the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seeks to expand its control of a major portion of the Middle East, Obama thought it was more important to lie about the climate to college graduates.

How much more damage Obama can inflict on the economy between now and the end of his second term in office is unknown, but what we do know is that his priorities, based on scare-mongering speeches about the climate will continue until he leaves office.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED ARTICLES:

The scandal of fiddled global warming data: The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record
The ISIS takeover of Iraq leads to Jerusalem

EPA Pumps Up Benefits of Proposed Carbon Regulation

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EPA argues that its proposed carbon regulations on existing power plants will offer $30 billion in climate benefits by 2030 with only $7.3 billion in costs. Sounds like a great deal, right? Not so fast.

A Brookings Institution white paper finds that EPA pumped up that number by including global climate benefits. If the agency took the standard approach and only examined the costs and benefits to those in the United States—who will feel its full brunt —then the climate benefits from the proposed rule would fall to as little as 7% of what EPA estimates, much less than the proposed regulation’s costs.

Authors Ted Gayer, Vice President and Director, Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi, law professor at Vanderbilt University, explain that a basic component to cost-benefit analysis is looking at the appropriate population:

The pertinent populations that are attributed standing in a benefit-cost analysis should correspond to the political jurisdiction that is bearing the cost.

For example, when analyzing a new Wisconsin milk regulation, one should include the regulation’s effects on Wisconsin farmers and milk drinkers and not on those living in Florida.

Likewise, the cost-benefit analysis of EPA’s proposed carbon should be limited to the United States, but that’s not what EPA is doing. Gayer and Viscusi write [emphasis mine]:

The recent governmental analyses of the benefits associated with reduction of [greenhouse gas] emissions represent a rare instance in which U.S. regulatory impact analyses have used a worldwide benefits reference point rather than a U.S. reference point.

The only other time the authors could find an instance of this was in 1980 involving a uranium regulation.

Why is EPA doing this? Because it’ll make the proposed rule more politically palatable, write Gayer and Viscusi:

[I]mposing a global perspective on benefits will increase the apparent desirability of the policy but will overstate the actual benefits to the American people.

However, EPA’s use of global benefits as the justification for the proposed carbon rule crosses Presidential Executive Orders that state that cost-benefit analyses should be limited to the effects on the American public. For instance, President Clinton’s Executive Order 12866 reads: [emphasis mine]

The American people deserve a regulatory system that works for them, not against them: a regulatory system that protects and improves their health, safety, environment, and well-being and improves the performance of the economy without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society…

President Obama’s Executive Order 13563 is along those same lines: [emphasis mine]:

Federal agencies should promulgate only such regulations as are required by law, are necessary to interpret the law, or are made necessary by compelling public need, such as material failures of private markets to protect or improve the health and safety of the public, the environment, or the well-being of the American people.

In addition, guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) advises regulators that

Your analysis should focus on benefits and costs that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States. Where you choose to evaluate a regulation that is likely to have effects beyond the borders of the United States, these effects should be reported separately.

The U.S. Chamber and several other trade associations have been arguing this exact point. “Consistent with OMB guidance, the costs of a rule for entities in the United States should be presented in comparison with the benefits occurring in the United States,” states a comment to OMB on the administration’s social cost of carbon estimates.

Gayer and Viscusi go on to write, “If one were to focus on the domestic benefits rather than the worldwide benefits, the [greenhouse gas] benefit component would sometimes be extremely small.”

How small? The Obama Administration estimates that most of the climate benefits of reducing carbon emissions would be outside the United States. “Only 7 to 23 percent of these benefits would be domestic benefits,” write Gayer and Viscusi. This means that “the domestic benefits amount [of the proposed carbon rule] is only $2.1 billion-$6.9 billion, which is less than the estimated compliance costs for the rule of $7.3 billion.”

EPA should be honest with the American people. Based on its own estimates, the costs of the proposed carbon rule–job losses, higher electricity costs, and a less-reliable electrical grid–outweigh its domestic climate benefits. The proposed rule is bad enough, but the misleading way EPA is justifying it is just as bad.

UPDATE: Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller News Foundation pulled out a few more interesting quotes from the paper:

“If global consequences are permitted to govern the terms of the benefit-cost analysis, then the selection of policy initiatives likewise should be governed by global considerations, subject to compliance with U.S. law,” argue Gayer and Viscusi.

“Whether it makes sense to routinely expand the scope of the assessed policy impacts beyond the citizenry of the nation bearing the costs is highly problematic,” the authors write. “What is clear at this juncture is that the recent expansion of [greenhouse gas] benefit assessments to include global impacts merits much more scrutiny and justification than it has received to date.”

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

RELATED ARTICLE: Begich Earmarked Millions for Bankrupt Green Energy Company

RELATED VIDEO: 

[youtube]http://youtu.be/CpJhJW0rvbg[/youtube]

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is courtesy of photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg.

Senator Rubio not all aboard with All Aboard Florida rail system

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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety, and Security, today raised constituent concerns regarding the ongoing All Aboard Florida project and SunRail, Central Florida’s new commuter rail system. During the subcommittee hearing, Rubio questioned the Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), Joseph Szabo, on the FRA’s role in both responding to these concerns and overseeing the safety of these projects.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/fYwrCWunYg8[/youtube]

 

Excerpts from the exchange are available below:

Senator Marco Rubio: “[…] I’ve also heard from constituents, including many in the Treasure Coast, which is just north of West Palm Beach, expressing concerns about the impact this could have on their community. The issues they’re concerned about are safety at the gate crossings and noise pollution. And I’ve passed these comments along to the FRA as we’ve gotten them, and I hope the agency has reviewed them. Can you share with us whether you are taking these concerns into consideration when you’re making assessments and conducting oversights over these projects?”

Rubio: “Let me ask specifically about safety. There’s already been an EIS conducted on the West Palm Beach to Miami segment, and you issued a finding of no significant impact. In that finding, the FRA lists over 120 locations for proposed crossing upgrades. Is the FRA proposing that those crossings be upgraded? Or are those upgrades that are being recommended by All Aboard Florida?”

Rubio: “I have one last question and it has to do with SunRail, a different project.”

FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo: “Ok, we’ll go to Orlando.”

Rubio: “Yeah, exactly. And it’s a new commuter rail system, for those not familiar with it. It just started operations last month. There was an incident in which a car stalled on the tracks and was struck by a SunRail train. Luckily, there was no one injured, but the collision, along with other close calls on the rail lines, has prompted calls for additional safety measures on the system.

“In fact, yesterday the Florida Highway Patrol announced that it’s going to be patrolling SunRail intersections to make sure drivers are following the law. So, as the agency with safety jurisdiction over SunRail, is FRA looking at these incidents? And what role does it play in recommending safety precautions or improvements?”

Rubio: “Ok, just to close up. Just back to the All Aboard Florida for a moment, as you work through the EIS process and the public hearings, and so forth, […]. How can my constituents best know where and when these hearings are going to take place and how they can best input?”

BREAKING: Homeland Security Police Caught Harassing Sick Veterans

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The below listed BREAKING news press release was drafted in response to my column and related email titled, “OIG & FOIA REQUEST: Homeland Security Police Harassing and Intimidating Veterans at Mission Valley VA Clinic.

It is our position that the unannounced exercises conducted by the Federal Protective Services (FPS) at the VA Medical Facilities in Mission Valley, CA while Veteran patients were seeking medical support from doctors, was “oppressive” and was being conducted in violation of standard law enforcement practices and procedures (armed individuals wearing black, carrying weapons, wearing bullet proof vests, with leased guard dogs, helmets, dark glasses, while refusing to identify themselves,  threatened Veterans with arrest when they tried to take photos & asked the FPS Officers to identify themselves; there actions patrolling up and own corridors in the VA Medical Center frightened elderly patients & their wives).

The major concern is for the health of sick and elderly Veterans.  Heart patients could have suffered severe stress or could have had a heart attack from freight, PTSD patients may have been spurred to react in a self-destructive manner later on, very elderly & infirmed patients of WWII or Korean eras may with serious medical conditions were frightened by strange armed men in black walking in the corridors, some of the patients may have been affected mentally by so many armed men in black with dogs, and a certain number of patients arriving at the VA Medical facility in Mission Valley elected to avoid going to their medical appointments because of the overwhelming show of force and their vehicles blocking the parking lot.

Unannounced exercises should “never” be held at any facility by any law enforcement agency, management at the facility should have been alerted in advance so they could alert Veterans seeking medical care.  The media should have been alerted in advance to prevent confusion, and a Public Relations Officer from the FPS should have arrived with the team to respond to questions.   Badge numbers and IDs should have been provided to “any” US Citizens upon request, but it was reported that FPS Officers threatened and intimidates Veterans when they asked for IDs or tried to take photos.  Black cammies worn by FPS Officers may have been an attempt to emulate FBI SWAT Teams and their leaders may be watching too many macho Hollywood movies  (OD Greens would be more effective in all seasons and times of day).  Since it was an exercise and there was no threat of gunfire, there was no need for body armor, facial cover, helmets, and rifles.  There shouldn’t have been any interference with Veterans trying to enter & park to make their medical appointments  (FPS Officers did block the parking lot, interfering with Veterans trying to make their appointments on time).

Unannounced and announced exercises held at VA Medical facilities should “cease immediately”; Congress should prevent them from being conducted at any VA Medical facility anywhere in the nation. There are hundreds of thousands of government buildings throughout the nation where these type of exercises can be easily conducted without threatening the health and well-being of Veterans.  Congress should determine why the Obama administration has been targeting the relatively few VA Medical facilities in San Diego County, when there are thousands of other government building where those exercises can be conducted.  The management at DHS giving FPS Officers orders to conduct those exercises should be replaced, like the leadership at the VA is being replaced.  Veterans should not be bothered  while they are seeking medical treatment for injuries they may have sustained in the defense of the Republic.

Please review the below listed BREAKING news release that has more detailed information and was distributed to 15,000 recipients last night.

hls at vaBREAKING: Homeland Security Police Caught Harassing Sick Veterans

By Investigative Journalist, Benjamin Krause of DisabledVeterans.org

SAN DIEGO – Veterans were horrified while seeking VA health care on Wednesday when approached by Homeland Security police in an Operation Shield exercise. The exercise was for the purpose of “presence deterrence” at a VA health care facility in San Diego. Many veterans’ legal advocates are concerned about what this “presence deterrence” actually means and what is seeks to accomplish for veterans needing care.

According to reports, 20 officers from the DHS Federal Protective Service (FPS) dressed in full black combat gear crowded at the entrance of VA Mission Valley Health Care Clinic on Wednesday. These officers were not wearing any nametags and refused to identify themselves. Four bomb-sniffing dogs accompanied the secretive police group that arrived at the facility in 8 white SUVs, which then blocked all access to parking for disabled veterans. Veterans arriving for care were alarmed and some frightened away…

VA Mission Valley Health Care Clinic houses numerous service centers including a general practice clinic, psychiatric clinic, PTSD treatment clinic, and the disability compensation evaluation clinic. The impact of this event on veterans is disturbing.

The advocacy group, Honoring Our Troops (HRT), promptly wrote a formal complaint to VA OIG in Washington, DC after fielding numerous communications from veterans who were shocked by these recent federal secret police actions. OIG has yet to formally acknowledge receipt of their complaint since it was filed several days ago.

According to HRT’s OIG complaint, veterans on site were harassed and threatened when they took pictures and asked questions about this bizarre behavior. One veteran was threatened with a fine of $10,000 and arrest if he did not delete a photo he had taken. Another elderly veteran refused to enter the clinic with his wife. When the veteran’s wife asked a VA doctor about the action, she was told it was a “familiarization exercise.” Is this the new normal at VA facilities that veterans must become familiarized with and used to? And why? What justifies this kind of action by the Feds?

Captain Joseph John, USN (Ret), Chairman of Combat Veterans For Congress PAC, was not surprised when the report crossed his desk. After a cursory investigation, Capt. John concluded, “Due to [confidentiality] concerns, we can only get personnel in the office of Honoring Our Troops to tell us that the parties who witnessed the exercise [saw, which included] a retired Navy Chief, employees of the VA Medical Center, patients inside the building, etc., who witnessed armed FPS officers in SWAT gear with dogs on leash walking up and down the corridors inside the VA Medical Clinic in Mission Valley.”

Capt. John opposes unannounced police actions at VA Medical facilities that resemble “para-military exercises.” His deepest concerns are for elderly veterans with “heart conditions, suffering from PTSD, or elderly Veterans from the WWII or Korean era could be frightened and negatively affected by these [secret police] exercises in the middle of [their medical treatments].” For these reasons, Capt. John believes DHS and its FPS division “should be prevented from holding these para-military exercises at any VA Medical Center,” especially during patient treatment and service times during the day.

Since the OIG complaint, HRT received numerous threatening calls to their organization’s volunteers by individuals whom they believed were VA or DHS employees. Callers blasted the organization saying, “VA does not need this type of exposure right now; bringing this up will not help veterans.” Other harassing calls threatened the staff with stalking and investigations into their own personal conduct. According to HRT, the calls were all blocked to hide the caller’s phone number.

A spokesman for the San Diego VA Regional Office, Alejandro Mendio la Flores, verified this FPS police action and stated it was part of Operation Shield for “presence deterrence.” VA claims the official count of FPS officers was only 8, and that the FPS does not owe VA any explanation for its actions or training exercises — even if it affects a VA medical facility or its patients. Nor does DHS-FPS have to give VA any advance notice that these exercises will occur or get VA’s permission to conduct them. Just what is going on here?

VA already has in place a “patient security flag” procedure under VHA Directive 2010-053. Even though this procedure is completely illegal and occurs in secret VAMC staff councils behind closed doors, it is nevertheless the main device VA has created to deal with security issues with any veterans who give them reason to be concerned for potential violent incidents. The VA-OIG made a rather shocking report about this illegal procedure just last year — and any lawyer or judge who reads it would be horrified at the blatant “due process” violations, since veterans cannot know who made the complaints about them or in any way have a chance to refute or defend against false allegations by VA staff. See OIG Report No. 11-02585-129, March 7, 2013.

The questions that beg to be answered are: Why does DHS-FPS and VA think these preemptive “presence deterrence” exercises are needed to enhance or maintain security at VA medical and other facilities? What evidence does DHS-FPS and VA have to think this para-military behavior is even necessary and put the health of veterans at risk when arriving for a wide range of treatments? None of this makes any sense or seems to be well thought out. So what is the meaning of all of this?

Does DHS and VA have such callous disregard that they never considered the harmful impact such presence would have on veterans with serious physical and mental health disabilities for which they are coming to VA to get treatment?

VA constantly asserts they are striving to give veterans the best in health care. If that is true, why did they leave these questions out of their thinking? Is this the new veteran-centric care Secretary Sloan Gibson recently promised to the American public and veterans?

Mr. Mendio la Flores refused to answer additional questions on the concerns relating to whether or not any veterans were in fact harmed by these recent incidents. The House Committee on Veterans Affairs was asked for comment but was not able to reply to this writer prior to publication.

Planned Parenthood Childhood Sexualization Lesson Grounded in Indiana History

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Headshot_Gov.-elect_Pence

Governor Mike Pence

The families of the State of Indiana must call upon Governor Mike Pence, his wife Karen, and every Indiana elected official to denounce the recent actions of an Indianapolis Midtown Planned Parenthood counselor, who graphically and zealously instructed a 15-year-old child (decoy) in how to perform sado-masochistic acts with ropes, whips, and handcuffs, while dressed in leather.  The “health education” counselor, caught on videotape in her office at 3750 North Meridian Street, was exuberant in promoting pornography and pain to the girl.

Although some have sought to dismiss the advice from Planned Parenthood as “an aberration” (Indianapolis Star, June 12, 2014, “Planned Parenthood: Sex counseling on undercover video an aberration”), there is fertile soil for such sexualization of children in Indiana, beginning even before the horrific experiments conducted on infants and minors who were used as subjects to collect sexual data published by the Kinsey Institute in the 1940s and reprinted in the 1990s, in celebration of its 50th anniversary.

Like Alfred Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an avid advocate of the eugenics movement, which forcibly sterilized untold thousands of “undesirables” – poor, disabled, and minority victims.  In 1907, Indiana became the world leader in eugenics by passing the very first law legalizing forced sterilizations of “dispensable’ human beings, who were permanently prevented from ever reproducing their kind.

In 1927, the esteemed Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the following words which precisely sum up the mentality of the progressive eugenics movement that lived in Indiana for 67 years until its eugenics law was finally repealed in 1974:

It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind …. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. – Buck v. Bell, U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion

Indiana’s soil is soaked with blood from innocent victims of legal and illegal sexual experiments.  It is not “an aberration” that a counselor at an Indianapolis office just a few miles from the Statehouse feels perfectly at ease in “selling” sado-masochism to a child, by displaying a full array of gestures to accompany her vivid instructions on what to use and how to dress to “enjoy” the pain.

Having reported childhood sexual abuse to Indiana authorities, I am personally aware of their indifference to the excruciating and life-long pain children experience as captives of adult predation.  Why is the photograph of an Indiana Jewish teenage boy in a leopard woman’s lounging outfit and fur hat with pigtails posted on the Internet?  Is he a “dancing boy,” as the young male victims are called?  Why were hundreds of boys between the ages of 13 and 15 being used as prey in Indianapolis and elsewhere for predators in the massive child trafficking operation uncovered in March 2014?

Who pays for indifference to the theft of children’s innocence?  What difference does it make?  It is only “an aberration” deep-seated in the heart of the Heartland.

RELATED ARTICLE:

Another Elementary School Brainwashing Our Children With Homosexual Deviancy

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[youtube]http://youtu.be/vbENfOKi5AM[/youtube]

 

60,000 Illegal Alien Kid Invasion is Nothing!

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Everyone’s panties are in a wad because 60,000 illegal alien kids showing up at one time to be let in the country. Do something cry the politicians to President Obama, who apparently by his inaction loves the chaos, as if this is a big deal . I’ll prove it isn’t.

In a small Mexican village of adobe huts and dirt paths lives brothers Juan and Jose who marry sisters Juanita and Maria. Juan and Juanita hear if they can get to the U.S. that life is easy, especially if Juanita, who is pregnant, can have her baby just across the border. They get across the unguarded border and Juanita gives birth to a baby named Pedro a day later. The baby is declared a U.S. citizen and the hospital writes off the cost of the delivery because Jose has no money. Officially they are the parents of a U.S. citizen most commonly known as an “Anchor Baby” because that is the key to welfare. Pedro is now on the Taxpayer’s dime until adulthood.

This event happens approximately 30,000 times every month amounting to billions of dollars a year taxpayers have to pay to support babies born to foreigners on our soil.

Sixty thousand illegal alien kids showing up at the border is equivalent to only about two months of illegal aliens giving birth in the U.S. If there was as much uproar about illegal alien births in the country then legislation might get passed.

Why haven’t the politicians amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to end the misinterpretation? Call and ask. If they pass HR 140 Birthright Citizenship Act of 2013 into law it would end the insanity but for sure the Democrats won’t want to end it since citizenship to them is only a word.

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For a larger view click on the poster.

An Increased Minimum Wage Equals Greater Unemployment

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It’s June, a month famed for marriages, but it is likely to be remembered for the high rate of teen unemployment which has been soaring for a long time. By February, the national unemployment rate for youth, age 16 to 19, had reached 20.7%. By November 2013 it was three times higher than the national average of 6.6% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Teens are rivaled by the number of American men in their prime working years, a record 1-in-8,who are not in the labor force. These men, age 25-54, represent 61.1 million who are either not working or no longer looking for work. The Weekly Standard reported that “This is an all-time high dating back to when records were first kept in 1955.”

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in February that said the wage hike to $10.10 could result in a net loss of about a half a million workers at the same time in increased wages for 16.5 million others.

So, naturally, President Obama in his State of the Union speech, called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. Soon after, he signed an Executive Order to raise the minimum wage for individuals working on new federal service contracts. That means that taxpayers will pay more for those services as the cost gets passed along. Does he have the power to impose the increase? Probably not.

Meanwhile in California where countless businesses are fleeing thanks to the insanity of its liberal legislature and Governor, as May ended its senate approved a measure that would lift the state pay floor to $13.00 an hour by 2017. If it becomes law, Californians will be interacting with machines for everything from banking to filling their gas tank to having a fast-food meal. Even more insane, Seattle has become home to the highest minimum wage in the nation, $15.00 an hour!

Minimum wage laws have been around a long time. Their original goal was to raise the income of the working poor, but the fact that there is still talk of raising them suggests they don’t work as intended. Letting the job market determine wages holds a greater promise of increased wages because businesses have to remain competitive and that means paying a wage that attracts skilled and even unskilled workers.

As Thomas E. Hall, the author of “Aftermath: The Unintended Consequences of Public Policies” (Cato Institute, $24.95, due in August) notes, “The living wage concept moved to the forefront during the Industrial Revolution, along with calls to end practices such as child labor and conditions poor working women faced. Massachusetts passed the nation’s first minimum wage law in 1912.

One of the outcomes of the Great Depression, 1929 to 1941, was the inclusion of a minimum wage as part of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Suffice to say, the NIRA, which actually encouraged businesses to collude together to set prices, failed to promote economic recovery. It was very unpopular and in 1935 the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

Because liberals never learn anything from experience, the NIRA was resurrected later in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that raised the minimum wage to 40 cents in 1945. “The United States has had a federal minimum wage ever since.”

Politicians and even some demented economists like the minimum wage. Every time it is raised, it appears to the general public that working people benefit. The problem is that the wage increases also include increases in unemployment as businesses try to contain costs in order to remain competitive and make a profit.

As Hall, a professor of economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, notes, “The minimum wage’s first significant impact on national labor market conditions occurred in 1956, when the hourly rate was raised from 75 cents to $1.00.” The increase had its “greatest impact on teenagers because they possess the fewest marketable skills among the working-age population. Also, teens often do, or have in the past, worked at jobs easily replaceable with machinery or by conducting business in a different manner.”

The minimum wage rate, nonetheless, has continued to increase since the 1950s and, “By the early 1990s, these changes had caused to minimum wage to apply to over 90 percent of the U.S. workforce.”

Here’s the fundamental lesson about the minimum wage that continues to be ignored. “President Ronald Reagan, who occupied the White House from 1981 to 1989, did not support further increases because he believed that raising the minimum wage would discourage employment growth…during that decade, the U.S. economy created 18 million new jobs.”

As Hall succinctly points out “Remember that the minimum wage is just a government-imposed price-fixing scheme that creates winners and losers.”

Teens that stayed in school and will either be facing a summer vacation or graduating are particularly disadvantaged by a minimum wage law.

“The effects of high unemployment among this demographic group,” says Hall, “should not be discounted. One reason is that the lack of employment opportunities for young people deprives them of valuable work experience in the form of learning the responsibility of showing up for a job on time, learning to follow directions and complete tasks, learning to work with others…these skills can prove to be beneficial later in life.”

It is likely that the minimum wage is also a factor in why many men in the 25-54 age cohort are not working either. This is hardly the time to be increasing the rate unless you want to see the rate of unemployment increase for all ages and both sexes.

By contrast, in addition to the energy sector, the sector that builds machines to replace human workers is likely to do very well over the coming years.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED ARTICLE: Consumers Hit With Surcharge to Cover City’s $15 Minimum Wage