Conservative Musings

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Friday, May 20, 2016

The Nation Is Getting Sicker By The Day!

Charlotte Observer: School Girls Must Get 'Comfortable' With 'Male Genitalia' in Bathrooms

(Getty Images)

By Jason Devaney | Thursday, 19 May 2016 06:23 PM

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A recent editorial in North Carolina's leading newspaper says that when it comes to transgender issues, girls must get used to seeing male genitalia in school locker rooms.

Responding to the Obama administration's nationwide directive that public schools must allow transgender students to use the bathroom they feel most comfortable with, The Charlotte Observer's editorial board has likened the issue to civil rights legislation.

"This is what the Obama administration nudged the rest of the country toward Friday," reads the editorial, which was published May 13 but is now gaining national attention. "Yes, the thought of male genitalia in girls' locker rooms — and vice versa — might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort — with blacks sharing facilities, with gays sharing marriage — then realizing that it was not nearly so awful as some people imagined."

The Way To Crush A Nation Is With Unrestrained Debt. One Of Obama's Accomplishments

Obama on track to double national debt

by Keith Jacobs in News 0

By -NO AUTHOR-

President Obama (White House photo)

NEW YORK – President Obama is on track to double the national debt by the end of his eight years in office.

Currently at $19.4 trillion, the debt is projected to hit $20 trillion by Inauguration Day 2016, up from $10.6 trillion when Obama entered the White House on Jan. 20, 2009.

Put in perspective, it means Obama will have added to the debt as much as all previous 43 presidents have done cumulatively.

Whether the economy is up or down, Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” is a proven plan for financial fitness

Two graphs illustrate why many financial analysts are concerned. The first shows the steep climb in debt under Obama.

The second shows the sharp rise in total U.S. credit market debt, including household debt and credit card debt, that has occurred since the 1980s. The total U.S. credit market debt hit a high of approximately 385 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in 2009-2010 during the recession brought on by the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in office.

OBAMA DEBT chart 2 TOTAL US CREDIT MARKET DEBT AS % OF GDP May 17 2016

The graph shows the ratio of total U.S. credit market debt to the GDP has fallen off in recent years, down to a current level of about 355 percent of GDP.

The drop-off has occurred only because household debt has been declining since 2010 while government spending has continued to rise.

Among the many concerns is that the staggering increase in U.S. national debt evident over the past eight years has limited the ability of the federal Click to see the original article

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

TSA An Example Of Why Government Fails At Everything It Tries To Manage

TSA WATCHDOG SPILLS SECRET BEHIND LONG AIRPORT LINES

Truth involves Obama, 'nude pictures of passengers' and fed-up workers

Published: 14 hours ago

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GREG COROMBOS About | Email | Archive

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TSA lines are getting longer (Photo: Twitter)

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warns air travelers to prepare for much longer than usual airport security lines, but a Transportation Security Administration watchdog says this mess is simply a matter of the government failing to manage its resources responsibly.

On Monday, Johnson stood at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside Washington and told passengers to expect longer than expected wait times as the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, expedites hundreds of new personnel into service to speed up the security process. In Chicago, passengers were told to arrive three hours prior to departure.

The TSA claims congressional action has led to the elimination of some 4,500 personnel over the past few years and the agency simply doesn’t have the manpower to keep up, but that’s just spin according to Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. He also run Cato’s Downsizing Government blog.

Edwards told WND and Radio America the TSA is littered with problems, starting with its existing personnel.

“Annual surveys of federal government employees find that the TSA and the broader Homeland Security Department have some of the poorest morale in the federal government,” Edwards said. “The TSA has a high turnover rate for their screeners, which is not good for morale and is not good for security.”

But perhaps even worse is TSA’s penchant for directing its ever-increasing budget into the wrong areas.

“TSA has spent many billions of dollars on things that don’t work,” Edwards said. “As a result, they’ve starved their budget from hiring more screeners to reduce congestion.”

He said the most glaring example is one of TSA’s most controversial projects.

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“Remember those full-body scanning machines that were in airports for years that essentially showed nude pictures of passengers as they got screened?” asked Edwards.

“Those things were eventually withdrawn because of civil liberties concerns. People didn’t want to see their nude bodies when they went to the airport. But those things have been found to not really work at all. It’s fairly easy to slip guns and plastic explosives through those machines.”

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Chris Edwards:

Chris Edwards reveals real reason Americans are waiting in long airport lines

Another major problem, Edwards said, is the inability of such a large bureaucracy to adapt to differing needs at different airports.

“As a government bureaucracy, the TSA has a very inflexible workforce,” he said. “Unlike a private company, where if they saw one of their facilities or one of their cities get a lot more business and a lot more demand, they’d move workers over there. They’d hire more part-time workers to fill surges in demand. Government bureaucracies don’t do that. They have fixed numbers of people at these airports, and they don’t adjust them like any normal private business would.”

He said airports do have the option to boot the TSA and go with private security. He said only 15-20 airports do that and actually perform better when secret tests are conducted to see whether weapons or explosive materials get past security.

“Airports are allowed to opt out of TSA screening, and some of them have been looking at that recently because of the huge congestion at the airports,” Edwards said.

He said things work much more smoothly north of the border.

“In Canada, all major airports have private screening,” Edwards explained. “There’s a number of different expert companies that specialize in airport screening. They get three-year contracts to do particular airports. If they don’t do a good job, if they don’t have high security, they get fired. The next time around, a different company gets the contract.”

While U.S. airports do have the ability to ditch the TSA and hire private security, Edwards said the Obama administration is making it much tougher to do that.

“Congress has had to slap down the administration a few times to get it to allow airports to go private,” he said. “In the original legislation that created TSA, House Republicans slipped in this provision that airports could petition the Department of Transportation to go private, but the Obama administration has made that very difficult.”

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