Nancy Pelosi’s Planet

Among the many pellets of wisdom Nancy Pelosi has left along her rabbit trail of quotes is this one: “The cupboard is bare. There are no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that.” She was responding to a question about cuts to federal spending.

I think what people actually understand is that the federal government represents the virtual epitome of wasteful spending. There has been nothing in the history of the world to even compare with it.

Let us consider:

• The Veterans Administration is (as of this writing) building a hospital in Denver, Colorado. The projected cost of the hospital when the project was started was about $360 million. The estimated final cost now will be about $1.73 billion – that’s not a typo, $1.73 billion, with a “B.”

First of all, if you can’t build a building for $360 million, you maybe shouldn’t be in the building buildings business. Second, the rule of “It’s not my money” seems to apply as it does with most government projects. “Who cares if there are cost overruns? It’s not my money.” Well, it is our money. The average family in the U.S. pays about $7,000 in income taxes each year. The cost overrun on this project alone consumed the income taxes of about 195,000 families.

But stay tuned – the VA hospital is only half done.

• On May 5, 2015, the IRS inspector general reported that the agency had issued $5.6 billion in possibly bogus education credits in just 2012. More than 3.6 million taxpayers got the credits without providing verification from the students’ schools.

“The IRS still does not have effective processes to identify erroneous claims for education credits,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general for tax administration, told the AP.

This was not exactly a new situation. George reported that the IRS issued $3.2 billion potentially bogus education tax credits in 2010.

This apparently happens to one degree or another every year, and the IRS says – as all bureaucracies do when they’re caught not doing their jobs – it doesn’t have enough resources to properly monitor the tax credits.

So let’s just take the two years in which $7.8 billion were squandered. Going back to the above calculation, that means the revenue from about 1.12 million taxpayers was wasted.

• The IRS isn’t the only big federal agency that can’t police itself. The Social Security Administration has added 5.9 million people to the lists of the Social Security Disability program since President Obama took office in 2009. That brings the total number of recipients to 10.9 million.

According to a U.S. Senate Investigation, 25 percent of the claims under the Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI) are suspect.

In just one investigation in New York, investigators allege that 134 people defrauded the SSDI program out of $30 million.

The perps were using the rather liberal interpretations of what constitutes mental illness, such as “sleep disturbance,” “decreased energy” and, ironically, “feelings of guilt or worthlessness.”

In the year 2014, SSDI paid out $140 billion in benefits. So if the Senate investigators are even close to correct, $35 billion were paid to people who didn’t deserve it, or was in other words, wasted.

Even if SSDI recipients are cut off from benefits through administrative procedures, the payments can go on. The SSA’s Office of the Investigator General found that $83.6 million was paid out after benefits were ordered terminated. That was due to poor record keeping. It makes you wonder if anything at the federal level works right.

Asked at a Congressional hearing how much money the SSA spends on anti-fraud efforts, the acting commissioner replied that the SSA “doesn’t track that.”

So let’s just say 10 percent of the claims against SSDI are fraudulent, or $14 billion. That means, according to our above calculation, that the taxes of 2 million American familes are going to crooks. Every year.

But it won’t last long. The SSA the SSDI program will begin to run out of money 2016. Next year, the program trustees say they may be able to pay only 81 percent of promised benefits.

• Those are big numbers. There are also little numbers, if you consider $490 million little. That’s what the U.S. will pay the Russians in 2015 to carry payloads and passengers to the International Space Station.

You remember the U.S., the first nation to put a man on the moon, the nation that launched and placed the Global Positioning System, the country that built and operates the Hubble Space Telescope.

We don’t have a way to get up there anymore. When the space shuttle program came to an end, this administration had already scuttled the Orion Program that would have replaced it.

It’s not that the U.S. wouldn’t have spent $490 million putting objects and people into space, but we’d have been spending it in America. Out tax dollars would have gone to a program that employed American workers, who paid American taxes and raised American families. Instead, $490 million is going to Russia. President John F. Kennedy would be appalled.

So that’s tax money from 70,000 American families going to support Russian families.

• And let’s go even smaller to find examples of waste. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2010 sent a crew of a dozen people to a county with a population of 1,350. The county seat had five motels, but the crew chief wanted to stay in a resort town 65 miles away.

Federal regulations, we were told, required that each employee have a separate room. So the crew chief and the employees stayed in the resort town for $210 per night and commuted back and forth each day instead of staying at the county seat for half the price and eliminating the need for a reimbursement of 130 miles per day.

Several years later, the U.S. Postal Service did the same thing. The same county of 1,350 people has three staffed post offices. The Postal Service needed to jump through all sorts of hoops to do the obvious – close the two small post offices.

Part of the process was holding meeting in the two small villages. The Postal Service assigned two people to hold these meetings, and those people scheduled the meeting for two different days. The meetings lasted less than two hours each. And yes, the Postal Service officials stayed in the resort town 65 miles away and drove back and forth to the meetings.

And guess what – the two small post offices are still open and operating.

• President Barack Obama had this plan to deal with ISIS. Instead of using American military assets to bring down this barbaric, murderous, theocratic army, Obama came up with a plan to train opposition soldiers to fight against ISIS; mercenaries, if you will. It would have cost $500 million (and could have been made revenue-neutral by defunding Planned Parenthood at the same time).

The idea was to arm and train indigenous troops and base them in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those four countries didn’t exactly agree, even from the outset, with the aims and goals of the program, but the U.S. plunged ahead. After spending a year and $40 million on the program, a year during which ISIS has made great gains in Syria and Iraq, the number of opposition troops ready to go into the field numbered – wait for it – four or five. If you’re math-challenged, that works out to $10 million per man.

So it takes the average payment of 1,428 American taxpaying families to support one anti-ISIS soldier in the Middle East. A Private First Class with four years experience in the U.S. Army makes $24,418.80. A Private First Class with six years experience in the U.S. Army makes $24,418.80.

• In October of 2015, state regulators in Colorado announced that they would be shutting down Colorado HealthOp, a creature of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The demise of this agency looks like it’s going to cost taxpayers $72 million.

Colorado HealthOp’s mission under an an Affordable Care Act program was to help insurers take on the sickest, most expensive members. If you recall, the “logic” of this was that younger, healthier Americans would pay more in health insurance premiums to take care of the older, sicker Americans, something the former has stubbornly refused to do for the latter.

Anyway, 83,000 members of Colorado HealthOp will have to look for new insurance in November, and that insurance will cost more. Meanwhile, the $72 million in federal loans used to prop up Colorado HealthOp’s questionable business model will not be paid back. By the way, this is one of seven state health insurance co-ops organized under Obamacare than have failed.

So again using our model, the taxes of about 10,300 families have just been lost.

• In early November, the news broke that the Pentagon had spent $43 million to build a filling station in Afghanistan, and then couldn’t explain why the station cost that much. It is a compressed natural gas filling station for vehicles, which might explain why it cost more than a regular gas station.

But, the Pentagon built a similar station in neighboring Pakistan for a mere $500,000. Apparently, the gas station in Afghanistan took three years to build and bring on line. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction discovered this fuelish project and then inquired of the Department of Defense about how such a thing could occur.

The Department of Defense replied that the personnel responsible couldn’t be found. Those would be members of the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, an entity created because, really, what is more important to the American taxpayer than rebuilding Afghanistan into the country we all know it could be. Our friends in Washington, D.C., have appropriated $110 billion for this purpose.

But let’s just focus on the filling station. It’s closed. So the taxes of about 6,150 taxpaying American families went up in smoke.

• In November of 2015, the U.S. Military “lost” a $180 million blimp it was using to protect the east coast of the United States from cruise missiles. I don’t know if I buy that, but the unmanned blimp came loose from its mooring and drifted over 100 miles before it deflated and came to the ground. But it was dragging its heavy tether the whole way and did a considerable amount of damage on the ground. 30,000 people lost power as a result, so there’s no way to estimate what the civil damages will be.

This is part of a $2.7 billion program that is – sigh – already over budget. The military only has two of these things, and one would think, wouldn’t one, that they could keep track of both of them. Like maybe they could place a PFC out there to watch the blimp and be ready to alert someone if something went awry. But no, so scratch another $180 million (before the lawsuits) that just blew away.

That equals the taxes paid by about 25,700 taxpaying families.

• The Obama administration in January of 2016 announced that it wanted to invest $4 billion into the the research and development of self-driving cars. Back in the days of fiscal sanity, the government was expected to involve itself only in things that the private sector couldn’t afford to do, like the interstate highway system or the space program.

The Obama administration may not have noticed, but there are several reputable firms in the private sector already working on this concept, including BMW, Google, GM, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Delphi Automotive and Nissan. Just exactly what is the government going to do better than those guys?

This needless expenditure equals the amount of taxes paid by by about 57,000 families every year for ten years.

• Does your town need major repairs to its sewer system? Perhaps your local 120-year-old church is in need of renovation and the bake sales aren’t getting you there. Or maybe the local mosque needs renovation. Too bad. Your town is in th United States, not overseas. If you were overseas, your might be able to benefit from $26 million the U.S. has spent since 2001 helping restore – for instance – a church in Russia, a sewer system that threatened a mosque in Cairo, a 16th Century mosque in China.

According to the State Department website, the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation “provides direct grant support for the preservation of cultural sites, cultural objects, and collections, as well as forms of traditional cultural expression, in eligible countries around the world.” U.S. ambassadors nominate projects to be funded.

The program was created by Congress in late 2000 under President Bill Clinton, and the first grants were announced under President George W. Bush in 2001. The State Department says that, in total, the fund has contributed nearly $26 million to approximately 640 cultural heritage sites in more than 100 countries, and more than half was given before Obama took office.

Is that how you want your tax money used, restoring a mosque in China? Does not China, which has loaned the U.S. over $1 trillion, not have the wherewithal to restore the mosques of its own people? Is there some valid reason why our beloved separation of church and state doctrine does not apply overseas?

The Cairo sewer system project cost $770 million, about $2.3 million of which was used to correct ground water problems that threatened a historic mosque built to commemorate the victory of Muslim armies over Christian Egypt in the 7th Century. The program has also helped restore mosques in the Sudan and Pakistan, and churches in Macedonia, Uganda and Spain.

Let’s take the $770 million Cairo sewer system project and the $26 million in “cultural aid” projects and come up with $796 million. That equals the taxes paid by 113,000 American families. No possible cuts there, or do you disagree?

 

 

(3,590,578)

 

 

 

• So finally we return to Nancy Pelosi who, along with her husband, is worth something like $30 million. When she was Speaker of the House, she got a salary of $223,500 and expense allowances of about $1.5 million. Yet she still felt the need to commandeer a U.S. Air force jet to take her back and forth across the country 85 times at a taxpayer cost of nearly $2.2 million over her two-year tenure as Speaker of the House.
•                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     The American public, for the most part, knows these things. They read papers, listen to the news. You couldn’t find a person on the street who, when presented with the question, “Does the federal government waste money?” would answer in the negative. But they live on this planet, not Nancy’s Pelosi’s home world.

The “cupboard is bare” indeed. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi is not alone. Quick, who the last high-ranking federal official fired for incompetence? These people have nothing but disdain for you, the average law-abiding, tax-paying American. They proceed with absolute impunity.

 

Enjoying The Jeanery

I’m having a jeanetic disorder.

I have this hierarchy of blue jeans that constitute the bulk of my lower body apparel. I gave away all my suits when I moved from St. Louis to the West and will be perfectly happy living the remainder of my life in jeans. However, the wear order has broken down.

It was supposed to work thusly:

Top Tier: newly purchased jeans suitable for attending almost any governmental meeting in Colorado and certainly any cowboy wedding. Hung properly on the line, Wrangler jeans develop their own crease. They can be worn with shirt, tie and sport coat.

Middle Tier: these used to be the top tier but have faded and degraded to the point where they have become recreational wear, suitable for hunting, hiking, riding, various chores, even golf at some courses. If they get stained or frayed or torn in some places, you don’t really care.

Bottom Tier: at this point, your middle tier jeans have become so torn up and full of holes that some pairs can’t be worn within 1,000 feet of an elementary school. Some people use bottom tier jeans as parts for middle tier jeans, cutting out swathes of denim from recently deceased jeans to patch up those jeans still in use.

My problem is that I don’t have a middle tier at the moment. I can’t go out shooting or hiking with my dress jeans because I don’t want to get them scuffed up, and my bottom tier jeans have too many mosquito portals.

I know some of these bottom tier jeans are highly fashionable in Hollywood, but I find them only attractive on smokin’ hot women. I don’t think jeans equipped with holes large enough to allow your underwear to stick out are very attractive on men, though I notice some men have attempted this look. This is America, and the First Amendment gives us the freedom to ensemble. I think I’ve got that right.

I usually have three pairs of jeans in each tier. I go out once a year and buy three pairs of jeans, and then move the previous set of dress jeans down the hierarchy, and the previous set of recreational jeans down to the painting level.

Sometimes this happens rather abruptly. I was once out in the woods operating a chain saw, and a near miss reduced my recreational jeans to the holey order. Well, it could have been worse. I still require jeans with two pants legs.

I guess I’m going to have to buy three more pairs of jeans and prematurely reduce the dressy ones to the recreation department. Anyway, that’s the way I alter my pants.

I should note that I did not start wearing jeans all the time just because I moved out west. I did grow up in the city, but I also attempted to wear jeans to school. In the early 1960s, you weren’t allowed to wear blue jeans to school (think about that, North Park High School). You could, however, wear colored jeans to school, and colored jeans became a sort of uniform.

My high school was divided into three groups: the colleeges, or those who were going to college; the hoods, or those who were going to the penitentiary; and the unaffiliated.

Hoods wore dark shirts, dark slacks, black socks and pointy-toed shoes. Their hair was long, combed straight back and welded in place with Vaseline. Hoods all smoked and made a point of coughing in class to let everyone know they smoked.

Colleeges wore button-down shirts, colored jeans, white socks and penny loafers. Our hair was fairly short and combed in a manner that made many of our heads resemble those of cocker spaniels. We were all athletes.

Jeans weren’t such a statement when I went to college in Missouri because I was inching my way west and finding that many churches didn’t mind you showing up in jeans, just as long as they were top tier.

And now I’m in a town of 600 people high in the mountains, which would be the Wrangler capital of the world if there weren’t so many, many towns like it. Maybe that’s why I’m so comfortable out here in the West. It’s in my jeans.

 

It’s Time To Impeach Obama

Should President Barack Obama be impeached? Of course he should be impeached. The problem is that the impetus for impeachment cannot come from the Republicans. Any such action from the GOP would be viewed as purely political and reported that way by the mainstream press.

I keep hoping that, if only for the good of the country, a group of Democrats will step forward and announce that they would support a bill of impeachment in the House. But then I am discouraged when they elect Nancy Pelosi as their leader, a person who seems to think her primary mission is to make her party look stupid.

At this moment in history, my view of the Democrat members in both the House and Senate is that all of them march in blind obedience to the orders coming out of the White House. That in itself is dangerous to the Republic. It has the effect of making legislative branch of our government an arm of the executive branch.

I don’t know what holds that bloc together today. It would seem to me that unless Valerie Jarrett has some new machine that interrupts normal brain functions in Democrat senators and House members, at least some would see that what Obama is now doing could be done by some future Republican president if Obama’s actions aren’t curtailed and an example made.

The Constitution allows for the impeachment of a sitting president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” I could wish the founders would have added “or general incompetence,” which would make the case even more clear. But let’s look at what’s been done by this president.

Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution says, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” It doesn’t say some powers, it says “All powers.” The president can’t make laws, yet Obama does. He has by decree changed provisions in the Affordable Care Act more than 20 times.

I’m just hitting the highlights here. Should we delve deeper, we would find there are laws against selling guns to Mexican criminals, laws against the federal government invading the computers and phones of members of the press, laws against using the IRS to target individuals or groups, laws requiring that government files and records be backed up, and so on.

You might argue that the president himself didn’t do these things, but his lieutenants did. Have any of those people paid a price? I laugh when Obama’s underlings like Hillary Clinton say, “I’ll take responsibility for those actions,” which means nothing. It’s not like they lose their jobs, or their pay, or their pensions.

And maybe to bolster the courage of those Democrats wavering and saying, “Yeah, but,” and “Bush did it,” and “Oh, well, he’s only got two years left,” let us look at a sentence in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution: “he (the president) shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Obama’s reign started with the dismissal of federal charges against two members of the New Black Panthers who had already been convicted of voter intimidation. It continued with a decree that certain immigration laws would not be enforced, a decision to release some 36,000 illegal immigrants suspected of or convicted of serious crimes from jail, and the non-enforcement of felony charges against foreign nationals who had repeatedly entered the U.S. illegally. This latter policy resulted in the deaths of two police officers in California by a suspect who was deported twice and returned both times. The Fast and Furious debacle resulted in the death of at least one border patrol agent. And regarding guns, Obama amended ObamaCare – which he cannot do – to allow doctors to investigate gun owners. Obama has made illegal appointments to boards and commissions, some of which have been negated through long and expensive court actions. The president set aside long-standing legal precedent in the takeover of GM and Chrysler corporations that cost private bondholders dearly. The problem here is that the list of law violations is not short; it is extensive. Even the Department of Justice has invaded the privacy of citizens and members of the press.

So let’s move on to general ineptitude. Quick, name a federal department or agency that is not involved in some scandal. The list is really depressing. The Department of Justice can’t seem to get to the bottom of the IRS mess, but can send 100 FBI agents to Ferguson, Missouri; the Department of the Treasury is responsible for Lois Lerner; the Department of Veterans Affairs not only can’t properly treat veterans, but lies about its ability to do so; the Department of State hired a local gang to protect its consulate in Benghazi, and we all saw how well that worked out; the Department of Health and Human Services given a year and $300 million couldn’t produce a working website; the Department of Energy invested $6.2 billion of your money in “alternative energy” companies and was just recently notified that yet another one had gone belly up; the Department of Homeland Security has not only not built the southern border fence required by law but allowed tens of thousands of kids to pour into the U.S. without challenge; the EPA head was forced to quietly resign over misuse of email accounts, including a secret email account that she assigned to her dog; the Department of Agriculture has overseen a food stamp program that has doubled in cost since Obama took office and which recently admitted that its anti-fraud measures have been “overwhelmed”; the Department of Labor has misused its powers in trying to prevent Boeing from building a plant in South Carolina, then was further hamstrung by Obama’s illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

I could go on. In fact, I will go on. Nothing has been done to ensure that Social Security and Medicare stave off financial collapse; nothing has been done to approve the Keystone XL pipeline despite six years of study; nothing has been done to expedite natural gas sales to Europe despite the enormous economic opportunity there; nothing has been done to improve K-12 education in the U.S., although fruitier lunches have been mandated; nothing has been done to reduce the black-on-black murder rate in Chicago where maybe 100 FBI agents might be of assistance; and Obama had to first be motivated by the public beheading of an American before he was dragged kicking and screaming into military action to oppose ISIS.

Finally, there is the constant lying and misleading of the American public by this administration. I’ve dealt with that in another column, but this latest flip-flop is just stunning. No less than 25 times did Obama tell us that he did not have the authority to do what he did on Nov. 20 when he issued the Latination Proclamation.

You know, we have Democrat senators and representatives in states along the southern border; in states that depend on the coal industry; in states that find, transport and refine fossil fuels; in states that are having enormous problems absorbing and serving illegal immigrants; in states where citizens have been targeted by the IRS; in cities where K-12 public education stinks; or in a country where many believe they will outlive the dollar.

It wouldn’t take a lot of them to step up and recognize the obvious: this president is bad for the country now and his actions are jeopardizing our future. I’m actually stunned that many Democrat members of Congress don’t realize that their power as delineated in the Constitution is being usurped. If this continues, we might be looking at Gaius Octavius, otherwise known as Augustus Caesar, as our next president. That led Rome to Caligula, who did not have have any respect (understatement) at all for his Senate.

Congress needs to impeach Obama if for no other reason than to prevent future Obamas from doing what this one is doing.

 

Highway Trust?

The government would like to take this opportunity to impose a gasoline tax hike on you.

It’s the winter of 2014-15, and gas prices in my town have fallen to $2.39 a gallon from a high of $3.99 not all that long ago. Given the inexplicable (for us mortals, anyway) nature of gas prices, I can drive 65 miles north to Laramie and buy gas for $1.64 a gallon.

To the government, this presents an opportunity to say, “Now we can raises federal gas taxes, and the public won’t feel it because they will still be paying less for gas than they did a year ago.”

And then the feds follow up with arguments that “Ronald Reagan did it” and “George H.W. Bush did it” and “Bill Clinton did it.” And then there’s the “crumbling infrastructure” argument.

It’s all so tiresome, and it’s tiresome on a non-partisan basis. The current bill to raise the gas tax is being sponsored by a Republican from Wisconsin and a Democrat from Oregon.

They want to raise the federal gas tax by 15 cents on top of the current 18.4 cents per gallon, and after that tie the gas tax to inflation so Congress will never again have to vote on raising this particular tax.

It’s how congresspeople avoid accountability, as they did with congressional pay raises and military base closings. They adopt a mechanism that allows them not to vote on a particularly contentious issue.

Well, this might be a surprise for some of my regular readers, but I would support a gas tax hike if I thought the revenues therefrom would be spent honestly and efficiently. However, the U.S. has time and again proven itself incapable of adhering to the aforesaid stipulation on anything.

It creates money sumps like the Highway Trust Fund that over time become slush funds that congresspeople fling willy-nilly all over the place in the manner of some medieval potentate flinging pennies to the crowds along a processional route.

This was true of the $700 billion Toxic Assets Relief Program (TARP) under George W. Bush and Obama’s $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Stimulus Bill). The money appropriated under those programs didn’t go where federal officials – elected or otherwise – said it would go, or at least not all of it.

If you drive, you know that workers are repairing and upgrading highways all over America. The infrastructure might be crumbling in places pointed out by the American Society of Civil Engineers (which might just have an ulterior motive in prophesying doom and gloom), but we are also improving infrastructure all over the place.

And that would be great … if the Highway Trust Fund worked as it was designed to work. And the condition of Social Security would be just peachy if the Social Security Trust Fund had been managed like it was supposed to be managed. Instead, it has been used since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson as a loan fund for Congress.

So for what do we use the Highway Trust Fund? One plan on the books is a new headquarters building. Bureaucrats love new digs. The Department of Transportation (DOT) has asked for proposals from contractors to build a new headquarters building but has released no cost estimates.

Why should they? It’s not their money; it’s your money.

The last federal agency to build itself a new headquarters on your dime was the Patent and Trademarks offices, a project that came in at $1.4 billion. That’s not a typo; their new headquarters cost $1.4 billion.

And here are some other examples of Highway (let’s emphasize “highway”) Trust (okay, let’s also emphasize “trust”) Fund appropriations:

• $12.3 million on an Alaskan ferry that was so high-tech that it couldn’t be used, and an additional $21.2 million trying to figure out how to use it. At last report, the Alaskan authority that ended up owning the ferry planned to give it to the Philippine navy. A similar fiasco occurred when the DOT acquired two ferries for the Virgin Islands that were never used.
• $160,000 to restore a privately-owned lighthouse that hasn’t been used for actual lighthouse duties in 130 years. The total taxpayer money spent on that lighthouse has reached $515,000.
• $90,000 for a Portland suburb to build speed bumps.
• $1.5 million for bicycle paths in New Mexico.
• $500,000 for a beach promenade in Pascagula, a town of 23,000.
• $2.5 million for a community center in Kansas City.
• $1.6 million for a Cape Girardeau river walk trail.
• $392,000 to beautify a street in Dahlouga, Georgia.

 

And on it goes. Required reading for every American voter should be Citizens Against Government Waste’s annual pig books and Sen. Tom Coburn’s annual “wastebooks.” Unlike most things in Washington, D.C. nowadays, these aren’t secrets.

And you know it. Voters made a pretty strong statement last November that they aren’t sheep. To a certain extent, I believe that’s true. Voters kicked out the Republicans in 2006, elected a Democrat president in 2008, kicked out House Democrats in 2010, reelected a Democrat president in 2012 and kicked out Senate Democrats in 2014.

I also believe if the Republicans don’t clearly operate in the voters’ interests in the next two years, Democrats will take over the Senate again in 2016. We’re unhappy. We don’t trust you. We live in Not-Washington. Stop with the tax and fee hikes. Show us that you can spend our money intelligently.

Or even better, lower a tax. On anything.

 

Peeing in the Shower

Glenn Beck and his cohorts had in March of 2015 a flowing discussion on their morning radio show on an urgent issue: peeing in the shower.

The three men – and I believe this subject is limited to men – claimed to not know a single male who peed, or confessed to peeing in the shower. Well, I’m here to say I pee in the shower, and I pee in the shower for several valid reasons:

• Splatter. Let’s be honest, guys miss. You may be distracted, or drunk, or aiming at a fly in the toilet bowl or a little speck of turd, but some of that product ends up on the floor. Someone – spouse, partner, live-in, you – eventually has to clean it up. That’s no problem in the shower. The pee is confined to the shower stall and washes away without ever threatening to stain the bathroom floor.

• Hygiene. Most of us wash our hands after the act of peeing, but what about that other appendage? It never gets washed after peeing … except in the shower! That’s the purpose of a shower, to wash all those other parts of your body that don’t get cleaned in the regular course of the day.
• Conservation. If you pee in the shower, you use x-amount of water. If you take a shower and then pee in the toilet, or pee in the toilet and then take a shower, you use x + 1.6 gallons of water. With global warming looming on the horizon with the threat of evaporating every drop of water on the planet and shooting it all into space, we need to cut back on our water usage. One way you can do that? Pee in the shower.

• Time. The combining of two separate exercises – peeing and showering – into one exercise not only conserves water, it saves time. It takes about three seconds to reach over and flush the toilet, and if you have my toilet, about 15 seconds more to see if the thing worked properly. It takes another two seconds to zip up. If you’re over 65, you’re going to be doing this six or seven or maybe 12 times a day. If you eliminate just one visit to the toilet, you have saved yourself 20 seconds, which over the course of a year is more than two hours. Think of all you could have accomplished with those extra two hours. You could write a column.
• Fungus. Athlete’s foot is a fungus. One of the components in pee is uric acid. I’m not a doctor, but I have to believe that fungus doesn’t like acid. I contract athlete’s foot every now and then, and one of my treatment options is to pee on my foot while in the shower. It’s cheaper than Tinactin and much easier to apply.

• Stains. There always seems to be some left over, doesn’t there. And that left-over seepage sometimes finds its way to your underwear, and more embarrassingly, to your pants. Unless you are an even greater fanatic than me and shower fully clothed to skip the laundry chore, one less visit to the toilet eliminates one more threat to your pants.
• Simplicity. There is no procedure required to pee in the shower. Peeing in the toilet requires unzipping, unbuckling, unbuttoning or just the dropping of pants, assuming the stance, aiming, shaking, then rezipping, rebuckling or rebuttoning. In the shower, you just let it go (unless you’re aiming at your feet).
• Protection. If you pee in the toilet, due to the aforementioned splatter problem you are going to leave DNA evidence on the toilet. There are cases where this may be a concern, like if you are a serial rapist or some other sort of sexual predator, or if a 22-year-old stranger with piercings and tattoos unexpectedly shows up and says, “Hi, Dad!” But if you do have concerns, peeing in the shower usually leaves no residue sufficient for a DNA test.
• Sanitation. There is no downside to peeing in the shower. It all ends up in the same drain. It all goes to the same sewage treatment plant. The advantage of shower sewage over toilet sewage is the shower sewage is accompanied by soap suds that have already begun the sewage treatment process, thereby lessening wear and tear your city’s terribly expensive treatment plant – or your septic tank leach field.
• Anonymity. If you are embarrassed to admit that you pee in the shower – as Mr. Beck and his lackeys seem to be – then don’t admit it. Assuming you shower alone, no one is going to know that you pee in the shower (unless you happen to write a blog column).

Final note: this all does not apply to No. 2. That’s just wrong.