Only 12 years after a fuel tank explosion killed 230 on TWA flight 800.
Thank you for your prompt and timely response, guys.
Category: Bureaucracy
Because Lead Paint and Children’s Toys Go Together Like Republican Donors and Evil
The commission itself has only 2/3 of its seats filled, and his staff has been cut by ½, so it’s no wonder that we are seeing increasing numbers of severe problems with products from toys to shower curtains.
Halliburton/KBR Stories
It now appears that the contract manager for a multi billion KBR contract was forced out after insisting for documentation for the invoices that they were sending in.
Delightful….Dick Cheney’s company, under a policy created by SecDef Dick Cheney, was allowed to submit smudged receipts on cocktail napkins.
OMFG!!! This is So Lame!!!
Scott Bloch, the head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, who had a computer consultant wipe his hard drive, and whose office was raided by the FBI with accusations of abuse of authority, retaliation, political bias, and obstruction of justice, now has a new title Sock Puppet* by Proxy. It appears that he ordered subordinates to post stuff supporting him on blogs when they posted bad news about him.
This is so incredibly pathetic.
*Full disclosure, I’ve sock puppeted. I acknowledge that this means that I have no personal credibility. Confirm what I write by going to the links I cite, and reviewing my arguments. Seriously. FWIW, I’ll try not to sock puppet in my own comments section. I haven’t yet.
Seriously, if I say the sky is blue, go check the Weather Channel to confirm this.
USAF Secretary and Chief of Staff Forced Out
General Michael Mosley and Secretary Michael Wynne have been forced to resign.
While the nominal reason given by SecDef Gates is mishandling of nuclear weapons by the USAF, I agree with Noah Shachtman’s take on it, that the USAF has been insubordinate on the F-22, and strongly resisting the supporting needs for more UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were let go for this reason.
Gates pretty much said it himself, “For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts,” he told the Heritage Foundation. “In short, to ensure that all parts of the Defense Department are, in fact, at war.”
Unfortunately, the USAF’s first priority has been a war with the rest of the DoD over the budget, in order to support their bloated spending priorities.
More Food Safety Problems
It turns out that the private food labs that we depend on to test imports may be colluding with the importers who pay them to do the test in order to allow suspect food into the US.
Imagine that. You outsource food safety to private companies who are paid by the people that they are supposed to test, and they bend over backwards to please their real customers, as opposed to the American people.
Senate Considers Bill to Reign In Contractors
Should go further though….They are a problem throughout the government, not just in Iraq.
30 Former Officials Became Corporate Monitors – NYTimes.com
Over the past few years, Bush and His Evil Minions™ have aggressively expanded a program called, “deferred prosecutions” where the companies avoid a court case by paying a fine and agreeing to supervision.
Well, it now appears that in addition to helping along one goal of the Bush adminsitration, slaps on the wrist for corporate law breakers, they have gotten a twofer by creating lucrative private contracts for former political allys, in the form of “corporate monitors”.
You may recall that John Ashcroft got a $52,000,000.00 contract to do this, for example.
5 Years In, the Pentagon Still Cannot Count
They just audited $8.2 billion in Iraq spending, and once again no oversight to the people paid.
Money quote:
those results meant that almost 95 percent of the payments had not been properly documented.
**sigh**
Another Financial Bigwig Says US is Goosing Inflation Statistics
This time, it’s Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Bill Gross, who has been called, ” Called “the nation’s most prominent bond investor” by the New York Times.”
You can read his essay here:
The U.S. seems to differ from the rest of the world in how it computes its inflation rate in three primary ways: 1) hedonic quality adjustments, 2) calculations of housing costs via owners’ equivalent rent, and 3) geometric weighting/product substitution. The changes in all three areas have favored lower U.S. inflation and have taken place over the past 25 years, the first occurring in 1983 with the BLS decision to modify the cost of housing. It was claimed that a measure based on what an owner might get for renting his house would more accurately reflect the real world – a dubious assumption belied by the experience of the past 10 years during which the average cost of homes has appreciated at 3x the annual pace of the substituted owners’ equivalent rent (OER), and which would have raised the total CPI by approximately 1% annually if the switch had not been made.
Me, I’d argue that he’s conservative in his estimates, and place the error closer to 3% than to 1%.
Note that as a bond trader, he is in a segment of the market most effected by these aberrations, and by virtue of being Bill Gross, the financial press will cover this.
Bush’s Evil Minions&trade at HUD Ignored Allegations of Corruption
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
It appears that when career staffers at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development noticed that contracts were going to unqualified, but politically connected, contractors, in what appeared to be a highly irregular process senior management ignored their warnings.
Who could imagine that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson and His Evil Minions™ would let out contracts on the basis of politics….Oh wait….he said this on tape in a speech….Never mind.
Orwellian Freedom of Religion in the Secular Turkish State
There is an interesting court case in Turkey.
The background is as follows, in 1980, following a military coup, the Turkish Junta created mandatory religion classes in the schools as a way increasing government control of religious activities.
Additionally, the government either created or gave new powers to (not clear from the article) the directorate of religious affairs in Ankara, a government agency which which appoints imams, pays their wages, and reviews the sermons they give.
You see the Orwellian bit here. The government is micro-managing religion in order to maintain the secular character of the Turkish state.
It turns out that there is a problem though, Turkey is not completely Sunni Moslem, court cases have been filed, including this one by a member of the Alevi religious minority:
A court victory by Alevi mother Hatice Kose has prompted public questions over the government’s commitment to minority religious rights.
In 2004 Kose sparked a long legal battle when she tried to exempt her son from mandatory religious classes in elementary school: these include lessons on praying in a mosque as well fasting during the holy month of Ramadan and the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca.
“We have our own beliefs and our own culture which is not what is being taught in schools,” said Kose, who says she was ridiculed as a pupil in her religion class as a child because she didn’t know how to pray.
“I can’t accept them trying to impose a foreign religion on us.”
In February Kose won her case in the Turkish Court of Appeals, which would have forced the ministry of education to change the content of the curriculum in religious education classes earlier this month.
But the government has appealed the decision in the Kose case, as it has other cases, saying it does not have the power to alter mandatory religion classes.
“Because religion classes are protected in the constitution there is nothing that can be done right now, it is beyond our authority,” said Mustafa Oymak, a spokesman for the ministry.
There are any number of reasons to support the plaintiffs, both in terms of civil rights, and the basic fact that a wall between the state and religion is a good thing.
What is notable in this case is that the plaintiffs also appear to be admirable in their own right, which is often not the case in civil rights litigation, “Alevism stresses tolerance and respect for all and equality between the sexes.:
Another Day, Another DoD Contract Protest
This time, it’s Lockheed Martin formally protesting the BAMS UAV award by the navy.
I predicted a challenge, but that does not require Kreskin. The stakes of these contracts are high enough, and the costs of challenges are low enough, that challenges will be pressed even when there is no merit, on the off chance that something will turn up.
Yes, There Are Similarities. Corruption is as Corruption Does
Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) is noting that the firing of Mary Gade as regional administrator of region 5 for her attempts to keep dioxin out of the environment resembles the US attorney scandal.
Of course. When one believes that government is an unmitigated evil, as movement conservatives do, the only role for government agencies is to do favors for friends and allies.
Dow is a friend, poor children who you put at risk for cancer are not.
Washington Post Misses the Point, Quelle Surprise
This time, it’s about the aggressive policy to outsource civil service positions to private contractors, where they say that the zeal of Bush and His Evil Minions™ is because they ,”entered office with a deep skepticism of government. He saw competitive sourcing as a way to improve agencies’ performance.”
Any objective evaluation of Republicans, and government, including Bush, shows that they have no interest at all in improving agencies performance. One need only read their own declarations. They find government programs, with the exception of the state security apparatus, to be evil, and to the degree that it is less efficient, they see this lack of effectiveness as an independent good.
Contracting out government work is not about efficiency, it’s about patronage and rewarding contributors. It frees up money to shovel to one’s supporters.
This is Most Unfortunate
It appears that the UK’s Office of Government Commerce’s new logo will be modified.
Some people have noticed a problem, see here:
Do you see the problem?
OK, tilt your head to the left……
A bit more…..
Nope a bit more…..
See it?
Needless to say, someone there need to take this issue well “in hand”, and get a “firm grip” on the situation.
Obviously, if this is what fourteen thousand quid buys from a graphics house in the UK, there is a problem somewhere.
The Department of Homeland Imbicility
This time, it’s the $20 million high-tech fenceless border fence, which is now being dumped less than three months after being implemented as a technology demonstrator.
Morons.
Forest Service May Move From AG to Interior
Personally, I like the idea of moving the National Forests, but there may be issues with cultures.
The Forest Service is has very much the culture of the AG department, profits through harvest, with the National Forests having as their de facto primary purpose providing wood for the timber industry, and the Interior Department is about preservation of special places as an independent good.
To the degree that the Forest Service ends up more like the Park Service, that will be a good thing.
Bush Political HUD Staffers Too Stupid for Email
You may have heard of HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson.
He was the one who said in a public speech, that he would not make grants to Democrats.
Well, it now appears that he cut off funding to the Philadelphia Housing Authority because they refused to give a vacant lot to a friend of his.
The housing authority sued, and their email records have been introduced into evidence, and it’s ugly*.
After Philadelphia’s housing director refused a demand by President Bush’s housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.
“Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?” Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene.
“Take away all of his Federal dollars?” responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, “:-D,” at the end of her January 2007 note.
Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: “Let me look into that possibility.”
*I don’t just mean ugly, I mean ugly even by the standards of the Bush administration, which is makes this AMC Pacer ugly.
Wack Job Religious Fundamentalist Nutjobs Should Not Be Given Secular Power Over People: Israel Edition
The story is in the New York Times.
Basically, a Jew, from a long line of Jews, wanted to get married, and the Rabbinic courts there made her jump through a series of hoops to prove she was Jewish.
I’d say that the officials on the Chief Rabbinate’s office can to go to hell, but that would be superfluous. They are already well on their way toward Gehenna.