Here is the last line, “Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.”
Just go read it.
Category: Bureaucracy
Dances With TSA
I’m sitting in Philadelphia waiting for the flight to Boston, and I thought that I would relate my experience with airport security.
It was a surprisingly smooth experience, despite the fact that they pulled my bag for further inspection.
The 7 day yartzheit (memorial candle) is a 3″ x 14″cylinder, so I can see how the X-ray machine operator flagged it for further scrutiny.
Still, the whole process, show my ID (honest, officer, I look better in person) and bording pass, take off shoes, put shoes, keys, etc. in bin, put bin and bag through the X-ray machine, grab my stuff, put on my shoes, open my case, show the candle, let the TSA guy wipe my stuff with a “sniffer”, and repacking my case only took about 15 minutes.
I can’t complain.
Interesting Anti-Fed Graphic
Note here, this is largely Paulite critiques, so I generally do not agree, though I do think that the purview of the Fed should be reduced in scope because of regulatory capture issues (much of it is literally owned by the banks), so it amounts to the fox watching the hen house, but we do need an independent central bank.
Click for full size
H/t Calculated Risk.
The Senator from the State of Oil Wants to Overturn EPA Regs on CO2
It appears that Lisa Murkowski is trying to overturn the EPA’s notice of proposed rule making on carbon emissions:
Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Tuesday left open the possibility that she would seek a vote next week on stopping the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from going forward with regulations to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.
“I do not believe and I don’t believe that most of my colleagues in the Senate believe that the EPA is the entity that is the best suited to develop climate-change policy for this country,” Ms. Murkowski (R., Alaska) told reporters. “I’m trying to get a time-out. I’m trying to allow the legislative process to proceed. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to have a vote that will allow for that discussion.”
You know, somehow I think that the folks who don’t come from oil (and coal) producing states might be a wee bit receptive, and there’s also the whole veto thing to deal with.
Best Prediction for 2010
Bruce Krasting, retired finance guy, makes his predictions, and while most are pretty safe, thinks like ‘Phants pick up seats, but Dems retain majorities, and Boeing delivers a pitifully small number of Dreamliners, one is completely off the wall, and I mean that in a good way:
- Tim Geithner will resign as Treasury Secretary. Sheila Bair will replace him.
My inclination on reading this was to go all Poppy Bush, and say, “Not gonna happen,” but based on recent events, I need to add a qualifier, and say, “Not gonna happen before November 2,” the day of the general election.
I think that Barack Obama really believes that Geithner and Summers are the best people for the job, and he believes that the American people believe this too, and it’s going to take a big clue stick, something like House Speaker David Boehner, to convince him otherwise.
I tend to agree that a change in party control is unlikely, but I think that there will be significant losses by the Dems, on the order of 30-35 seats, which will put the House in the 1981-83 dynamic, where the Democrats nominally controlled the house, but the Republicans could always peel away enough Dems to get their way.
Another Nail in the Lead System Integrator Concept Coffin
As I have said before, with the LSI model, you have the contractor supervising their own performance, which is almost literally a fox in the henhouse:
Defense contractors developing the Army’s largest modernization program — the Future Combat System — also were paid $91 million in 2007 to report back to the Pentagon on how well the program was performing, according to a new inspector general report, adding fuel to demands for tougher conflict-of-interest rules.
The Nov. 24 Defense Department inspector general report, reviewed by POLITICO, was sparked by an anonymous tip. The probe found that the $100 billion FCS program contained numerous conflicts that went unreported and that, between 1987 and 2007, the Pentagon increased its reliance on contractors for quality assurance and other tests by 375 percent.
……………
For instance, SAIC, a prime contractor doing systems engineering along with Boeing, received $2.2 billion for development of the FCS program, but in 2007 it also received $25.8 million for testing the program. Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman also received money to create elements of the FCS at the same time they were helping to test it, according to the report.
(emphasis mine)
I worked with folks from the SAIC when I was at FCS, and got very little “L” from the LSIs: they simply did not provide direction to the contractors.
It’s no surprise that the inspector’s report was marked “For Official Use Only”, because the powers that be in the Pentagon want this buried, but someone, probably someone who actually thinks about the soldiers who use the product, leaked it.
Note that this is an artifact of a number of administrations:
In addition to pursuing specific allegations of conflicts of interest, the inspector’s report looked more broadly at the trend toward using services contracts for testing. The review found that before the 1990s — when the Pentagon embraced the trend of cutting government employees and instead contracting for services — the Pentagon spent about $8.9 million a year on contractors for testing. In 2007, it spent $42.6 million.
The Pentagon started doing this under Bush I SecDef Richard Bruce Cheney, though it is fair to say that it was expanded under Clinton, and went, as did defense procurement generally, completely haywire under Bush II.
The problem is that when you have contractors testing for you, they lie, they self-deal, and they cheat.
That’s capitalism, baby: Cheating is a profit opportunity.
Unfortunately, the capabilities that the government has shed over the past few years will take much longer, but if the development of new systems is curtailed until the internal governmental testing capabilities, it will result in a exodus of people in private testing, because their jobs will be gone, and return to government.
Barack Obama: Hating te Gay Since 2007*
Yes, the group most likely to be thrown under a bus by Barack Obama, the LGBT community, just got thrown under the bus again going through back-flips to defy a Federal Judge’s order on this:
Because she is a federal employee, Golinski’s benefits are overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, which effectively serves as the human resources department for about 1.9 million federal workers nationwide. Golinski’s insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, declined to provide health benefits for her legal spouse, Amy Cunninghis, but ninth circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski said that violated the court’s guarantee of equal employment opportunity and that same-sex spouses were entitled to benefits under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.
OPM attorneys consulted with the Department of Justice on this case, and the key to the case, according to the OPM official, was that Kozinski was presiding over an administrative proceeding that’s an internal employee grievance procedure — he was not serving in his official capacity as a ninth circuit judge.
I suppose that he’s better for Gays than the Christo-Fascist right, which was actively working for a death penalty for gays in Uganda until Rachael Maddow outed their murderous efforts, and that he figures that the LGBT community knows that it has no where else to go, but such a calculus is repugnant, immoral, and evil.
Let me quote Joseph Nye Welch:
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
I support Howard Dean for President in 2012…………………Hell I support anyone who opposes Barack Obama in the primaries† in 2012.
*The Donnie McClurkin episode.
†This offer does not apply to Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, or Paris Glendenning. Note that side effects of an endorsement from Matthew Saroff can include:
- Losing elections
- Voting irregularities
- An extremely hostile press corps
- Embarrassing Youtube clips
Do not operate a political campaign under the influence of a Matthew Saroff endorsement, and avoid heavy consumption of alcohol.
IRS Looking to Coordinate Audits Internationally
One of the bright sides of the financial downturn is that tax collection agencies all over the world are looking to coordinate their efforts to go after rich tax cheats who use national borders to hide income.
I think that the deals with the Swiss banks are only the beginning, and hopefully, there will be some lengthy jail terms after a while.
Ass Covering: Secretary of the Treasury Edition
So, now that there are an increasing number of people calling for his scalp, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner is talking tough about the banks:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner disputed claims by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives that the bank could have survived the financial crisis without government help and said it and other Wall Street firms should show some restraint in handing out bonuses this year.
“It is very important that we change the way these executives are paid, the form of compensation, this year,” Geithner said in an interview yesterday for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” which is being aired throughout the weekend. “We have to end that era of irresponsibly high bonuses.”
So, the guy who, until now, said very little about bank pay, and:
- Continued to support front-running via high-frequency trading
- Supported naked naked credit default swaps (CDS) despite the fact that this sort of insurance were banned 367 years ago because of the danger they posed to the economy.
- Tried to get Sheila Bair fired
Now he’s saying that none of the banks were solvent, and that they all survived only through government largess, and that they are overpaying their staff.
This is all about the calls to can him getting louder, not any “road to Damascus” moment.
Just When I Thought That Bush and His Evil Minions™; Could Not Be Any Worse….
I find out that the Bush appointees in the Veteran’s Administration went all out in an attempt to deny care to soldiers suffering from PTSD.
The reason that they gave was because they believed that it was an indicator of insufficient patriotism and faith in God, but there is also a more sinister, and self-serving calculus here (at bottom), one that would have Richard Dawkins maintaining that these folks would be damned for all eternity:
During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.” Benimoff and the others who returned with devastating psychological injuries found a faith-based bureau within the VA. At veterans’ hospitals, chaplains were conducting spirituality assessments of patients.
Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” [Appeared to be? Is a religious nutcase] For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.
….
When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.
(emphasis mine)
We have to realize that there was more to this though, than just penny pinching, or a wish to rely on the the great “Sky God”, this is also all about patronage.
The Bush administration used its “faith based initiative” as a patronage and pork-barrel program, and every dollar that they diverted to their Evangelical Christo-Fascist allies was a dollar that could be used by these folks to politically support the Republican Party.
About F@#$ing Time
It looks like the IRS has set up a new unit in the organization to go after the tax dodges of the wealthy:
A new Internal Revenue Service enforcement unit targeting the very wealthy will help the tax agency decode partnerships, offshore trusts and other complex techniques used to hide income, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said Monday.
Dubbed the Global High Wealth Industry group, the unit will launch “a small number” of audits of individuals with assets or income in the tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Shulman told an accountants’ trade group. An IRS official said the group would begin work on these initial audits in the next month.
The high-wealth group, housed in the IRS’s large- and medium-sized business division, marks a sharpening of the IRS approach to auditing the very wealthy. Its creation is a response to the complex web of entities and transactions many high-net-worth individuals use to manage their financial affairs.
This is good for a number of reasons:
- The wealthy are, as Willie Sutton didn’t say, “where the money is.”
- The tax dodges that they have used have become increasingly more sophisticated, and need a dedicated team with the forensic skills in order to pursue these tax cheats.
- Allowing rich people to evade taxes is corrosive to society, tax collection, and budget decisions, and create an environment where politicians say that you can’t raise taxes on the rich, because they will just weasel out of them. (see Bush, George W.)
- If everyone believes that the rich do not pay their share, they will be less inclined to pay their share too, and the cooperation of the taxpayer is crucial to our system working.
Now what they need to do is go go criminal prosecution, with jail time, on the some of the worst offenders.
EU Approves Lisbon Treaty
This is a major streamlining of the EU’s governance practices:
The treaty aims to give the European Union a bigger role internationally by creating a full-time presidential post with a two-and-a-half-year term and setting up a more powerful foreign policy chief supported by a network of diplomats around the world. It will put in place a new voting system that reflects countries’ population size, while reducing the opportunities for individual countries to block a proposal. It also gives more power to the directly elected European Parliament.
So, they have it.
Now they need to show what they are going to do with it.
The Worst Job in the World Candidate
Somali Navy Chief Farah Ahmed OmarIt may not be the world’s worst job, but it’s certainly in the top 10, though Tom Delay’s dance partner is a tough competitor.
Our Fat Nation
And the fat heads that have created our fat nation.
Bill Volk pointed me to the thoroughly repulsive school policy at the Saratoga Springs, NY schools that forbids children from biking or walking to school:
The biking debate started last spring, when school district officials told Kaddo Marino that Adam was violating school rules by biking to class. Walking to the school also is not permitted.
Kaddo Marino challenged the policy and asked the school board to change it. The district charged a committee to review the rule, which was instituted in 1994.
At the start of school in September, Kaddo Marino thought that she had a nonverbal agreement with school officials to allow her son to ride his bike until a new policy was resolved. But on the night before classes started, school authorities called parents to say that walking and biking to school would not be tolerated.
When the pair stuck with their plan, they were met by school administrators and a state trooper, who emphasized that biking was prohibited, Kaddo Marino said.
(emphasis mine)
In addition to the Saratoga Springs school board, whoever authorized that state trooper to be employed in such a manner should be fired, either by the voters, or by a superior with common sense.
I would also note that while school officials have the right to prohibit bicycles on school property, they have no authority on how a parent, and the kid is accompanied by a parent when he bikes to school transports their kid anywhere.
Least Surprising News of the Day
Remember When I Said “First Comes the Denial”?
Here, when I noted that the FHA was flat out denying that increased write-downs on loans would require a bailout?
My response was:
Next should come a statement of health, then a statement of robust health (or some synonym), and then comes the bailout.
Well, here we are, and the FHA is admitting that it will fall below the cash reserves required by legislation, but they are denying that it will require that they increase the fees that they charge on the loans, or that they get a bailout.
Instead they are planning to announce, “Several measures that should help the reserves rebound quickly.”
Yeah….Right, like that will work, though their decision to require future property valuations conform with the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC), will go a long way toward fixing what continues to be a broken system where realtors whipsaw the appraisers, as the FHA is pretty close to the only game in town right now.
H/t Calculated Risk.
Galrahn Observes
That, “US Navy has 46% of our sub force on deployment,” not just at sea, but on deployment, and it is a high number.
Could be one of those year end things where they are trying to meet deployment rates, or maybe, as Galhran wonders, something is about to happen.
If it is prepositioning for some sort of action, the two most likely reasons to have subs out there loaded for bear would be to make some surprise cruise missile strikes, or SEAL insertions to go after some some nasty on a personal level.
In either case, it’s odd, even if it’s just a statistical glitch.
FMTV Production Contract Award Protested
Remember when I said that Oshkosh had won the FMTV military truck production competition, and so would be replacing BAE subsidiary Stewart and Stevenson?*
Well, BAE has filed a protest on the FMTV award, which means that there stop work order in effect.
Thankfully, production does not start for about year, so it should not have much of an effect, unless, of course, Oshkosh is using the time to redo the drawing package, which is likely.
*Full disclosure I worked at Stewart & Stevenson, Tactical Vehicle Systems, in Sealy, TX on the FMTV in 1992 and 1993.†
†Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
Dodd Stays at Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Harkin Takes Over at Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
I think that this is good news good news.
Harkin is actually more liberal on the safety net, he is kind of classic New Dealer, and Dodd knows banking, and has been relatively tough on the banks.
On the F135/F136 Debate
Well, we have Pratt & Whitney talking to the press about how very serious they are about containing costs, even though the latest estimate shows that its price will increase to $8.3M an engine, up from $6.7 million in the most recent DoD estimate. (H/T ELP Defens(c)e Blog)
People who cover defense for a living are noting that also there is no real indicator of a cost savings by killing the F-136, it just saves a few pennies now at the expense of a few dollars later.
In any case, the DoD is in full “cover your ass” mode with Secdef Gates telling Program Executive Officer, General David Heinz, to sit down and shut up, because he is being too forthcoming about potential benefits.
We also have dueling consultants on Aviation Week’s Ares weblog, with retired general Michael Hough (GE-Rolls Royce), dsaying that there was never a competition between the engines, and retired general Mike Loh (P&W) claiming that the bidders in the program competed the engines and selected the F136.
As it turns out, General Loh is lying. The bidders for the JSF, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and McDonnell-Douglas, never competed the engines, they simply selected an engine for the prototypes, and since the F119, the basis of the F135 engine was already in production, they deemed it more mature for the prototype effort. (see also
here)
It should be noted that the competition is already saving money for the government, as P&W is now offering a fixed price for the first 100 of their engines, in response to the GE-Rolls Royce fixed price offer.
BTW, as to the idea that P&W has their sh%$ together in regard to cost and performance? Maybe not, because the government is sending a team of fixers to evaluate the progam, a good indication of cost and schedule problems.