Tag: Incompetence

Stupid is as Stupid Does

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Some exciting news…the wonderful @RobbyMook is taking over as President of House Majority PAC! House Democrats and Speaker Pelosi couldn’t have a better ally heading into 2020.

— Alixandria Lapp (@AliLapp) February 26, 2019


Seriously, just how badly does someone have to f%$# up for the Democratic Party establishment to say, “That’s it, out of the pool.”

This man ran the worst campaign in the history of history, he lost to an inverted traffic cone, and he is still getting jobs.

In related news, Harvey Weinstein has been appointed by the DNC to head its gender equity committee.

Someone Is Losing Their Job

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It appears that the shutdown of Gatwick airport may have been caused by police drones, and not some nefarious terrorist or prankster:

Some of the drone sightings which kept Gatwick Airport on lockdown for 36 hours may have been reports of Sussex Police’s own aircraft, the force’s highest-ranking officer admitted yesterday.

Police received 115 reports of sightings in the area surrounding the airfield, including 92 confirmed by Sussex Police’s Chief Constable Giles York as coming from “credible people”.

But the force launched its own drone to search for what officers believed at the time to be malicious aircraft deliberately being flown above the runway in the early hours of December 19 to intentionally force Gatwick to shut down.

Well, the behavior to this point DOES seem to reek of authorities covering up their own incompetence.

Gatwick was shut down for 3 days at the height of the holiday travel season, and if this turns out to be a police screw up, there will be hell to pay.

This is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

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One day, they are there, and the next, they aren’t, and they refuse all forms of contact:

Economists report that workers are starting to act like millennials on Tinder: They’re ditching jobs with nary a text.

“A number of contacts said that they had been ‘ghosted,’ a situation in which a worker stops coming to work without notice and then is impossible to contact,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago noted in December’s Beige Book, which tracks employment trends.

National data on economic “ghosting” is lacking. The term, which usually applies to dating, first surfaced in 2016 on Dictionary.com. But companies across the country say silent exits are on the rise.

Analysts blame America’s increasingly tight labor market. Job openings have surpassed the number of seekers for eight straight months, and the unemployment rate has clung to a 49-year low of 3.7 percent since September.

Janitors, baristas, welders, accountants, engineers — they’re all in demand, said Michael Hicks, a labor economist at Ball State University in Indiana. More people may opt to skip tough conversations and slide right into the next thing.

“Why hassle with a boss and a bunch of out-processing,” he said, “when literally everyone has been hiring?”

The academics above don’t get it, but this guy does:

Someone who feels invested in an enterprise is less likely to bounce, write Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale, co-authors of “How F*cked Up Is Your Management?: An uncomfortable conversation about modern leadership.”

“Employees leave jobs that suck,” they said in an email. “Jobs where they’re abused. Jobs where they don’t care about the work. And the less engaged they are, the less need they feel to give their bosses any warning.”

Modern management has been eating its metaphorical seed corn for decades, and now they are reaping the consequences of the complete absence of goodwill from their employees.

Dropping the “A Word” on Brexit

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This is rather evocative language within the context of British Politics, and what it evokes is well deserved loathing of May and her Evil Minions™:

Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has launched a stinging attack on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, likening it to the appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s.

In a sweeping attack on No 10, the Treasury and his successor, Mark Carney, the Brexit-supporting King said the political elite was allowing the UK to become a vassal state that would be forced to accept Brussels diktats. He described the deal negotiated by the government as “incompetence of a high order”.

King’s comments came as Carney told the Treasury select committee on Tuesday that the price of food could go up by 10% if the UK left the EU with no deal and with no plans to avoid chaos at the country’s ports.

He said Britain’s ports were not ready for a shift to World Trade Organization rules for the country’s exports and imports with the EU.

King, however, slammed May’s deal as “a muddled commitment to perpetual subordination from which the UK cannot withdraw without the agreement of the EU”.

He added: “It simply beggars belief that a government could be hellbent on a deal that hands over £39bn while giving the EU both the right to impose laws on the UK indefinitely and a veto on ending this state of fiefdom.”

May’s Brexit deal is so bad that it could have been negotiated by Donald Trump.

Tweet of the Day

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BBC reporting that May is banking on people being so bored with Brexit that they will support her deal so they don't have to hear about it again.
Like being so bored with your food you take a large dose of strychnine so you don't have to eat it again.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) November 26, 2018

Given her justaposition of unlikability, incompetence, and complete lack of political instincts, I am not sure how Theresa May remains at 10 Downing Street.

The Good News is that They Just Completed the First Ever Full Audit of the Pentagon

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The bad news is that they just completed the first ever full audit at the Pentagon.

The audit was, to use military jargon, a complete clusterf%$#:

The Pentagon has failed what is being called its first-ever comprehensive audit, a senior official said on Thursday, finding U.S. Defense Department accounting discrepancies that could take years to resolve.  

 Results of the inspection – conducted by some 1,200 auditors and examining financial accounting on a wide range of spending including on weapons systems, military personnel and property – were expected to be completed later in the day.

“We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters, adding that the findings showed the need for greater discipline in financial matters within the Pentagon.

“It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial,” Shanahan added.

No, the fact that you did an audit was bureaucracy 101, and you f%$#ing failed in f%$#ing flying colors.

Shanahan said areas the Pentagon must improve upon based on the audit results include compliance with cybersecurity policies and improving inventory accuracy. In a briefing with reporters, he did not provide a figure detailing how much money was unaccounted for in the audit.

It was unclear what consequences there would be after the audit, but Shanahan said the focus would be on fixing the issues.

Translation:  How do we overpay contractors to wallpaper this over.

A 1990 federal law mandated that U.S. government agencies be audited, but the Pentagon had not faced a comprehensive audit until this one was launched in December.

Defense officials and outside experts have said it may be years before the Pentagon is able to fix its accounting gaps and errors and pass an audit.

I’m not sure how to fix the mess, but a good start is to remove the authority of the people who created the mess.

A good start would be for there to be another Truman Commission, but given the predilection of politicians these days for grandstanding, and their deep distaste for the hard work involved in real oversight, I’m not holding my breath.

Where the Democrats Won’t Go, but Should Go

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Because going after the rampant wage theft in America today would upset their big money donors:

………

If the Democrats’ job number one heading into 2020 is to win back some of those white working-class voters who deserted them in 2016, this general problem of wage theft seems like an awfully good place to start. It affects many millions of Americans of all races and in all places. Yet I don’t hear many Democrats talk about it. No one in the broader public even knows what “wage theft” means. Somebody stole your pay packet as you walked home from work? No. It’s what employers extract from employees in not paying them what they’ve earned.

There are two notable exceptions to this silence that I’m aware of (though one is not a Democrat). Bernie Sanders has a bill that would impose a 100 percent tax on large employers for every dollar an employee needs in public assistance like food stamps; he has singled out Amazon, whose warehouses are going to be stuffed to the gills with part-timers for the next month. As is Bernie’s wont, that seems a bit grandiose, but at least he’s trying to get the issue discussed, so good on him for that. (I wonder why a lot of more main$tream Democrat$ are aver$e to $ocking it to Amazon….)

And Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is a Democrat, has legislation that would similarly tax companies (though at a lower rate than Sanders) whose employees need public assistance and would offer some tax credits to companies that did the right thing and raised wages. So, stick and carrot, in other words. The Senate actually voted on it during the farm bill debate last June, and while it lost, it got the support of every Democrat. Note, every Democrat: Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester, everyone. Democrats are and will be divided on some cultural issues, but on something like this, they can be 100 percent united.

Wages, work, and the idea that if you work full-time you deserve a decent life have to be the cornerstones of what Democrats present to people in 2020. Medicare for All and free college, which constitute most of what I’m hearing out of the newly energized left that will be seated in the next House of Representatives, are secondary. Medicare for All failed in Vermont, and free college does nothing for the 65 percent of young people who don’t go to college. But everybody (mostly) works. Everybody is entitled to a good wage. If the Democrats haven’t firmly associated themselves with these simple ideas by 2020, they have failed.

And they will embrace failure, like they always do, because too many of them and theirs secure their sinecures by sucking up to rich donors and doing their bidding.

Google+ Still Has 500,000 Users?

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Google discovered that its programming tools for Google+ allowed advertisers and programmers to access private data.

They sat on this information for months, and then, when threatened with exposure announced that they will be shuttering Google Plus:

Google exposed the private details of almost 500,000 Google+ users and then opted not to report the lapse, in part out of concern disclosure would trigger regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people briefed on the matter and documents that discussed it. Shortly after the article was published, Google said it would close the Google+ social networking service to consumers.

The exposure was the result of a flaw in programming interfaces Google made available to developers of applications that interacted with users’ Google+ profiles, Google officials said in a post published after the WSJ report. From 2015 to March 2018, the APIs made it possible for developers to view profile information not marked as public, including full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation, and relationship status. Data exposed didn’t include Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers, or G Suite content. Some of the users affected included paying G Suite users.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai knew of the glitch and the decision not to publicly disclose it, the WSJ reported. Based on a two-week test designed to measure the impact of the API bugs before they were fixed, Google analysts believe that data for 496,951 users was improperly exposed. According to the report:

Google:  That whole, “Don’t be evil,” thing is, “inoperative.”

BTW, I am aware of the irony present in my using a Google blogging platform, and (barely) monetizing said blog on Google™ Adsense™.

F%$# the DNC

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Pathetic

Tom Perez, chair of the DNC says that here will be no consequences for Democratic Senators who vote for Kavanaugh.

Seriously, the only reason that the Democratic Party establishment gives to vote for them is, “The Supreme Court,” and Perez cannot even hold the line on that.

They are the problem, not the solution, and they are dedicated to the dystopian status quo.

Give to candidates, or give to state parties, but don’t give money, or your personal information, to the DNC, and do not refer friends to the DNC, because they are nothing more than a way for incompetent consultants to get paid.

The DNC Could F%$# Up a Two Car Funeral

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Remember the attempted Russian hack of the DNC from about a week ago?

Well, never mind:

What the Democratic National Committee this week thought was an attempted hack of its valuable voter file turned out to be a security test organized by a state party, unbeknown to the national organization.

The committee on Tuesday alerted the FBI to a fake online portal it thought had been set up as an elaborate attempt to trick DNC staff into giving up their log-in credentials — through a hacking technique known as “phishing” — as a way to gain access to the party’s VoteBuilder database.

Late Wednesday night, DNC Chief Security Officer Bob Lord reversed course. “We, along with the partners who reported the [fake] site, now believe it was built by a third party as part of a simulated phishing test on VoteBuilder,” he said in a statement. 

………

The mix-up resulted from a state Democratic organization seeking to test employees’ ability to avoid falling prey to phishing attempts.

The test was conducted at the behest of the Michigan Democratic Party, using “white-hat” security personnel with the group DigiDems, who provided their services to create the mock site, a Democratic official said. The state party did not notify the national committee or NGP, the firm that hosts the voter database, the official said.

There is actually a deeper problem here:  The party apparatus in general, and the DNC have become completely dependent on overpriced (and under-performing) outside consultants, and as a result, they have no internal expertise to provide even a basic evaluation of potential problems.

The DNC Could F%$# Up a 2 Car Funeral

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After less than 2 months, the DNC has reversed itself and decided that they will take energy company money after all.

The original motion was passed with an eye toward, “connecting with grass-roots voters and emphasize the party’s stance on environmentalism,” but apparrently it’s big donors that matters:

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Friday evening saying it welcomes donations from fossil fuel industry workers and “employers’ political action committees.”

Critics of the newly passed resolution are calling it a reversal of the DNC’s recently adopted ban on accepting donations from fossil fuel companies’ political organizations.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez sponsored Friday’s resolution that allows the committee to accept contributions from “workers, including those in energy and related industries, who organize and donate to Democratic candidates individually or through their unions’ or employers’ political action committees.”

Perez, who served as Labor Secretary in the Obama administration, said the new measure was a commitment to organized labor. The resolution also says that the party wants “to support fossil fuel workers in an evolving energy economy.”

Bullsh%$.

This is about the money, and the cut that consultants get from wasteful media buys.

Do not donate to the DNC, or the DCCC, or the DSCC.

Choose your candidates, and dial directly.

Not Learning the Lessons of Cuba

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What a surprise, our policy of sanctions against Russia does not hurt Putin’s political standing among Russian citizens.

If anything, it improves his political positions, because hardships can be blamed on an aggressively overbearing United States.

Seriously, this sh%$ kept the Castros in power for 60 years (and counting) in Russia, why should we expect anything different this time?

Headline of the Day

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Amber Rudd stumbles toward total ineptitude over Windrush

—The Guardian

Amber Rudd is in a no win situation, of course.

This cock-up was created by her predecessor at Home Secretary, probably deliberately, but seeing as how the prior Home Secretary is one Theresa May, now Prime Minister, and as such is Rudd’s boss, (for a while, at least), she is precluded from pointing at the person who created the problem in the first place.

Hopefully, this takes both Rudd and May down.

I Guess that they Don’t Need to Put a Contractor in Every Congressional District Now

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Early in the process, the goal was to spread work around to as many Congressional districts as possible, but now that the proram is too big to fail, they are looking for people who can actually do the work competently for a reasonable price:

The Pentagon is embarking on a comprehensive effort to examine the entire F-35 supply chain from top to bottom for opportunities to compete components and repair work, a top Defense Department official says.

The move is aimed at incentivizing suppliers to reduce cost and increase efficiencies, as the F-35 enterprise faces severe parts shortages and a skyrocketing sustainment bill (AW&ST April 9-22, p. 40).

The department’s efforts to inject competition into the supply chain comes as the F-35 program faces challenges on the production line. The rate of mistakes by suppliers or skilled workers during the manufacturing process is too high, according to F-35 Program Executive Officer Mat Winter.

………

As the government and Lockheed work to get support costs under control, competition and alternative parts sourcing could be key, Robert McMahon, assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, said during Aviation Week’s MRO Americas conference in Orlando, Florida, April 11. The F-35 operations and sustainment bill has been pegged at more than $1 trillion over the life of the program.

The current structure was driven by politics, not competence or efficiency, and it is a remarkably wasteful way to create jobs.

To quote Ike, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

1 Part Ayn Rand, 1 Part Fredo Corleone

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Tesla Model 3 production isn’t just behind schedule, Tesla Model 3 production has been shut down:

Tesla Inc. is temporarily suspending production of the Model 3 sedan for at least the second time in roughly two months, just after Elon Musk admitted to mistakes that hindered his most important car.

The company informed employees that the pause will last four to five days, Buzzfeed reported. A Tesla spokesman referred back to a statement provided last month, when Bloomberg News first reported that Model 3 production was idled from Feb. 20 to 24. The carmaker said then that it planned periods of downtime at both its vehicle and battery factories to improve automation and address bottlenecks.

The hiatus is another setback for the first model Musk has tried to mass-manufacture. In addition to trying to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream, the chief executive officer had sought to build a competitive advantage over established automakers by installing more robots to quickly produce vehicles. Last week, he acknowledged “excessive” automation at Tesla was a mistake.

It’s more than the lure of automation that has done the damage.

It is the fact that they hold assembly workers in contempt, and this has driven the excessive automation.

Another artifact of this disdain is the fact that it has been concealing assembly line injuries from regulators as well:

Inside Tesla’s electric car factory, giant red robots – some named for X-Men characters – heave car parts in the air, while workers wearing black toil on aluminum car bodies. Forklifts and tuggers zip by on gray-painted floors, differentiated from pedestrian walkways by another shade of gray.

 There’s one color, though, that some of Tesla’s former safety experts wanted to see more of: yellow – the traditional hue of caution used to mark hazards.

 Concerned about bone-crunching collisions and the lack of clearly marked pedestrian lanes at the Fremont, California, plant, the general assembly line’s then-lead safety professional went to her boss, who she said told her, “Elon does not like the color yellow.”

 ………

 What she and some of her colleagues found, they said, was a chaotic factory floor where style and speed trumped safety. Musk’s name often was invoked to justify shortcuts and shoot down concerns, they said.

Under fire for mounting injuries, Tesla recently touted a sharp drop in its injury rate for 2017, which it says came down to meet the auto industry average of about 6.2 injuries per 100 workers.

But things are not always as they seem at Tesla. An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Tesla has failed to report some of its serious injuries on legally mandated reports, making the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are.

 ………

 Instead, company officials labeled the injuries personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid, according to internal company records obtained by Reveal.

 Undercounting injuries is one symptom of a more fundamental problem at Tesla: The company has put its manufacturing of electric cars above safety concerns, according to five former members of its environment, health and safety team who left the company last year. That, they said, has put workers unnecessarily in harm’s way.

Tesla may be the future of electric cars, but it it is, it means that the future of electric cars sounds a lot like Walmart.

Tweet of the Day

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Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking… #SOTUniom pic.twitter.com/ZgFTGtTkzv

— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) January 29, 2018

I’ve verified this on Snopes, it is true.

I swear, the Trump administration couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, but this is probably a good thing, because it makes them less effective at prosecuting their agenda.

Someone on the inside Is Sabotaging These Prosecutions

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It appears that I conflated a 4 month old news story with what happened today.

No acquittal today, the charges against the Malheur terrorists was dismissed because of gross prosecutorial misconduct:

A federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, on Monday.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.

The decision could be appealed by prosecutors. But they would only be able to bring charges again if they won the appeal and the ruling was reversed — and they then got a new indictment from a new grand jury.

Judge Navarro declared a mistrial last month in the case, stemming from an armed standoff at the Bundy ranch in 2014 that had arisen over land-grazing fees. She said then that prosecutors had erred in failing to turn over important evidence to the defense, including video taken surreptitiously within the ranch during the standoff, and evidence that F.B.I. agents were involved in the incident.

My original thesis stands, “Either the prosecutors are too stupid to cut their own meat, or someone on the inside was sabotaging the prosecution.”

Original article after the break.


Seriously, I’m not sure how they could have could have screwed up their prosecution of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupiers:

A federal jury on Thursday found Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five co-defendants not guilty of conspiring to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

The Bundy brothers and occupiers Jeff Banta and David Fry also were found not guilty of having guns in a federal facility. Kenneth Medenbach was found not guilty of stealing government property, and a hung jury was declared on Ryan Bundy’s charge of theft of FBI surveillance cameras.

Either the prosecutors are too stupid to cut their own meat, or someone on the inside was sabotaging the prosecution.

My money is on the latter.

You Run the Most Incompetent Campaign in History, You Change Nothing, and You Want My Money

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The same incompetent people are running the same organizations, and are allowed to continue to be paid without anything even vaguely resembling adult supervision, but they are surprised when it proves difficult to convince people to throw good money after bad:

Democrats aim to win back control of Congress and build up their presence in state capitals during next year’s elections, but they begin this ambitious mission with precious little cash to finance it.

The Democratic National Committee had $6.3 million in the bank on Dec. 1, while the Republican National Committee had six times as much, at $40 million, according to documents the parties filed with the Federal Election Commission. In November, the DNC posted its worst fundraising amount for the month in a decade.

The Democratic Party’s political committees dedicated to House and Senate races show more parity with their Republican counterparts, but not enough of an advantage to outweigh the struggles of the DNC. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ended November with $34.2 million in cash, compared with National Republican Campaign Committee’s $42.3 million, fundraising reports show.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a former DNC chairman who hosted a party fundraiser at his home Dec. 14, is among the Democratic stalwarts stepping in to try to reverse the course. “I have heard a lot of donors say they need to take a break,” said Mr. McAuliffe. “The party’s job is to convince them they can’t.”

The national committee’s lackluster fundraising is at odds with a wave of enthusiasm Democrats have experienced across the country: A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found 50% of respondents want Democrats to lead Congress after next year’s elections and 39% said Republicans—a Democratic lead that has widened since an October poll.

Over the last election cycle, the Democratic establishment in Washington DC:

  • Systematically eliminated Hillary Clintons’s potential opponents in the primaries. (Not just Sanders, but O’Malley, Biden, etc.)
  • Studiously ignored reports from the field.
  • Strip mined the state and local parties.
  • Lost to an orange haired carnival clown who was caught on tape bragging about assaulting women.
  • Spent over a BILLION dollars doing all of the above.

People are not donating because they think that the current “Professionals” running the party will just waste the money on stupid sh%$.

Clean house publicly, and send the current lot back home to flip burgers, and the money will return.

Maybe They Can Expand Medicaid Now

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In Virginia, a recount of a House of Delegates race has has the Democrat winning the race by one vote, which creates a 50-50 tie in that body:

The balance of power in Virginia’s legislature turned on a single vote in a recount Tuesday that flipped a seat in the House of Delegates from Republican to Democratic, leaving control of the lower chamber evenly split.

The outcome, which reverberated across Virginia, ends 17 years of GOP control of the House and forces Republicans into a rare episode of power sharing with Democrats that will refashion the political landscape in Richmond.

It was the culmination of last month’s Democratic wave that had diminished Republican power in purple Virginia.

Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th House District, seizing the seat from Republican David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.

Of the 23,215 votes cast in the district on Election Day, Yancey held a lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.

But five hours later, after a painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed — and then reversed.

The final tally: 11,608 for Simonds to 11,607 for Yancey.

………

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise; the last such arrangement was in 1998. Committee chairs have to be negotiated, as does the person who will serve as speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties, and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance.

Republicans hold a slight 21-to-19 edge in the state Senate, but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

It’s a dramatic shift that caught even top Democrats by surprise. Republicans have controlled the 100-seat House since 2000; even outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a cheerleader for his party, had thought the Republican edge was insurmountable.

………

The final makeup of the legislature is not settled. Recounts in two additional races are taking place this week: on Wednesday in Richmond’s District 68, where the Democrat leads by 336 votes, and on Thursday in Fredericksburg’s District 28, where the Republican leads by 82 votes. Democrats are seeking a new election in the latter because more than 100 voters were mistakenly given ballots for the wrong legislative district.

My bad, it appears that Ralph Northam, the Governor elect, appears to be determined to kowtow to Republicans as a part of any implementation of Medicaid expansion, despite his promises on the campaign trail.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory since 1976: The mainstream Democratic Party.