'kay....fun time's over !
Does it strike anyone else as odd, that suddenly, just in the last couple of years, an advanced society like the U.S., which has a string of historic successes, setbacks, and remarkable comebacks, just can't seem to do anything right, especially in the areas of government management, military planning, software and electronic systems, except when partisan politics are involved?
Just for May 12, there are three dozen, MSM reports about flawed and insecure software or otherwise inoperable Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting systems, all over the country:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...16#post2061616
But...the NSA seems to have no problem with it's monitoring of our formerly anonymous activities and communications with it's new super secret and super capable date management and mining software and electronics!
FEMA management was packed with Bush's unqualified political cronies when Katrina struck New Orleans, and the disaster response and relief was incredibly slow, and inadequate....
Four years earlier...within 48 hours of a call for the republican party "faithful" to descend upon Florida to counter 2000 presidential election vote recount efforts, 700 congressional staffers, and other hopeful republican politcal patronage job seekers arrived to stage well organized, fake protests designed to intimidate local Florida polling officials and make it appear, in front of TV news cameras, that the atmosphere was chaotic in order to discredit efforts to re-count disputed ballots.
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...mi#post2048366
The invasion of Iraq went flawlessly, but securing order in it's aftermath, and managing the occupation and reconstruction of the country was a disaster.
The CIA recruited Saddam's foreign minister and it's analysts were skeptical of administration claims of vast WMD stockpiles and reconstituted WMD manufacturing programs. Ten visits to Langley by VP Cheney and disinterest in the "no WMD" claims of the "turned" Iraqi foreign minister, supported by the lies of the drunken and discredited single source, "curveball", turned things around. The CIA "got it". They were on board with views that complimented what the administration needed to invade Iraq.
Then came reform....Porter Goss as new CIA director and his handpicked #3,
Dusty Foggo. Now...the CIA is in shambles, Goss resigned after purging all the experienced covert section hands out of the agency, leaving it stocked up with loyal partisan hacks. Foggo resigned, too, and today his house and CIA office were raided by a joint DOJ, DIA, and CIA Inspector General taskforce, looking for evidence that Foggo took bribes in exchange for contracts awarded to his best friend and "Briber #1" in the Randy Cunningham indictments, Brent Wilkes.
K Street was transformed by republicans into a super efficient revenue in exchange for federal legislation, thanks to the teams of Delay, Santorum, and Abramoff. The lobbyists, like the ones for the oil and pharma industries, wrote the energy and medicare prescription legislation, every republican legislator who voted with Delay, received campaign funds and perks from Abramoff. This was a tremendously well managed, one party lobbying system that generated jobs for outgoing legislators and their former staffers.
No spending controls could be proposed in congress and passed. Only tax cuts favoring the rich and mushrooming federal deficits were achieved on the budget management side.
"Brownie", at FEMA, the fired Arabian horse judge who mismanaged N.O. relief, the man who Bush praised just a week before he dismissed him, proved to be no lesson learned or impediment to the one thing that Bush does right.
Rewarding incompetent political hacks with important jobs continued as usual:
Alice Fisher has no experience as a federal prosecutor. Julie Myers is Gen. Richard Myer's niece:
Quote:
http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticle...hub=TopStories
Chertoff's Wake
The DHS chief's coattails extend to the administration's highest levels
By Jason McLure
Legal Times
January 23, 2006
After a rocky year, things are looking brighter for some protégés of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
On Jan. 4, President George W. Bush granted a recess appointment to Julie Myers, making the 36-year-old former Chertoff chief of staff the head of Homeland Security’s 15,000-employee Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Just a day earlier, Alice Fisher, Chertoff’s former deputy at the Justice Department who now heads the DOJ’s Criminal Division, had been on national television touting the guilty plea federal prosecutors had extracted from Jack Abramoff......
........Some have had an easier time in their roles than others. Myers perhaps suffered the most by her association with the post-Katrina Chertoff.
Myers and Chertoff both worked on the Whitewater investigation; Chertoff was special counsel to the Senate, and later Myers was a junior lawyer in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s office. After brief stints as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York and at the Treasury Department, Myers became Chertoff’s chief of staff in November 2002, during his tenure as assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Criminal Division...........
........But when Chertoff returned to the Bush administration last year, he hadn’t forgotten Myers, who had job-hopped from Justice to the Commerce Department to the White House’s personnel office.
Her confirmation hearings couldn’t have come at a tougher time. It was Sept. 15, 2005, and the political winds stirred up by Homeland Security’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina were still blowing through Congress. Three days earlier, Michael Brown had resigned in disgrace as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Congress and the media were on the hunt for underqualified Bush administration cronies.
Myers fit the bill. Nominated to become head of the federal government’s second-largest investigative agency, Myers had virtually no experience in immigration policy and a thin record of management of any sort. (Myers was unavailable for an interview. A spokesman for her office issued a statement saying, “She has great respect for Michael Chertoff and is extremely proud of her work with him.” ) And it couldn’t have helped that the other DHS nominee before the Senate committee was Stewart Baker, an older and deeply experienced Washington lawyer and policy-maker who is now assistant secretary for policy at the department.
“I think we ought to have a meeting with [DHS Secretary] Mike Chertoff, either privately or publicly, to ask him why he particularly . . . thinks you’re qualified for the job,” Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) told Myers, with her parents, her fiancé, and her future in-laws looking on from the audience. Because based on the résumé, I don’t think you are.”
But Voinovich had hit on Myers’ ace in the hole. Chertoff would not only speak privately with Voinovich but, according to one of the senator’s aides, would play a key role in persuading the senator to back her nomination. When Bush bypassed the Senate to give Myers a controversial recess appointment over the holidays, there was nary a protest from the normally independent-minded Voinovich. “He believes she has the potential to be a good manager,” says Marcie Ridgway, Voinovich’s press secretary.
If Myers’ credentials aren’t impeccable, her connections certainly are. She is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Upon taking the helm at the DHS, Chertoff tapped her then-fiance (now husband), John Wood, who was once an aide to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, to be his chief of staff.
But Myers is far from the only government lawyer whose career has taken off after working for Chertoff. There’s also Alice Fisher, who worked with Chertoff on the Whitewater investigation. After Fisher left the Senate committee, she joined Latham & Watkins, Chertoff’s old firm. She became a partner at the firm in 2001, just as Chertoff tapped her to become one of five deputy assistants at the Criminal Division...........
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When there is a direct politcal, PR, or patronage quid pro quo, these folks never miss a beat. With everything else they (mis)manage, Haliburton, KBR, or some other connected corp, on their no-bid list of cleaner uppers and fixers is called in to make big profits from our money, often with poor performance and shoddy, or contaminated, or criminally marked up supplies and materials.
Things work when they want them to....and they don't want the e-voting machines to work. They intend for the november election to be enveloped in a chaotic climate similar to post invasion Iraq, and post Katrina Gulf coast. They can steal much more in that kind of climate.