<$BlogRSDURL$>

news2notice

Commentary

Monday, March 12, 2007

Re editorial in Palm Beach Post about the high cost of funding Gov. Crist's anti-murder bill

2 small articles in the PBP Sunday tell how to free up jail space for potential murderers.

Let Richard Paey out. FL put him in jail for having too many prescriptions for pain pills.
FL law enforcement staked him out for 6 months, and never saw him selling drugs, yet
prosectuted him and sentence him to 15 years in jail. "60 Minutes" showed him in jail
in a wheel chair with a morphine pump, because apparently, he is in great pain from a
past car accident.

A similar tiny article was about a FL county paying $350,000 to a woman serving a 2-year
jail term for prostitution. All the publicity given to abortion, but this woman's baby died
in a toilet because apparently no one believed that she was in labor?

Lots of protest about Libby not committing a "real" crime. Neither did those 2. Let's save
jail for those who are truly dangerous. Is that guy who killed 4 people with his bare hands
at Savannahs hospital, not in jail at all, but in a mental hospital? Last I read he was walking
the grounds, supervised?

On another subject: The DVD, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" is a well-done mystery that will make you wonder.

Labels:


posted by news2notice  # 10:05 AM

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Army finds evil can be outsourced
By Stebbins Jefferson
Palm Beach Post Columnist Saturday, March 10, 2007

"If you're like me, you're wondering how the outpatient facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center could have fallen into such a state of disrepair and how our elected leaders failed to notice that unconscionable system failure until The Washington Post series appeared.
If so, like me, you're trying to determine how such a god-awful state of bungled bureaucracy could have developed with the best minds in the country in charge of veterans' health care.We tend to attribute such egregious errors to partisan politics and concede that any dysfunction must be tolerated until the next election. Then, we can throw out the bums and replace them with a new group slickly packaged for our consumption. But this time, that solution is not workable. It is a national disgrace that we have failed to provide appropriate care and support for our wounded troops. We have to decide whether incompetence, callousness or evil allowed this to happen.
I'm leaning toward evil. But then, from time to time, I have been accused of being too critical of government. So let me explain.
Since 2000, Bill Clinton's last year in power, outsourcing government responsibilities to private companies has been the favored strategy for doing federal business on the cheap. In keeping with that "reinventing government" philosophy, conditions at Walter Reed were scrutinized. Supposedly, detailed comparison studies were made to determine what services could be outsourced more economically to private firms.
Predictably, the jobs of civilian federal employees who do the grunt work were chosen for this experiment. The next step was to seek private proposals to do the work and let current federal workers work for those private contractors or find employment elsewhere.
If you think you've heard this brilliant proposal before, you have. It has been considered by many local school systems. But I digress.
In the case of Walter Reed, after several years of dickering, the federal civilian workers got together and proposed a bid to self-manage their jobs. When their bid was chosen, the Army Audit Agency overturned it, and the Government Accountability Office upheld that decision.
Meanwhile, Walter Reed was put on the list of Army facilities to be closed. Apparently, even after the war in Iraq began and casualties began to flow in like the waters of Lake Ponchatrain spilling over and through the levees during Hurricane Katrina, no one in the administration or Congress saw the need to reverse that myopic plan.
Enter here IAP Worldwide, a Florida-based management company headed by Al Neffgen and David Swindle - no pun intended. They are former executives of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root. Founded in 1989, by 2005 IAP had gained about $1.5 billion in federal contracts. This company had failed miserably in a $103 million contract last year to revamp IRS file management by a specified date. At the beginning of this year, IAP began the takeover of management at certain levels of Walter Reed for a contracted fee of $120 million over five years.
In September, the Walter Reed garrison commander, Army Col. Peter Garibaldi, sent his superiors a memo warning that the substantial number of skilled workers leaving because of the impending IAP takeover was worsening physical conditions at the center. Patients and their families had futilely begged for better outpatient care.
Ignorance of the looming crisis is in no way plausible. But do not despair. Congress is graciously holding hearings on-site at the veterans hospital, and President Bush has appointed former Republican Sen. Bob Dole and Democrat Donna Shalala, who was President Clinton's secretary of health and human services, to head a review task force.
I thank President Bush for his noble gesture. The report probably will take enough months of study to end his tenure and consume enough trees to hasten global warming.
Forgive my cynicism. I forewarned you that I believe evil is afoot." Stebbins Jefferson in the Palm Beach Post, 3-10-07

posted by news2notice  # 7:25 AM
To our Senator, FL's Bill Nelson. Thank you for your reply. I agree completely about community policing, etc. But Marijuana has been used for centuries w/o killing anyone, yet we classify it as more dangerous than cocaine. And cocaine also has been chewed for centuries in leaf form. We lived in Hastert territory for 33 years, and I remember a Chicago Tribune photo of him with a Columbia police honcho, and we gave Billions because Hastert was really going to stop the flow from Columbia. Now I see we're supposed to keep throwing more money into the Drug Pit, even though nothing has improved, except maybe our prison population #'s. If the Drug War was treated like ADC or Schools, we would be demanding reform and common sense. Speaking of which, we have law enforcement arresting travel agents for selling trips to Cuba, and other govt. employees practicing what happens with another Mariel boatlift? Vengeance is ours, for 47 years now? "Free Trade" ? Open Markets?

posted by news2notice  # 7:21 AM

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Page 32 of the PalmBeachPost, 2-25-07, "most U.S intelligence shared with the U.N nuclear watchdog agency has proved
inaccurate..." Page 24 of the PBP 3-2-07: "while U.S intelligence helped reveal Iran's secret nuclear program in 2002,
none of the info ...since...had led to meaningful leads. Still unproven is whether Tehran is using the cover of a nuclear
power plant program to try to make atomic weapons."

As to North Korea, "It appears that U.S intelligence overstated a purported secret N.K second-track nuclear program",
PBP,3-2-07, from the AP. "...belief that such a program exists was now 'at the mid-confidence level'"

When do we call for accountability in the huge "Intelligence" bureaucracy, as we do with Welfare, Schools, etc.?
"Trust, but verify", Reagan's standard should apply to them, too. They're from the government, and are they
here to help us, or to "make work" for the Military Industrial Complex?

posted by news2notice  # 7:57 AM

Thursday, March 01, 2007

"America at Night: the True Story of 2 rogue CIA Operatives, Homeland Security Failures, Dirty Money, and a plot to steal the 2004 U.S Presidential election...by Larry J. Kolb. Riverhead, 305 pages, $26.95, reviewed in the Palm Beach Post, 2-25-07.

His first book was "Overworld"

Labels:


posted by news2notice  # 1:51 PM

Archives

01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004   02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004   03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004   05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004   06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004   07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004   08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004   11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004   12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005   01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005   02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005   03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005   12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006   01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006   02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006   03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006   04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006   05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006   06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006   07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006   08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006   10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006   11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006   12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007   01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007   03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007   04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007   11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007   12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008   01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008   02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008   03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008   04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008   07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008   09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008   10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008   03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009   06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009   07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009   08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009   09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009   10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009   11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009   12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010   01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010   02/01/2010 - 03/01/2010   07/01/2010 - 08/01/2010   08/01/2010 - 09/01/2010   09/01/2011 - 10/01/2011   12/01/2011 - 01/01/2012   01/01/2012 - 02/01/2012   03/01/2012 - 04/01/2012   04/01/2012 - 05/01/2012   07/01/2012 - 08/01/2012   08/01/2012 - 09/01/2012   09/01/2012 - 10/01/2012   10/01/2012 - 11/01/2012   11/01/2012 - 12/01/2012   12/01/2012 - 01/01/2013   01/01/2013 - 02/01/2013   07/01/2013 - 08/01/2013   05/01/2015 - 06/01/2015   06/01/2015 - 07/01/2015  

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?