Monthly Archives: September 2015

An Excerpt

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…from a VA Office of the Inspector General report.

We substantiated the second allegation that pending ES [Enrollment System] records included entries for individuals reported to be deceased. As of September 2014, more than 307,000 pending ES records, or about 35 percent of all pending records, were for individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration. However, due to data limitations, we could not determine specifically how many pending ES records represent veterans who applied for health care benefits. These conditions occurred because the enrollment program did not effectively define, collect, and manage enrollment data. In addition, VHA lacked adequate procedures to identify date of death information and implement necessary updates to the individual’s status. Unless VHA officials establish effective procedures to identify deceased individuals and accurately update their status, ES will continue to provide unreliable information on the status of applications for veterans seeking enrollment in the VA health care system.

Not only is the VA not trying to take care of our vets—307,000 of them died waiting to get treatment—they’re not even troubling themselves to keep records.

We substantiated the third allegation that employees incorrectly marked unprocessed applications as completed and possibly deleted 10,000 or more transactions from the Workload Reporting and Productivity (WRAP) tool over the past 5 years.

They do, though, go to the effort of covering up their non-performance (I hesitate to say “failure to perform;” that would suggest they’re trying).

And there’s this insulting bit of vapidity from the Under Secretary for Health in response to the IG’s report (the whole letter is at Appendix D of the report at the link. It doesn’t get any better).

We regret the inconvenience and potential hardship place on applicants for health care and we are working hard to restore Veterans’ confidence and trust in VA’s systems and staff. We have and will continue to take timely and appropriate steps to improve our services to ensure we meet the expectations of those whom we have the honor of serving.

Yeah, dying while on the VA’s who gives a patootie wait list is such a potentially inconvenient hardship.

Since the VA doesn’t care, we should honor their lack of interest. Disband the VA, and use the budget dollars that would have gone to the VA in any particular year as vouchers for our veterans which they can find, in that year, their own quality care and decent hospitals.

Undoing a Unilateral “Presidency”

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Lahnee Chen closed his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar title with this:

By revoking Mr Obama’s executive actions, and beginning the arduous task of identifying and addressing his many other unilateral moves, the next president wouldn’t have to jettison the entire Obama legacy.

But our next President should.

On the next president’s first day in office, the president could simply issue an executive order revoking all of his predecessor’s executive actions, except those necessary for national security or the basic functioning of government. This includes Mr Obama’s executive orders, but also a flood of presidential memorandums and directives, as well as informal guidance and orders from federal agencies, that he has used to reshape federal policy.

Not “except for.” Every single one. Don’t waste time sorting through the mess to find the occasional nugget that might be useful. Rescind every single one. The next President should issue his own few Executive Orders regarding those narrow areas of national security and the basic functioning of government. That last, especially, doesn’t need many, since government can, and should be, shrunk drastically by the next President and the next two (at least) Congresses.

In the name of actual transparency, this item, too. Those Presidential Memoranda don’t need to be, and so they’re not, published in the Federal Register, and so the public has very limited access to them. The next President, on day two, should publish those memoranda. Every single one of them.

Keep in mind this, too. It’s not only Obama’s legacy. It’s our nation’s legacy, it’s the legacy of us citizens, it’s your and my legacy. It needs to jettisoned in its entirety, every single syllable. For our national honor.

Who’s In Charge?

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…of our foreign policy—us, or foreign entities?

Here’s the latest, against the backdrop of Russian reestablishment of an archipelago of its Cold War military bases across the Arctic?

After invading Ukraine, Russia pulled out of the Arctic Council, a consortium of eight countries that includes the US.

In response, there’s this [emphasis added]:

Asked about Russia’s recent moves in the Arctic, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: “And so do we have concerns specifically about Russia? I would say…we have concerns about how militaries conduct themselves in the Arctic, but that’s for all of the Arctic Council members to discuss.“

Hmm….

Government Transparency

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President Obama favors government by executive order. How about this one: a Presidential directive requiring every appointee and bureaucrat to attest to the existence of any private email, texting or instant-messaging systems being used for government work. All off-the-reservation documentation must cease. Private email is for personal needs.

The chances of this happening are nil. Opacity has served the Obama Administration’s political purposes if not the country. A sunnier day will have to wait until 2017.

Here’s an action that doesn’t necessarily have to wait on an Executive Order (which, being only temporary, would be a suboptimal answer, anyway): call every Department and Agency head before the House Government Reform Committee and separately and sequentially before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to certify under oath to each that the Department or Agency he heads has no private email correspondence going out over government servers, no government emails going out over private servers, and that all government business is conducted over and only over government servers—three separate, if overlapping, sworn certifications, each made separately to the two committees. For any such head who does not make that sworn certification, cut his organization’s budget by 10%. Do it again at the start of the next budget cycle.

Don’t ask these heads, pretty please, to come on over; subpoena their patooties to testify on the first day of the week following the subpoena.

That’ll likely have to wait until 2017, too, though, to get any teeth.

Whose Phones Are They?

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Apple Inc’s move to make it easier to block ads on iPhones and iPads is troubling publishers and heightening tensions with its Silicon Valley neighbors.
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Putting such “ad blockers” within reach of hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users threatens to disrupt the $70 billion annual mobile-marketing business, where many publishers and tech firms hope to generate far more revenue from a growing mobile audience. If fewer users see ads, publishers—and other players such as ad networks—will reap less revenue.

Yeah, and? I sympathize with publishers and tech firms and…ad networks…over their loss of revenue from their ads not being viewed—about as much as I sympathize with other advertisers over the loss of revenue from their bulk snail mail brochures going unread directly from my mailbox to my trash can.

My house is my own, and advertisers have no authority, no right, to enter it to pitch their wares, or for any other reason at all, without my prior permission to come in. If I wanted to be a curmudgeon about it, I could—quite legally and morally—take steps to prevent them from entering my property at all to gain access to my doorbell. That I don’t is only because such a measure would interfere with the access to my door that my friends and those friends who are still strangers should have.

So it is with my cell phone. It’s my cell phone, not those advertisers’, and if I don’t want them to clutter up my phone with their digital brochures, then they have no choice but to comply with my wish that they not come knocking at all.

Here’s Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next:

The ad-blocking problem is real and growing, and ad-blocking on iOS is only going to accelerate it.

Problem for whom? Not for the property owners. We’re not your piggy bank.

I don’t often agree with Apple, but on this question I say a hearty well done.