Category Archives: morality

Embarrassingly Dysfunctional

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To coin a phrase, this is embarrassing, a Department like this.

Ignored claims, manipulated records, cost overruns and even one facility infested with insects and rodents are among the latest issues uncovered by a blistering VA Inspector General’s report. The auditor’s probe found that more than 31,000 inquiries placed by veterans to the Philadelphia Regional VA office call center went ignored for more than 312 days, even though they were supposed to be answered in five. Perhaps even worse, claim dates were manipulated to hide delays, $2.2 million in improper payments were made because of duplicate records, 22,000 pieces of returned mail went ignored, and some 16,600 documents involving patient records and dating back to 2011 were never scanned into the system.

This is a year after the Veterans Administration promised, to Congress and to us, that they were cleaning up their act.

Disband the Veterans Administration; it’s an affront to our veterans and an embarrassment to our nation. Use the VA budget for vouchers for vets. No more delay. Our vets can’t wait.

A Stay on Illegal Immigration

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Federal Judge Andrew Hanen has refused to stay his temporary injunction blocking President Barack Obama’s refusal to deport some 4 million illegal immigrants in Federal custody or whose whereabouts otherwise is known to the Feds. Hanen’s injunction will remain in force while Obama’s men appeal the stay to the 5th Circuit.

Refusing to stay his injunction has the effect, among others, of blocking Obama from pursuing (pending that appeal’s outcome) his Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program and his planned expansion of the 2012 program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

OF course, enforcing that block is problematic. Aside from the obvious reasons for suspicion, there’s this about that 2012 program from Hanen’s order and ruling:

The Court finds that the Government’s multiple statements on this subject were indeed misleading, as detailed in the Order filed simultaneously with this Order. It also finds that the remedial measure taken by counsel for the Government through the filing of an “advisory” on March 3, 2015, was neither prompt nor fully candid.

Since this administration, once again, has shown it cannot be trusted, there’s no reason to suppose Obama won’t move ahead apace with both programs.

Hanen wasn’t done, though. In a separate order, on the matter of that 2012 program and the President’s men lying about it, Hanen

also issued a separate ruling Tuesday night allowing the states to conduct discovery into their separate claim that the administration, beginning late last year, improperly implemented part of its immigration program, even though it had allegedly represented to Judge Hanen that it wouldn’t do so until February.

Assault on Conservatives

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…by the Obama administration is continuing in spades. This time, it’s a naked assault on a conservative Congressman, Jason Chaffetz (R, UT). The Secret Service “leaked” information concerning a decade old application for work with the SS submitted by Chaffetz and which was rejected by the SS. This sort of thing is confidential, which SS employees know full well.

Supposedly, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson personally called Chaffetz after the release of that confidential information, as did Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy.

However.

Chaffetz is Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and he’s

been relentless in his scrutiny of the [Secret Service], particularly in the wake of a March incident where agents returning from a party drove into an active bomb investigation scene. Chaffetz earlier this week subpoenaed the two agents in question—a step Johnson called “unprecedented and unnecessary.”

He’s also been an ardent critic of Obama administration policies all across the board.

Now, it’s certainly true that, in the larger scheme of things, this is a relatively minor matter. But regarding that larger scheme of things, this is a part of that larger scheme.

In light of that, what’s the value of these…apologies?

How do they make Chaffetz, the victim of this assault on privacy, whole?

How do they give any material assurance that this miscreancy won’t be repeated?

What’s really needed is a wholesale replacement of management (I won’t say leadership) of DHS and of the Secret Service.

Remember this in the fall of 2016.

Integrity, Take Two

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The House Oversight Committee issued the subpoenas to two agents who are familiar with the March 4 episode, which occurred as authorities were investigating a possible bomb threat while President Obama was in the residence. During the investigation, two agents, who were reportedly drinking that night, nearly drove over the object in question, which turned out to be a book.

One of the subpoenaed agents was on the ground at the White House that night, sources said.

The subpoenas became necessary when Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy refused to allow them to testify voluntarily.

Naturally, Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security Secretary, and whose department owns the Secret Service, is objecting.

Director Clancy and I must fight to protect [the agents] against the visibility, public glare, and inevitable second-guessing, of a congressional hearing.

Sure. Because everything Johnson, Clancy, and the Homeland Security generally do is entirely above board, while Congress cannot be trusted. Neither can the American people be trusted. Far more importantly, the Secret Service must never be questioned, must never be second-guessed.

Johnson went on:

I, too, want to know what happened on the night of March 4. This is why the Department’s Inspector General is conducting a thorough investigation into the matter.

Of course, we can’t know there’s an internal investigation. Johnson and Clancy are zealously keeping whatever it is they’re doing—or not doing—secret. Even from our elected representatives.

Projecting

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The Texas House last Wednesday passed its version of the State’s spending budget. In the course of that, there was debate over Congressman Stuart Spitzer’s (R, Kaufman) amendment to reallocate $3 million from Texas’ HIV and STD prevention programs to its abstinence sex education programs. That amendment debate included this…foolishness:

Congressman Harold Dutton, Jr (D, Houston), asked Spitzer—a surgeon—whether abstinence had worked for him personally.

“It did,” Spitzer replied. “I’ve had sex with one woman in my life, and that’s my wife.”

Not content with his embarrassment (or simply unable to recognize it), Dutton pressed the matter.

Is that the first woman you asked?

Even at the State level, Democrats shamelessly assume their own shortcomings are held by everyone else, too. Psychologists call that (absent the qualifier) projecting. I add the qualifier because I don’t assume these highly educated and intelligent Democratic Party men and women really are that stupid or insensitive.