SO THIS WASN’T JUST A SPONTANEOUS REACTION BY LOW-LEVEL EMPLOYEES, BUT “A DELIBERATE STRATEGY USED BY VA SENIOR MANAGEMENT:” Video: VA whistleblower claims supervisors forced her to keep secret wait list.
Archive for 2014
June 26, 2014
BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE CAN BE TRUSTED TO BLOCK INVESTIGATIONS AND HARASS ENEMIES WITH SUCH LOYALTY: Washington asks, “Why The Hell Is Eric Holder Still Around?”
FLASHBACK: Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven: U.S. Government Should Increase Firing Rate. “The dearth of federal firing is consistent with the general lack of incentives for good performance in the bureaucracy. Official surveys find that most federal workers do not believe that the best-qualified people are the ones receiving promotions. . . . The low federal firing rate reflects both agency cultures that are undemanding and the difficulty of terminating bad workers. The low federal firing rate reflects both agency cultures that are undemanding and the difficulty of terminating bad workers.”
That was in 2002. Since then, it’s only gotten worse.
EXPECT TO SEE MORE OF THIS: Anti-IRS group uses Democrats’ defenses in new ad.
ED DRISCOLL: The Palace Guard Media Drops The Mask.
CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: Title lX: How a Good Law Went Terribly Wrong; The landmark legislation was supposed to bring equality, instead it devastated mens’ sports on campus. If it went so terribly wrong, maybe it wasn’t such a good law.
ROGER SIMON: IRS: Shame and Loathing on the Media Trail.
A number of smart people, among them Peter Wehner, Mark Halperin and John Hinderaker, have been pointing out the unfortunately predictable silence of the mainstream media regarding the IRS scandal — not to mention the myriad other Obama scandals that we will soon be counting on three, or is it four, hands.
The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times made no mention of the congressional hearings on the missing Lois Lerner emails and putative computer crash; the networks were a virtual silence of the not-so-lambs. (Remember how they obsessed on the Christie/GW Bridge contretemps as if it were the beginning of nuclear war?)
On his Wednesday Talking Points Memo, Bill O’Reilly went so far as to say the media silence, censorship, whatever you want to call it was subverting democracy. That’s an understatement. It was trampling on it.
The conventional explanation for this willful blindness cited by the above mentioned gentlemen is that the media is in the tank for the Democratic Party and, by extension, for Obama. Well, sure. But it is far more than that. Political parties and politicians come and go. The media doesn’t. They may be in the tank for Obama, but much more than that they are in the tank for themselves — a whole lifestyle and world view that has been going on for decades, moral narcissism distilled to its purest essence.
The New Class protects its own.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Is A Picture Worth 1,000 Polls?
President Barack Obama’s poll numbers have been terrible lately, hitting a low of 41 percent approval in the most recent Gallup and Wall Street Journal-NBC polls. That’s hardly surprising, given the state of his foreign policy. But there’s hope.
Whoever selected the photos for Monday’s big New York Times story on the “achingly ephemeral” end of U.S. involvement in Iraq may have done the president a big favor. Presumably intended as irony, the images of Obama from December 2011, including one of him amid an enthusiastic crowd of soldiers, all make him look good. Although undercut by a more up-to-date photo of a downcast president, the upbeat images also outnumber it three-to-one.
U.S. media use images to manipulate opinion. Kind of like they use words.
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Poland’s Top Diplomat ‘Calls US Alliance Worthless.’
Related: Obama Administration Foreign Policy: We’d Laugh if Lives Weren’t at Stake.
NICK GILLESPIE ON HOW the VA Scandal is the face of government as it actually exists.
SO, PRETTY MUCH LIKE HERE THEN ONLY EVEN WORSE: What Keeps Young Europeans Out of Jobs? Stupid Rules.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What The $1+ Trillion Student Debt Bubble Is Being Spent On.
Gosh, who could have seen this coming?
JOEL KOTKIN: European Style Going Out Of Style At The Ballot Box.
The bigger loser in the May elections was the notion that more concentration of power leads to better results. Many American intellectuals and policy wonks favor handing ever-greater control to the “best and brightest” who run academia, much of the media and the bureaucracy. Figures, such as former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, argue that power should shift from naturally contentious elected bodies – subject to pressure from the lower orders – to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations. This notion suggests the popular will is too lacking in scientific judgment and societal wisdom to be trusted with real authority.
Yet, as the EU parliamentary elections suggest, people object to having details of their lives controlled from a great distance. Beyond the Right, many on the Left also nowoppose the Brussels-based EU for imposing austerity measures on several struggling economies. The British website Socialist Alternative saw the vote not just as a shift to the right but “a revolt against the capitalist establishment,” which remains, like the bureaucracy and media, devotedly pro-EU.
The EU bureaucracy — like the federal bureaucracy here in the United States — is basically a New Class entitlement project. Which is why New Class institutions like the press support it.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Populist Uprising Against Common Core Is Libertarian and It’s Winning.
METAPHOR ALERT: Democrat Kills Driverless Car Because She Just Couldn’t Resist Pushing a Big Button. “It killed the car. Of course it’s a Government Motors car. Why did you ask?”
OF COURSE IT DID: VA nurse alleges agency turned on her after she reported abuses.
It’s not like they care about the patients.
June 25, 2014
MORE OBAMA-ATE-A-DOG FUN from Jim Treacher.
EVOLUTION IN ACTION: “Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners. We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country, and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy.”
THE SUPREME COURT’S CELLPHONE PRIVACY DECISION IN PLAIN ENGLISH.
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Emails reveal IRS official Lois Lerner sought audit of GOP senator Charles Grassley. As I’ve said, the emails that they didn’t destroy are bad enough that the emails that they did destroy must be truly awful.