U.S. Government Incompetence, Negligence, Cover-Ups, Abuse of Power

[From article]

America continues its devolution into a feudal society, with an overclass that lives by very different rules from those of the ordinary people, who labor mightily to pay the taxes that sustain the overclass in an existence untroubled by the concerns that preoccupy the serfs.
Getting fired for incompetence is far less of a worry than dying at your desk from a heart attack if you are a government bureaucrat. So is having your misbehavior exposed to the serfs. A pair of stories from the Daily Caller News Foundation illustrate the immunity from public accountability that shelters our masters.
Ethan Barton documents the effort made to prevent disclosure of the federal bureaucrat who caused the Gold King Mine disaster that polluted the Animus River and caused millions of dollars in damage.



Environmental Protection Agency worker Hays Griswold was in charge at the Gold King Mine in August 2015 when a three-million gallon flood of dangerous mine waste — including 880,000 pounds of toxic elements like lead and arsenic — poured into Colorado’s Animus River, turning it yellow for nearly a week and poisoning the drinking water source for residents of three states and the Navajo Nation.



But somebody contrived to remove critical details, including Griswold’s name, from an “independent” review of the disaster, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Officials at the Department of the Interior – and perhaps EPA – had access to the draft.
Of course, nobody in the federal bureaucracy has suffered any consequences.
[N]o one has been punished for the disaster, which likely will ultimately cost state and federal taxpayers millions of dollars. The disaster also negatively affected the area’s farming and tourism industries and may even be linked to suicides.
In a second instance of protecting its own, the same Ethan Barton reports:
A U.S. attorney sexually harassed an ex-lover and former subordinate, then tried hiding the deed from federal investigators, a government watchdog reported Tuesday.



The unnamed U.S. attorney resigned during the investigation and was not prosecuted, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) reported. The lovers’ genders weren’t identified.
The public is like mushrooms as far as the feds are concerned. We’re kept in the dark and covered in dung.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/06/feds_shield_misbehaving_bureaucrats_from_public_exposure_for_their_misdeeds.html

June 9, 2016
Feds shield misbehaving bureaucrats from public exposure for their misdeeds
By Thomas Lifson

Federal Policeman Held In Three DC Area Shootings

Eulalio Tordil
Photo: EPA

[From article]

Authorities say a suspect in three fatal shootings in the Washington, DC, area has been taken into custody.
Police announced at a news conference Friday that 62-year-old Eulalio Tordil had been taken into custody without incident. Tordil is an employee of the Federal Protective Service, which provides security at federal properties. He was put on administrative duties in March after a protective order was issued against him.
The first shooting occurred Thursday at a high school. The second occurred in a mall parking lot Friday morning and the third happened about 30 minutes later at a nearby shopping center.
Documents show Gladys Tordil previously told authorities that Eulalio threatened to harm her if she left him. According to a protective order obtained by the Washington Post, she said he once slapped her so hard that her glasses broke on her face.

http://nypost.com/2016/05/06/three-injured-in-shooting-outside-mall-in-dc-suburb/

Federal cop arrested in three DC-area shootings
By Associated Press
New York Post
May 6, 2016 | 12:24pm | Updated

Harvard University Studies Sexual Behavior of Students For Federal Government

After studying campus sexual practices, will the federal government issue guidelines for proper behavior? The city of Cambridge appropriates taxpayer funds to rear children just as predicted by George Orwell. Government will control all behavior especially mating and rearing children. Will that end all freedom to be bad and to have fun? Will everyone strive to be conformist and obedient?



http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/2/26/gsas-departments-sexual-harassment/

Departments Instruct Graduate Students On Sexual Harassment
By MELISSA C. RODMAN and LUCA F. SCHROEDER

Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
February 26, 2016

US Government Publishes Website Explaining to Black Men How To Rear Their Children

This is one practice predicted by George Orwell that the government would raise children not parents. The destruction of marriage is well on its way and the government is getting ready take over rearing children.

[From article]
If you're a black father reading this, have you ever wondered whether you should spend time with your kids? The federal government thinks this question stumps a lot of you, so it has set up a website called Fatherhood.gov to give you some clues to the answer. The site doesn't explicitly say "black," but most of the photos and literature for it feature black dads.
[. . .]
4) Another web page mentions something called the "National Park Service." Apparently this organization has parks all over America! A black father could find a park and take his child to one of them! (Though hopefully not a national park like Mount Rainier, where black people don't feel welcome!)
5) The website also suggests that black dads take their kids to something called "public libraries," which apparently have a lot of books – all of which are free! There is even a link that shows black fathers how to search for these "public libraries" in their neighborhoods.
6) There is an online form where black dads are invited to take a pledge to take care of their black children. Once they fill out the form, they are pledged to take care of their kids!
7) There is even a link to a National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse Hotline, where black dads can call the government to find out how to be responsible dads. Just try not to abuse your kids while you are waiting on hold!
[. . .]
Questions for discussion:
[. . .]



3) How do mothers know to care for their kids if there is no website instructing them?
[. . .]
6) If anyone else but the federal government produced such a patronizing website for black people, how many seconds would it take for him to be labeled as racist?
7) Which is worse: the epidemic of single parenting in the black community or the federal government thinking it can be fixed by giving irresponsible black dads a website to teach them how to feel affection for their kids?
[. . .]
Thomas Lifson adds:
The sad truth is that this campaign is probably necessary. We can’t openly discuss the problems with contemporary black culture without being called racists. So the federal government ends up patronizing black males.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/fatherhoodgov_teaches_black_fathers_to_care_for_their_kids.html

December 28, 2015
Fatherhood.gov teaches black fathers to care for their kids
By Ed Straker

VA Employees Padded Their Salaries Wasting Taxpayer Funds

[From article]
Deputy Inspector General Linda Halliday reported in September that two senior executives gamed VA’s moving-expense system for $400,000 in what she described as questionable reimbursements, with taxpayers paying $300,000 for one of them to relocate 140 miles, from the District to Philadelphia.
Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves “inappropriately used their positions of authority for personal and financial benefit when they participated personally and substantially in creating opportunities for their own transfers to positions they were interested in filling,” investigators found.
[. . .]

 

Rubens and Graves kept their salaries of $181,497 and $173,949, respectively, even though the new positions they took as directors of the Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minnesota, regional offices had less responsibility, overseeing a fraction of the employees at lower pay levels. Rubens had been deputy undersecretary for field operations.

 

Between salary increases and relocation expenses, the Veterans Benefits Administration, where they worked, spent $1.8 million to reassign 23 senior executives from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2015, investigators found. In all but two cases, the new jobs came with pay raises, despite a White House-imposed freeze on senior executives' pay — and a widely publicized ban on bonuses stemming from a backlog of outstanding claims for disability benefits.

http://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/lawmakers-probe-shockingly-unethical-misuse-of-funds-by-2-va-execs-1.373538

Lawmakers probe 'shockingly unethical misuse of funds' by 2 VA execs
By Lisa Rein
The Washington Post
Published: October 15, 2015

Seventy-five Percent of US Adults Think US Government Is Corrupt, Gallup

Scandanavian Countries report 30 percent or less think their governments are corrupt. See complete list in article.

[From article]
Three in four Americans (75%) last year perceived corruption as widespread in the country's government. This figure is up from two in three in 2007 (67%) and 2009 (66%).
While the numbers have fluctuated slightly since 2007, the trend has been largely stable since 2010. However, the percentage of U.S. adults who see corruption as pervasive has never been less than a majority in the past decade, which has had no shortage of controversies from the U.S. Justice Department's firings of U.S. attorneys to the IRS scandal.
These figures are higher than some might expect, and while the lack of improvement is somewhat disconcerting, the positive takeaway is that Americans still feel fairly free to criticize their government. This is not the case in some parts of the world. Questions about corruption are so sensitive in some countries that even if Gallup is allowed to ask them, the results may reflect residents' reluctance to disparage their government. This is particularly true in countries where media freedom is restricted.


http://www.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-corruption.aspx

SEPTEMBER 19, 2015
75% in U.S. See Widespread Government Corruption

US Government Is Larger Than Anyone Knows, Or Cares

[From article]
Background: In most of my classes I will either show the picture nearby of federal agency acronyms (remember that none of these are cabinet departments spelled out in the Constitution), or start writing them one-by-one on the blackboard while rattling off their name and purpose. If I show the slide I’ll see how many agencies students can identify from their acronym (usually not very many, and I’ve forgotten some of these myself), but if I recite them seriatim,after a few minutes students get the point: the government is massive, and largely beyond the direct—or even indirect—control of voters. (Recall Obama saying that he couldn’t control the “independent” National Labor Relations Board when it tried to stop Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina. No reporter thought to follow up: “Mr. President, just who does control the NLRB if it’s not you?”)
[. . .]



Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports:
Digging through other counts offered by federal officials, he found an online Federal Register Index of 257.



United States Government Manual lists 316.
Then there was a 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing during which a senator listed over 430 departments, agencies and sub-agencies.
“As bureaucracy sprawls, nobody can say with complete authority exactly how many federal agencies exist,” blogged Crews on the CEI site.



http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/just-how-big-is-the-government.php

POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2015

BY STEVEN HAYWARD
JUST HOW BIG IS THE GOVERNMENT?
The answer is . . . no one really knows. At least the government can’t tell you.

Bud The Cowboy

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new 2015 BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked thecowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Bud looks at the man, who obviously is a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Apple i phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop® and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany ...

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Apple iPad® that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL® database through an ODBC connected Excel® spreadsheet with email on his Galaxy S5® and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet® printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," saysBud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S.Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered thecowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know S--- about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep.”

“Now give me back my dog.”

Unconstitutional Supreme Court Activism, New Book

Book Review:
The Constitution: An Introduction 

by Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen

Basic Books 2015

[From review]

The Paulsens are at their best when critiquing the modern era of judicial activism. In their telling, the Warren Court (1953–69) produced “careless” decisions, because the justices were focused on achieving policy goals rather than upholding the law. The nadir of this results-oriented jurisprudence was, as the authors correctly point out, the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which invented a federal right to abortion on demand. The authors assail Roe as “the most extreme example of judicial activism in the twentieth century.” They even compare the decision—unfavorably—to Dred Scott, the notorious pro-slavery decision that helped provoke the Civil War. “Not even Dred Scott,” they argue, “so completely seemed to disregard the text as Roe did.”
Rather than citing the Constitution’s actual language, the Roe Court relied on the doctrine of “substantive due process,” the idea that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment empowers judges to strike down laws that they consider flawed, even if not strictly unconstitutional. That doctrine had been strongly endorsed by the Court eight years earlier inGriswold v. Connecticut, in which Justice William O. Douglas famously discovered a constitutional right to privacy hidden in “penumbras, formed by emanations” of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments.
[. . .] 

The authors take aim at many other sacred cows of progressive jurisprudence. The famous police warnings mandated by Miranda v.Arizona (1966) reflected the Court’s “policy judgment” and not the text of the Fifth Amendment. The Court’s rejection of school prayer in Engel v.Vitale (1962) was based on a notion of the separation of church and state that is “found nowhere in the Constitution.” The Court’s 2013 decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act was “cryptic and meandering in its reasoning.” Lawrence v. Texas (2003)—which struck down state anti-sodomy laws—is portrayed as an abrupt reversal of an earlier precedent (Bowers v. Hardwick) driven by certain justices’ desire to legislate from the bench. On affirmative action, the authors take a hard line: the plain meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “renders nearly all forms of state affirmative action programs illegal”—notwithstanding the Court’s continued tolerance of certain forms of affirmative action.
[. . .]
The Constitution is a structural document—its purpose is to create a central government and simultaneously to limit that government’s scope. The document’s framers cared deeply about rights, but they believed that the best way to protect Americans’ rights was to limit the power of the federal government. The right to local self-government—ultimately enshrined in the Tenth Amendment—was the right that would safeguard all others.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0616af.html

ADAM FREEDMAN
Against Judicial Activism
Defending the Constitution from those who would rewrite it
June 16, 2015

Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers Revisited

Alger Hiss (1950)


Whittaker Chambers

[From article]
Communism was in its ascendancy at the time, and Chambers ascended with it. As a writer and true believer, he sufficiently impressed his superiors that they asked him to go underground in Washington D.C. and organize a high level ring of federal bureaucrats working on behalf of the Soviet Union.
Prominent among those bureaucrats was Hiss. A Harvard Law graduate, Hiss would rise through the ranks to become a special assistant in the State Department, an adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, and one of the principal architects of the United Nations. After World War II, he was named president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
[. . .]
Chambers had chosen to change sides in the great ideological conflict of his age and of ours, a conflict he described as “Almighty Man vs Almighty God.” Stalin’s lethal, large-scale purges in the late 1930s helped open Chambers’ eyes.
Upon rejecting the “left’s vision of Man without God,” Chambers came to see Christianity as the one force powerful enough to resist communism.
[. . .]
Chambers felt obliged to let the Roosevelt administration know how thoroughly its ranks had been infested with high-level Soviet agents. He met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle and shared his information. Berle’s efforts to alert his superiors went nowhere, and Chambers retreated into anonymity for the next nine years.
In 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) came calling. Now settled in as senior editor of Time magazine, Chambers had little desire to expose his own past or to testify against his friend, but his conscience obliged him to do so. Hiss made the ordeal much harder by denying he ever knew Chambers. The media believed Hiss, and President Harry Truman promptly dismissed the case as a “red herring”
Indeed, so well esteemed was Hiss by the media and the liberal establishment that HCUA would have dropped the case altogether had not freshman Congressman Richard Nixon convinced his colleagues that Hiss was lying. For this breach of political etiquette, Nixon would not be forgiven.
[. . .]
Hiss would eventually be convicted of perjury -- the statute of limitations having expired on espionage -- and would serve nearly four years in a federal prison.
[. . .]
It was, not invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.
I came across this paragraph days after the media unloaded on Giuliani for daring to say the obvious about the Harvard Law grad in the White House, namely that he does not love America, at least under any useful definition of the word “love.” When Giuliani followed up, saying, “From the time he was nine years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” he was introducing evidence to people who had long since snapped their minds shut about Obama. Most, even in the media, had likely never even heard of Davis.
[. . .]
As to why our progressive betters respond as they do to the truth tellers in their midst, Chambers nailed that as well:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/03/what_whittaker_chambers_tells_us_about_the_age_of_obama.html

March 2, 2015
What Whittaker Chambers Tells Us about the Age of Obama
By Jack Cashill

US Government Will Auction Bitcoins; NYC Fireman Robbed Of His Bitcoins

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

[From article]

Bitcoin, the technology that’s meant to revolutionize the way we think of money, is simultaneously revolutionizing the way we get mugged.

A New York City firefighter named Dwayne Richards was recently held up, stabbed and robbed by thieves who were after his bitcoin, the Observer has learned. From what we’ve discovered, Mr. Richards, who is a firefighter in lower Manhattan, was mugged and left bleeding after meeting the robbers under the pretense of exchanging bitcoin for cash in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’s alive, well, and refusing comment.

Dwayne Richards, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
(Photo: Getty)

But robbing someone of his bitcoin in person can be an astonishingly effective way to make off with vast sums of capital quickly and untraceably. And Mr. Richards is far from the first to fall victim to bitcoin-related brutality.Typically, when we hear of bitcoin-related crimes, it’s a white-collar affair—millions of dollars going missing from an overseas exchange, or a plucky enthusiast finding himself in an international money-laundering scheme.

http://observer.com/2015/02/bitcoin-crime-wave-breaks-out-in-nyc/

Bitcoin Crime Wave Breaks Out in NYC
NYC firefighter kidnapped, robbed and stabbed by crypto thieves
By Jack Smith IV

02/20/15 9:54am
* * *


Bitcoin is growing in popularity as a way of quickly and safely moving money. But that also makes the job of a thief much more lucrative and efficient. 

(Photo: Getty)
[From article]
The U.S. government on Wednesday said it plans to auction 50,000 bitcoins on March 5, following the recent criminal conviction of Ross Ulbricht for being the mastermind behind the online black market known as Silk Road.
The auction being conducted by the U.S. Marshals Service is the third for bitcoins seized in connection with Silk Road, which prosecutors said let customers buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods beneath the radar of law enforcement.
A federal jury in Manhattan on Feb. 4 found Ulbricht guilty of narcotics and other charges for helping to enable about $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using bitcoins.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht, 30, had run Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts” before the website was shut down in October 2013.

http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/us-will-auction-nearly-12m-in-bitcoins-from-silk-road/

US will auction nearly $12M in bitcoins seized from Silk Road
By Reuters
New York Post
February 18, 2015 | 4:20pm

Sharyl Attkisson Reveals Federal Government Uses Taxpayer Funds To Produce Sophisticated Propaganda

[From article]
Attkisson said the federal government has adopted many public affairs strategies used by large corporations, except the government is using public funds to “advance its propaganda.”
“One way they do it is by self-producing videos and building their very own television production facilities where the upper echelon give interviews and speeches, controlling everything from content to lighting,” she said.

According to Attkisson, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) use millions of taxpayer dollars to expand or create their own television studios. Attkisson said the FDA has a studio that can fit a live audience of 100 people and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a studio with Hitachi high-definition cameras and LCD-based teleprompters.
“When top officials from those federal agencies appear on camera, naturally they have to look good. So your tax dollars may kick in for the cost of their hairstylists, makeup artists and wardrobe consultants,” she said. “One insider told me that the head of a federal agency even had her fashion colors analyzed at taxpayer expense.”

[. . .]

A few years ago, a well-placed insider at the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Attkisson he was surprised to learn there were more than 1,200 “media relations employees” on staff.

[. . .]

“There’s delay, denial, obstruction, intimidation, retaliation, bullying, surveillance and for some, the possible threat of criminal prosecution. In my view and that of other national reporters, this is proving to be the least transparent administration we’ve covered,” she said. “It’s so bad that practically every major news outlet including the CBS News,Washington Post and the New York Times signed a scathing letter to the White House in 2013 objecting to restrictions on the press that are unprecedented, that we have not dealt with before.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/attkisson-white-house-using-tax-dollars-for-studio-grade-pure-propaganda/

Attkisson: White House Using Tax Dollars for Studio-Grade ‘Pure Propaganda’
"Your tax dollars may kick in for the cost of their hairstylists, makeup artists and wardrobe consultants."
February 2, 2015 - 1:53 pm
by NICHOLAS BALLASY

Published on Jan 30, 2015

Former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson said the Obama administration is generating its own video content to control messaging with taxpayer-funded staff, including hairstylists, makeup artists and wardrobe consultants.

Americans Distrust Federal Government, Ready For Revolution?

[From article]
Americans view the federal government as dreadful.
Americans are more dissatisfied with federal government services than at any time since this survey began. The survey also found that in three of the four aspects of service – “process,” “information,” and “customer services” – satisfaction with the federal government was at the lowest level ever.[. . .]
There are two levels of “government” service tested, “federal government” and “local and federal government,” and “federal” is viewed as worse than “state and local” government services. Even when the federal government is broken down by agency – Defense, Agriculture, Treasury, etc. – not a single federal agency is as high as the aggregate average for private and public institutions.
[. . .]
Gallup showed that trust in the executive branch was not at the lowest level ever (that nadir was reached when Nixon resigned forty years ago), but this confidence was still near its lowest. Trust in the legislative branch is at the lowest level ever as well, as is trust in the judicial branch.
This is a problem of trust not in government generally, but in the federal government specifically.[. . .]
People correctly see the federal government, which lives in the Never-Never Land of Washington, as about as close to America generally as London was to the colonies in 1775.
There are seeds of a peaceful and constitutional revolution.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/americans_and_washington.html

February 3, 2015
Americans and Washington
By Bruce Walker

Federal Debt Up By 8 Trillion Under Obama

[From article]
The federal government drove $789,473,350,613.20 deeper into debt in calendar year 2014, an increase that equaled $6,875 per household, $7,458 per full-time year-round worker, and $8,853 per full-time year-round private-sector worker.
[. . .]
When Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08. Since then, it has increased $7,514,567,086,650.22--which is $65,443 per household, $70,985 per full-time worker and $84,266 per full-time private-sector worker.
[. . .]
Ten years ago, at the end of 2004, the federal debt was $7,596,142,802,424.14. Since then, it has grown by $10,545,301,333,139.16—an average pace of $1,054,530,133,313.92 per year.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/under-obama-federal-debt-84266-full-time-private-sector-worker

Under Obama: Federal Debt Up $84,266 Per Full-Time Private-Sector Worker
January 5, 2015 - 11:41 AM
By Terence P. Jeffrey

US Agencies Waste Millions Without Accountability

[From article]
The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.
The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public.
[. . .]
A “micropurchase” is a purchase costing less than $3,000 in which a government-issued purchase card is swiped. The U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Defense, each made tens of millions of dollars of “micropurchases” in the past year,
[. . .]
        These agencies refused to provide details
        U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
        EPA
        Department of Transportation:
        U.S. State Department
        Health and Human Services
        Department of Homeland Security

http://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/Federal-Government-Made-20-Billion-in-Secret-Purchases-in-Recent-Months-280997562.html

Federal Government Made $20 Billion in Secret Purchases in Recent Months
I-Team review finds $30,000 in one agency’s Starbucks purchases kept confidential from public
By Scott MacFarlane
October 30, 2014

Fighting Ebola

FEMA Seeks Repayment of Benefits From NY-NJ Hurricane Victims

[From article]
FEMA isn’t the only government agency trying to recover Sandy-related funding.
Last spring, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development urged officials in New Jersey and New York to step up their scrutiny of hundreds of millions of dollars in other federal rebuilding grants.
New Jersey’s Department of Consumer Affairs says it has asked 51 homeowners to return a combined $940,000 — a number that probably will rise as the state looks at more cases.

http://nypost.com/2014/09/11/fema-demands-sandy-victims-repay-5-8m-in-aid/

FEMA demands Sandy victims repay $5.8M in aid
By Associated Press
New York Post
September 11, 2014 | 1:47pm

Government Assistance To Black People Is Not Helping

[From article]
Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a man from one of the colonies addressed a London audience.
"Please do not do any more good in my country," he said. "We have suffered too much already from all the good that you have done."
That is essentially the message of an outstanding new book by Jason Riley about blacks in America. Its title is "Please Stop Helping Us."
[. . .]
When it comes to affirmative action, Jason Riley asks the key question: "Do racial preferences work? What is the track record?" Like many other well-meaning and nice-sounding policies, affirmative action cannot survive factual scrutiny.
[. . .]
in response to claims that blacks don't do well academically because the schools use an approach geared to white students, he points out that blacks from foreign, non-English-speaking countries do better in American schools than black, English-speaking American students.
[. . .]
Asian students do better than whites in schools supposedly geared to whites. In New York City's three academically elite public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — there are more than twice as many Asian students as white students in all three institutions.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell070814.php3#.U93eDt0--yN

Jewish World Review
July 8, 2014 / 10 Tammuz, 5774
A Primer on Race
By Thomas Sowell

Changing Patterns Of Governance

[From article]
From the tribal leader comes the monarch, whose reign gives way to an aristocracy that produces a middle class that creates a republic, the degenerative form of which is that pure democracy of which John Adams wrote:
"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide." Then comes the strong man again.
[. . .]
Eurocrats bewail what is happening, but, inhibited by secularist ideology, fail to understand it.
They believe in economism, rule by scholarly global elites, and recoil at the resurgence of nationalism and populism. They do no understand people of the heart because they do not understand human nature.
People don't enlist, endure, fight and die for cerebral constructs.
[. . .]
Last week, Alabama Congressman "Mo" Brooks said there is a "war on whites" in America, being led by Obama, noting that under civil right laws the only group one may discriminate against is white males.
[. . .]

Dana Milbank concedes that, by 2043, white Americans will be less than half of the U.S. population. They were near 90 percent in 1960.

http://buchanan.org/blog/owns-future-6850

Who Owns the Future?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Government Incapable Of Providing Good Health Care

[From article]
A more dysfunctional “pot of partners” would be hard to find. According to the Talmud’s wisdom, if eight different authorities are simultaneously in charge of Medicare, it means that nobody is in charge! Hence, it is all but guaranteed that Medicare (or any other similarly managed entity) will be riddled with inefficiency, mismanagement, and fraud.
[. . .]
Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman wrote that between 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid were introduced, and 1989, the cost per patient day at a U.S. hospital increased eightfold.
[. . .]
The fact however remains that the 2013 bill for Medicare was 4,100% more than the government once said Medicare would eventually cost in 1990.
[. . .]
For the VA to function acceptably, its functions mustbe turned over to private sector healthcare providers.
ObamaCare promises to become the biggest bureaucracy of them all. Consequently, unless repealed, it will utterly devastate U.S. healthcare – far more so than Medicare, Medicaid, or anything else.

http://americanthinker.com/2014/06/the_same_fatal_flaw.html

June 11, 2014
The Same Fatal Flaw
By DB Ganz