So, let’s continue plodding through the latest antics from America’s under performing but overpaid politicians:
1) According to a November 20, 20912 Associated Press report, there have been five different generals in charge of executing our war effort in Afghanistan in just the past five years. Given the complexity of executing a war across a wide geographic area with no front lines and that the leader in that execution changes once a year on average, is it any wonder that our military situation in Afghanistan is such a mess and waste of blood and wealth?
The article quotes a number of experts who seem to agree that this quick turnover of high ranking leadership is crazy and stupid:
- Thomas E. Ricks, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security: "Rotating top commanders on an annual basis makes no management sense. Imagine trying to run a corporation by swapping the senior executives every year. Or imagine if, at the beginning of 1944, six months before D-Day, Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, told Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, that it was time to give someone else a chance to lead."
- Jawed Kohistani, military analyst in Kabul: "It gives an opportunity for the enemy to use this gap — the time between the leaving of one commander and the arrival of another — to their advantage. There should be enough time for a NATO commander to get to know the Afghan president, vice presidents, security ministers and assess the situation. If he doesn't have enough time to do all these things, it has a negative effect on the security situation."
- Anthony Cordesman, a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: "What the Afghans see is constant change at every level. They constantly see people come and go. They have no reason to establish lasting relationships. People leave at the point where they're becoming most effective. This constant rotation is a problem everybody recognizes, but no one has really been willing to address."
So experts agree that this is not the right way to run a war effort. And now the sixth general in five years is needed to take over this critical military post. Obviously, none these experts are politicians, whose lack of expertise and commons sense is wasting American lives and wealth in a fruitless, directionless war effort.
2) Another potential reason for the mess in Afghanistan, besides this annual turnover of military leadership in Afghanistan, was uncovered in a November 10, 2012 Associated Press article. As a tangent to the former CIA David Patraeus sex scandal, it has come to light that the most recent top military man in Afghanistan, General John Allen, is under investigation for possible “inappropriate communications” with a woman who is said to have received threatening emails from Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had an extramarital affair.
The investigation has so far identified somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 direct electronic communications between General Allen and this civilian connection. It is unknown what was in those communications and whether the communications were of a sexual nature or if military and national security could have been endangered by the communications.
But put that all aside for the time being and do some simple math. Let’s take the average between 20,000 and 30,000, 25,000 communications, which occurred over a two year period. On average, this comes out an astounding 34 communications a day for two years. Seems like the General was busier typing out emails than worrying where the Taliban might be lurking in the Afghanistan countryside.
We spend almost $700 billion a year for national defense and…we have 25,000 emails to show for it.
3) In a November 25, 2012 article in the Washington Times, an investigation by the Times and Northwestern University’s Medill News Service found still more disturbing wasteful spending by the Federal government, unnecessary spending in the times during record setting annual budget deficits and skyrocketing national debt:
- The government has spent more than $16 billion over the past decade on outside advertising, marketing and public relations contractors.
- Many of the contracts are awarded without open bidding and full competition, possibly leading to overpayment and abuse of taxpayer wealth.
- To add insult to injury, some of the spending and funding was awarded to foreign advertising and media experts, not even American owned and operated firms.
- To add further insult to injury, the Federal government refuses to disclose the names of those foreign companies who received media work and funding.
- These expenditures are above and beyond the millions of dollars a year that agencies already spend in their annual budgets on their regular press, communications and media operations, and it has gone to pay for projects as varied as NASCAR and sports sponsorships, recruitment efforts for the military services, veterans benefits, welfare aid, and programs that help multibillion-dollar multinational corporations pitch their products to overseas customers, the records show.
- The Veterans Affairs Department has spent $25 million on advertising since 2011 to encourage more retired troops to take advantage of its mental health services, enticing new customers into a system that is suffering historic backlogs and cannot properly serve the veterans it already tries to serve.
- The Labor Department spent a half-million dollars on a public relations firm to advertise the benefits of a clean-energy jobs retraining program, a program which the Washington Guardian reported in September significantly missed its goals and was deemed an overall failure.
4) During his recent visit to the Far East, President Obama announced that the Federal government will spend $6 billion over four years for a “sustainable energy future” plan with Asian countries. This plan involves loaning tax dollars to other countries to increase their purchasing power for U.S. technology, services and equipment. Haven’t we already lived through this financial nightmare before within our own borders, a nightmare that involved the Obama administration loaning out money or guaranteeing loans to domestic companies in the alternative energy/sustainable energy fields?
Didn’t the taxpayer lose out in this area when domestic companies such as Solyandra, Ener1, Abound Solar, and three or four other dozen companies got the same Obama administration generosity and promptly went bankrupt, taking American taxpayer wealth with them down the fiscal drain? Did we not learn anything from these fiascos and now we are giving similar loans and loan guarantees to foreign entities?
Einstein nailed it when he famously quoted: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Almost seems like Einstein had Obama’s funding of alternative energy efforts in mind, initially domestic and now foreign in mind.
5) I came across the following interesting graphic from the Against Cronyism Capitalism website (you can double click on the graphic to get a larger view):
I always thought it was insanity that no one in the banking industry ever went to trial or jail for the banking shenanigans that went on prior to the housing collapse and the subsequent Great Recession. This was particularly true of Goldman Sachs personnel, a company that a Senate investigation found was at the heart of some of the shady dealings in the run up to the recession.
But maybe it is not insanity, given this graphic. Seems like there is a very gray area that divides the boundaries between Goldman Sachs and high ranking Federal government positions. In other words, given how many former or current Goldman employees served in the Federal government, especially the Obama administration, it should not be a surprise that none of them went to jail for banking irregularities. Who would ever want to put themselves or their banking cronies in jail? Not insanity, just cronyism to the detriment of the American taxpayer.
5) According to the Office of Immigration Statistics, 188,380 criminal illegal immigrants were deported in fiscal 2011. Sounds like good news about our leaky southern borders, over 188,000 criminals found and deported. Good work.
Well, maybe not so good work. Our border security is so bad that the Office found that 86,699 of the deported criminals, or 46 percent, had illegally returned to the United States at a later date. Twenty three percent of the illegal alien criminals deported in 2011 had committed drug-related offenses, 20% had committed criminal traffic offenses, 12% had committed a violent crime, and another 7% committed larceny, fraud, or burglary.
The Center for Immigration Studies issued a report and analysis based on these statistics: The CIS also noted that once a deportee re-enters the country illegally: “In nearly all cases the (criminal) deportee will go undetected unless charged with another crime or if the deportee returns to his old neighborhood and is recognized by local law enforcement officials. Thus, the number of deportees who make an illegal re-entry is possibly much higher than indicated.
“The extent of our revolving door for deported criminal illegal immigrants points to failures in securing our nation’s borders. These failures do not bode well for our future ability to intercept known and unknown terrorists who try to gain access to our country.”
Thus, even when the Federal government does one part of its job well, rounding up and deporting alien criminals, almost half of them still return to torment American citizens in a variety of criminal ways, proving the point we have made many times in past posts, the notion of border security is a fantasy.
6) And a little Christmas holiday insanity to close out today's review. According to an article in the December 2, 2012 Investor Business Daily, the White House, i.e. Michelle Obama, is very excited that the White House will have 54 Christmas trees displayed within the building this year, 50% more than it had last year.
A couple of problems here:
- Does the First Family really need to have 54 trees to look at? Wouldn't the expense of purchasing, transporting, and decorating 54 trees have been better spent supporting a local food bank or homeless shelter during the holidays? With 23 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, a much better option for that taxpayer money would have been to use it to support America's needy this holiday season.
- I guess global warming isn't such a big deal after all if the First Family can unnecessarily cut down 54 live trees, taking them out of the business of reducing our carbon footprint.
And, unfortunately, we are still not done with chronicling the latest insanity from the political class. More tomorrow since the fountain of insanity seems to be overflowing.
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