That GSA clown conference, it was…whatelse…Bush’s fault
I’m sure everyone has heard about the $1 million GSA conference in Las Vegas that taxpayers paid exorbitant prices to keep the government class entertained. Even NPR thought it was over the top, but probably only because it happened in an election year and endangered their incumbent friends. The Washington Post reports that Martha N. Johnson, the administrator of GSA has resigned;
Administrator Martha N. Johnson, in her resignation letter, acknowledged a “significant misstep” at the agency that manages real estate for the federal government. “Taxpayer dollars were squandered,” she wrote. At the start of her tenure in February 2010 she called ethics “a big issue for me.”
Apparently, ethics ended up being a bigger issue than she expected. We’re still waiting for someone to resign at the Justice Department, by the way, for their little conference.
Anyway, I just saw some GSA spokespuppet on Fox News explain how this behavior was a holdover from the Bush Administration. Excuse me, but Bush has been out of office for more than three years, and I don’t remember any videos during the Bush Administration that mocked the American taxpayers like the one that was on YouTube last week.
Even Dick Durbin has his hackles up, according to Fox News;
“It’s an absolutely outrageous expenditure of taxpayers’ money,” Durbin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That kind of misuse of taxpayers’ funds is totally unacceptable.”
But, probably because it makes Democrats look so bad in the current debate on how to balance the budget on the backs of veterans.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Congress sucks
Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ. At what point is this administration going to fix problems instead of trying to fix blame?
And really, Congress bitching about wasted funds, after the links I posted in the Panetta thread yesterday? Stop. Hurt. Sides. Laughing. If it didn’t piss me off so badly.
Meanwhile, I run a program for the government (yeah, I’m a federal employee) that actually avoids $130m in expenditures a year while allowing us to still train to standard. But I’ve been audited five times for it.
Assholes like these do NOT help those of us who work hard and do a good job.
3 and a half years and Obama is still trying to pass his failures off on Bush? The only thing more WTf then that are the people that buy into it.
What the current administration is trying to do is point to the large increase budgeted for this function under Bush–and it was rather significant–by jacking it up that much more, then like a child that just got caught, claiming, “But HE did it too!!!”
Again, if this administration had any semblance of adult leadership in it, this 1–wouldn’t have happened, 2–they’d have taken their lumps and moved on, 3–not pointed fingers.
I swear, I haven’t been do DC lately, but is there a brain-removal device on the edge of the Beltway?
I’d like to be more spun up over this, but this is business as usual in DC…just as blaming the last Adminsitration is.
VI, I know exactly what you mean! I’m a municipal employee who got so fed up with getting bashed by council members, the public, newspapers, etc., that I’ve taken a leave of absence.
Solid Waste Field Services (Sanitation) is the largest division in the largest department in the city of Phoenix yet we are the most efficient, relatively speaking, of every division in the city! Yet we have someone with their nose up our but, what seems like 24/7 seeing if they can find where we might have miss spent $.13. SWFS has. 98.3% customer satisfaction rating 2 nd only to the fire department and who doesn’t like the boys in blue who hand out Teddy bears?!
You know what pisses me off about this? I am a DA civilian…or federal employee. I work fucking hard to make sure that there is no perception of fraud waste and abuse. I have to fill out financial forms telling them where all my money comes from, AND I get an FBI background check every 3-5 years. Then these fuckers go and change my hard work. Not to mention this is CLEAR violation of ethics regulations. Every year we have to have this class, goes double for those of us manage contracts which is what 90% of what GSA does. In there they tell you that even the mere perception is the same as actually doing it. GSA knows this. They are full of it if they say otherwise. Case in point: this Vegas boon dongle. I know, from having setup conferences and industrial base meetings that Vegas is pretty cheap compared to doing it within one’s own city. Even flying all people there, hosting and all that….it is cheap. After all Vegas wants you to come there. Still, the ethics regs are clear…this is a perception problem. Hell I can’t fly first class while on TDY even if I PAY FOR IT! I have spent many OCONUS TDY trips in coach. try going to Austrailia coach. MF’er is that a pain. Many people I know wonder why the government can’t be more high speed with computers and get into cloud computing with iPads or some other tablets. Or even telework to save money on building heat/AC or in the liberal sense being Green. Yeah…perception problem. The first thing someone would see is NOT the federal govermnet working effiecintly but a lazy government worker getting a free iPad to work from his couch in jammies. Fuckers like this piss me off to the core. I see them here in my office and there is not a bloody thing you can do –because we have a Union. The Union. crap. these butt munchers need to be fired. They knew it was wrong the moment they did it. Anything else is a… Read more »
Ass clown got canned (or quit)…either way.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-05-24/gsa-executive-vegas-conference-gone/55195118/1
The government leadership do not want to know anything. I reported my director and four managers for creating a dummy company and fruding the government out of milllions of dollars. What happened to me, although myself and others have supporting documentations, was the Garrison Commander Peter T. McHugh went behind my back and had me terminated. He and others attacked me and allowed the criminals to remain in their jobs. McHugh is a piece of trash, who does not deserve to be in uniform. He is at the Hoffman building now as Chief of Warrior Transistion Unit. Why? I do not know. He is worthless and has a integrity problem. At my Fact Finding Conference, he lied to my attorney and stated that he did not have anything to do with terminating me, however, during discovery, there is his sorry ass in email to the North Atlantic Regional Commanding General Hawley-Bowley, begging her if he could fire me that day, and if not, he would put me on administrative leave. Why doesn’t someone investigate Jacques Larochelle,and his four managers as to where did all of the monies spent with TODD-1 Communications Services (company which was not active) go to? However, a female in the clinic could go to prison for 18 months for frauding Walter Reed out of $165,000. Hawley-Bowland has double standards. Screw this trash and we, as american citizens will always live in a poverty stricken environment as long as the government support these thiefs and disrespect the honest person trying to maintains standards.