Category Archives: Politics: US

Pensito Review, via South Florida Daily Blog

A few weeks ago I suggested that the political tea leaves looked kind of good for the Democrats, and it was time for some optimism. Mark Thoma, speaking no doubt for many, asked if I wasn’t maybe overly optimistic.

Well, I think I can claim a sorta told you so as it has been a surprisingly productive May for Democrats, culminating in last night’s win of a Jack Kemp’s old seat in upstate New York.

I don’t know if he is a reliable narrator, but Michael Moore tells a good yarn in The Day I Was To be Tarred and Feathered.

I mention this because it sort of parallels something I’ve been thinking recently: the wheels are really starting to come off the Republican insurgency. It’s only starting, and there’s some considerable momentum left before it collapses. And meanwhile a lot of people are going to be hurt. Indeed there will be a great deal of misery in the next two years due to what the national party does in Congress and to what state parties do here in Florida and in other GOP-dominated states like Wisconsin. But they’ve overplayed their hand. People are going to hate the results, and I think the pendulum will swing the other way so long as progressives are able to clearly explain who is responsible (and so long as most Democrats don’t decide to play along).

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Whoever said it, I think it’s true.

This will be a one-day story: Report: U.S. Has Wasted Tens Of Billions Of Dollars On Contractors In Iraq And Afghanistan.

A new report from a bipartisan commission set up to scrutinize the unprecedented use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan concludes that the United States has wasted tens of billions of the nearly $177 billion that has been spent on those contracts and grants since 2002.

The report, titled “At What Risk? Correcting Over-reliance on Contractors in Contingency Operations,” said its estimate may even understate the problem because it may not take into full account ill-conceived projects, poor planning and oversight by the U.S. government, as well as criminal behavior and blatant corruption by both government and contractor employees.

“For many years,” the report says, “the government has abdicated its contracting responsibilities – too often using contractors as the default mechanism … without consideration for the resources needed to manage them.”

But the political rhetoric will continue to be about reducing the number of government workers, instead of the logical thing, which would be to increase them in order to reduce (note that I did not say “prevent”) this sort of ripoff.

Not invading foreign countries also helps.