No One Ever Is To Blame

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Tom Balek Standard 1

U.S. Capitol, Senate Office Buildings It must be great to work for the federal government.

The pay is outstanding – the CBO says wages and benefits for almost all federal workers are much higher than for the same jobs in the private sector. Federal employees get extra paid days off, like extra holidays, personal leave time, snow days, sick days, etc. They get full pay for not working whenever the President chooses to shut the government down rather than live within a budget. They can take early retirement from their federal jobs after 20 years if they are 50 years old.

Heck, while private sector managers work 45 – 55 hours per week, the upper-half of the federal food chain works only about half-time. I have offered a standing challenge for many years (and done the exercise myself many times): pick any manager-level federal employee, at random, from the government phone directory and call his or her office after 2:00 pm on Monday through Thursday, or after 12:00 pm on any Friday. You will never, never, never reach that person. Never. Try it!

But the best thing of all about working for the federal government is: nobody ever gets fired. Once you land a federal job, you will get your full paycheck, pay raises, ever-growing benefits, and bonuses for the rest of your life, no matter how poorly you perform. Turnover is virtually non-existent. Even the guy who was written up for farting at employees 61 times in 17 days was not reprimanded.

Jeff Neely, the GSA executive who helped put together the million-dollar conference in Las Vegas for his 300 hard-working office jockeys, is a rare exception – he actually got fired. But he was reinstated eleven months later with full back pay.

My Congressman, Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), at one of his outstanding recent town hall meetings, told us, “The Veteran’s Administration has 330,000 employees and only about 500 have been fired in the last ten years.” Meanwhile executives in the VA received bonuses based on fictitious reports about their pristine performance while soldiers died waiting for health care. Director Eric Shinseki was powerless to fire anybody, and committed political hara-kiri by resigning.

Congressman Mulvaney told another stunning story about a meeting he had with an upper-level HUD executive. He was grilling her about some problem in her agency, and she was having none of it. “Don’t give me a hard time,” she said. “I don’t make that much money and it doesn’t matter whether I do a good job or not.” She had absolutely no fear of discipline from a United States Congressman. Is that job security, or what?

And it’s not just the mid-level federal employees who are totally unaccountable. When pressed for evidence that she knew would implicate her in a world-class corruption scandal, IRS director Lois Lerner made up a story about seven simultaneous hard-drive failures that ate her e-mails. The odds of that happening are one in 79 billion. Nobody has been held accountable.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is made of Teflon, too. She never has recanted the lame excuse that terrorists murdered our Libyan ambassador and his brave defenders because they were upset about a Hollywood video. One of the terrorists admitted planning and executing the Benghazi attack, but knew nothing about any video, and the CIA was listening in on terrorist phone activity during the attack, which never mentioned any video. She still deflects questions about her failure to provide adequate protection after it was requested, saying “what does it matter?” And nobody has even asked yet why the ambassador was in Benghazi in the first place. Not only is she not accountable for the fiasco, Clinton is the current leader in the 2016 presidential race.

President Obama carries a long list of excuses for the many failures of his administration. Most of them blame his predecessor. The latest failure is the border crisis that resulted from his open invitation to illegal immigrant children to enter our country and enjoy the amenities. When he finally did go to Texas to meet with Governor Perry, who is trying to deal with the situation, he spent most of his time shifting the blame.

I seldom agree with John Boehner any more, but I jumped up and cheered when, in utter exasperation with the Obama administration, he cried, “He’s been president for five and a half years. When is he going to take responsibility for SOMETHING!”

But hey, it’s the government. No one ever is to blame.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Doctor says you’re cured but you still feel the pain
Aspirations in the clouds but your hopes go down the drain
No one ever is to blame.

Howard Jones – No One Is to Blame

I want to thank all the many great songwriters and performers who inspire and enrich my blog topics. This is one of the best “fits” – music to message – yet, I think! Here’s a great live performance by Howard Jones, very much enjoyed by his audience.

There Must Be One Honest Democrat Out There

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Tom Balek Standard 3

honesty Several years ago, while on a long drive, I tuned in to National Public Radio’s afternoon talk show featuring Diane Rehm. I nearly wrecked my truck as several Democrats fervently defended government officials and scientists who were caught fabricating weather data and computer models to make it appear that man-caused global warming was real. They forthrightly stated that lying was the right thing to do if it achieved the results they sought.

Democrats routinely approve of dishonesty. There is no longer any question that many Democrats will say anything, do anything that will keep them in power. Part of the vaunted Cloward-Piven strategy, and the teachings of Saul Alinsky in “Rules for Radicals“, the playbook used so effectively by the Obama administration, is this tenet: “The end justifies the means”. They believe it. Honesty and playing by the rules does not matter, as long as you win.

Conservatives like me can’t understand it. We value honesty. It is the bedrock on which civilization is built. Relationships, societies, commerce and governments can not function without trust based on honesty.

But liberal Democrats don’t see it that way. It shocked the conservative world when our president looked squarely into a television camera and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and then later admitted that he did. As stunning as his lapse of morality was, what really blew us away was the unanimous dismissal of his dishonesty by Democrats. They justified their support of a proven liar on the grounds that they generally agreed with his politics, and found him to be “cool”. Conservatives asked, “if he would lie to his wife and family, and openly lie to the American public, how dangerous is it to believe anything he says as the leader of the free world?”

When a Republican is caught in an outright lie or an illegal or immoral act, he or she is removed. When a Democrat is caught in an outright lie or an illegal or immoral act, his party and the complicit media circle the wagons and often will tell more lies aimed at baffling the dumbed-down, undiscerning populace – case in point, the Obama Administration’s ham-handed Benghazi Lie.

In an attempt to justify dishonesty, Democrats frequently turn to the only example they can think of by a conservative: the claim that President Bush lied when he said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They stop short of admitting that he based his concern on intelligence that was acknowledged by every official in the U.S. government, including their own Democrat leaders. And Bush may yet be proven right – just this week our state department reported terrorists gained control of one of Hussein’s poison gas factories.

The level of dishonesty and immorality in American government during the Obama era has reached epic proportions. When Nixon was found to have lied about a rather minor, but nonetheless illegal and immoral campaign activity, and then tried to cover it up by erasing taped evidence, he was unceremoniously thrown out of office by officials and supporters of both parties.

This week we are told that Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS, directly after being questioned about illegal targeting of conservatives during a campaign, had a computer malfunction that caused the loss of smoking-gun e-mail evidence from her and six other officials, and that in spite of legal requirements, department policy, and common practice, no backups exist. Just “Oops, you’ll have to trust us.”

And NOT ONE DEMOCRAT will question her honesty. Not one is bothered by the stench of corruption.

It is hard for me to accept that there aren’t still a few honest Democrats out there. There must be. Believing that every single Democrat accepts dishonesty is like believing that every single voter in 59 Philadelphia precincts pulled the lever for Barack Obama.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Honesty is such a lonely word.
Everyone is so untrue.
Honesty is hardly ever heard.
And mostly what I need from you.

Honesty – Billy Joel

How E-mail Works – THE IRS IS LYING

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Tom Balek Standard 2

photo credit (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Many of you already know the nuts-and-bolts of how e-mail works so you understand that Lois Lerner, the IRS, and the Obama Administration are caught in yet another bald-faced lie when they say her e-mail files are missing. If you are in this category, you may skip this article and move on to something productive.

I did not intend to write about the IRS scandal because I thought the “big lie” is just so obvious that everybody will see right through it and justice will prevail. But the controversy goes on. The corruptocrats are betting they can get away with their contempt of congress, the law, and the taxpayers because there are still enough people who (a) don’t care and (b) don’t understand. I can’t do much about (a), but I can help with (b).

Let me explain in layman’s terms why it is impossible for Lerner’s IRS e-mails to be lost forever.

Let’s say Yahoo is your mail service provider. When you write an e-mail and press the “send” key, the e-mail file goes through the internet to Yahoo’s mail server (a large computer system specifically designated for handling e-mails). A copy of this file is then routed through other internet computers to the recipient you specified. The file remains on Yahoo’s mail server disk drive, and is also copied to other Yahoo drives for backup protection, permanent storage, and to free up space on the main mail server. Yahoo keeps many copies of every e-mail you send, and they are retained forever.

Conversely, when someone sends an e-mail to your “@yahoo.com” address, Yahoo’s mail server forwards a copy of the e-mail file to your computer, and saves the file on several of its own disk drives.

You might be thinking “Yeah, but what if I delete the e-mail?” Well, it won’t show up in your list of e-mails any more, but trust me – it’s still there on Yahoo’s drives. There is considerable controversy right now over who owns these e-mail files, whether they can be processed and the information from them sold, and whether the government should be allowed access to them. Do not assume that the content of your e-mails will not be seen by other eyes, or that when you delete an e-mail, it is gone forever. The big e-mail providers will never destroy any data that has profit potential, and that includes your e-mails.

The process is the same for government computers. Just change the “@yahoo.com” to “@irs.gov”. The federal government’s mail servers have multiple backup copies of every e-mail received or sent by everybody who works there. And outside mail providers have copies of the same e-mail files that they processed on the way to and from their mail clients.

One IRS spokesman said that e-mails are only stored on the federal government’s mail servers for six months and are then deleted. This contradicts the government’s own policy, which states that the retention requirement for most e-mail records is permanent. Further, it instructs employees:

Once you determine that an e-mail message is an official record, you should ensure that it is kept in an approved file system that satisfies the requirements for recordkeeping set out in points 1 to 5 above. You may, of course, retain your personal copy in your personal e-mail, but you must ensure that the record is placed in an approved file system.

The government contracts with a private data security firm to provide and manage the file backup system. The defense that Lois Lerner lost her e-mail to a “hard drive crash” on her personal computer ten days after her department was implicated in the scandal, is moot. And how can we be expected to believe that e-mails from six other key IRS employees were lost at about the same time? How many times does lightning strike the same spot?

Where is the DOJ? Where is the FBI? Where are the terminations, if not criminal prosecutions? This is an outright, in-your-face assault on the taxpaying citizens of the US. We can’t allow government employees, and the elected officials who direct them, to break the law and cover their tracks without repercussions. When will we say enough is enough?

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Lerner is not the first person to have problems with the mail . . .

Return to sender, address unknown.
No such number, no such zone.
We had a quarrel, a lover’s spat
I write I’m sorry but my letter keeps coming back!

Elvis Presley – Return to Sender