Report: Government spends billions more hiring contractors over public workers

I have a hard time understanding how people can say Obama is a far-left liberal when he kept this egregious Bush-Cheney practice in place:

"As Washington's use of private contractors grows, the government is paying those contractors billions more than it would pay their government workers to do the same job, according to a new study released Tuesday..

In an attempt to verify frequently made claims that the government can save money by outsourcing its work, the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) compared the total annual compensation for federal (and private sector) employees with federal contractor billing rates.

The group found that in 33 of the 35 occupational categories it reviewed, federal government employees were less expensive than contractors. On average, the federal government pays contractors 1.83 times more than it pays federal employees and two times more than what comparable workers in the private sector are paid."

Can't someone else do it?

The Fix blog has a post about how the Republicans ran the type of election in 2010 that Homer Simpson did when he ran for Garbage Commissioner in a Simpsons episode. The parallels are very interesting.

There is one more thing the article doesn't mention from the episode that is also similar to the way Republicans run for office. They claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism but do the exact opposite when they get elected, like this exchange between Marge and Homer:

Marge: How could you blow through a year's budget in just one month?
Homer: They let me sign checks with a stamp, Marge. WITH A STAMP!!

Kind of like rubber-stamping everything that the "fiscal conservative" George W. Bush did in his eight years as President.

Friedman: The Bin Laden Decade - NYTimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman, right on point today in The New York Times:

"Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.

It wasn’t meant as a free pass, and we really did have a security problem with jihadists, and we really didn’t mean to give up on our freedom agenda — but Arab leaders, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, sensed where our priorities were. That is why Mubarak actually arrested the one Egyptian who dared to run against him for president in his last election, and he and the other Arab autocrats moved to install their sons as successors."

Furthermore...

"President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford. He followed that with a Medicare prescription drug entitlement we cannot afford and started two wars in the wake of 9/11 without raising taxes to pay for them — all at a time when we should have been saving money in anticipation of the baby boomers’ imminent retirement. As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever and Republicans and Democrats — rather than coming together and generating the political authority needed for us to take our castor oil to compensate for our binge — are just demonizing one another."

Credit where credit is due: Navy SEALs, then everyone else involved...

I recently commented on an online post:

"Can't give more or less credit to anyone other than the Navy SEALs that pulled this off. What this proves is the vibrancy of our democracy in spite of the polarization of the recent years. The reason this happened is because the Clinton people told the Bush people that bin Laden is known to use couriers, which the Bush people used to identify the couriers and their names, which the Obama people used to find out where the courier lived. Even in the stablest of democracies, it would be rare for leaders of opposing political parties sharing that kind of information."

to which a friend of mine wrote:

"excellent point. seriously, more people need to read what you wrote. been reading too much of Bush vs Obama BS regarding this Osama killing."

So here you go. :-)

Huffington Post: George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted Passages From Advisers' Books

I guess 'plagiarism' is another word we can add to the list of words Dubya doesn't know or can't pronounce (like 'nuclear'). Now, before people go off the deep end complaining about how Huffington Post is just a partisan lefty liberal site that never liked Bush, skip the main article and go straight to the slideshow of examples at the bottom that indicate the quote and page number from Bush's memoir and the corresponding quote and source of the original author.

President {insert name here} wants to destroy the Constitution!

Interesting op-ed by Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe” in Politico last Monday. This is remarkably, and sadly, a very accurate passage:

“For eight grim years, Democrats worked to delegitimize Bush. Opinion leaders on the left relentlessly bashed the 43rd president on national TV and online, accusing him of being a fascist and war criminal who worked in tandem with Vice President Dick Cheney to destroy the Constitution.

Eight years before Bush entered the White House, Republicans (like myself) glared at Bill Clinton as he was being sworn in as president, immediately declaring him unfit for office. Soon after he was sworn in, extremists began claiming that the 42nd president was a Marxist and fascist who sought to destroy the Constitution.

The ugliness that followed set a dangerous precedent that fed into the shrillness of the Bush era. And as the Age of Bush mercifully came to a close, a cacophony of enraged right-wing voices welcomed Obama to the White House by accusing him of being a Marxist, a fascist, a Nazi and a racist who hated America and was — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — trying to destroy the Constitution.”