Issues
What’s the Beef – It Was Only $100 Million?
This week we travel across the Columbia River on the jammed up I5 bridge to award a Golden
Fleece, framed in silver pontoons, to the Washington State Dept. of Transportation.
When designing pontoons for Seattle’s 520 bridge these geniuses made a bit of a boo-boo – to the tune of $100 million.
Geeze, guys – Weren’t the Romans doing this a couple thousand years ago?
For Women Only: Are You Offended/Marginalized/Denigrated by Wikipedia?
Once again we present a coveted Golden Fleece Award to our pals at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which awarded $202,000 to two professors to solve a question that troubles us all: “Why Is Wikipedia Sexist?”
NSF bureaucrats demand to know: “… an emerging body of research indicates that Wikipedia suffers from systematic gender bias with respect to both contributors and content…How and why is this bias produced?”
Here’s one thing you can count on: the “emerging body of research” that uncovered this existential outrage was paid for by government loonies wasting your money.
OR Dept. of Human Services Puts Kids in Crooks’ Hands;Torches $2 Million
The proud winner of this week’s Golden Fleece Award, which is presented to “public servants” who distinguish themselves by wasting buckets of your tax dollars, is the Oregon Dept. of Human Services (DHS).
Seven years ago the head of DHS was warned that not only was foster care provider Give Us This Day unlicensed, but also that every one of their staff had a criminal record.
Nonetheless, DHS kept tossing not only children, but $2 million of your tax dollars to these reprobates.
Remember this the next time the Salem brainiacs want more of your money “for the children.”
Shrimp, Cougars, and Now… Monkeys on Treadmills!
What is it about animals on treadmills? First the “public servants” at the National Science Foundation scorched $500,000 putting shrimp on them. Then these geniuses blew $856,000 teaching cougars to run on them.
Now the National Institutes of Health (NIH), winners of several Golden Fleece Awards, snags another one for tossing a whopping $8 million at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio for introducing 12 monkeys to treadmills.
Here’s the kicker: the San Antonio Center spent $30,000 paying federal fines for abusing the monkeys! We wish they’d just abused the NIH idiots for abusing us taxpayers!
Scandal Plagued VA Workers Paid $142.5 Million for Performance
Today we award our coveted Golden Fleece to the Veterans Administration for dishing out $142.5 million in bonuses for 2014. Included in those slopping up at your trough were:
- Philadelphia claims processors in the VA office labeled by investigators the worst in the country;
- Managers over construction of a Denver facility that was years late and a cool $1 billion over budget;
- Chief of staff of the Tomah, WI VA medical center, dubbed “Candy Man” for over prescribing narcotics;
- Augusta, GA financial manager who admitted drinking and driving a government owned truck to a VA meeting. And did we mention that a co-worker fell out of the truck and died?
According to a VA spokesman they doled out these bonuses to “…attract and maintain the best talent to serve our nation’s veterans…”
Maybe this should have been a platinum fleece.
Oversight? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Oversight!
Before ObamaCare launched, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) contracted private contractors to build the healthcare.gov website at a cost of $600 million. But it was your money, not theirs, so CMS dolts didn’t bother watching it.
A government audit reveals that CMS staffed the overseers with poorly trained, sloppy “public servants” whose carelessness caused massive delays and cost overruns, leaving taxpayers unable to find health insurance.
For this all too typical behavior we award CMS this week’s Golden Fleece Award. Oh, well, it was only $600 million.
It Was Only $14,700,000 – And the Afghans Don’t Even Want It!
This week’s prestigious Golden Fleece Award, presented with six turbans and a mangy goat, goes to the Defense Logistics Agency.
These brainiacs knew that the U.S. was beating feet out of Afghanistan. But they went ahead with building a $14.7 million warehouse.
Now the U.S. military has no use for this boondoggle. Neither do its probable owners the Afghans. The Special Inspector General concluded that “…the funds…are likely to have been wasted.” Thank you Captain Obvious.
And did we mention that this idiocy was two and a half years behind schedule and $1.2 million over budget?
$1.1 Billion & Counting!
Today’s lucky recipient of a prestigious Golden Fleece Award is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), keepers of Obamacare.
Our HHS “public servants” loaned out $2.4 Billion to 23 regional “Consumer Operated and Oriented (insurance) Plans.” Already 12 have gone belly up, leaving somebody holding a $1.1 Billion bag.
Collateral damage here is more than 740,000 Americans who’ve lost coverage. Some will be stuck with fines for not being insured because their insurer went bust.
Anybody remember “If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan. Period”?
Your Government the Art Collector
We bet you didn’t know that some of the dollars you work for go to shipping, storing and maintaining one of the largest art collections in the world.
We don’t know how much the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) spends on its 26,000 paintings, sculptures and other “objets d’art,” but we bet it’s a lot. And, search as we might in the Constitution, we couldn’t find one article demanding that the government pose as modern day Medicis.
So this week we award our coveted Golden Fleece Award, encased in a solid gold frame, to our pals at the GSA.
Click here to learn where in Eugene, Portland, and, yes, even Philomath, your money has landed: http://www.gsa.gov/fa/#/location/OR
Is Your Computer Gender Sensitive, or Does It Alienate Women?
And now – To those wizards at the National Science Foundation (NSF) who blew $856,000 of your dollars teaching mountain lions to run on a treadmill (Lane Solutions #83) – we present yet another Golden Fleece Award.
They earned it by blowing $364,019 to make computers with “gender sensitive designs.”
These geniuses think fewer women are in computing fields because men design them. So we’ve got to design them so they don’t “alienate women.”
But questions remain. What if your computer is “gender confused”? Does it make you “gender confused”? Does it draw more “gender confused” people into computer fields? Can it be “re-gendered?
What if….Never mind. We’ve taken this too far already.