SharedThought

NPR aired a story today about the problems presented by outsourcing of military support functions to contractors. The problem goes beyond my concerns in a previous post that outsourcing contracts are merely political largess for Republican party faithful. Evidently, the outsourced jobs just aren’t getting done. Private contractors, as it turns out, don’t perform as well in combat operations as uniformed personnel. What a surprise.

The NPR story noted that there has been a serious problem with “no-shows” — contract employees who don’t show up because of concerns about personal security. A Post article yesterday made a similar point:

“At the end of the day, neither these companies nor their employees are bound by military justice, and it is up to them whether to show up or not.” Singer said. “The result is that there have been delays in setting up showers for soldiers, getting them cooked meals and so on.”

NPR reported that it’s gotten so bad that the mother of one soldier bought an air conditioner for her son’s tent because the outsourced supply system had broken down and couldn’t provide one. It had gotten so hot the kid’s soap had melted!

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Halliburton has received contracts worth more than $1.5 billion. The size of the contracts has been justified as part of the Army’s efforts to outsource its support functions. As the article notes, however:

Independent experts said the trend toward outsourcing logistic operations has resulted in new problems, such as a lack of accountability and transparency on the part of private military firms and sometimes questionable billing practices.

Let’s be real, outsourcing is just another way to keep the Republican party base happy. Instead of spending the money on uniformed personnel, give the money to defense contractors. They’re the ones who get you elected (and then maybe serve as your vice president or Defense secretary).

The San Francisco Chronicle (of all papers) has an article that douses a little water on the Democrats’ argument that Governor Davis is being blamed for problems that he has no control over. The article points out that when Davis was elected governor in 1998 he was the first Democratic governor in 16 years. Democrats had control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time, and Davis promised to end politics as usual. Almost immediately after his election, however, the in-fighting began. Instead of working together to achieve common aims, Democrats were busy arguing with each other.

The article makes a great comparison to Bill Clinton in 1992. When Clinton was elected he ended 12 years of Republican control of the presidency, and there was hope that with Democrats in control of the legislature many great things could be accomplished. Then, as the article points out:

But, being Democrats, they were soon fighting each other over Clinton’s No. 1 priority: reforming the health-care system. Hillary Clinton cooked up her own secret plan. Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Pete Stark and a host of other Democrats all came up with their preferred versions. Why they wouldn’t get together in a room and agree on a single plan was (and still is) beyond me.

Instead, health-care reform crashed and burned. It’s true that even if Democrats had agreed, the insurance industry might still have killed the legislation. But Rep. Newt Gingrich was able to exploit the Democrats’ disarray to topple them from power in Congress.

The Democratic Party’s inability to organize around a coherent platform and impose party discipline has always been a weakness. For a political party that controls neither the White House nor Congress, it may prove to be fatal.

I had problems with my web hosting provider last week and am still trying to get them ironed out. Please stay tuned as I hope to begin posting again today or tomorrow!

The blame for last week’s power outage in the northeast appears to be falling at the feet of First Energy Corporation. In a sign of things to come, here is First Energy’s attempt to point the finger at someone else:

Contrary to misinterpretations that identified FirstEnergy as the cause of the widespread outage, it is clear that extensive data needs to be gathered and analyzed in order to determine with any degree of certainty the circumstances that led to the outage. What happened on Thursday afternoon is a very complex situation, far broader than the power line outages we experienced on our system.

From the preliminary data we are gathering — and based on what others are providing — it is clear that the transmission grid in the Eastern Interconnection, not just within our system, was experiencing unusual electrical conditions at various times prior to the event.

Maureen Dowd’s column last week cited campaign blogs as proof of the demise of Internet blogging. I doubt it, but then there’s this. . .
Bush Campaign Reaching Out to Bloggers (washingtonpost.com)

The Washington Post runs with the breaking story about the massive power outage in the northeast here. Here’s a bit:

The outage was caused by an outage at a Manhattan power plant which destabilized the power grid as far as Canada, FERC spokesman Bryan Lee said.

“We have no indication that there is any terrorism involved,” Lee said

That’s a relief. I’m sure everyone feels much better now knowing that the power grid was completely disrupted by a non-terrorist mishap of some sort. Terrorist groups are probably scratching their heads and thinking: “It can’t be this easy, can it?”

In earlier entries here and here I discussed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Fred Kaplan has an interesting article in Slate about Colin Powell’s speech to the UN in February regarding Iraq’s WMD. He goes through all of the evidence presented by Powell and shows how virtually none of it has not held up. The only remaining bits to support the existence of WMD in pre-war Iraq are the wire intercepts discussing moving or hiding WMD. Kaplan surmises that this evidence may have been faked (like the Nigerian uranium document) or planted. Disappointingly, there was no mention in the article of the point The Cultural Elite has been making about errors in the transcription of those intercepts.

Another interesting tidbit in Kaplan’s article is a link to the LA Times story yesterday about the chaos that reigned in Iraq’s military in the waning days of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Regarding WMD, the story says this:

Commanders interviewed for this article said they were issued no orders regarding chemical or biological weapons. And they denied that Iraq ever possessed such weapons.

Now that sounds convincing.

Maureen Dowd disses blogs today in her column titled Blah Blah Blog. At first I thought it was a reference to a blog written by new Liberian President Moses Blah. It’s not. Rather, it’s a Dowd piece that asserts the end of blogging is nigh. In her words:

The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.

In a lame attempt to be hip, pols are posting soggy, foggy, bloggy musings on the Internet. Inspired by Howard Dean’s success in fund-raising and mobilizing on the Web, candidates are crowding into the blogosphere — spewing out canned meanderings in a genre invented by unstructured exhibitionists.

I think the growth of blogging is more a reflection that people have grown tired of the mass media types like Dowd. Blogging allows unfiltered content to be published to a worldwide audience in essentially real time. While the political blogs Dowd discusses in her column may be lame, they are one of the only mediums available to campaigns to get an undiluted message out to the electorate. Maybe Dowd should be more worried about the future of old-media than the future of the Internet and blogging?

The New York Times has a positive review about an off Broadway play called Matt and Ben (How off Broadway? It’s being staged at P.S. 122!). It’s a play set at the time Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were working on the script for Good Will Hunting. In the play, the script falls into their lives as a completed work, and Matt and Ben have to decide whether to use the material as their own. According to the review there’s lots of juicy celebrity bashing in the play. And Ben Affleck thought the bad press was over?