Surprise! Fraud, waste cited in war contracts

By GottaLaff

I'm stunned. How could this be true? BushCo would have told us if things weren't A-OK, I just know they would have!

Poor planning, weak oversight and greed combined to soak U.S. taxpayers and undermine American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, government watchdogs tell a new commission examining waste and corruption in wartime contracts.

No way! The troops got screwed over? By the very Amurka-loving administration who sworetogod that they loved our soldiers nearly as much as they loved apple pie, hot dogs, and perchance-maybe-possibly-perhaps even booze? Well, okay, no, not their booze. That's sacrosanct.

Since 2003, the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have paid contractors more than $100 billion for goods and services to support war operations and rebuilding.

$100 billion?! Why, bless my sould, that's a lot of money that could, ohIdunno, go toward an... economic recovery package?

There are 154 open criminal investigations into allegations of bribery, conflicts of interest, defective products, bid rigging and theft stemming from the wars, said Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon’s principal deputy inspector general.

Nothing says BushCo like bribery, conflicts of interest, theft, and bid-rigging. There's your legacy, George.

The ugly Bush stain: Watchdog group's List of Bush Failures edition

By GottaLaff

This list is of Bush failures is astounding, but not unexpected. Here's the background:

The most comprehensive guide to these and other Bush administration failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently "set out to document just how off-track things have gone," assigning thirteen reporters to document the worst failures of the last eight years.

Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 "that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans."

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI's PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

Here's the list, in part. No amount of scouring, scrubbing, detoxifying, or sanitizing can compensate for the following:

• 730,000 backlogged patent applications
• 760,000 Social Security disability claims
• 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims
• A recurrence of recent losses of hundreds of laptops containing sensitive law enforcement information
• The decision to keep plowing $12.5 billion into a joint civilian-military weather satellite system that is still incomplete and may leave gaps in crucial climate monitoring as older satellites fail
• $300 billion over budget for Defense Department weapons acquisitions
• $100 billion lost every year to corporate offshore tax shelters
• Faulty National Security Administration computer system, which carries a price tag of $4 billion
• The complete failure of a $100 million attempt to create a new system of internal information-sharing for the FBI in the wake of 9/11
• The record $9.91 billion spent on government secrecy in 2007
• The dismissal of all but 17 out of the 1273 whistleblower complaints filed from 2002 to 2008
• Pollution that causes 20,000 deaths a year
• Pollution that puts 60,000 newborns at risk of neurological problems
• A two-thirds dropoff in the cleanup of toxic waste sites
• 2.5 million toxic toys recalled in the summer of 2007

This isn't a stain, it's a cancer.

Senate Confirms New York Prosecutor as Watchdog for $700B Bailout

By GottaLaff

There's slim pickin's out there in the news world today:

The Senate has confirmed a New York prosecutor as watchdog of the $700 billion rescue program for the nation's financial sector.

Neil M. Barofsky will become a special inspector general within the Treasury Department to audit and investigate spending by the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program. President George W. Bush nominated Barofsky to the position last month.

His confirmation had been held up anonymously by one senator. The opposition was lifted last week.

I wonder who Anon was.