Fool Us Once?

If I called for a show of hands for everyone reading this who believes that this administration has any interest in the 'common good', I am pretty sure there would not be any waving around. So maybe it should come as no surprise that another blow against protecting taxpayers from being robbed has been struck. This strike is from the General Services Administration. With that name, maybe the GSA thought it wouldn't be noticed. No such luck.

" "The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews.

GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors.

Doan also has chided Inspector General Brian D. Miller for not going along with her attempts to streamline the agency's contracting efforts. In a private staff meeting Aug. 18, Doan said Miller's effort to examine contracts had "gone too far and is eroding the health of the organization," according to notes of the meeting written by an unidentified participant from the Office of Inspector General (OIG).

The GSA is responsible for managing about $56 billion worth of contracts each year for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other agencies.

Doan compared Miller and his staff to terrorists, according to a copy of the notes obtained by The Washington Post.

"There are two kinds of terrorism in the US: the external kind; and, internally, the IGs have terrorized the Regional Administrators," Doan said, according to the notes.

Through a spokesman, Doan said she respects the inspector general's role and is not doing anything to undercut his independence. She also denied that she had referred to Miller, a former terrorism prosecutor, or his staff as terrorists.""

Being caught robbing the public is no longer even an embarrassment to these cretins, I guess getting caught in a lie is nothing either to the crooks. Maybe it provides a distraction from their basic criminality, and serves as a shield of sorts.

The latest undermining of an official whose job is to keep the administration follows closely on the recent dismissal of the Inspector General of Iraq, which was accomplished by a little provision slipped in after the conference had approved the legislation concerned.

"Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Mr. Bowen’s office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence.

But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course without a hard end date.

The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen’s Republican credentials — he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White House — and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war.

Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.

Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.

“It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.”

“The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion,” she said."

The shameless swilling at the public trough that the administration and its businesses have indulged in has become so open that its agents are eliminating all of the checks and balances that were put in place to prevent that robbery. It's going to take the Democratic powers a long time to return balance to our economy this time.

It should come as no surprise that the dollar is plummeting, as the world sees our economy going to the dogs - or is it too much of an insult to the precious pooches to bring them into comparison with the party that has so damaged this country? Going to pot it is, then.

"The dollar tumbled to the lowest level since March 2005 against the common currency today" - although being Bloomberg News, needing to keep its business sources pacified, the cause was attributed to manufacturing sector weakness. Of course, the dollar is sound as long as the rest of the world has confidence in it.

For the cretins in the White House, no doubt all these silly restrictions on their thefts must be a nuisance, and eliminating them in order to steal more readily makes perfect sense. For those of us who care about the U.S., and want to see it continue its former economic health, this administration cannot end too soon.