Monday, May 19, 2014

Current Events - May 19, 2014



Obama, U.S. Embassies Fail To Notice Armed Forces Day, But Do Recognize ‘International Day Against Homophobia Or Transphobia’

 [Saturday] was Armed Forces Day. Armed Forces Day was created under Harry Truman in 1949, celebrating all the branches of the military. Among other things, it was meant to be a day to honor and acknowledge the people of the Armed Forces of the United States.
Many recognized it today, including Senator Ted Cruz and Rep. Darrell Issa:
But our President, our Commander-In-Chief, failed to recognize it in his Twitter account, although the account recognized ‘International Day Against Homophobia Or Transphobia’, even using the #IDAHOT hashtag.
Various embassies followed suit, going to the trouble to recognize the IDAHOT date by displaying the Pride flag, but making no mention of Armed Forces Day:

Another: Eighth VA Wait List Allegation Arises, WH in Damage Control Mode

By Guy Benson
The Veterans Affairs healthcare scandal continues to escalate, with a number of newsworthy developments hitting on Friday afternoon, then reverberating throughout the weekend. As VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and his deputy testified on Capitol Hill, another "isolated incident" came to light -- this time in Florida:

Three mental health administrators at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville have been placed on administrative leave after U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials found a "secret" waiting list of more than 200 patients, a local union president said Thursday. The director of the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System, Thomas Wisnieski, however, said what officials found was a paper list of patients who needed appointment callbacks. That list isn't considered proper protocol, Wisnieski said. Wisnieski said the list was not a secret waiting list, but he also said he did not know about it until a VA team discovered it while visiting the hospital Tuesday for a review...News recently surfaced of alleged secret waiting lists and falsified records at VA hospitals around the country, including reports of allegations that some veterans on such a list at the Veterans Affairs Health Care system in Phoenix had died while waiting for appointments. Reports have said the secret waiting lists were meant to hide delays and could have been used so management executives could get bonuses related to shorter wait times.

House may begin debating NSA measure this week

By Susan Ferrechio

Congress this week could begin considering an anti-snooping measure that would end the government's dragnet collection of telephone call data.
The House will also take on the growing mismanagement scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs with legislation that would make it easier to fire top executives for poor performance.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has tentatively placed the “USA Freedom Act” on the floor schedule for a time later in the week.
The bill is all but guaranteed to bring to the floor a heated debate on the nation's privacy rights when it comes to electronic surveillance by the government's National Security Agency as it tries to monitor warning signs for terrorism.
House Republican leaders have are aiming to keep the debate on NSA surveillance separate from a planned vote later in the week that would authorize fiscal 2015 defense spending.
.....House lawmakers are likely to support the “Department of Veterans Affairs Management Accountability Act of 2014.”
The legislation was authored in response to reports that Veterans Affairs administrators were falsifying records to hide long waiting lists for veterans seeking medical care. But it also provides a way to allow the faulty employee to remain on the government payroll.
The bill would give the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs authority to fire senior executives, “whose performance the Secretary believes warrants removal, from the government service completely or transfer them to a General Schedule position within the current civil service system.”

PK'S NOTE: You know, nothing here is actual governing. It's all ceremonial.

White House week ahead: Will Obama address Veterans Affairs controversy?


By Brian Hughes
President Obama is facing growing calls this week to address the simmering controversy over the backlog of disability claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a series of deaths at VA hospitals.
.....After his lunch with military leaders Monday, Obama will attend a fundraiser for Democrats in Maryland.
On Wednesday, the president participates in an ambassador credentialing ceremony and welcomes the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks to the White House. And Obama Thursday heads to Chicago for a pair of Democratic fundraisers.

The week ahead in economics: Timothy Geithner, too-big-to-fail and housing


 By Joseph Lawler

.....on Monday, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the group of top financial regulators charged with assessing the financial system as a whole, will meet to consider the risks to financial stability posed by asset management firms such as hedge funds and private equity funds. The FSOC has been considering whether certain large asset managers should be designated as systemically important financial institutions — meaning that they are officially too big to fail and will be subject to added regulation.
On Wednesday, Yellen will give a commencement address to New York University at Yankee Stadium. Later that day, the Fed will release the minutes from its April meeting. The notes could contain hints about the central bank’s plans for eventually tightening monetary policy as the economy recovers. Last week, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard declared that the Fed’s goals for employment and inflation are “within sight.”
On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors will report on existing home sales for April, with 4.7 million expected. That number will be followed on Friday with numbers from the federal government on new home sales, with analysts expecting an improvement from 384,000 to roughly 420,000.
Housing remains a crucial aspect of the economic recovery, and policymakers at the Fed and elsewhere noted their concern that new and existing home sales and housing starts declined in March. Last week, however, the number of housing starts for April reported by the federal government — more than a million — was significantly stronger than expected, raising hopes for continued strength in housing

If chosen for HUD, Julian Castro's work, big payday could face scrutiny


 By Byron York
San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro is widely referred to as a "rising star" in Democratic politics. There's even talk the Mexican-American Castro could earn the vice-presidential spot on the 2016 Democratic ticket in an effort to further strengthen the party's bonds with Hispanic voters. And now, it appears Castro's national profile is about to rise with word that President Obama plans to nominate him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
If Castro is tapped for the job, his Senate confirmation hearings will likely shine a spotlight both on his role in San Antonio's government and his way of making a living.

The Narcissistic Creed

When preening replaces thinking, our ability to engage in responsible self-government is diminished. 

By Kevin D Williamson
.....Slavery in Nigeria, the occupation of Ukraine, whatever: It ain’t about you, Sunshine.
The “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign, directed at the fanatical Islamist slavers in Nigeria, has inspired selfies from U.S. senators and the wife of the president of these United States, while State Department spokesman Jen Psaki, the Pippi Longstocking of the diplomatic world, took to Twitter to photograph herself with a “United for Ukraine” placard. To confront the heinous crimes of Boko Haram, a U.S. senator has many options — for example, introducing an authorization to use military force against said terrorist franchise. The U.S. State Department has many tools at its disposal for confronting the expansionist tendencies of Vladimir Putin.
The selfie is not among those tools.
Imagine, if you can, the abjectly juvenile state of mind necessary to contemplate the hundreds of Nigerian girls taken into slavery by a fanatical Muslim anti-education militia — whose characteristic activity beyond slave-taking is setting fire to children — and, in the face of all that horror, concluding: “You know what this situation really calls for? A cutesy picture of . . . me!” Bad enough when your cousin Caitlin at Bryn Mawr does that — but senators? State Department officials? These are men and (disproportionately, I think) women of power and influence, who have the ability to engage with the world and change it. But they are enchanted by the unique witchcraft of the age of social media, the totemic power of the digital expression of the self. It is not accidental that the only good selfie in the history of world leaders came well before the invention of Twitter from a man with an ego sufficiently robust not to require the constant reinforcement that is the psychic lifeblood of Millennials (and Washingtonians well old enough to know better), without which they find themselves paralyzed.
.... Social media and other online communications do not make people vicious and shallow; they reveal people as vicious and shallow. Sometimes, that is called “democraticizing the media,” and sometimes it is that. Other times, it’s just giving people enough rope to hang themselves publicly for the crime of felonious jackassery....
....If your reading on public affairs has not progressed much past Internet memes, you have a responsibility to your country: Don’t vote. In fact, you probably should not even speak about those things. There is no shame in that; all of us are mostly ignorant about most things, as my poor father is reminded every time he tries to talk to me about sports. But please, if you actually care about the world and the human beings who inhabit it, stop — just stop — subordinating girls taken into slavery in Nigeria to the satisfaction of your ego. Go read a book. This is not about you.

Benham Brothers Can Bank on SunTrust After All

 By Ken McIntyre
SunTrust Bank will continue to do business with David and Jason Benham, reversing course after the twin brothers publicly announced the bank had cut ties.
SunTrust said a “third party vendor” had misapplied corporate policy in severing ties with the real-estate entrepreneurs — who lost a cable TV show a week ago over their Christian beliefs on marriage and abortion.
Early this afternoon, the Benham brothers put out a statement confirming that SunTrust had pulled all of its listed properties with the Concord, N.C.-based brothers and several franchisees across the nation, the Independent Tribune reported.
“We were caught off-guard with this one,” David Benham said.
But late this afternoon SunTrust released a statement that read, in part:
SunTrust supports the rights of all Americans to fully exercise their freedoms granted under the Constitution, including those with respect to free speech and freedom of religion.
While we do not publicly comment on specific vendor relationships, we don’t make choices on suppliers nor base business decisions on political factors, nor do we direct our third party vendors to do so. We clarified our policies with our vendor and the issue has been resolved.
The Daily Caller reported that a surge of outrage, especially among the bank’s conservative customers, prompted SunTrust to quickly reverse the move made against Benham Real Estate by its unnamed third-party vendor.
“The Left is overreaching, and ordinary Americans are not OK with the new intolerance,” Heritage Foundation scholar Ryan T. Anderson, who writes about religious liberty and marriage, told The Foundry. “As in the cases of ‘Duck Dynasty’  and Cracker Barrel, public reaction in support of civility and tolerance makes companies reconsider.  They can’t afford to alienate their customers.”

Michelle Obama Wants Students to Monitor Family Members for Racial Insensitivity

By Jason DeWitt
First lady Michelle Obama wants students to police their families for any “racially insensitive comments” they might make, and to challenge those comments whenever they’re made, asking them to “drag” their presumably racist relatives into the “fight against racism.”
Huh?
Yep, the lady whose husband has taken every opportunity to fan the flames of racism, from the Cambridge police, to Arizona’s immigration law, to the Trayvon Martin case, and on and on, wants everyone else to stop being so racist.
The first lady spoke on Friday to graduating high school students in Topeka, Kansas, and in remarks released over the weekend, Obama said students need to police family and friends because federal laws can only go so far in stopping racism.
“[O]ur laws may no longer separate us based on our skin color, but nothing in the Constitution says we have to eat together in the lunchroom, or live together in the same neighborhoods,” she said. “There’s no court case against believing in stereotypes or thinking that certain kinds of hateful jokes or comments are funny.”
To address these limitations in the law, Obama asked students to take steps to “drag my generation and your grandparents’ generation along with you” in the fight against racism.
“Maybe that starts simply in your own family, when grandpa tells that off-colored joke at Thanksgiving, or you’ve got an aunt [that] talks about ‘those people,’” she said. “Well, you can politely inform them that they’re talking about your friends.
“Or maybe it’s when you go off to college and you decide to join a sorority or fraternity, and you ask the question, how can we get more diversity in our next pledge class?” she added. “Or maybe it’s years from now, when you’re on the job and you’re the one who asks, do we really have all the voices and viewpoints we need at this table?
“But no matter what you do, the point is to never be afraid to talk about these issues, particularly the issue of race,” she said.

Feds used donations intended for poor for massages, luxuries for themselves

By Luke Rosiak

Federal employees and a contractor diverted more than $1 million of charitable contributions to spending on themselves for in-office massages, meals at every meeting and other luxuries and unnecessary expenses, a government audit found.
They called themselves "volunteers" and said they needed "motivation" to help the less fortunate, even though some 41 federal workers were being paid full-time salaries to administer just one local chapter of the government's annual workplace charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign.
They arrived a day early and stayed a day late for annual training conferences in New Orleans and Las Vegas, and paid for room service and pay-per-view movies with donated funds. Then, they adamantly defended their right to do so when questioned by auditors.
They claimed that restrictions on spending for things like first-class flights didn't apply to donated funds because taxpayer money was not involved.
The whole time they were working on the CFC full-time, these "loaned executives" received full government salaries, and were able to ignore the work they were originally hired by agencies to do.
The CFC is overseen by the Office of Personnel Management through regional committees made up of government employees.
Each of the committees contract with an outside nonprofit group to do most of the work, paying expenses out of the donations.
Federal agencies detail hundreds of employees from their regular duties to work at CFC contractor offices, all at taxpayer expense.
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