Ebola Infects the Presidency

Three Short Ebola Observations:

• We American citizens were over confident and, well, downright smug about the ability of our vastly superior Health and Medical Structure to combat Ebola if it ever invaded our country.  Now, as it turns out, our strengths have proven to be our weakness.  In small African nations, the population is very poor and relatively stationary making it easy to locate and quarantine the infected people.

Here in the United States, people are relatively wealthy and extremely mobile, taking trips constantly by plane, train, bus and even vacations on cruise ships.  In Africa an Ebola victim generally can only infect family, friends and very close neighbors.  Here anyone EXPOSED can jump on a plane, train or ship and expose hundreds or even thousands of people.  Our wealth and independence make controlling the disease both more difficult and vastly more expensive.

• President Obama's extremely poor management style where no one is ever held accountable for anything, has created a massive bureaucracy of sheer incompetence throughout the Federal Government.  Never in our history has our government been less prepared to face a crisis.  As error after error piled up on the gross mishandling on the first Ebola patient, no one from the CDC ever did so much as issue an intelligent guideline, let alone provider hands-on direction to health care workers.  

The hospital did not even have the correct protective gear for doctors and nurses for days.  The CDC never issued guidelines on how to handle the infection.  CDC Director Thomas Frieden, no matter how intelligent or educated he might be on infectious diseases, is a grossly incompetent manager. Worse, he is an ineffective spokesperson.  Many Democrats as well as virtually all Republicans are calling for his resignation.


Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal "The administration’s handling of the Ebola crisis continues to be marked by double talk, runaround and gobbledygook. And its logic is worse than its language. In many of its actions, especially its public pronouncements, the government is functioning not as a soother of public anxiety but the cause of it."

• Only a President as totally unprepared for his job, a President who seemingly has learned nothing over six years, could possibly appoint someone as thoroughly unqualified as Ron Klain to the EBOLA CZAR.  Klain has not one second of medical experience and not one second of experience in handling an epidemic.

To be certain Mr. Klain will have, as his primary job, communicating with the press and public.  Since he cannot credibly answer a single question, the press will eat him alive and the public will further lose confidence in the Obama Administration.

You would think at least on person advising the President would have said, "Sir, you know this appointment of a political manager is going to look very bad and will reflect poorly on your continued handling of this crisis.  This IS NOT a political crisis, Sir, it's a medical crisis." 


Perhaps it was said. Perhaps the President chose not to listen.

A Lesson We Liberals MUST Learn

The ObamaCare roll out somehow managed to be more flawed than the horrific law itself. As impossible as it seems, the initial introduction of President Obama's prize accomplishment from his first term is, so far, one of the biggest embarrassments in the entire history of our government.

And each and every day it gets worse.

The President's biggest allies for the first two weeks were the hapless Republicans who stole the spotlight from the ObamaCare introduction with their ill advised government shutdown.  President Obama ought to write Senator Ted Cruz a "Thank You" note". 

The biggest error the President made was letting the shutdown be settled.  Two weeks was not long enough to fix the flawed website design. And once the shutdown ended, the press and blogosphere turned its full attention to ObamaCare.

Speaking of mistakes, President Obama's second largest mistake was not to accept the Republican DEMAND that ObamaCare's mandates be delayed a full year.  He needs that time (which could have easily buried the issue past the 2014 election) to fix this mess.

Actually biggest problem is the ObamaCare Law itself, but that is for another blog entry in a few weeks.  Today we, as Liberals, need to learn one critically important lesson: The Government Should NEVER Do Anything EVER!

If we love people, if we want fairness, if we demand the folks get full value with no waste, programs like Universal Health Care need to be turned over to the private sector. We can legislate universality, fairness and value and we can hire inspectors to make certain the law is accomplished, but GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT RUN THE PROGRAM.

We, the taxpayers, spent $680,000,000.00 on bad code, poor design, insane logic, zero testing and no results.  By contrast Facebook's website was started at less than $80 million. Twitter at less than $300 million. And there are countless other examples.  And they all work.

The problem lies in government management, the bidding process and the sheer bureaucracy that permits no innovation and allows no decision to ever be made. 

Megan Neal pointed out over on the Motherboard Website (not a political site, but an IT site) that the bureaucratic morass of bidding on government contracts guarantees no qualified company will ever win a contract or even bid on one.  

     The "procurement" process of government contracts is so labyrinthine, the administration has to hire firms that are adept at the process, even if that means they're not sufficiently adept at the actual task. As a result, despite a government budget of $80 billion a year for information-technology services, federal web services wind up clunky and glitchy like they're stuck in the dial-up age.

Today many are calling for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to be fired for incompetence. Indeed she is totally incompetent and ought to be fired. In any private company she would have been long gone, years ago. But politics, not competency rule Washington.  And that is exactly why programs should always be delegated to the private sector.  Yes, private companies will make a profit but, like Amazon, they will get the job done for less taxpayer dollars with better results.

As Liberals we hate giving profit for needed services to the private sector.  Yet we waste many times the money for vastly inferior services.  We must learn to Legislate and Regulate, instead of trying to Implement the program in the systemically incompetent government sector.

The Growing Layers of Failure

The irony is so thick here it could be used as mortar to cement bricks.


STORY ONE (via National Public Radio): Kansas City's Failed Schools Leave Students Behind


STORY TWO (via The Blaze): North Carolina Food Police Replaces Nutritious Homemade Lunches with Deep Fried Processed Chicken Nuggets

PHOTO BY TOM BULLOCK OF NPR

The tragedy in Kansas City schools in story ONE above is simply heartbreaking.  The Kansas City failure is a story of a revolving door of administrators, an incompetent school board, middle class flight to private schools and suburban districts, and a teachers union deeply invested in a system that assures failure.  Scott Simon of NPR will continue this series next Saturday and I hope you will all tune in or visit the NPR Website.


I've written often here that Government does absolutely nothing well.  There are some things that only Government can do, the military is the most often mentioned example.  But even then the waste, incompetence, the inefficiencies and corruption is staggering.  


I'm guessing next week, Scott Simon will at least mention the state is considering Charter Schools or even privatizing the entire failed Kansas City School System.  This is exactly what should happen.


Meanwhile, via story TWO above, we have our government taking on another task that it will mismanage completely.  The well meaning North Carolina Legislature wanted to make sure children in the pre-kindergarten program had the proper nutrition to help them prepare for school.  Unfortunately, they only created a bureaucracy of food police following bureaucratic guidelines without even a modicum of logic or intelligence.  


So we have nameless inspectors not allowing children to eat a homemade meat and cheese sandwich on a whole wheat bun with fruit and fruit juice and instead forcing the child to eat in the school cafeteria.  Because the inspector is only "doing his job" he has no idea what the school cafeteria lunch actually is.  His job is to simply inspect the homemade lunch to be certain it has two fruits and vegetables. He doesn't care his actions forced the child to eat deep fried processed chicken nuggets with white bread and milk and ABSOLUTELY NO VEGETABLES!!!.


Somewhere along the line the mission of schools to teach got lost and their new mission is monitor homemade lunches.


As Liberals we should not ever be invested in the process, but only in the results. By definition Liberals should think outside the box, love alternatives and innovation.  We should not be invested in methodology of the past.  We should always strive for new, groundbreaking solutions.  It's time we realized that government is virtually never the solution.


Our goals and dreams must never change, but we must be willing to follow new paths toward achieving those goals.

Brownie, Your Doin' A Heck of A Job!

If we even needed an example of just how bad government bureaucracies are at handling a complex crisis, one need look no further than the oil spill disaster now befalling the marshes and wetlands on Louisiana. The inaction, waffling, internal debate and inaction on the part of the Federal Government, fully in charge of the clean-up and protection of our coasts, makes Michael Brown, Bush's oft vilified FEMA head, look like an administrative genius.

Our Federal Government couldn't possibly do any worse, because they are generally doing nothing but actually stopping the efforts of state and local governments. This is a disaster of inaction and incompetence.

The Army Corps of Engineers is unwilling to make a decision on how and where to deploy oil skimming beams or how and where to build sand berms to stop the oil flow. Each hour of indecision is killing the fragile gulf coast.

This situation of so bizarrely stupid that local parishes are actually commandeering and deploying hundreds of Federally chartered boats and putting them to work in fighting the spill. No one is Washington is willing to make a decision.

Perhaps the greatest irony is the failure of the major news networks or the cable news networks to even give anything more than marginal coverage to the spill itself. While they are covering the infighting in the House and Senate and the daily battles between BP and the Obama Administration, what is missing is the very real human drama unfolding on the coast. No shows or anchors have been deployed to the coast.

The best coverage I've found is on National Public Radio. Be sure to listen to these reports and tune into NPR each day until the networks wake up from their politically induced coma:

• Officials Scrutinize BP's Ability To Close Oil Leak


• BP Hard To Pin Down On Oil Spill Claims


• Frustration Grows Over Gulf Oil Spill

I do also want to compliment The Huffington Post for their excellent coverage of the environmental disaster.