GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman 133
schwit1 writes In a report as well as at House hearings today the GAO reported that Northrop Grumman has denied them one-on-one access to workers building the James Webb Space Telescope. "The interviews, part of a running series of GAO audits of the NASA flagship observatory, which is billions of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule, were intended to identify potential future trouble spots, according to a GAO official. But Northrop Grumman Aerospace, which along with NASA says the $9 billion project is back on track, cited concerns that the employees, 30 in all, would be intimidated by the process." To give Northrop Grumman the benefit of the doubt, these interviews were a somewhat unusual request. Then again, if all was well why would they resist? Note too that the quote above says the cost of the telescope project is now $9 billion. If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:4, Funny)
You can get a whole month of war for that!
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Maybe 5 weeks, if you don't run into cost overruns.
Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:1)
Guess that shows what you know about the telescope. I'm surprised its only $9 billion.
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Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:5, Informative)
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Find the spot where "Invent entire new techniques and industries in the process of making the bird fly, then give them away" that NASA does all the time with these kind of engineering marvels fits in and I'd say you've about nailed it.
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Look, I'm on your side in the sense that science is worth dollars. At least I think I am, but I feel confused.
I have no idea how much it costs to make, launch, test, or do anything to a telescope other than break it with a hammer, which costs zero dollars and might be largely ineffective.
So you are going to claim that retention is behind the cost increase? You said $6b, with another $2B, citing retention. What about the other $1B to add up to the $9B cited directly twice, and indirectly once, in the summ
Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:4, Informative)
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that could make sense if the addition was 3 million / 30 guys - not 1 billion. 1 billion extra needs some manufacturing contracting price to rise.
for the amount of people involved, it's an outrageous addition to the budget, especially for adding costs to planning. they techies certainly do not cost 30 million per head per year or anything near that.
the latest one billion addition can be summed up by "because we can ask for it". never mind they got the project because of their low bid.
but you're seriously
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Not at all. You're confusing the cost of staff (which he didn't talk about) with the cost impact on the project of a drop in staff quality. When you're making decisions about things that cost millions, or billions, then losing a top talent with experience could lead to gigantic cost increases. The difference in shock resistance between a $200 million design that c
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Wait a minute -- Since when is "Add another 50 percent to make it flight qualified and for the various surprises that happen at the coal face and aren't quite as evident when you're writing a grant proposal" supposed to be a normal part of project execution? Flight qualification is supposed to be built into the project cost from the beginning. And any honest cost proposal for an aerospace project with new technology needs a large contingency reserve. No, even by your numbers the Webb is incredibly overbu
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Re: 9 whole billion? OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:2)
... and it would look like the underfunded and slap-dash POC that would require Orion to make repair flights, if you don't skip town first. It takes people at all stages of the production phase to deliver a valuable scientific instrument, and you are the only one who wants to send up an Apple I.
GAO = U.S. Government Accountability Office (Score:5, Informative)
n/t
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Re: GAO = U.S. Government Accountability Office (Score:2)
Who performs governmental oversight in your country.
Please don't say "BDO".
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So who are BDO anyway? I'm assuming they're not a US organisation otherwise your comment makes no sense.
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Another important note is that the GAO is probably the most trustworthy and reliable portion of the U.S. Federal government from the public's point of view. They are sort of like Cassandra; they constantly give dire warnings about where the Feds are failing, they're almost always right, and nobody pays attention to them.
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Another important note is that the GAO is probably the most trustworthy and reliable portion of the U.S. Federal government from the public's point of view.
I agree that they are certainly up there with regard to trustworthiness. However they are hardly the only ones. I know it's super fashionable to claim that government is nothing but a bunch of crooks and that they can't do anything right but it's demonstrably not true. Government can be and often is a powerful force for good in society and while there is no denying that power often breeds/attracts corruption, for a government to be effective it cannot be universally incompetent and/or corrupt.
Other gener
Still not as bad as Perkin-Elmer... (Score:5, Informative)
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I'll bet the other 10 or so they made worked fine, but they were deigned to point down!
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But because they were on classified work, they couldn't say a thing.
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First time I heard of this. Care to elaborate for us stupid retarded ignorant plebians?
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I worked for Ball Aerospace during this time frame. Before the final packaging for putting the telescope on the rocket, there was supposed to be a final laser alignment test to check the all the components and to make sure everything was alligned properly. (This test would have cost about $50000) But the government told Ball to skip the test as they knew everything was correct. This was done to save money. The Ball team objected but was overruled. The final alignment test was never done and we know the
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What really saddens me is that Perkin-Elmer still exists. If there was ever a justifiable reason to revoke a corporation's charter, something this monumental to mankind is it.
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Remember this one?
http://articles.latimes.com/19... [latimes.com]
Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error
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It blows my mind that aerospace engineers haven't converted to using SI for design and implementation on projects that are global in scope.
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I was taught the metric system back in the 60/70s in public schools around Detroit. I even remember when this happened... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org] It's a shame that we're too lazy to make the switch.
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...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...
Also not true. Nasa could have checked the mirror on the ground. I understand it would have cost about 30K to do that. Since they were sure it was right, and nobody noticed the cone divit was reversed, why bother? I know one of the guys that found the problem and fixed it. He explained in detail, way more than I wanted to know.
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"How cute, a selfy ... Oh shit!"
I'm a hypocrite (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, yeah, but you won't get it if the folks who are paying for it think they're getting ripped off. Here's the thing, science or no...
People who are paying for your project have a right to audit. Period. You want to sue them after the fact for the reason that their audit fucked things up and you should still get paid, fine. But fucking play by the rules.
Frankly, half of the trouble around today is a bunch of rich folks/company that run around screaming "We don't have to obey the rules if we don't like th
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Re: I'm a hypocrite (Score:2)
All you said is absolute truth. Can the NRO satellites be used for "sky survey" purposes and asteroid counting? If these two satellites have any infrared capability, do they have enough resolution to find small rotating objects at distances measured by Astronomical Units (AU)?
Then again, if all was well why would they resist? (Score:2)
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You're right, there is nothing at all complicated about this situation, and intuition will answer all questions, no need for details. /sarcasm
Project Management (Score:1)
Each interview is man-hours not spent working on the project. GTFO GAO.
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You're worrying about a couple hundred dollars in man-hours for accountability on a $9,000,000,000 project?
Should have been spelled out in the contract (Score:2)
If the customer (the U.S. government) wants its auditors to be able to question individual employees, that should be clearly stipulated in the contract, and then the contractor should have no qualms about meeting the terms of that stipulation.
Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
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Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.
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Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
That's a two way street, son. The contractor is hat in hand looking for more funds beyond the terms of the current contract. All of the contract terms are on the table, as they should be, when a contractor fails to perform.
All carrot (Score:2)
No stick
Maybe (Score:2)
the other way (Score:4, Insightful)
S.r. Hadden (Score:2)
: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept secret....
And Northrop is right to do it. (Score:4)
We recently had an quality audit at the manufacturing firm I work for. The auditor noted that several of our part-feeders had parts laying underneath, and broke into a full fledged 'teach moment' about how we could save money and lower scrap by correcting the feeding issues. I bit my tongue.
At the wrap-up meeting with directors present, the auditor pressed the point. I was quiet as long as I could, then I carefully explained that we had a $2,000,000 capacity problem that our engineers were working on, and politely asked my director if he'd like me to pull those engineers off that to work on saving a couple dozen parts a day that cost a fraction of a penny a piece.
Auditting rarely adds anything of value anywhere. If it were that easy to the correct the problems, the competent engineers would have already done it.
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I suspect auditors is behind a process I noted at a large American company I worked at for a bit:
In the engineering office, the engineers were using laptops. The laptops were managed by a third party, which bought new parts from a fourth party through a fifith party.
If one engineering laptop broke, it could take 2-3 weeks to get it repaired.
In the meantime the engineer can't work, and just costs money. This happened, in my office, to a consultant - costing about a laptop a day.
But in some budget somewhere I
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They have neither the time nor the intelligence to actually understand why decisions were made the way they were made.
I've worked with auditors, both clueful and clueless, just like I've worked with similar people in many domains. The fact that you've only encountered poor auditors is more a reflection of the firm(s) your company is(are) hiring to do your auditing. The fact that you see no value in the process does not mean that others do not see value. Frankly, there are a lot of people (besides complianc
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Auditing is a self-perpetuating (see how smart we are?) parasite that has come about mainly because someone wanted to make some money and was good at blowing smoke up other people's asses.
Punish companies that break the law equal with how badly they broke it. After they break it. ANY company that wants to hide thing from auditors knows just how much of a cakewalk it is. After all, the only way a company can incriminate itself to aud
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"Auditting rarely adds anything of value anywhere."
Says someone who has never seen a manager cover-up problems that proper oversight would have caught, and cost more money in the long run. You had bad auditors focused on the wrong goals. GOOD auditors are a valuable part of enterprise risk management, who are an independent means for testing assertions made by management, and who can help add value to a business or process.
If a production-and-P&L oriented process manager is telling the president t
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Perhaps part of the issue is that auditors (appear to) only ever look for negatives. If they had to look for positives as well, and apply weights to the two sides, it would work out better for everyone.
9G/30 (Score:2)
Wait, 30 people have cost $9 billion?
Do they eat gold? :)
Because innocent people are always treated fairly (Score:2)
Then again, if all was well why would they resist?
If you're innocent, why would you resist talking to investigators all by yourself?
Really?
Yes, I realize that this isn't a criminal investigation, but honestly. If I knew there were a chance that any offhand remark or misstatement I made could end up being quoted on C-SPAN by a Senator with an axe to grind...yeah, I'd be pretty damned reluctant to talk. Even if I weren't bright enough to figure that out for myself, I'm pretty sure I can see why my employer would have similar concerns.
Right to remain silent (Score:1)
Any time you are approached by any State actor, you have the absolute right not to talk to them about anything. Northrop Grumman is doing the right thing in protecting their employees' from unlawful interrogation by State actors.
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In this case the State is paying all the bills -- those people's salaries, the inflated salaries of the Northrop Grumman executives, and the inflated profits which Northrop Grumman is getting from the project. Don't want to talk to the State actors? -- fine, then don't accept a paycheck from them either. The State needs to cut off the money spigot until there is more cooperation from the contractor.
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That's not at all how Rights work, at least not in the USA. You do not give up your rights just because your paycheck comes from the government.
Simple solution to the problem (Score:2)
As this is government (i.e. taxpayer) money, you stop paying Nothrop Grumman until they grant access to the employees.
Since, as people like to say, the government doesn't create jobs, cutting off funding won't have any effect so there can't be any complaints. In fact, stopping payments on a project which is this far over budget would be good PR: a private company unable to do what they've been paid to do so the government is cutting them off.
Overbudget? (Score:2)
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Sorry but the OP states it's over budget and overdue. Well if you look at the original budget & deadline yes this is correct, however, subsequently the scope of the project has been massively increased which consequently increased the budget and time scale. Its not due to fly until 2018 and has still cost less than the Hubble.
There are several things to note here. First, the cost of Hubble included six Space Shuttle launches and 24 years of operation. Second, The JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) is eight years behind schedule. Third, massive increase in scope of a federal project is a common ploy for siphoning more funds. Maybe nothing untoward happened with the changing of JWST's scope, but it's an easy thing for a bribe to arrange. And the project went on for five more years as a result of this changing of scope.
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Massive increase in the scope nearly doubled the size of the thing however its still being launched by the same vehicle (Saturn V)
If they're having to restart Saturn V production just to launch the thing, no wonder the cost is so high!
A Question That Almost Answers Itself (Score:2)
> then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
The project is back on track to be able to stick around for another fiscal year in order to ask for another budget increase.
See? How difficult was that? Simple actually.
Denied ? (Score:1)
Who fuck is working for working for who here?
Sure, the employees would be intimidated (Score:2)
"You say anything to the GAO people we don't like, we'll find out, and you'll never work again".
And I was a contractor for a company that was sold to them... and they proceeded to get rid of those of us who knew the project best, on a variety of excuses.
I read, a few years ago, that the client manager was in legal, or was it criminal, trouble.... (and he was a city government employee).
Do you *really* think NG is all wonderful, and doing everything right (and that it's all the federal gov't fault that the t
Re:Congress is a bunch of fucking retards (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the PP is a bit trolly, but it's important to note that the investigators that were denied access belong to the GAO, not to the Congress. The GAO has a generally good reputation as being non-partisan and being genuinely interested in reducing government waste.
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But the GAO has to make its findings public, or at least put it in congressional review reports. Congress persons are political animals by nature, both parties, and if they can take something out of context or cherry-pick bits and re-package them into a scary-sounding narrative to score political points, they will.
Look how they mangled issues with emails, back-up systems, file formats, servers, hard-drive failure rates, etc. in the Lerner/IRS situation. (Granted, some of the mangling of IT concerns* may hav
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I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth to look at details on the surface. A visit by GAO could have revealed secrets.
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I think that the reason is DoD. A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth
You'd think that after President Clark did that with the planetary defense grid, any new deployments would have safety interlocks to prevent it from happening again.
Re:Congress is a bunch of fucking retards (Score:5, Informative)
A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth to look at details on the surface.
No. For two reasons:
First, it's an IR telescope. The reason they're putting it in space is to get it away from Earth's atmosphere, which is opaque to the IR wavelengths it's designed to detect. Earth would look like a light bulb for all the IR it gives off and there is zero chance of seeing the surface.
Second, even if it could somehow be used to see through the opaque atmosphere, it couldn't make out anything. The James Webb telescope has a claimed resolution of 0.1 arc-seconds. It's going to be put into the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million km from the Earth. At that distance and resolution, each pixel of the image would be ~730 meters square... just under half a mile. Useless for any kind of surveillance.
=Smidge=
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Isn't this a NASA project? If so, that's not DoD.
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IIRC there are already 4 Hubble equivalents up there looking down.
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As an email guy, I am concerned about the coverup happening with Lerner. Email doesn't work like that unless someone in IT is intentionally trying to keep things out of other's hands. Government email systems are required to keep all emails, so how could Lerner's hard drive crashing make any difference at all to the ability of the IRS to provide a record of all the emails? Why would she be setup with POP, IMAP, or PST so that she is storing anything locally, especially in a critical agency like the IRS?
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The scary thing is this is an obvious lie. And nobody cares, they operate with impunity now.
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I don't believe that was true at the time.
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The laws have been on the books since the 50's so if it wasn't, that is news to the gov. It has always included official records, the update that happened in 2014ish was to specify that E-mail is a record, and always has been.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
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That can't be true since email didn't really exist in the 1950's. Obviously one was not required to keep every single correspondence to everybody in the paper era forever. Further, paper could be damaged from rain, fire, insects, etc.
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The requirement is to keep Official Records. Those are transferred to the national archives. They are the ones who release items that are no longer classified. The paper records were for years maintained. When scanning became possible, the archives started digitizing everything. When digital methods came around of generating records, digital records were expected to be maintained and transferred just like the old paper ones.
Obviously the old laws didn't cover email specifically, but they covered record
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Watch? Who has the time to watch news. I get my news from web sites run by slashdot, BBC, CNN, and Fox, but I actually design email systems (many servers, not just single server), so I know a bit about it. I can also spell!
They're the boss. (Score:3)
I can understand the reluctance to speak to Congress, or their henchmen.
I don't think you understand how federal programs work.
In order to bid on a government project, you have to comply with *a lot* of rules. If you don't want to, you don't have to big on the project. They're just such an awfully big buyer that a lot of people are willing to comply with the rules.
It's like any other moment in life when you're dealing with an annoying and overly demanding client. If you're very lucky you don't have to--but they do put the food on your table.
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In Federal contracting law it specifies that contractors have the right to have a corporate representative present when being questioned during financial audits. So, in other words, they are allowed to refuse 1-on-1 audit interviews in favor of contractor+rep-on-1 interviews, but not to refuse ALL audit interviews.
There is a very good reason for this - financial regulations for contracting are insanely complicated, and individual contractor employees that are unaware of all the intricacies of the law can e
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Granted, but the Democrats are the other corrupt party, with almost as much baggage, who will gladly do whatever corporations or ALEC instruct them to do, or what legislation to pass. So the Democrats have been the lesser of evils for a very long time now. Voting for the other corporate-controlled, militaristic party doesn't seem like a viable plan for getting out of this mess. But I digress, Northrop Grumman is doing what all defense contractors do, screw up and charge the government more, because they can
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Under Bush we helped turn Iraq into democracy
LOL.
How many tens of thousands of lives did that cost? How many billions of dollars? For what? A sandcastle that collapses pretty quickly on its own?
Great deal that one!
Neither Bush did anything for Iraq, unless you count the first one leaving a ruthless dictator in power, and I'm not so sure we should. It certainly didn't end up working too well when his son decided to play nation-builder and failed to get the lasting support of the American People.
Y'know, the ones who really don't want to play around
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Neither Bush did anything for Iraq, unless you count the first one leaving a ruthless dictator in power, and I'm not so sure we should.
To be fair, the Kuwaitis probably did appreciate JB Senior kicking the Iraqis out of their country.
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And if we hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place and destabilized it ISIS might not exist at all.
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How far back would you like to go? If Iraq hadn't invaded Kuwait, we wouldn't have ever invaded them either, and ISIS wouldn't exist. But, much more recently, if we had left a stabilizing force, as many recommended, instead of removing everyone for political reasons, the same would be true.
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How far back would you like to go? If Iraq hadn't invaded Kuwait...
Which the US set in motion by putting Saddam in power AND all but gave approval of the invasion by essentially turning a blind eye to it. If the international community didn't raise such a stink over it, it's quite likely the our boy Saddam would still be at the reins.
And we put Saddam in power because the Iranian people decided that they didn't like being oppressed under the rule of a bloody dictator (the Shah) who was, no surprise, also put into power with the help of the US.
Al Quaeda? We bankrolled their
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Not disagreeing with much of anything you stated, but my response is more about the laying of blame...Republican or Democrat, as the parent/grandparent seemed to be doing. Both sides have been guilty, but when you have a long string of events that eventually end up in the toilet, you can't cherry pick which to blame. And normally, if there was an exit-ramp that wasn't taken, it's the most recently missed that should take ownership.
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Not to argue too much because I agree with your sentiment, but Obama had nothing to do with solders coming out of Iraq, that was all the Iraqi president who refused to allow US solders to stay in his country. Unless we want to actually act like a colonial power, we should leave a country when told to and not overstay our welcome.
A pattern, a very disturbing pattern ... (Score:1)
... With the spy chief lying to the Congress, with Northrop Grumman denying GAO's access to their workers, with Obama administration kowtowing to Qatar on the IS issues, ...
All these signs point to one thing --- the beginning of the end of the might of the United States of America
The government of the United States of America doesn't get the respect it used to get, the reputation of USA going down the drain, the piling up of debts (now fast approaching 18 Trillion) ... what kind of future USA gonna
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You probably are the parent, GTFO.
Re: Government Contractors (Score:3)
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Funny, when I here government inspectors, I always think incompetence.
Funny, when I think of government inspectors, I always think of corporate malfeasance. Bit maybe I've just been paying for late, over-budget governmental contracts for too long.
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Government contractors can get fired, I believe what you are looking for here is government employees which are difficult to fire.
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