You all persuade him to knock it off. Good luck!

I live on the water, my boat is ready, and the fish are bitin’…

Later!

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39755&dcn=todaysnews

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39714&dcn=todays_most_popular

Still catching up on my reading…

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39702&dcn=todaysnews

The latest is that DOD is calling it a “coding error”.

Well, “fool me once…” but its unlikely this could occur twice as the code supposedly doesn’t legacy on to new applications.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/hey-feds-theres-this-thing-called.html

You have skills.

I view niblet as a conduit for rightist memes. I wonder if this latest about Democrat congressmen portends the newest attempt to blame the war…on the Democrats! If so, it is laughably weak.

The Democrats did it.

The Clintons did it.

Code Pink did it.

The Quakers did it.

The wounded Iraqi vets did it.

Yeah, we know.

“subrosa conflicts of interest”

that may be whats in the freezer.

We will see how this plays out. At the very minimum we will get the information on who evaluated the bids. We then will see them called to testify and thats when it will get interesting.

Go Davidson!!

My cynical guess at a scenario: Someone had a hook, as we used to say. This is going to lead to someone’s freezer in Washington. To that I would invest a few quid.

What the developing story will reveal, I confidently predict, is that the bid AEY submitted was evaluated by a third party contractor hired to do such evaluations.

Your government may have not made the decision. A private contractor may have, and made the recommendation to the procurement officer and that’s the way a huge amount of bids are awarded nowadays.

Your average citizen believes we are still doing things the old way. An O6 sitting in an office somewhere in the Pentagon looks at a stack of bids and rationally and impartially chooses the “best” one.

Not always. Such work is often performed by outside contractors who often as not may have subrosa conflicts of interest.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39586&ref=rellink

All my grant proposals to harvest brain tissue from House Republicans have met with rejections from the NSF.

How can Science advance at this rate?!

I know. Every time I ask for even a million, the government gets all snotty.

The last time I checked, such bids required extensive disclosure.

See it for yourself:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=31397346

Here’s a little update from The Guardian newspaper:

“The Pentagon entrusted a 22-year-old previously arrested for domestic violence and having a forged driving licence to be the main supplier of ammunition to Afghan forces at the height of the battle against the Taliban, it was reported yesterday.

AEY, essentially a one-man operation based in an unmarked office in Miami Beach, Florida, was awarded a contract worth $300m (£150m) to supply the Afghan army and police in January last year. But as the New York Times reported in a lengthy investigation, AEY’s president, Efraim Diversoli, 22, supplied stock that was 40 years old and rotting packing material.

“Much of the ammunition comes from the ageing stockpiles of the old communist bloc, including stockpiles that the state department and Nato have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed,” the paper said.”

To all but kermudgeon:
The webpage for the article is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/28/afghanistan.usa

That you thought the NYT out of business is no surprise to me.

Yes, but probably not.

Entrepeneur, is that what righties call business people who cheat the government, engage in war profiteering and jeopardize US allies’ and potentially US soldiers lives? Let’s see, no-bid contracts to Halliburton who gave foul water to US troops in Iraq or the indiscriminate mercenary murderers/rapists of Blackwater–I guess the answer is yes.

From NYT

“….Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

But I could be wrong.

Do you think the contract specs called for 40 year old Chinese ammo rather than new Hungarian rounds? If not, he’s a fraud. Plus, I guess you missed the part in the article where it clearly indicated the ammo was “corroded,” and judging by its age, could have been used against American vessels by the NVA in the Gulf of Tonkin. Nothing gives you confidence on a battlefield like legitimate worries about your ammo. Must you really read only those parts you like. Try the entire article occasionally. It saves a lot of embarrassment.

The problem is it WAS from China. The packaging had deteriorated which drew attention to it. Had this ammunition been repackaged I doubt if anyone would have ever noticed.

Interesting how the left celebrates a celebrity such as the Girls Gone Wild founder who ends up in jail, but a young entrepaneur is considered guilty before there is even a trial.

This doesn’t sound like anything a team of 2 $500 an hour attorneys can’t get him out of…….but I could be wrong.