Librarians School Ivanka Trump After Tone-Deaf Tweet

Me is mine, you is yours. Very beautiful imo.

 

congrats again on winning round 2

 

None of those facilities lost power during Hurricane Sandy even though all but the hospital were built before the library. Neither did any of the schools either even though one of them is 100 years old because they are all designated shelters in the event of emergencies. The local elected officials actually know what they doing and have done an excellent job IMO.

 

Excuses much? HC.gov is the poster-child for federal mismanagement, waste & inefficiency. And, the only reason it became public knowledge was because the Oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee requested the GAO investigate it! Of course, the investigation was done AFTER the money was spent, not before.
Ray, if you had a financial manager who pissed away your money the way the federal government does our tax-dollars you'ed probably sue, if you had any money left, that is. So, give it a rest. Your defense of government (so-called) "accountability" is pure nonsense.

 

Thanks to partisan hyperbole. When you look at the underlying causes, and what they were trying to do, it doesn't really hold up as a poster child.

Er, how do you think "accountability" works?

You cite an example of accountability, and then claim accountability doesn't exist. Okay.

 

Parts of the gov't absolutely needs to be run like a business, I never said ALL.

When you are running massive deficits you need to trim the fat and become more efficient, government struggles with that concept.

"Enhancing the experience" at a library is not a critical need, its nice, but not practical when the gov't is broke.

If you don't think there is government waste, if you think we are running as efficient as possible, if you don't think there is redundancy, then we can simply agree to disagree.

 

If cutting waste was the main focus and this "expense" was a significant cost relative to the entire deficit, then there are much easier targets for cuts that would be significantly more effective. An investment in education is just that, an investment in the future.

 

I have worked in the private sector, including owning my own business, been a volunteer for non-profits and, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, a volunteer trustee at a public library.

The greatest waste that I encountered was in large Fortune 500 corporations and it was almost always accompanied by dumb "cost cutting" measures that ended up costing even more to remediate afterwards and/or office politics when someone with an agenda was out to "prove something" irrespective of the cost.

The non-profit was exceptionally cost conscience and careful with the funds that it had because it could not afford any waste. The library was much the same since they had to fit within state funding guidelines. They subsidized their budget with book sales and the help of library volunteers to keep down costs.

So you are more than welcome to believe the extremist alt right disinformation that everything about the government is wasteful but that simply is not always the case. The single biggest waste of taxpayer funds is the military and yet there is no politician on the right willing to tackle that massive problem by slashing that budget line item.

 

Ron Paul!

 

OH, BS. The underlying causes amounted to federal mismanagement and unqualified leadership pissing away tax dollars, period.

Er, in regards to the federal government, not all that well.

LOL...Ray, labeling this as an example of "accountability" is laughable.
The Committees' 34-page report explains just how bad management, poor oversight, lack of communication, and intense political pressure combined to produce a technology failure of epic proportions. It's an all too familiar tale of government incompetence. And it offers a preview of the eye-popping sums of taxpayer dollars Obamacare is poised to waste in the years ahead.
Nine months before the launch of HealthCare.gov, back in December 2012, top administration officials reassured the public that all was well with the website's development.
That month, Gary Cohen, the former director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told a congressional panel that "the planning, development, and testing necessary to build the exchanges is well under way."
Seven months later, the agency told the Government Accountability Office that "we are in the final stages of finalizing and testing the IT infrastructure" and are "extremely confident that on Oct. 1 the marketplace will be open on schedule."
In August 2013, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius promised that "there is nothing that is not on track."
Behind the scenes, those working on HealthCare.gov were far more pessimistic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallyp...ts-of-the-healthcare-gov-fiasco/#30fabe102226

Yet, your idea of accountability is akin to Obama's, who heaped praise on Sebelius for her accomplishments in the HHS Secretary post???????

 

no arguments with the military discussion that should be tackled as well as other wasteful, redundant area's of government. Won't be easy.

 

As the report said, they had never managed a project of this size before, and didn't have the staff trained to do so. That combined with staff turnover resulted in management failures on the project.

The big contributing factor was the size and scope of the project. Which is why trying to point to this as an example of normal government practice isn't really valid. If you want to show that waste and mismanagement are routine in government, then you have to show it in routine projects. And show that it is prevalent, not isolated.

Way to avoid the question. Try again.

Only because you don't seem to understand what the term "accountable" means. It does not mean "no mistakes." It does not mean "catching all errors before the fact." It means "holding people accountable AFTER the fact", as well as "making sure the necessary information is available to judge how something was done."

So in terms of accountability, we have reams of it: data, reports, audit trails, oversight ... TONS of information on how things went down in the healthcare.gov project.

Indeed, here is a case study a management expert did on healthcare.gov -- in which he obtained a ton of documents through FOIA requests. That is transparency, which leads to accountability.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-spectacular-fall-and-fix-of-healthcare-gov

You might want to read that study. It outlines a bunch of things that were unique to healthcare.gov:

• The administration expected each state to build its own exchange. Instead, 36 GOP governors refused to do so. So suddenly the federal government was tasked with building what was essentially 36 different exchanges. It was a job they weren't expecting and didn't want, and had done no serious planning for.
• The task, as I have said repeatedly, was practically unprecedented. It was huge.
• There was literally NO agency with both knowledge of health-care issues and the managerial experience to tackle such a giant project. So it ended up falling to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Support. Which was logical in one sense, but they were totally unprepared to take on this project. Is that mismanagement? Or just the reality of dealing with such an unprecedented project?
• After that you had a bunch of issues that are common in large organizations -- lack of communication, unwillingness to send bad news up the ladder, etc. To the extent that the top people never received information suggesting the project was troubled. All of it made worse by the time constraints and political pressure involved.
• There was also the problem of turning to the usual government contractors, who had never done a job like this. THAT is a good example of bureaucratic pathology -- nobody ever got fired for using the usual suspects. But it was a problem that stemmed, again, from the fact that this project was of a scale never attempted before. 9 times out of 10, the usual suspects do just fine on the usual projects.

In terms of holding people responsible, Sebelius resigned over it, and the main contractor, CGI General, got fired. That's accountability.

I would not "heap praise" on Sebelius, no. But I would also recognize that she was not totally in the loop on the project, just like a CEO is not personally involved in major tech projects. She needed to resign, and she did.

 

How does the federal Government collecting taxes from the people and business of a state, to only give it back to the state with strings attached, to fund their libraries, improve general welfare?

 

Also, all commercial digital devices and storage are still vulnerable to radiation, EMP, hacking, etc. Books are still (ironically) a good backup.

 

In 5 to 10 years or less, the public library will be come extinct. The only place you'll find them is in schools and then they will be a small collection of computers with internet access to serve the kids without them at home. The old fashioned public library's simply cost too much and aren't used much. In California it's where the homeless go to look at internet porn. I thought ya'all were progressives? This is what progress is.

 

Not all Dinosaurs are extinct....some species adapted and survive intact to this day. Some in still in their primitive form and others more evolved....

 

This comment is a reach, an asteroid/meteor played a role.

 

You missed what he was trying to say.

 

OK, so this is your latest excuse; there was literally was no agency blah, blah, blah. And who's fault is that, the tax payers? I mean, the Dem's set all the deadlines, right? So, are you saying they were accountable & clueless? That they had good intentions so they deserve a pass? That Sebelius, the head brain at the time, was so out of touch with her own project she told Congress basically "hey, no problem....everything is smooth sailing"? Christ, I could on for ever describing how "F"ed up this one project was and how much waste resulted. So please, stop the excuse nonsense. It's getting ridiculous.

 

Um, yeah. That's my "excuse."

It's the fault of reality. When you're trying to do something unprecedented, you often start out behind the eight-ball and learn as you go.

I'm saying they were confronted with a massive task they were not expecting to be confronted with, and a tight timeline to get it done. As you may recall, there was no way to tweak Obamacare (to, say, change the deadlines) because the GOP (who by this time controlled the House and had long held a filibuster position in the Senate) refused to allow it.

Um, yeah. That's what the management case study I linked to said. People doing the work were reluctant to pass bad news up the chain, so the top decision makers had no idea the project was so far off the rails. Welcome to life in large organizations -- not just the government.

I agree it was a mess. I'm just pointing out that there were a whole bunch of contributing factors that make healthcare.gov more comparable to the NASA moon missions than routine government operations. It is not a good way to support your claim that government is routinely wasteful and inefficient.

 

The federal government has no obligation to insure a citizen can read a first edition of a book or any book, stop showing your ignorance about how our government works over here.

 

There are many things the government has no OBLIGATION to do, that are still a good idea. Ensuring widespread and equal access to learning and research materials being one such thing.

 

The preamble has no standing as to the defined functions of the government that is spelled out in the context and nowhere does it say the federal government shall provide public libraries. And the tax and spend clause authorizes the funding of the general welfare of the federal government not the citizens. If you want one in your town or city then you and your fellow citizens of that town or city can fund it.

 

Only it they are Constitutionally authorized expenditures of federal revenues and funding libraries is not, take it up with you local or state government.

 

We don't nearly the libraries since we have this new thing called the internet. You know, it's that thing Al Gore invented. What are we still pilgrims?