VA Fiasco: How DUMB Does Obama Think We Are?

Quiz: How Dumb Does Obama Think We Are?

The Veterans Affairs policy fiasco is magnified by an insulting-public relations strategy.

By Ron Fournier, The National Journal

News quiz: President Obama and his communications team hope that Americans are: 1) Dumb; 2) Distracted; 3) Numb to government inefficiency; 4) All of above.

Answer: 4, all of the above.

That answer along with utter incompetence are the best explanations for why the White House thought it could get away with claiming that the departure of Veterans Affairs official Robert Petzel was a step toward accountability for its scandalous treatment of war veterans.

Fact is, the department announced in 2013 that Dr. Petzel would retire this year.

"Well, Secretary Shinseki accepted Dr. Petzel's resignation this afternoon. He was due to retire early next month, and obviously there has been a nomination made for his replacement," White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough told CBS's Major Garrett last week. "I leave to Rick the explanation of his decision, but there is no question that this is a termination of his job there before he was planning to go."

No. This was neither a termination nor a housecleaning. It was a scapegoating. For all of its 21st-century savvy in the field of campaign technology, the Obama White House has repeatedly proven that its communications philosophy is stuck in the 20th century. Before the Internet gave voters instantaneous access to information, including every public utterance of the president and his team, White House strategists could hope to wear out the truth: If you said a lie enough, people might believe it.

It's harder to BS the public these days. White House press secretary Jay Carney still tries. On Monday, he repeatedly suggested that the American Legion had praised the move.

Via: National Journal

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Veterans Affairs ‘Falsifying Reported Wait-Times’

Veterans Affairs purged thousands of medical tests to 'game' its backlog stats

 Thousands of orders for diagnostic medical tests have been purged en masse by the Department of Veterans Affairs to make it appear its decade-long backlog is being eliminated, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

About 40,000 appointments were “administratively closed” in Los Angeles, and another 13,000 were cancelled in Dallas in 2012.

That means the patients did not receive the tests or treatment that had been ordered, but rather the orders for the follow-up procedures were simply deleted from the agency’s records.

It is not known how widespread the practice is, or how many veterans hospitals have mass-purged appointment orders to clear their backlogs.

Alas, this feels all too familiar to someone who grew up with Britain’s National Health Service.

Here’s the thing: when one subordinates healthcare to government, one inevitably gets all of the usual government games. A favorite trick: Mrs. Jones needs a hip replacement, so she calls up her local NHS hospital to arrange it; the NHS tells Mrs. Jones that she should call back in a given amount of time, after which she will be treated within 24 or 48 or 72 hours — or however long the government has promised would elapse between “phone call” and “treatment”; Mrs. Jones waits the requisite amount of time, then calls, then gets her appointment; the state then says semi-truthfully that Mrs. Jones was given a hip replacement “quickly” and that the gap between her requesting the treatment and her receiving the treatment was short. Now, did Mrs. Jones actually get her hip replacement “quickly”? Of course not. She waited both the amount of time that the government recorded and the amount of time that it did not. But who cares? All that matters when the government is elected or fired based on its performance running the health system is what the government is able to say about how it is running the health system. So it lies its damn head off.

Via: Washington Examiner

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Obama Executive Order Triples Number Of Agencies Required To Track Guns…

President Obama is tripling the number of Cabinet agencies with gun control law enforcement responsibilities in his new bid to track guns, adding six agencies to the three typically included--Justice, Homeland Security and Defense.

Section 1.e of his executive order released Wednesday adds State, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Energy, and Veterans Affairs. It reads: "For purposes of this memorandum, 'Federal law enforcement agencies' means the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, the Interior, Agriculture, Energy, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, and such other agencies and offices that regularly recover firearms in the course of their criminal investigations as the President may designate."

Most federal agencies have a police or security arm, but typically law enforcement doesn't included those other six agencies. Justice, in fact, defines law enforcement this way on its web page:

"A federal law enforcement agency is an organizational unit, or subunit, of the federal government with the principle functions of prevention, detection, and investigation of crime and the apprehension of alleged offenders. Examples of federal law enforcement agencies include the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). BJS has surveyed federal law enforcement agencies seven times since 1993. The 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers (FLEO) included agencies that employed full-time officers with federal arrest authority who were also authorized (but not necessarily required) to carry firearms while on duty. The officer counts exclude officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Transportation Security Administration's Federal Air Marshals. Findings are based on the 2008 Census of Federal Law Enforcement Officers."

Via: The Examiner

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