Stuff that Just Ain’t Right

OK, first we had headlines about SUVs attacking people and property and now we have rebellious body parts causing problems. (With Bill Clinton visiting a nearby college today, this remark seems even more appropriate.)

Jose’s finger is reportedly resting comfortably, it is unclear if he is now considered “dismembered”. How the rest of Jose is feeling after the accident is unclear. Presumable the gun is at fault.

This license plate frame was seen yesterday. Oh, in case you were wondering, the driver was in fact a woman.

The commonality of both of these pictures seems to be public education.

Voter Fraud-Proof It’s Election Time

Hugh Hewitt wrote a book a few years ago called, If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat”.

Chicago has a reputation of dead guys voting. In fact I used to say, “When you die, you don’t quit voting, you just change parties”.

Well not to be out done, New York has finally found that 850 of their active, registered voters were alive when Lincoln was President.

Here’s the URL before it gets pulled down.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/22/850-people-officially-over-164-years-old-nyc-board-of-elections/

A single Bronx voter listed in official records as being 164 years old led Board of Elections officials to review their files — where they turned up another 849 New Yorkers who were supposedly alive when Abe Lincoln was president.
The stunning discovery came after The Post reported last week that the birth date of Luz Pabellon, a spry 73-year-old who has been living and voting in The Bronx since the 1970s, was recorded as Jan. 1, 1850.
This week, a search of the records in all five boroughs found 849 more voters with the same wacky birth date.

New York election officials promise to try to fix this after the election.

With people like this defending the integrity of the ballot box, is it any wonder that their ilk don’t have a problem when voter turnout is 120 percent of registration? Instead they say, “Nothing to see here, move along now”.

More Fraud

CHICAGO — Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats.

Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library.

“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

The conservative website Illinois Review reported that “While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/22/calibration-error-changes-gop-votes-to-dem-in-illinois-county/

Ebola is the Zombie Apocalypse

OK; actually, Ebola is The Strain meets the Zombie Apocalypse.

The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, tells the story of an employee from the Center for Disease Control, fighting against all odds to stop a plague that nobody believes can happen. One of his chief obstacles in preventing the spread of the disease is the director of the CDC—who is personally benefitting from the misery of others—and thus won’t do his job. The director’s political power is more important than doing the right thing.

Lest you think this type of ‘politics over public health’ only happens in the 2009 novel, here is Obama’s CDC Director,

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/cdc-you-can-give-can-t-get-ebola-bus

My nephew works in the hospital in Dallas which seems to be ground zero for this disease in the United States. I am not happy with what is going on.

Matt Drudge sums it up well on his website

The second nurse to get Ebola called CDC several times to be sure it was OK to fly on commercial airliner

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Vinson called the agency several times before flying, saying that she had a fever with a temperature of 99.5 degrees. But because her fever wasn’t 100.4 degrees or higher, she didn’t officially fall into the group of “high risk” and was allowed to fly.

Officials in the U.S. have been trying to calm fears over the Ebola crisis, but time and again events have overtaken their assurances.

In August, before the first U.S. infection, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said: “We’re confident that we have the facilities here to isolate patients, not only at the highly advanced ones like the one at Emory, but really at virtually every major hospital in the U.S.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ebola-nurse-called-cdc-several-times/

What training? Nurses had none

The statement, which was played in its entirety on CNN on Wednesday morning, also reports that Ebola training at the hospital was “optional,” “nurses have been left to train each other,” and that nurses who interacted with Duncan simply continued treating other patients.

According to the statement, “there was no advanced preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol, there was no system. The nurses were asked to call the Infectious Disease Department. The Infectious Disease Department did not have clear policies to provide either.”
The union added that “advanced preparation that had been done by the hospital primarily consisted of e-mailing us about one optional lecture or seminar on Ebola.  There was no mandate for nurses to attend training or what nurses had to do in the event of arrival of a patient with Ebola-like symptoms.”  And “there was no hands-on training on the use of personal protective equipment for Ebola, no training on the symptoms to look for, no training on what questions to ask.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/10/15/Nurses-We-Were-Told-to-Call-Authorities-for-Ebola-Protocol

Yeah, nurses treated the Ebola patient with no protective gear and then treated other patients. Oh, don’t forget that the hospital discharged the guy with Ebola and he returned a few days later when he was re-admitted and later died.

Memo to healthcare workings, treat this as a radiological accident (or dirty bomb attack) and your protective gear will be more in line with what you need to use.

Ok so what happens when ISIS decides to purposely shoot-up some people with this disease and dispatch them to Western countries to hang-out in shopping malls? The economic panic would be about the same as the Zombie Apocalypse. Economic chaos, government collapses, and general lawlessness. It may not result in the world of Mad Max but it could get quite far in that direction.

The end result is less personal freedom and more government control.

Oh, we are still issuing 100 Visas a day to people in the hardest hit African countries so they can travel to the United States. On the plus side, at least Aids is not the only disease with civil rights now.

Example of Why Govenment is Going Broke

When bureaucrats “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” that’s bad. When that bureaucrat is your boss it’s hell. I had that experience yesterday.

My main task at work is to do collections. This isn’t the typical “cold calling” where some guy in New York or Guatemala calls your house at dinnertime and threatens to remove your kneecaps or repo your car. My job is a lot more low keyed that that. I try to collect money from former California state employees that were over paid for a variety of reasons. Truthfully most of these screw-ups are the result of personnel specialists that don’t know what they are doing or that don’t follow-up from one month to the next resulting in an accumulation of unresolved issues. Government employees usually operate by the “squeaky wheel” method so if it doesn’t make noise then it doesn’t get fixed.

Well my department is hemorrhaging money—especially since it is financed out of the General Fund. Democrats try to defund law enforcement in any form since they believe criminals are not really bad people just socioeconomically disadvantaged. As a result, my department is making an effort to collect money owed to them.

The collection process here is anemic when compared to the private sector. In my department, employees owe millions of dollars due to overpayments. I’m tasked with trying to get about 1 ½ million from headquarters employees. (There are over thirty entities in my department with Headquarters being the largest.) Most of this money is never recovered; in part due to the restrictions placed on us by the government. We cannot go after any retirement money or disability payments—even if the employee owes tens of thousands of dollars. We also are bound by a notification statute—if you are not informed that you were overpaid within three years—the state can never go after you. Another constraint—which was removed two years ago—was that even if you owed the state money and everyone knew it, personnel was prohibited from collecting it from your final check unless you voluntarily allowed them to do so. In other words the standing policy was “bill me later”.

Last year, the collection unit for our department recovered about $120,000. It costs the department about double this amount in wages and benefits just to have my unit on the payroll. This collection recovery figure includes not just our efforts but those of the Franchise Tax Board (intercepting tax returns) and a collection agency acting on our behalf. My recollection is that FTB recovered just over four percent of the collection amount given to them while the collection agency recovered about two percent of the amount turned over to them.

Our collection efforts can only be triggered when two conditions are met: the employee has left state service—not just our department—and the first notification letter was sent within the three year statute. We then follow up with three letters sent at 30 day or longer intervals. Only after all letters are sent can we turn the people over to FTB and the collection agency. Typically this period is a two year cycle—at least on paper. The reality is that I have seen people at FTB for over seven years and similar intervals at the collection agency. Often no money is collected. Some people have been thru the collection cycle two and three times. If we don’t have records of previous collection attempts or they are incomplete then management will make us do the whole thing over again. The presumption is that if we don’t have the records then nothing was ever done. The burden is on the former employees to prove that we have already attempted collection.

Historically, management is reluctant to write-off anything once the collection process is complete. Prior to taking on the responsibility of Headquarters a few months ago, another agency that I had responsibility for had items in collections dating back to 1998—these are still actively in the collection process.

Once that first letter is made, we will periodically hound former employees. Death is not a barrier to our collection efforts. I often sent letters to dead people that read in part, “Should you return to State service, SCO will notify the Department you have reinstated with to pursue collection of your overpayment to CDCR.”

This job is not very difficult once the work is organized. I am confident that I sent more collection letters out last month than the rest of my unit put together. Let’s just say that Rush Limbaugh is not the only guy that shows up to work every day with “half his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair”.

Typically, personnel will not generate one collection letter for everything on an employee’s account but letters are generated individually or in small batches for most items. Occasionally, other items occur after the collection process has begun. We have no control over this process. 30 days after the first letters are generated and sent to the employee, responsibility falls on my unit to continue the collection process.

Yesterday, my supervisor refused to sign the collection letters for two employees because we were missing collection letters for items on their accounts. My reaction was, really? I try to do my best when generating these letters so I took a look at the accounts to see what the issue was. I was incredulous. The amounts necessary to halt collection were thirteen and fifty-nine cents respectively.

Just so you understand what my supervisor was demanding… I was expected to send emails to each personnel specialist instructing them to complete the forms for .13 and .59 cents. The forms were then to be placed in envelopes, stamped and mailed to the employees. A copy of each letter would then need to be scanned and attached in the accounting program with the original filed in the employee’s personnel file. Then I would have to wait for 30 days before continuing collections. Yeah, I know: postage and an envelope cost more than that but this is the government.

As a taxpayer and a human being, this instruction was offensive. Instead, I printed copies of the accounting items and then taped a dime, nickel and two pennies to the item for seventeen cents and the taped two quarters, a nickel and four pennies to the other document for fifty-nine cents and submitted them for deposit. Once the payment is posted I can continue collections on the employees.

I have the satisfaction that I saved the taxpayers a few dollars and denied a few bureaucrats a pyric victory by letting common sense triumph over process.