These are Civil Service jobs, supposedly they are non-patronage positions to be based on merit and qualifications, so how in hell are these folks being placed in them? How can they be placed in positions that have Civil Service protections?

This is simply one more reason to introduce a board in Congress to IMPEACH those from offices that they are not qualified for or who have undertaken “high crimes and misdemeanors” and to permanently remove them from Government Service and any benefits accrued therefrom (pensions). As well bar them from any position of “trust, honor or profit” from the United States (i.e. no lobbying, contracts, lonas, grants, etc.).

These folks need to be purged, and any resume padding that they got from their incompetance should be actually a hindrance to getting a corporate position.

“Oh you were impeached and convicted when you were were head of NOAA? That means we can’t get a Federal contract if you work here…sorry…there’s the door!”

This has got to be a coincidence, right?

In one recent example, Todd Harding — a 30-year-old political appointee at the Energy Department — applied for and won a post this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There, he told colleagues in a Nov. 12 e-mail, he will work on “space-based science using satellites for geostationary and meteorological data.”

and, from the normally sober Bob Park, this:

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 21 Nov 08 Washington, DC

1. DSCOVR: WHAT IS IT THEY DON’T WANT THE WORLD TO SEE?
At a meeting of 44 top climate scientists in Frankfurt, Germany in March,
it was agreed that observations from the L-1 point, a stable point between
the Sun and Earth, are essential for assessing changes in cloud cover and
climate. The latest plan for the Deep Space Climate Observatory is to
park it at the L-1 point, from which it could forever stare at the Sun,
but modify it to prevent it from looking back at Earth. It sounds like
the biblical story of Lot. The plan, said to be urged by the Air Force, is
the latest chapter in the bizarre history of DSCOVR, which was to have
been launched in 2001. Instead it was kept in solitary confinement in
Greenbelt, MD. From the L-1 point it could have continuously monitored
reflected and emitted radiation from the whole Earth. What don’t they
want us to see?

NOAA at one point offered to take over the DSCOVR mission, but NASA refused without explanation.

I read too much science fiction.

I seem to recall someone commenting that actually knows about the whole CS thing(JimWhite, perhaps?), that said that if a person has less than 3 years in the CS position, they are still probationary.

The Office of Personnel Management tries to defend these choices in the source article, but I think it’s pretty clear that some of these politicos aren’t qualified for the jobs they are being given. Let’s have some hearings, Congress!

Isn’t there a probationary period before these positions come under Civil Service protection? Maybe some of these guys got in under the wire, but if they didn’t, can them. I want to know as others here do who are the people who hired them. They should minimum get a letter in their files which might put their own future promotions in jeopardy. If you want to stop this kind of thing, you go after the people who allow it.

I would certainly hope that there is a way to prove that these people got these position by a little “insider trading” and that they will be gone quickly. Jeez, I wish I knew that civil service jobs were that easy to come by in the science field. My son has a biology degree and taught junior high school. He could probably head NOAA with those credentials.

These burrowed Bushniks are a lot like roadside IEDs waiting for a convoy from the next administration to drive by. At least now we know, they have learned SOMETHING from the Iraq debacle.

We could Liarman conduct the hearings and turn them into big cumbaya fests /s

Didn’t George Bush put in his daughter Jenna’s ex-boyfriend over at NASA? And he fired a bunch of the REAL scientists and brought in fake ones and had them rewrite some of the older reports to reflect today that global warming isn’t real or something like that? He was 22 years old when he got the job.

How many people have already been burrowed in? Hugh, are you making a list?

I’ve seen these types of people in every workplace. They excel at shameless self-promotion and little (or nothing else). In the private sector they tend to fill the ranks of middle management, except for the really exceptional self-promoters who move up to senior management. With so many talentless idiots running things, I’ve often marveled at the fact that this country isn’t completely immobilized by incompetence.

They have been putting loyal Bushies in positions they are not qualified since day one.
These are different.
once in, it is nigh on impossible to get em back out.

If you put a match to a tick it will back out>

What makes the current round of burrowing so troubling is that the kind of people that Bush has put in politically appointed positions are qualitatively different from those of other Administrations both Democratic and Republican. With Bush, it wasn’t a question of liberal vs conservative. Istead as I document in my scandals list, he chose people diametrically opposed to the core agencies in which they worked. Anti-labor people in the Labor Department. Pro-mining interests in charge of mining safety boards. Pro-development people at Interior. Anti-environmentalists at the EPA. And this didn’t happen here or there. It happened across the board and several layers down into the bureaucracy. This is why the Bush burrowers are both different and dangerous.

With so many talentless idiots running things, I’ve often marveled at the fact that this country isn’t completely immobilized by incompetence.

I’ve often said that what is amazing is not that things are working as badly as they do but that they work at all. Our elites have become a very expensive place to park layers and layers of deadwood. They not only make consistently bad decisions they prevent anyone qualified from making a good one.

Stirling Newberry up at the Mothership

BTW anyone gotten Boxer to ‘fess up about how she voted on Lieberman?

That was the Bush philosophy from the outset, best illustrated by his cabinet choices. For example Secretary of the Interior Christine Whitman espoused allowing industries to monitor their own compliance with antipollution regulations.

FWIW, I believe Whitman was EPA in Bush’s first term and resigned because she couldn’t promote the “Clean Skies” crap with a straight face.

We need to come up with a catchy name for this, like “rat packing.”

how did they pass the civil service exam?

You are correct regarding her role. She was actually one of Bush’s less terrible picks. She is way too Republican for me but she’s smart and capable and I couldn’t help but wonder how she must have felt when McCain selected an ignoramus like Palin as his running mate.

did anyone get the vote count? yeas and nays?

We can call attempts to eradicate them the “Roach Patrol.”

I believe the announced caucus vote on the single resolution was 42-13 in favor of Short Ride keeping his gavel.

It is all about consolidating the neo conservative dictatorship. The neo-cons hate science and scientists. They are trying to purge the scientificlly and politically incorrect. The Bushie Commissars have used the 9-11 attacks (financed by the neo-cons themselves) to discover the political activities of scientists.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers sued NASA and the California Institute of Technology on Thursday, challenging extensive new background checks that the space exploration center and other federal agencies began requiring in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks…

Commerce Department and NASA instituted requirements that employees and contractors permit sweeping background checks to qualify for credentials and refusal would mean the loss of their jobs.

NASA calls on employees to permit investigators to delve into medical, financial and past employment records, and to question friends and acquaintances about everything from their finances to sex lives, according to the suit. The requirements apply to everyone from janitors to visiting professors.

Their “faith based” loyalty to the Bushie Crime Family is everywhere, not just in DC civil service jobs. I recently posted about Kris Kobach, Kansas Republican chairman, and his Loyalty committee, to purge insufficiently loyal Republicans. I am guessing almost every community has similar stories of Bushies political purges by their own local neo-con “gruppenfuehrers”.

wow.

thanks.

wow.

In other words, 43 who deserve a primary challenge.

But they’re all doin such a heckuva job, bownie!

I must disagree. That WITCH Whitman told the people of New York that their air was safe to breath after the 9-11 attack. Whitman and the Federal government knew the air was extremely toxic with asbestos and other horrible poisons. They deliberately deceived the people of New York. Those who had the breath the poisoned air continue to die from respiratory deseases. Whitman deserves much of the blame.

or in the case of those we can’t get rid of, roach motelers.

an updating list of late Bush shenanigans to keep in mind and get after folks about.

http://www.propublica.org/spec.....gulations/

She was being a team player. Don’t think we really disagree. She wasn’t as nefarious as some in the Bush cabal but she wouldn’t get my vote for dog-catcher.

Wow. Another sternly worded letter. Our government is safe at last.

Any chance the existing agencies could be done away with if there is no other way, and new ones instituted staffed with people of proper training and schooling? There has to be a way to undo another Bush ratf*&k.

One of the big issues with the corruption-ridden Grant administration, one of the most corrupt in history, was civil service reform.

Maybe with the unions involved participating to protect real career professionals Obama’s people might be able to ask for and receive the resignations of everyone hired in the past eight years with an eye towards hiring back the real professionals that deserve the jobs and throwing the Bush chaff to the wind.

It took 30 years for the Soviet Union to expel all the untrained bureaucrats that Stalin put into the Russian Academy of Science and the Scientific institutions associated with it. The ended up destroying the biological science, agricultural and genetics sections with something called Lysenkoism. The only benefit was that many of the young Russian biologists escaped to the United States (Theodosius Dobzhansky and Michael Lerner) and this sped up the end of the eugenics movement in the West. But most of the great Russian biological scientists either ended up working as trashmen, were sent to Siberia if they complained too much, or were executed for thought crimes.

Even some physicists and geologists fell into the web of recriminations…scientists tend to have a bad habit of defending other scientists against imbeciles who make decisions based on political agendas rather than the Scientific method.

My suggestion is that there be a general review of the qualifications of those in management and communication areas of these agencies. Do we really want people who believe in witchcraft and curses and “evil” as a cause of disease at the CDC? Or global warming deniers still embedded at NOAA? Or “Big Bang” deniers and those who believe the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago at NASA?

That’s a terrible thought. Also do you realize how much this is going to cost US in many ways to get rid of these people? Congress could spend the next 4 years trying to uproot them all.
Nadler: http://www.gather.com/viewArti.....4977515575 wants to deny Bush the power to blanket pardon his administration. I think there must a blanket investigation into practically everyone he’s appointed also. And don’t forget the judges…never forget the judges.

We’ve already seen an exodus of scientists from America too. they’ve gone to Europe. Thanks George, ya meathead.