"Official Washington" Is The Last Outpost Of The Blackberry

I found this story to be quite amusing for a number of reasons. Here is the Washington Post with the details:

Outside Washington, the world is moving at warp speed away from the BlackBerry. At its maker, profits are declining and executives are leaving, and the BlackBerry has even conceded its perch as the top smartphone in its native Canada.

Inside the Beltway, time stands still. A half million federal workers — President Obama and his staff among them — are still thumbing little black keyboards on little black devices. And that number hasn’t dipped over the past few years while Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s maker, has recorded plummeting sales everywhere else.

The slow-moving federal bureaucracy is keeping the BlackBerry around. But RIM’s intensifying troubles and thriving rivals are confronting Washington with a question: Should it break its “crackberry” addiction?

Some agencies are already loosening their policies to let their workers choose other smartphones. Lawmakers and aides can now bring iPhones into the halls of Congress.

But, for the most part, the federal government hasn’t joined the smartphone revolution.

“We appreciate RIM’s focus on security, which is paramount for government use,” said Casey Coleman, the chief information officer at the General Services Administration. The agency has issued some iPhones and Android-based phones for staffers, but the vast majority of its 12,000 agency-issued smartphones are BlackBerrys.

But Coleman added that other platforms are proving equally secure. The GSA, she said, places “a priority on adoption where appropriate of innovative new technologies,”

Agencies and big contractors note that the BlackBerry is cheaper than the iPhone and many Android devices. IT departments across the government have years-long contracts with RIM and the wireless carriers that promote the device. And tech staffers at federal agencies are trained to fix BlackBerry products, which makes it harder to switch to new technologies, analysts say.

Plus, newer devices aren’t as secure as the BlackBerry, some agency officials said.

The slow pace of change has made the BlackBerry as much a part of federal culture as short-sleeve, white-collared shirts were among NASA engineers or lapel pins are among politicians on Capitol Hill. Some analysts even expect Washington to become the last bastion for RIM’s devices.

That would leave many Washingtonians with smartphone envy.

Paul Silder, a government contractor, says he feels stuck with the BlackBerry that the Department of Homeland Security gave him.

So the 44-year-old father of two is left longing for an iPhone or an Android that he can proudly tuck into the holster on his left hip.

“I want a bigger screen. I only really use it for work, but it would be nice to surf the Web more easily,” Silder sighs.

Not to be crass, Mr. Silder, but you should actually feel really lucky that you still have a secure, high paying job. It's infinitely better to be stuck with a small penis screen that to be foraging around in dumpsters for your meals.

Actually, the Feds may soon not have any choice but to change their cellphone technology:

Overall, BlackBerry’s dominance has quickly faded. Today, phones based on Google’s Android software account for 48 percent of the market, while Apple’s iPhone has 32 percent and BlackBerrys have dropped to a distant third place with 12 percent.

Last week, RIM reported quarterly earnings that missed analysts’ expectations. Its profit dropped to $418 million in the last three months of 2011, compared with the $934 million it earned during the same period in 2010. Several senior executives resigned their posts, including former co-chief executive Jim Balsillie. On Monday, RIM’s stock fell about 9.5 percent in regular trading.

It sounds like in a couple of more years, tops, that this problem is going to sort itself out. Much to the relief of this twit:

Lindsey Bowen, a 29-year-old program director at the Junior Statesmen Foundation, often has to defend her BlackBerry as iPhone- and Android-obsessed friends mock her device. Seen as outdated and uncool, it's become the Washington worker’s fashion equivalent of a hard-shell Samsonite briefcase.

“Tell us again, how many apps do you have on that thing?” they tease.

The mind reels at just how superficial some people can be.


Bonus: Sounds like the Feds are getting the long distance runaround

The Scum Also Rises: The 50 Most Powerful People in Washington

Once again, GQ Magazine has put together its list of the 50 Most Powerful People in Washington (other than Obama and Biden). The article is a slideshow with details on each person listed and why they were chosen, but I've reprinted the actual list below. Even though I think some of the choices are a bit daffy (the list includes Washington Nationals pitcher Steven Strasburg, but not Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi...WTF?), it really is all you need to know to know why we're screwed.

1. Eric Cantor: Virginia Representative, House Majority Leader

2. Mitch McConnell: Kentucky Senator, Senate Minority Leader

3. David Plouffe: Senior Advisor to the President

4. Leon Panetta: Secretary of Defense

5. Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State

6. Ben Bernanke: Chairman, Federal Reserve

7. David Petraeus: Director, CIA

8. Kevin McCarthy: California Representative, House Majority Whip

9. Peter Rouse: Counselor to the President, the White House

10. Tom Donohue: President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

11. Tim Geithner: Treasury Secretary

12. John Boehner: Ohio Representative, Speaker of the House

13. Karl Rove, Steven Law, Ed Gillespie: American Crossroads & Crossroads GPS

14. Tommy Boggs: Chairman, Patton Boggs

15. Dan Pfeiffer: White House Communications Director

16. Gene Sperling and Jack Lew: Director, White House National Economic Council & New White House Chief of Staff

17. Chuck Schumer: New York Senator

18. Grover Norquist: President, Americans for Tax Reform

19. Chuck Todd: Chief White House Correspondent, NBC News

20. David Rhodes & Ben Rhodes: President, CBS News; Deputy National Security Advisor and speechwriter

21. Paul Ryan: Wisconsin Representative

22. Denis McDonough: Deputy National Security Adviser

23. Heather and Tony Podesta: Heather Podesta + Partners; Podesta Group

24. Chris Van Hollen: Maryland Representative

25. Paul D. Clement: Partner, Bancroft

26. Jim DeMint: South Carolina Senator

27. Kathy Ruemmler: White House Counsel

28. Joe Pounder: Research Director, Republican National Committee

29. Tim Scott: South Carolina Representative

30. Nancy Hogan: Director, Presidential Personnel

31. Brian Deese: Deputy Director, White House National Economic Council

32. Arne Duncan: Secretary of Education

33. Jake Sullivan: Director of Policy Planning, State Department

34. Ezra Klein: Blogger, The Washington Post

35. Rob Nabors: White House Director of Legislative Affairs

36. Bill Daley: (Former) Chief of Staff, White House

37. Patty Murray: Washington Senator

38. Capital Weather Gang: Bloggers, The Washington Post

39. Liz Cheney: Co-Founder, Keep America Safe

40. Mike Allen: Reporter, Politico

41. José Andrés: Restaurateur

42. Svetlana Legetic, Jayne Sandman, Barbara Martin: Party planners

43. Marco Rubio: Florida Senator

44. Jeremy Bernard: White House Social Secretary

45. Charles Krauthammer: Syndicated Columnist

46. Chris Dodd: Chairman, Motion Picture Association of America

47. Stephen Strasburg: Pitcher, Washington Nationals

48. Jack Quinn: Chairman, Quinn Gillespie & Associates

49. James Alefantis: Restaurateur and Bon Vivant

50. Bradley Graham & Lissa Muscatine: Owners, Politics & Prose

Bonus: Imagine how much better off we'd all be if Washington's very own Fugazi topped the list instead

More Than Half a Trillion Dollars Needed to Fix America's Water and Sewer Systems

Though the rapid deterioration of the nation's roads and bridges gets more publicity, the similar situation involving our water and sewage systems may in fact be even more dire, as indicated by this rather sobering story from the Washington Post:

At first glance, the pizza-size hole that popped open when a heavy truck passed over a freshly paved District street seemed fairly minor.

Then city inspectors got on their bellies with a flashlight to peer into it. What they discovered has become far too common. A massive 19th-century brick sewer had silently eroded away, leaving a cavern beneath a street in Adams Morgan that could have swallowed most of a Metro bus.

It took three weeks and about a million dollars to repair the sewer, which was built in 1889.

Time and wear “had torn off all the bricks and sent them God knows where,” said George S. Hawkins, general manager of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. “We have to find them and see if they’re plugging up the system somewhere farther down the line.”

Sadly, this isn't just a Washington story:

Although they are out of sight and out of mind except when they spring a leak, water and sewer systems are more vital to civilized society than any other aspect of infrastructure.

Rapidly deteriorating roads and bridges may stifle America’s economy and turn transportation headaches into nightmares, but if the nation’s water and sewer systems begin to fail, life as we know it will too. Without an ample supply of water, people don’t drink, toilets don’t flush, factories don’t operate, offices shut down and fires go unchecked. When sewage systems fail, cities can’t function and epidemics break out.

“All the big cities have these problems, and to me it’s the unseen catastrophe,” Hawkins said. “My humble view is that the industry we’re in is the bedrock of civilization because it’s not just an infrastructure that is a convenience, that allows you to get to work faster or slower. At least with bridges or a road, people have some idea of what it is because they drive on them and see them. ”

And just like roads and bridges, the vast majority of the country’s water systems are in urgent need of repair and replacement. At a Senate hearing last month, it was estimated that, on average, 25 percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before reaching the faucet. The same committee was told it will take $335 billion to resurrect water systems and $300 billion to fix sewer systems.

Kudos to the Washington Post for not understating what the risks are of this particular infrastructure crisis. And a crisis is what it is. For just about two-thirds of the cost of the Iraq War, America could have addressed this situation, which given the potential for a major epidemic outbreak is obviously a far greater threat to our national security than Saddam's Hussein's non-existant weapons of mass destruction ever were.

Probably, the most frightening part of this story came at the very end:

Firefighters are equipped with computerized cue sheets to tell them which of the 9,157 hydrants in the District have enough water pressure to put out a fire.

Someday, they are going to do that check and the answer is going to be "none." And then the city will really be in trouble.

But hey, didn't Rick Santorum say something stupid about gay marriage again on the campaign trail the other day? I guess all is well in the republic and this report can be safely dismissed as the ramblings of an unbalanced Cassandra.

MSNBC: Washington's Air & Space Museum Shut After Protesters "Storm In"

The mainstream media's coverage of the Occupy movement has been to sum it up in one word: pathetic. This was demonstrated again today with the headline above that appeared on MSNBC describing an altercation that occurred yesterday between protesters and security guards at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum:

Washington's National Air and Space Museum was closed Saturday afternoon after sign-wielding demonstrators tried to storm the building on the National Mall.

Yikes! Batten down the hatches, honey! The hippie barbarians are at the gates ready to rape and pillage!

So how bad was it? Judge for yourself:

At least one person was pepper sprayed when the crowd pinned a guard against a wall and another guard came to his rescue, Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas told NBC station WRC.

"You cannot bring that stuff in the museum under any circumstances," St. Thomas told WRC.

Wow--that's quite a "storming," all right. I'm surprised anyone got out of there alive.

A video of the Smithsonian incident has since appeared on You Tube, which seems to indicate that far more than just one person was pepper sprayed by the security staff:



And this horribly slanted coverage is by the supposedly liberal MSNBC. It's like I've said before, any individual or institution owned by or that takes any money from big business or Wall Street is not to be trusted.

The “Beltway Bandits” are Making Out Like Bandits

Last week, in my post, “Corporate Welfare for Dummies: the Federal Government Overpays Private Companies for Contract Employees,” I wrote about how even in this supposed age of “austerity,” the federal government continues to shell out big money to private contractors (known as "Beltway Bandits") who would not be in business were it not for all that federal largess. Yesterday, a friend sent me a Washington Post article from last month that drives home the point even more dramatically:

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman — one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue — all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success — and that of hundreds of other contractors like her — is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

The signs of that wealth are on display all over, from the string of luxury boutiques such as Gucci and Tory Burch opening at Tysons Galleria to the $15 cocktails served over artisanal ice at the W Hotel in the District to the ever-larger houses rising off River Road in Potomac.

But nowhere is the region’s wealth more concentrated than the place where Talwar purchased her 15,000-square-foot white-brick estate home: Great Falls, a once-rural enclave of about 15,000 residents 17 miles west of the White House.

Sixteen percent of Great Falls households earn $500,000 or above a year, and more than half make at least $250,000, according to Nielsen Claritas. By comparison, 11 percent of households in Potomac earn $500,000 or more, and McLean and Bethesda each boast 10 percent at that level.

Talwar’s neighbors are entrepreneurs, lobbyists, CEOs, tech moguls, financiers and defense contractors for whom two wars have been very, very good business. Their portfolios take hits when the stock market plummets, as it did this month, but the setbacks are usually temporary.

While others have struggled to recover from the recession, many of the residents of Great Falls have continued to launch new business ventures, enjoy easy access to venture capital and reap the benefits of bonuses and deferred compensation plans. Median household income there has increased 32 percent in the last 10 years, helping to widen the divide between those at the top and bottom of the economic ladder to a record high in Virginia.

The whole article is quite lengthy and well worth reading in its entirety. I also encourage you to take a look at the accompanying slideshow of pictures showing the luxurious living conditions in and around Great Falls. I live about ten miles from there and have driven through that area many times, so I can attest to the accuracy of the article’s description of it as a swanky enclave. In fact, I always used to wonder exactly who was making the kind of dough that allowed them the conspicuous wealth on display there. Well, now I know.

If you want to know why our so-called “leaders” are having so much trouble wrestling with reducing the federal budget deficit, this is a big part of the answer. These are the people who live in the same neighborhoods as our Congressmen and Senators. Their kids go to the same elite private schools, they all play golf at the same ritzy country clubs and they network over $200 bottles of wine and hors’doeuvers at the same fashionable parties. The chart above also tells you all you need to know about why the DC-area economy continues to boom while much of the rest of the country remains mired in recession.

It should go without saying that any system that enables people who do government work to purchase multimillion dollar homes and live a lifestyle of the rich and famous at a time when so many Americans are out of work and destitute is fundamentally broken. Sadly, it is exactly the sort of thing you would expect to see in a third world banana republic. So far, public anger in the U.S. has mostly been directed on the left at Wall Street and the big banks, or on the right at beneficiaries of government entitlement spending. The Beltway Bandits have largely avoided public scrutiny, except for occasional notorious incidents like when some Blackwater operatives shot innocent civilians in Iraq.

I also find Ms. Talwar’s story to be interesting. Back on May 17th, I wrote a post entitled, “Whatever Your Ancestry, Being an American Means the Freedom to Consume as Much of the Planet's Resources as Possible,” in which I asserted that the delusional American Dream of having the big house, the big cars and all of the luxuries in life in a resource limited world is what really draws people to the United States rather than any naive notion of this supposedly being the land of the free. Clearly, Ms. Talwar is living that dream, even if it was underwritten by the U.S. taxpayers.

Remember this story next month when the deficit reduction commission delivers its recommendations and the next big round of budget battles begins in Congress. An obvious starting point for reducing government spending would be to greatly reduce government contracting. But I’m willing to bet you right now that it is not going to happen any time soon.

When You Slavishly Vote for One Party, This is What You Get

Image: By giving taxpayer money directly to rich sports team owners, DC Council Member Jack Evans proves that he REALLY IS a bobblehead

It ought to obvious by now to anyone who is paying attention that our political system at all levels of government is thoroughly corrupt. As a political office holder, about the only thing you can do these days that will get you thrown out on your ass is to engage in some kind of sex scandal. Otherwise, you’re pretty much free to rape and pillage the taxpayers at your convenience without fear of ever being held accountable.

Every now and then, the system will hang a nominal scalp on the wall, like it did with the utterly buffoonish former Gubbner of the Great State of Illinois, the epic hairpiece in a stuffed suit, Rod Blagojevich. But that’s mostly just for show. Blaggo had become such an embarrassment and a liability to the “legitimacy” of the system that he HAD to go down.

The reason creatures like Blaggo exist in the first place is due to the failure of a stupendously lazy and criminally uniformed electorate to do even their basic homework as to whom it is they are voting for each November. This problem is widespread across the country, but is particularly bad in locations where one of the two major parties holds electoral dominance over the other. In such locations, elections for the utterly safe incumbents have become merely an inconvenience as well as an excuse to raise gobs of campaign cash.

Few areas of the country have as big a problem in this area as does the District of Columbia. The local populace typically votes about four-fifths Democrat. The city has never elected a Republican mayor, and only rarely does the GOP even win a city council seat. This has led to spectacular embarrassments like the return of Marion Berry to the mayor’s office in the mid-1990s, just four years after the “bitch” so memorably set him up and he was sent to prison for drug possession.

Another long time DC politico is City Council member Jack Evans, a Democrat who has sat on the council for 20 years now, and has been regularly returned to office with around 80% of the vote. He is the very definition of a career politician who, because of a complacent partisan electorate, scarcely needs to lift a finger to win reelection. Perhaps that very arrogance and complacency is what led to an incident reported in the Washington Post this past weekend. Here’s an excerpt:

D.C. Council member Jack Evans has paid $135,897 for professional sports tickets over the past decade using money from his constituent services fund, renewing calls for tighter restrictions on the accounts, which are meant to help city residents.

The article goes on to state:

Local elected officials have said that they use the funds — also known as citizen service programs — to help needy constituents with rent and utility bills as well as unexpected expenses, such as funerals.

The records show that Evans spent $135,897 — about 31 percent of his total spending during the period — on tickets to the Washington Nationals, Washington Wizards, Washington Kastles and through the Washington Sports and Entertainment organization. By comparison, The Post identified $101,564 that Evans directed toward charitable organizations, neighborhood associations, arts groups or charitable activities, such as buying trophies for Little League teams.

Evans defended the spending. He said that he has bought season tickets to athletic events for years to help local sports franchises and that he gives away most of the tickets to Ward 2 residents and local schools and charities.

Just amazing. Evans gave more taxpayer money to the wealthy local sports team owners than he did to charity despite the fact, and I can attest to this as a local area resident, that there are a few needy residents who reside in the District as evidenced by the large number of homeless people you see on the streets. Even more amazing is that there are absolutely no rules in place to prevent Evans from doing this.

Evans’s excuse couldn’t be any lamer. Are we really to believe that the city's sports franchises can’t give out unsold tickets for charity without taxpayer money being involved? The answer, of course, is yes; apparently we are expected to be just that stupid. And this doesn’t even take into account the fact that the sports teams play in taxpayer-funded stadiums in the first place. Essentially what Evans is doing is giving even more taxpayer money to the wealthy sports owners, who I'm sure are happy to invite him to the owner's box during the games for a little wining and dining in grateful appreciation.

Now, is this the worst example of political corruption we’ve witnessed in America just in this past year alone? Not hardly, of course. Rather, this example is illustrative because it is in fact so routine and is not even against the law. I will also bet that similar examples of petty corruption occur nearly every single day somewhere in America.

If the voters of Evans’s ward were at all paying attention, he would rightfully be resoundingly defeated for reelection next time around. But I guarantee you they aren’t and he won’t be. It’s a tired old cliché in America that everyone hates the politicians. And yet, miraculously, most of them somehow manage to get reelected despite routinely engaging in disgraceful shenanigans such as this.

Where Were You When the Walls Went UP?

I used to consider myself extremely fortunate to have graduated from college the very year that the Berlin Wall fell--a very exciting time to be a young American just embarking on your working career. The Cold War was over and the future seemed so bright that we had to wear shades, but no longer to shield us from the glare of a possible nuclear holocaust. Where were you when The Wall came down? That was a question many of us asked each other back then in our enthusiasm for the future.

Two years later the Soviet Union collapsed for good and by the following autumn I had relocated from Chicago to Washington, DC. It was an exciting to be living in the nation’s capital. Bill Clinton was elected President less than two months after I got here, and even if you weren’t terribly political you could tell there was a sea change in the air as a stuffy generation of older politicos gave way a young and vibrant new generation. We were going to change the world back then, using the so-called “Peace Dividend” to help America finally live up to its values and principles.

So what the hell happened?

The shortcomings of Bill Clinton as a “leader” are well documented and need not be recounted here. The first Baby Boomer president turned out to be just as superficial and narcissistic as the stereotype that bedevils his generation in general. He was followed, of course, by an even worse Boomer in Junior Bush; the two of them representing the ying and yang of college age 1960s youth—counterculture on the one hand and establishment on the other.

Between them they managed to oversee the completion of the project to wreck American representative democracy that gained steam with the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980. The central component of this effort was our nation’s transition from republic to empire, and nowhere has this transformation been more physically evident than in the Imperial Capital.

Amazing as it seems now, when I first moved to DC an American citizen wanting to visit one of their representatives or even the office of a government official could walk right into a federal building without having to pass through security barriers or enduring an airport-security style screening. Security in the nation’s capital as we know it today didn’t really start to ratchet up until after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when Clinton took the first big step by ordering that Pennsylvania Avenue be closed in front of the White House:


Of course the security measures then REALLY took off after 9/11. Partly because of fear of the next terrorist attack, but mostly because Beltway bandit contractors and their paid army of lobbyists recognized just how much money there was to be made from the latest political buzzword. No elected official or senior government bureaucrat was ever going to take a chance at being accused of being “soft” on security measures. Certainly not if he or she wanted to keep their job.

And so the security barriers went up--from the Capitol to the Washington Monument--and with them was born Fortress DC, an unwelcoming place in which the people’s so called “representatives” and bureaucratic officials hide from the public behind walls that become a little more forbidding with each passing year. Today you can’t even ride on the Washington Metro subway system without the specter of your bag potentially being searched, and just to make sure the masses go along with it prerecorded messages from the likes of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano blare over the Metro’s public address system extolling riders to be vigilant and if they “see something, say something.”


True story: one day a few years ago the building that I work in was locked down for a couple of hours after some overly hysterical employee reported finding white powder on the floor of the women's restroom. The hazmat team from the local fire department responded and determined that the potential "deadly" threat was (surprise! surprise!) talcum powder.

Lost in all of the hysteria is that there has not been a successful terrorist attack on the American homeland in nearly ten years. This is not to say vigilance isn't important, but it must be weighed against the waste of many billions of dollars and the loss of our basic freedoms.

All of this has somehow become “normal” and accepted by a docile public. The national security state radiates outward from the Capital Beltway through the nation’s airports and sports venues and even more recently to its small town Walmarts. Paranoia strikes deep, and it has indeed struck our own body politic so deeply that we fail to even recognize it as paranoia anymore.

No supposedly democratic society can survive with the malignant cancer of an out-of-control national security state metastasizing within its bowels. It's a supreme irony that the fall more than 20 years ago of the most iconic symbol of state security repression the world has ever seen should have been almost immediately followed by the rise of a repressive national security state within the very open society that had led the fight to tear that wall down.

Benjamin Franklin had it right when he said that those who would trade a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither. He also said that the founding fathers had given us a republic, if we could keep it. Unfortunately, it has become very evident that we cannot. Osama bin Laden did not take our freedoms away; we managed to do that to ourselves.