And the Rosemary Goes to ...

Congratulations are due to the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council, which beat out strong competition to win the 2010 Rosemary Award for Worst Open Government Performance.

Washington, DC, March 12, 2010 - The Rosemary Award for worst open government performance, named after President Nixon’s secretary who erased 18 ½ minutes of a crucial Watergate tape, this year goes to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, the senior federal officials (responsible for $71 billion a year of IT purchases) who have never addressed the failure of the government to save its e-mail electronically, according to the citation today by the National Security Archive.

-- snip --

Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include the FBI in 2009 (for having a record-setting rate of “no records” responses to FOIA requests), the Treasury Department in 2008 (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades), the Air Force in 2007, and the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006. The Award is named after President Nixon’s long-time secretary Rose Mary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch – answering the phone while keeping her foot on the pedal of a tape transcription machine – that she testified caused the erasure of an 18 ½ minute section of a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child?

The U.S. Department of Education is buying tactical shotguns for it's Chicago Office of the Inspector General:

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14"

And not just any shotguns, but bad-ass ones with law enforcement-restricted short barrels, ghost ring sights, recoil reducers, and Speedfeed stocks for carrying extra ammo. Pretty much every shotgun accessory except a tactical light. (Maybe they skipped that option because school's out at night?)

What's up with that? Is the Department of Education creating its own SWAT teams?

It is not uncommon for Inspector General personnel to be law enforcement officers, since they might investigate criminal violations such as fraud and other white-collar offenses. But the usual self-defense weapon is a pistol. An accountant with a shotgun? Now, that's frightening.

Pakistani Visitors Receive a Cultural Experience, TSA-Style

The New York Times is reporting tonight on a fiasco of a cultural exchange visit to the U.S. by a group of Pakistani parliamentarians (Upset by U.S. Security, Pakistanis Return as Heroes):

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.

“People should be thankful, you made them so proud,” said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, during an interview in his studio on Tuesday with four of the six politicians, who railed against the security precautions at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Meetings with the Obama administration’s top policy makers on Pakistan, including the president’s special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, and visits to the Pentagon and the National Security Council, did not allay the anger the politicians said they felt at being asked to submit to a secondary screening on Sunday before boarding a flight to New Orleans. They declined to be screened and did not board the flight.

Pakistan is one of 14 mostly Muslim countries whose citizens must go through increased checks before they fly into the United States, a procedure mandated by the Obama administration in the wake of the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up an airliner flying from the Netherlands to Detroit on Dec. 25.

The inclusion of Pakistan on the list was broadly criticized as an insult to a country that the United States calls an ally.

The leader of the parliamentary group, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, said in an interview on Tuesday that before they were to board the flight for New Orleans, he and his colleagues were selected from a crowd of passengers at the airport and asked to stand aside.

They were then asked to accept a full-body scan by a machine, he said. Such body-scanning units are in use at 19 airports across the United States, and more are being installed.

One of Mr. Afridi’s colleagues, Akhunzada Chitan, told Mr. Mir on his “Capital Talk” program, “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”

The lawmakers were chosen to visit the United States by the Political Section of the American Embassy. American officials are eager to reach out to political figures from the underdeveloped and isolated tribal areas where the Pakistani Army is now fighting to reclaim territory from the Taliban.

The United States Agency for International Development pledged two years ago to spend $750 million on various projects in the tribal areas, but residents there complain that they see more of the Taliban than American assistance.

In preparatory briefings for their trip, the politicians were advised that they might have to submit to extra body searches, just as randomly selected Americans must submit to secondary screening by the new machines, two officials from the American Embassy said.

The Pakistanis were specifically warned that the United States was not a “V.I.P. culture,” unlike Pakistan, where politicians are often exempted from unpalatable procedures that other people have to tolerate, the American officials said.

“We are disappointed that the group took offense at the security procedures thousands of Americans and visitors must endure at airports every day,” said Larry Schwartz, the senior communications adviser at the American Embassy in Islamabad.

“No offense was intended. Indeed, they were warmly welcomed at high levels in Washington.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad has been endowed with an extra $37 million by Congress to spend on exchange programs intended to show skeptical Pakistanis that the United States is a real ally, a country that wants to help, not hinder, Pakistan.

The people-to-people exchanges between Pakistan and the United States, which include American lecturers and teachers of English coming to Pakistan, is now the most ambitious of such efforts run by the State Department around the globe, Mr. Schwartz said.

About 2,000 Pakistanis are expected to participate in the strengthened educational and cultural programs this year, he said. Indeed, a prime motivation of the protest against the screening procedures by the tribal area politicians appeared to be an effort to appeal to their home constituencies, many of whom regard the United States as an enemy.

“Our people were very disturbed we were going to America,” Mr. Afridi said. “We were under threat for going to the United States. We took the risk to see if America was interested in solving the problems.”

It isn't clear from this report whether the Pakistanis absolutely, positively, refused to go through a body scanner, or whether they were reacting to a little bad attitude from a TSA Inspector. (What? A TSA Inspector getting officious? Hard to believe, I know.) Or was it a case of foreign VIP presumption meeting homegrown TSA intransigence? Either way, things will not end happily.

"Azzam the American" Captured in Pakistan (?); Who Do We Pay?

Update:

Evidently, the American-born al Qa'ida operative who was arrested in Karachi today was not / not Adam Gadahn, AKA "Azzam the American."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

According to Pakistan's Dawn News:

KARACHI: Pakistani security forces along with help of US intelligence arrested Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al- Adam, who is a close associate of Osama Bin Laden. Abu Yahya was arrested on Sunday from an area surrounding the super highway, on the outskirts of Karachi.

The Associated Press is also reporting the arrest of Adam Yahiye Gadahn, the native American who became al Qa'ida's spokesman to the English-speaking world and who is under indictment in the United States for treason. So it might be true, but we should wait for official confirmation of his identity.

The arrest occurred on the same day Gadahn's latest video was posted to militant web sites.

Here's a profile of Gadahn that helps to put the twisted freak into perspective.

Assuming the man in custody in Karachi is really Gadahn, it looks like the Department of State might owe someone one million dollars.

The Cherry Trees Will Bloom in Three Weeks

The U.S. National Park Service has set the dates for the 2010 National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington DC as March 27 to April 11, and predicts the average peak bloom will occur on April 4. Evidently, the trees survived our February Snowpocalypse with little or no damage to their blooms.

From the NPS press release:

The Blooming Period is defined as the period that starts when 20% of the blossoms are open and ends when the petals fall and the leaves appear. The Blooming period starts several days before the Peak Bloom Date and can last as long as 14 days; however, frost or high temperatures combined with wind and/or rain can shorten this period.

During the Blooming Period, the National Park Service conducts annual Cherry Tree Walks and bike tours around the Tidal Basin. These Park Ranger conducted programs present an interpretive look at the historical and cultural influence of the Japanese Flowering Cherry Trees in our Nation's Capital. For information on the dates and times of the walks and bike tours please call (202) 426-6841.

The cherry tree blossoming is one of those local events I try not to miss. Really very lovely.

The cherry trees were a gift from Japan in 1912, and were intended to symbolize the friendship that existed between the peoples of the two countries. Helen Herron Taft, the wife of President Taft, and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese Ambassador to the United states, planted the first two cherry trees in March of that year.

To put a political twist on a botanical matter, you might ask: how did the trees fare during the severe rupture of U.S. - Japanese relations that occurred 29 years after they were planted? Very well, it turns out. According to the NPS web page on the history of the cherry trees, only four of them were vandalized after Pearl Harbor, and for the duration of the Second World War the trees were officially referred to as "Oriental" flowering cherry trees. All was soon forgiven after the war, and in 1952, after the stock of trees in the Adachi Ward near Tokyo had fallen into decline, the NPS sent budwood from the original Japanese donation to restore the grove.

Who Is the Biggest Tax Deadbeat of Them All?

It's not news that there are Federal employees with delinquent tax debts. Read more about that here. When you dig down, it turns out that many of them are on mutually agreed payment plans with the Internal Revenue Service and are current with their payments, so the idea that there are thousands of federal tax deadbeats isn't so juicy as it seems at first. But that doesn't stop some Congressmen from making a big deal about it. According to an item in the WaPo's Federal Diary column today, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced legislation that would fire federal tax deadbeats.

“Federal employees have an obvious obligation to pay their federal income taxes,” said Chaffetz. “Because they draw their compensation from the American taxpayers, federal employees owe it to the taxpayers themselves to pay their taxes. If not, they should be fired.”

OK with me. Fire away. But, as I continue to flip through the WaPo, I see a news story about another federal employee with tax problems, one who failed to report assets totaling more than $1 million on legally required financial disclosure forms. Neither did he report or pay taxes on rental income from a villa in the Caribbean, an infraction for which the Internal Revenue Service merely required him to paid the taxes but not any penalties or interest. I suggest that, in fairness, any federal employee with a tax delinquency should be treated according to the Rangel Rule. That is, they should be treated with the same courtesy that the IRS extends toward the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Did the Hawaiian Islands Merge With the Galápagos?

Even better question: when did schools stop requiring Geography?