pawatercooler.com

Obama wants a new dialogue on race – well, here’s a good place to start:

Colin McNickle of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review explains why Tom Corbett should not heed the Philadelphia Inquirer’s recommendation that he resign for doing his job:

What tees off The Inquirer is that Corbett is doing his job and, in the process, taking stands on issues it opposes.

Think health-care “reform.” Corbett joined a lawsuit filed by attorneys general of several states alleging a federal provision mandating that individuals buy health insurance or be fined is a gross violation of the Commerce Clause.

And it is. The federal government, indeed, can regulate commerce. But it can’t force commerce.

McNickle goes on to say that the Inquirer thinks that pretty much anything Corbett does is nothing but a cynical attempt to gain conservative support for November. Liberal projection at its finest; since they will do anything to get elected and retain power, they assume the same is true of the other side.

The thought never crosses their minds that maybe, just maybe, Tom Corbett and millions of other reasonable people might actually think that ObamaCare is an unconstitutional disaster waiting to happen. No, we’re just trying to protect “the rich”, or we’re “racist”, or we’re “stupid”, or in the case of politicians like Corbett, they’re just trying to gain the support of us stupid racists who vote against our own self-interest in order to protect the rich.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, high-ranking Democrat and madman Howard Dean told Chris Wallace that racists at Fox News got Shirley Sherrod fired. When Wallace pointed out that Sherrod was fired by the White House before she was ever mentioned on Fox News, Dean said that it didn’t matter. Liberalism in a nutshell: Reality doesn’t matter.

Update

Looks like the dishonest filth have succeeded in getting the meme out that Fox News is responsible for Shirley Sherrod’s firing. Today’s Post-Gazette is full of letters from good little Democrat operatives condemning Fox News for being racist and causing Sherrod to lose her job. As I said, reality doesn’t matter with these people.

Alex, don’t you mean RAAAAAAAAAACIST?

And if everyone is a racist, there can be no meaning to the term. It is equivalent to saying someone is a living person.

And in conclusion, I am convinced that everyone is a racist except me and thee, and I am starting to wonder about thee.

Dale, it was discussed on Journolist, and it was decided that you’re a racist.

Moe Lane responds to this news item:

When a Bethlehem police officer is hospitalized in the line of duty, and by a car driving too fast and in the wrong direction on a one-way road, that’s news. Especially when the driver just happens to be Dino Cantelmi, the Mayor’s brother-in-law. Amazingly, there never was any account of this incident in either The Morning Call or Express Times.

Read his comments here.

As long as a 2-1 vote carries the day in Montgomery County, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Montgomery County’s perpetual supplier of health care consulting services, CBIZ, has won the day again, this time securing a sweetheart deal that kicks back $10 to the consultant for every $75 fee per employee paid to IBC. With 3,000 county employees, you do the math.

Now I know what you are thinking: What exactly is it that a healthcare consultant does and why is one needed to manage a health care plan that the county has been on for years and why is the pay so lucrative? All good questions. Let’s turn to the Times Herald’s Keith Phucas for answers:

The Times Herald previously reported that since 2006, CBIZ officials have contributed a total of $24,463 to Matthew’s political campaign coffers, according to campaign finance reports.

During the 2007 commissioners race, company executives gave the Damsker-Hoeffel campaign $12,500.

On Feb. 12, 2008, CBIZ senior executive F. Bruce Walter gave Matthews, by then the commissioners chairman, a $1,000 campaign donation. Three months later, Walter gave $200 to Hoeffel’s campaign, according to 2008 campaign records.

I’m sure they do, you know, actual healthcare consulting stuff, too. Whatever that is.

So those of you with long memories may be saying to yourselves, “Don’t I recal that CBIZ is the company that was less than forthcoming about how they obtained those contracts and how much they were paid for the same? Wasn’t there something about producing Requests For Proposals (RFP) and complying with some Hoeffel-sponsored ordinance?” Well, you would be right. If you want to refresh your memory, you can look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So surely, you’re thinking, after all that fuss and stonewalling and charging for copies just a few short months ago, CBIZ must have finally produced the RFPs in question. That after the scrutiny of the press on a situation that had every appearance of Commissioners Hoeffel and Matthews engaging in pay to play, surely those aforementioned commissioners would not have the chutzpah to grant a two-year contract to CBIZ again without them complying with the original RFP request?

Errr….actually, no.

Not to worry, though. They submitted an RFP this time:

Recently, an RFP went out for a health insurance consultant, and five companies, including CBIZ, responded.

Explaining the evaluation process at Wednesday’s commissioners meeting, by G. Fred DiBona III, of DiBona Associates, admitted when questioned by Castor that he knew the firms by name that he helped county officials rank. As well, DiBona said Matthews recently hired him to assist human resources and commissioner staffers in the evaluations.

Hold up. Wait. Fred DiWHO the third? Who’s he?

He’s the consultant that was used to pick the consultant.

[DiBona] is a former employee of one of the vendors that submitted a proposal.

Castor echoed his past criticism about being kept out of the loop about professional services contractor selections.

“One of the things I thought we agreed on (in the new ordinance) was the three commissioners would get to vote on these contracts,” he said, referring to DiBona’s consultant work. “I didn’t know we were bringing you on.”

Matthews explained DiBona Associates met an exception in Ordinance 10-3 because he would not be paid more than $7,500 for his services.

DiBona also conceded the process that picked CBIZ was a “subjective determination,” and that evaluating consultant companies was not something he ordinarily does.

“It’s not a regular part of my business,” he said.

Not a regular part of his business? Well that’s a relief. At least he’s qualified to earn that $7500 fee.

So what does this all mean for the County? Bruce Castor (the “1″ vote in the perpetual “2-1″ voting pattern of the Montgomery County Commissioners) and Joe Hoeffel sum it up thusly:

The selection process was tipped in favor of CBIZ given that “The guy who is paying (DiBona) is CBIZ’s guy,” Castor said, referring to Matthews.

Hoeffel suggested possible bias was reflected in CBIZ’s high score for “Confidence of County HR/Finance Team with Vendor Capabilities,” perhaps because the company is the only health insurance consultant most of the staff had ever dealt with.

“The county staff likes CBIZ, and I think it helped (the firm),” Hoeffel said later.

And CBIZ will save the county money over the two-year $576,000 contract, by cutting the per-employee monthly rate by $2. Castor deemed it ironic that only now the consultant was revealing dollar figures for its services, something it has refused to do since December. He concluded current pricing makes the county contract worth more than $700,000 to the consultant for the same time period.

“Now you know why CBIZ didn’t want to tell us (how much it was paid),” Castor said following the meeting. “Because it looks like they’re getting a commission of $360,000 each year after contributing to the campaigns of Matthews and Hoeffel.”

Yup. Sounds like CBIZness as usual to me.

Heh.

Everyone has different nightmares, but high on the list for just about every Congressman would be something like this:

You hold a press conference, give some brief remarks and then open the floor to questions.

But there aren’t any. Silence. Does nobody care about your bill? Do they not like you?

Rep. Patrick Murphy lived the nightmare at the White House today, holding a press conference that lasted less than two minutes. Murphy is a cosponsor of a bill the President signed into law today that aims to cut down on wasteful government spending.

What actually happened: Andrew Breitbart put a clip from a speech made by Shirley Sherrod up on his website. In the clip, Sherrod admitted to discriminating against a poor white farmer in the past. And, actually, if you bothered to watch the entire clip put up by Breitbart, you would have seen her admit that it was wrong for her to do so, because she was supposed to be helping the poor regardless of skin color. The Obama Administration’s knee jerk reaction was to fire Sherrod, which left them with egg on their face when they bothered to watch the whole video. After the firing, Fox News started to cover the story.

What happened according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

That’s just plain wrong on so many levels.

And the Post-Gazette laughably said the following in their editorial:

The website that released the edited video is responsible for triggering the media firestorm. But the guiltiest party is an administration so insecure that it would throw a good employee to the wolves. This shameful capitulation to right-wing media must end before more reputations and careers are destroyed.

Rick Santorum, Dick Cheney, and Sarah Palin, check your voice mail. You might find a few hundred messages from the Post-Gazette apologizing for the endless dishonest attacks on your reputation. Or, not.

Apparently using the race card is the fast track to political success in Philly’s Democrat Party.

Philly’s disgraced City Council staffer, Latrice Bryant, is testing the waters for a potential run for Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller’s 8th district seat come 2011.

Latrice Bryant’s most notable accomplishment was to invoke the race card when confronted with evidence of falsified time sheets and an inappropriate physical relationship with her boss, City Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr back in 2008.

A local Fox News journalist, Jeff Cole, uncovered the evidence and confronted both Latrice and her confident, Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr. Her reaction was to literally flip him the race card:

(more…)

 

PLEASE TRY AGAIN BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 0800 AND 2000.

Due to our national economic collapse at the hands of Congress we are seeing unprecedented cuts to some areas of city services. It’s very strange to watch the schizophrenic policies of the democrats right now. Let me see if I can get some of this straight: On the national level, the federal government is spending billions of dollars they don’t have while the states and cities are going broke. The federal government is EXPANDING the ranks of the government workforce ostensibly to help stimulate the economy. Everyone knows that expanding government is a drain on the economy and government jobs are almost always make-work jobs beyond essential services. But some non-essential services are being  spared while other critical services are being attacked savagely. 

On the local and state level it’s exactly the opposite. These governments are actually CUTTING jobs, laying off or furloughing workers often in essential services like police and emergency services. They claim it’s because they are losing funding from the federal government. That begs the question: why is it the federal governments task to pay for local level, essential services? What has happened to the tax money that should be spent on these services in the first place? The short answer is that states and cities have long ago gone off the rails with their spending priorities. We pass public pools with seven kids swimming in them and four blocks away people have a fire hydrant open. Libraries get priority over fire companies in the Internet age. Only Democrats could come up with such an insanely dangerous plan. Then again we know they aren’t the party of safety and security either national or local.

No city or state politician gets elected so he can make the trains run on time (as they should). I have said repeatedly that big city mayors are more worried about national and international issues than they are about running the day-to-day operations of the city they were elected to oversee. For example our Mayor Nutter recently went to the Gulf to check out the oil leak. Why? We have an out of control murder rate here in Philly and an impending fiscal catastrophe. His time would be much better spent trying to get more businesses to relocate to the city. Unfortunately he’d have to fix a broken government, lower taxes and IMPROVE services to do that. So maybe it’s a smart thing for him to get out-of-town for a few days.

About fifteen years ago our governor “Fast” Eddy Rendell was elected mayor. At the time Philly was a fiscal basket case as is the norm. After generations of  one party (democrat ) control in Philly he was hailed by the local left-wing media much the same as Obama was by the national MSM. He was the guy who was going to clean up Philly and balance the books. He did to a large extent by gutting the city workforce and handing down contracts that destroyed the standard of living of average “Working families”. It is widely believed and circulated by the MSM that city employees are lazy fat cats and our wages and benefits are the reason the city is on the brink of insolvency. Rendell won large-scale cuts in benefits and wages thanks to a law he got passed (PICA). It gutted our collective bargaining rights (another democrat victory for the working man). Supposedly he set our fiscal house in order. Fifteen years later we are as broke as ever. In reality we have been broke all along yet Rendell was hailed as a hero for taking on the “MUNICIPAL UNIONS” and was elected Governor. Fast forward to today in New Jersey. Governor Chris Christie is being vilified for taking on the political machine there. That includes the ultra powerful teachers unions and the entrenched democrat political apparatus that has run up an eleven BILLION dollar deficit. You can’t make this stuff up.

As a point of fact Philadelphia firefighters have been on the job, working without a contract for about a year now.

Finally when John Street got elected Mayor after Ed Rendell he had an incredible crime problem. His solution? To use the police force to occupy large areas of the most crime ridden areas of Philly. Literally like an operation Fallujah. He spent millions of our surplus on forced police overtime. Often it was little more tha cops standing on corners to show a continued presence. It worked for a time. But after the money ran out the crime went right back to normal and even got worse thus proving you can take a neighborhood but the question is can you HOLD a neighborhood and for how long and at what price?

Now Mayor Nutter is gutting the Fire Department. Over three successive democrat regimes the fire department has become a favorite target. After many years of successful firefighting programs and operations they are now going to decimate our field forces. Inevitably this will lead to the undoing of everything we have achieved. The deaths, injuries and property losses will go up, it’s inevitable. The equipment and morale will erode and deteriorate. Philly will burn like Detroit, ironically something it managed to avoid during the war years of the 1960′s. Like Afghanistan in a year things will get much worse. What scares me the most is if the firefighting forces get to the level of our EMS forces. They are so short-staffed it’s scary.

The democrats made much of the way the Bush administration conducted the war in Iraq. We were told endless stories about up-armored Hum-Vees being in short supply or body armor that had to be mailed from home. We were told endlessly how it was going to be a quagmire like Viet Nam. Yet here at home, on the front lines that IS the reality. Broken and run down equipment and facilities. Staffing and budget cuts and company closures. Ambulance shortages have been the norm for twenty years. And people die and firefighters get injured needlessly.

Much like our national leaders have forsaken our military, our local leaders have forsaken our public safety. It is ironic. And tragic.

www.firstin.wordpress.com