Did Mooch Screw the Pooch? College Classmate’s Company Built Healthcare.gov

DC Clothesline ^ | 10/26/2013 | Dean D. Garrison

[IbJensen]

More than just a few of us are confused over how the feds let these contracts.

We thought everything had to be bid on. Just like all those helicopters we are buying from Russia to give to the Afghans when we have our own helicopter companies that could give them much better choppers.

Of course, I don’t think we have any business giving them choppers in the first place, but this is crazy. We can’t keep our Air Force flying…something like 17 squadrons, yet we can afford to buy helicopters from Russia to give away.

Could BO be more obvious? He is doing a damned good job of ruining us and we know that is his purpose.

[opentalk]

http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/26/company-behind-obamacare-website-in-charge-of-nearly-2-billion-in-sandy-relief/

Same Canadian company also given contract to distribute Sandy relief fund, poorly done

[yldstrk]

Public contracts are supposed to be bid on competitively with notice requirements etc except in emergencies or exigent circumstances

And even then you don’t necessarily take the lowest bid. The lowest bid say for a space shuttle might not be a smart move. You take the lowest responsive responsible bid. But since the obamas are taking care of their buds, this didn’t happen

[Dilbert San Diego]

The liberals used to complain about no bid contracts given to Halliburton. The whole Dick Cheney/Halliburton angle offended their sensibilities.

Will the liberals be offended and call for someone’s head over this no bid contract situation????

[ilovesarah2012]

Remember when the liberals freaked out over Halliburton? Not a peep about this.

[Venturer]

Everything done by Obama since his first day in office has been African-Engineered.

You have to ask why it doesn’t work??

[IbJensen]

This is crony capitalism at its worst. Keep in mind that Michelle Obama college buddy is an executive at this company, Valerie Jarrett may also have family connections to it, and there have been campaign donations to Obama and Democrat party which may be linked to favorable treatment for this company, which has proved it’s incompetence not only here, but in Canada, where it was fired for failure.

The “Liberals” and Obots fool themeselves into thinking that Obama wants some kind of utopian socialist paradise (a delusional desire in the first place), but his actions seem a lot more like Mussolini’s Corporatism/Fascism, which consolidated power with corporations to control the populace through employment, availability of goods and investment funds and government largesse, making govt and corporate executives not only powerful but rich.

Wake up America!

[IbJensen]

Incompetence and Marxism go hand in hand.

[Signalman]

Fed govt. contracts are supposed to be open-bid unless it is an emergency situation or if the product or service is so unique that only one company is capable of fulfilling the contract. This one in question does not pass the smell test.

[Liz]

Crony-ridden CGI Federal---another of Ohaha's cockamamie wealth-redistribution scams. The Canadian company got a billion tax dollars to build the abominable Obamacare web site.

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Taxpayers demand the mobilization of the Bank Secrecy Act---in which banks are required to establish, implement and maintaprograms designed to detect and report suspicious activity indicative of govt fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted to protect the public from harm by identifying and detecting money laundering from criminal enterprises, govt fraud, terrorism, tax evasion, or other unlawful activities.

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Toni Townes-Whitley, Senior Vice President at "CGI Federal" for Civilian Agency programs, is Princeton Class of 1985---same dumbed-down class as Michelle Obama. Both are members of Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

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NOTE CGI, the designer of the Obamacare website and computer system, is the parent company of Stanley, Inc. At the latter two employees, along with an employee of Analyst Corp, were investigated WRT State Dept passport breaches involving passports of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

THIS JUST IN News broke last night that Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, Laura works for CGI Federal (she's wedded to Canadian native Tony Balkisoon), whose dad is a Canadian MP).

Laura Jarret and hubby. More on Balkisoon's dad below.

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WIKI---Bas Balkissoon---RESIDES IN TORONTO---MEMBER Ontario Liberal Party---Tahay, spouse, three children

Born 1952 (age 60–61)-- Trinidad and Tobago, Indian ancestry

Bas Balkissoon (born ca. 1952) is a politician in Toronto, Ontario. Formerly the Toronto city councillor representing Ward 41 in northeast area of Scarborough, Balkissoon won election to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario on November 24, 2005 as the Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Scarborough—Rouge River.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, and of Indian descent, Balkissoon rose to prominence as the head of Scarborough Homeowners Alliance For Fair Taxes, an organization that challenged the province's property assessment system. In 1988, he ran for Scarborough city council in what was then Ward 13.

He currently serves as Deputy Speaker and Chair of the Committee of the Whole House (2011–present) and as Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Community and Social Services (2010–present).

[Liz]

After O blamed everybody but his sainted grandmother for the massive screwup....the floundering admin announced former White House budget director is now the abominable web site's "fixer"......

IT GETS BETTER---NY MAGAZINE REPORT Silicon Valley techies say the botched healthcare.gov rollout was emblematic of what's called "state-of-the-art incompetence" .......the dated, old-school approach to the site's development, which relies on a management system known as the "waterfall model," and whose back-end database appears to run on Oracle software, had all but ensured it would run over-budget, late, and riddled with technical problems.

You could have taken any SV engineer and asked them, 'I have a friend — don't mention the government — who's thinking about a five-year, $100 million Oracle installation, and they've hired an outsourced contractor (crony-ridden CGI-Canada)to build it for them. It's going to be proprietary, hosted in their own data center, Oracle-based, with waterfall management."

" What are the odds that it's working on Day One of the rollout? "

And everyone in SV will tell you: zero percent.

Silicon Valley's emerging suspicion of government, see the botched rollout as symptomatic of the government's ham-fisted approach to technology.

The healthcare.gov site is "only the latest episode in a string of information technology debacles by the federal government," wrote Clay Johnson and Harper Reed, two programmers with political pasts (Johnson was Howard Dean's lead programmer in 2004; Reed was the brain behind Obama's 2012 digital campaign) in a Times op-ed.

The pair went on: This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch ... We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.

The White House has promised that a "tech surge" of the "best and the brightest," including from Silicon Valley, has been brought in to repair the health-care site. But nobody knows, or is telling anyone, who those people actually are.

Contractors grilled at a congressional hearing this week wouldn't name names, and several tech executives questioned yesterday said they had no inside information on the makeup of the government's emergency coder team.

Verizon has reportedly been tapped to help with the revamp, but the extent of its involvement isn't known. Former budget official Jeffrey Zients is overseeing the rescue, but since he's not a known coder, his role is limited to managing the project.

--SNIP--

(In a conference call, Zients predicted that the site would "work smoothly" by the end of November.) But the episode has confirmed the suspicions of many in Silicon Valley that the government's infrastructure, even on key projects, relies too heavily on outdated legacy systems and could be run more efficiently by those inside their own camp.

[Paine in the Neck]

Not to take the thread off topic, but I got a chuckle out of this passage in the pictured newspaper clipping:

"Marable said there are many reasons not to vote for Mondale, one of them being that 'he has the personality and moral fortitude of a wet clam.'"

[DJ Taylor]

"Just like all those helicopters we are buying from Russia to give to the Afghans when we have our own helicopter companies that could give them much better choppers."

U.S. helicopters are better performing helicopters than Russian. However, U.S. helicopters are much more difficult to maintain than Russian helicopters, and are beyond the capability of most third world maintenance shops and maintenance personnel.

[jpsb]

I have not found a credible source on VJ daughter-son in law working for CGI federal? Do you have one? thanks

[Liz]

INTELLECTUAL VACUITY AT ITS BEST also known as "PAY--ME--I'M--A--VICTIM" Michelle Obama's thesis about her “blackness.” Here is a quote courtesy of Politico: “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction.

“I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

[IbJensen]

My point is why give anything away when this nation is flat broke?

[IbJensen]

They probably didn’t like her because she’s such a narcissistic ass.

She’s fortunate to have a mirror image of her psyche in her husband thingy. How cupcake fathered those daughters will be one of life’s mysteries.

[jpsb]

"back-end database appears to run on Oracle software, had all but ensured it would run over-budget, late, and riddled with technical problems"

What is wrong with Oracle? I have not used Oracle in quite a while (I use MySql) but back in the day Oracle was the best database software around.

[Liz]

I have not found a credible source on VJ daughter-son in law working for CGI federal....

Probably a sideline---tied to amorphous "consulting firms"---the two are both Harvard Law---must have jobs (/snix).

[Jeff Chandler]