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

In mid-October The Washington Examiner reported that Federal Officials only considered one firm to build the epic fail now known as healthcare.gov. When that story broke you had to suspect that someone probably had a kickback coming. Richard Pollock reported on October 13th:

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

Why was CGI chosen and how did this happen? Good question. Could it be that a certain First Lady might have had an inside track with that company?

That would never happen. This is surely coincidence. But even though it is probably coincidental it pains me to report that a college classmate of Michelle Obama just happens to be a high ranking executive at CGI.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998.

Do you remember the controversial stories of Michelle Obama struggling to find her place as a black woman in a white world? Here’s a quick reminder from The Blaze:

Michelle Obama attends and promotes a “Black Solidarity” event for guest lecturer Manning Marable, who was, according to Cornel West, probably “the best known black Marxist in the country.” The event is the work of the Third World Center (TWC), a campus group whose board membership is exclusively reserved for minorities.

Even her thesis was about her “blackness.” Here is a quote from her groundbreaking racist work 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.”

She is so torn up with the plight of blacks, who have the misfortune of going to Princeton, that she had no choice here but to give one of her struggling Ivy-League educated unfortunates a leg up.

So she somehow threw a bone to a fellow black woman who just happened to have a job at a firm that was deemed capable of handling a 678 million dollar government contract. Whether she did it for the cleansing of her black soul or the joy of a kickback we may never know.

What we do know is that this would seem to fit with Michelle’s hatred for anyone who is not black and not socialist. I wonder if she hates Barry’s white side.

I wish she would show some sympathy for a white guy who was not smart enough or rich enough to go to Princeton. Princeton currently costs over $58,000 yearly to attend.

How stupid was it that only one bid was considered and how convenient is it that Mrs. Obama just happens to have ties to the company that was awarded this contract?

I’m not a computer guy but I’m thinking that Microsoft or Apple or even those guys who make World of Warcraft might have done one hell of a job on this site. They might have even been able to do it for less money. But then the First Lady may have had to forego her door prizes, and I’d hate to see that.

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

My point is the Afghans would turn U.S. helicopters into junk in a very short time.

After logging quite a few hours in the back end of Russian Mi-17 Hip helicopters, several things about the aircraft and how the Russians built them became apparent. The Mi-17 is similar in size and has similar performance capabilities as a CH-47 Chinook helicopter but comparing the two is like comparing a Yugo with a Ferrari. Both helicopters will get you from point A to point B, but that’s about where the similarity ends.

When an American boards an Mi-17, he knows right away he’s on an alien aircraft; nothing is familiar. The interior is painted a sickly blue; there’s no soundproofing padding, leaking hydraulic fluid smells strange, the engine’s loud and sounds like a washing machine with an unbalanced load and emits a foul smelling exhaust from half-burned fuel that finds its way into the troop compartment through the rear gunner’s window. But the most disconcerting thing about the Mi-17 is that the five rotor blades turn in a clockwise direction and the fuselage wobbles under the rotor blades in a counter clockwise direction. To fly in a forward motion while at the same time moving in a counter clockwise direction takes some getting used to.

There’s nothing on the Mi-17 that’s automatic or computer controlled. If the pilot wants the helicopter to do something, a lever must be pulled, a switch flipped or a button pushed. It doesn’t appear possible for the pilot to fly the aircraft alone in anything but straight and level flight. For anything else, it takes the pilot, the copilot, and the flight engineer working together to make the thing fly any kind of intricate maneuver. To watch the three of them put an Mi-17 into a tight LZ in marginal weather is like watching three maestros performing a concert together, but it makes one wonder what would happen to all on board if one or more of the trio were to become a casualty.

The overall simplicity of the Mi-17 is one of the most impressive things about it. This simplicity was demonstrated one day when we were out on an operation and our Mi-17 developed engine trouble. The pilot set us down on a small dirt road by a river; the Flight Engineer climbed up on the top of the aircraft, removed the engine cowling, and proceeded to disassemble the engine. Within a few minutes, there were parts and pieces of the engine lying all over the road, and it began to look to us as if we were out of the ongoing operation for good. But, just as we were about to call in that we were out of the play, the Flight Engineer found the offending engine part, pulled it out, blew on it several times and wiped it on his shirt, then he reassembled the engine, and we took off. Just try doing that with a CH-47 Chinook.

Even though the Mi-17 is a troop transport helicopter, it can be and usually is heavily armed. The Mi-17 can carry a variety of rack mounted weapons and the usual armament consists of rocket pods on the right and left side of the helicopter.

Mi-17s have rear clam-shell doors that can be swung out to take on equipment when the helicopter is on the ground with the engine shut down, but isn’t practical for quickly loading and unloading troops. The helicopter can carry thirty-four troops who must enter and depart the aircraft from one small troop door near the front left side of the aircraft, and right beside this troop door is a rocket pod holding twenty 80MM rockets with High Explosive warheads. Passengers must pass directly in front of this rocket pod when entering or departing the aircraft, and if the pilot feels it’s necessary during a heliborne assault, he’ll salvo 10-20 80MM rockets into the LZ and at least one of these rockets will miss fire and still be hanging in the pod and smoking when the helicopter lands. Troops exiting the helicopter must pass directly in front of this smoking rocket, and, needless to say, this gives departing troops incentive to make a very quick exit of the aircraft.

Mounted over the Mi-17’s troop door is a hoist with a winch and several hundred feet of steel cable and is used to extract or lower personnel and equipment when an LZ is not available, but the hoist and steel cable have another and more mundane daily use. The five rotor blades on an Mi-17 generate a tremendous amount of static electricity during flight and when it sets down on an LZ on its three rubber tires it retains that charge of electricity until the helicopter is grounded. As an Mi-17 approaches an LZ, the Flight Engineer leans out the troop door, and, using the hoist, he lowers the steel cable with a grounding probe attached in order to ground the helicopter as it touches down. If a soldier walks up and touches an Mi-17 before the Flight Engineer has properly grounded the helicopter, the discharge of static electricity could possibly kill the soldier, or, at a minimum, it will knock him out.

It’s almost comical to see an Mi-17 arrive on an LZ to pick up a team, and, even though the Flight Engineer signals it’s safe to do so, no one wants to be the first to approach the helicopter. All too often, the Flight Engineer thinks he has properly grounded the helicopter but hasn’t. Therefore, Mi-17 protocol calls for junior personnel to board the aircraft first.

One of the most revealing things about how the Soviet Union designed and built aircraft or anything else for that matter is that the Mi-17 uses the same door handle on its troop door that's been used on Russian army trucks since 1935. Apparently when the Mi-17 designer needed a door handle, he simply ordered a vehicle door handle from the door handle factory and was done with it.

If the Mi-17 had been a U.S. helicopter, the production of its troop door handle would’ve been ladled out as a dollop of pork on some U.S. Congressman’s District. The contract for this door handle would’ve gone to, probably, the Congressman’s brother-in-law. Tens of thousands of dollars would’ve been spent on that door handle’s R&D, and the final thoroughly tested and approved product would’ve been a one of a kind, ergonomic, Helicopter Door Handle, Type Mi-17 at a cost to the U.S. Taxpayer of at least a $1,000 each, but it would’ve really opened that door in style.

Like the Russian AK-47, the Mi-17 is crude, roughly finished, heavy, and compared to U.S. equipment they’re technically unsophisticated therefore comparatively easy for Third World soldiers to operate and maintain. As different from U.S. military equipment, there was no agenda involved in their design and production other than their utility. Lobbyists, politicians, and industrialist’s profit didn’t enter into the equation as it always does in U.S. weapons procurement.

Sometimes I wonder how we won the “Cold War” with Russia and the Soviet Union. Or did we really win the war, as the United States now has a Marxist Communist President and Russia now has a Free Market Capitalist President. If that thought doesn’t make your head hurt, nothing will.

DJ Taylor

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.