Three Texas military commanders are being removed from top positions following allegations that they received paychecks from the state and federal government for work done at the same time, according to a report by KHOU-TV in Houston.
Gov. Rick Perry is removing Gens. John Furlow, commander of the Texas Army National Guard, and Allen Dehnert, who commands the Texas Air National Guard, the television station reported Thursday. The top commander of the Texas Military Forces, Adjutant Gen. Charles Rodriguez, is also being replaced.
Perry's spokeswoman, Allison Castle, said the removals were not related to the double-dipping of pay.
"The governor routinely appoints new leadership," Castle said, noting that Rodriguez's two-year term expired in February. He was appointed in 2005 and was reappointed in 2007.
However, all three came under scrutiny because they allegedly collected paychecks from the state while simultaneously performing work for the federal government, the television station reported. Rodriguez, Furlow and Dehnert did not go on "state leave" when they performed work for the federal government but instead took "emergency leave," allowing them to continue to be paid by Texas.
Chief Gonda Moncada of the Texas Air National Guard said Friday that the allegations stem from a busy period late last summer in which the officers were assisting with multiple hurricanes that threatened the state. She said in such a situation Guard members are most concerned with helping during the disaster and that administrative paperwork is secondary.
"Nobody would have done something like this purposely," she said.
Perry announced last week he would replace Rodriguez, currently the top military officer in Texas. The adjutant general oversees the Texas military's three branches - the Texas Army National Guard, Texas Air National Guard and the Texas State Guard.
Rodriguez, who also worked sometimes for the federal government, is to be replaced by Gen. Jose Mayorga, pending confirmation by the Texas Senate.
Rodriguez told KHOU he was in the process of repaying $53,000 and had paid nearly a third of it.
"I have every obligation to pay off the rest," he said.
Dehnert will be replaced by Col. John F. Nichols, who will receive a promotion to brigadier general, and Furlow will be replaced by Brig. Gen. Joyce Stevens.
Castle confirmed that Furlow and Dehner were double-paid but the amount they owed has not been disclosed. In a Jan. 14 memo, the governor' chief of staff, Jay Kimbrough, wrote to Rodriguez telling him to establish a new policy that prohibits the practice for all state employees.
Castle referred questions about how much money Dehnert and Furlow owe the state to the Guard. The Guard's internal audit director, Mike Garner, said he provided Rodriguez in October 2008 with estimates of how much is owed. The Guard would not release the amounts noted in those estimates, KHOU reported.
Meanwhile, a group of senior women officers in the Texas Air National Guard has filed a joint congressional complaint alleging sexual discrimination against the wing commander at Ellington Field. Their allegations were substantiated by Brig. Gen. Thomas Haynes, an independent investigator appointed from outside Texas to look into the matter, KHOU reported.
Castle said some of the findings remain under review.
#1
I hope who ever is doing the reporting is checking relevant federal and state statutes concerning pay. In some cases ANG positions are indeed partially paid by both the state and federal government. It all revolves around the specific position, personnel slotting, and particular 'status' of that position at a specific time when duty is split between the two jurisdictions.
Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been overwhelmed by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest....
Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the presidents surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk....
The American source said: Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.
That was the gamble these guys made at the front end of this presidency and I think theyre finding it a hard thing to do everything. Michelle Malkin comments:
Im not sure which is worse. At least if he meant to snub Brown, it would suggest a certain competence at this brand of diplomacy. Instead, were told that the Obama White House and their staff are just a bunch of incompetents who got in over their heads.
Which is, of course, the point we made continuously over the last two years.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/07/2009 17:26 ||
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#1
Perhaps President and Mrs. Obama might consider giving up their nightly parties, and go to bed well before midnight.
#3
Yes he is overwhelmed. He went to Columbia University as a minority. He was given points on his Sat as he is Black . His IQ is also increased for the same reason. He got accepted due to minority quotas. Now when he went to Harvard the same things applied. It costs at least $50,000 per semester to attend Harvard. I bet he didn't pay as well as at Columbia. Harvard graduates only get A's as they are the future leaders wherever they should go. I wonder if he applied under his real name of Barry Soetero. So yes he is overwhelmed as he has never been tested. He will soon show many signs of stress and could do something desperate to show he is up to the job.
His enablers will not see the harm he will cause.
He wants control period. So its the old Kennedy joke again "its my football so we play by my rules".
TKY,
Dale
#6
ahem: Barry resigns "I'm over my head. Above my pay grade". Joe "too deep implants" biden takes over and succumbs to a stroke when an intelligent thought occurs to him. Nancy "Blinky" Pelosi takes over.
/Moral: It can get worse
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/07/2009 19:03 Comments ||
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#11
Actually, I think the entire Democratic political circus is in over their heads - or at least I wished they were, somewhere in the middle of the Marianas Trench. We have a clown circus reject running the most complex government in the world. Pray hard, pray regular, my brothers, and hope God is listening!
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
03/07/2009 20:30 Comments ||
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#12
We may have had worse governments in the past, but I cannot seem to find one. This administration seems to be the ultimate bottom of the barrel - making even Jimmy Carter look somewhat competent.
#14
I resent a reference to Kansas and Obama in the same sentence. Oh wait I guess his mother was from Kansas or something like that and he did put Katy in the cabinet.
Oversight: Congressman Barney Frank says he wants some of those responsible for our current financial meltdown to be prosecuted. And we couldn't agree more. First up in the court dock: Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
Even by the extraordinarily loose standards of Congress, it takes some chutzpah for someone such as Frank to suggest that he'll seek prosecutions for those behind the housing and financial crunch and for what he called "a strongly empowered systemic risk regulator."
For Frank, perhaps more than any single individual in private or public life, is responsible for both the housing market mess and subsequent bank disaster. And no, this isn't partisan hyperbole or historical exaggeration.
But first, a little trip down memory lane.
It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two so-called Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), that lay behind the crisis. After regulatory changes made to the Community Reinvestment Act by President Clinton in 1995, Fannie and Freddie went into hyper-drive, channeling literally trillions of dollars into the housing markets, using leverage and implicit taxpayers' guarantees.
In November 2000, President Clinton's Housing and Urban Development Department would trumpet "new regulations to provide $2.4 trillion in mortgages for affordable housing for 28.1 million families." The vehicles for this were Fannie and Freddie. It was the largest expansion in housing aid ever.
Still, from the early 1990s on, many people both inside and outside Washington were alarmed by what they saw at Fannie and Freddie.
Not Barney Frank: Starting in the early 1990s, he (and other Democrats) stood athwart efforts by regulators, Congress and the White House to get the runaway housing market under control.
He opposed reform as early as 1992. And, in response to another attempt bring Fannie-Freddie to heel in 2000, Frank responded it wasn't needed because there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."
In 2002, Frank nixed reforms again. See a pattern here?
Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives had overstated earnings by as much as $10.6 billion in order to boost bonuses, Frank didn't miss a beat.
President Bush pushed for what the New York Times then called "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago."
If it had passed, the housing crisis likely would have never boiled over, at least not the extent it did, taking the economy with it. Instead, led by Frank, Democrats stood as a bloc against any changes.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis," Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
It's hard to say why Frank did all this. It could be his close ties to the Neighborhood Assistance Corp., a powerful housing activist group based in Boston, which controls billions in loans. Or that he received some $40,100 in campaign donations from Fannie and Freddie from 1989 to 2008. Or that he has been romantically linked to a one-time executive at Fannie during the 1990s.
Whatever the case, his conflicts are obvious and outrageous, and his refusal to countenance reforms of Fannie and Freddie contributed mightily to today's meltdown. If you're looking for a culprit in the meltdown to prosecute, no one fits the bill better than Frank.
Posted by: Omoter Speaking for Boskone7794 ||
03/07/2009 09:48 ||
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Via Instpundit.com
Only 6 weeks in and with the media industrial complex openly asking how they may be of service to the One.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that 39% of the nations voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-one percent (31%) Strongly Disapprove to give Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of +8 (see trends). ...
Posted by: ed ||
03/07/2009 14:17 ||
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I doubt that he cares, provided his agenda continues its great march forward....
The dichotomy between reality & the atmosphere at the WH is so great, even Whoopi & friends are playing CYA on the View
An organization that serves as a watchdog on the U.S. government for American taxpayers has launched a campaign to uncover exactly how much tax money is being spent on parties at the Obama White House.
The president has shown a penchant for lavish galas, such as the huge assembly orchestrated in Denver when he accepted his party's nomination for president -- an outdoor gathering for some 75,000 featuring a stage with Greek columns. He also held a multimillion-dollar victory celebration in Chicago, and his fancy inauguration cost an estimated $170 million, according to ABC News.
#1
Tempest in a teapot. Let them entertain, I don't care. Bush entertained a lot less and Obama entertains more. We have more important things to consider.
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/07/2009 16:23 Comments ||
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#2
I'd beg to differ, Steve. Most people have little real grasp of the magnitude of the sums being squandered by Obama's gang on the septic stimuli. Other examples of his fiscal irresponsibility are useful illustrators and likely to open eyes more effectively, per dollar, than trillions wasted elsewhere.
#3
Extroverts need parties like introverts need air. That's fine, but if, as is being said, President Obama is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work the job requires, he needs to find a less time-consuming way to meet his need for intimate crowds.
Don't miss my conpanion post on Bambi-clan partying post-election Commentary by John Kerry
March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Last week, when American taxpayers learned that a bank receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program funds had thrown a lavish bash and spared no expense to celebrate with the bands Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire, I introduced legislation based on a simple concept: if a company accepts bailout funds from the taxpayer, it can't waste money on lavish parties, expensive dinners and Tiffany trinkets.
The reaction in some quarters suggests that I had attempted -- like a modern-day Dean Wormer in "Animal House" -- to ban fun of any kind, or that the wheels of commerce and marketing would grind to a halt.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Normal marketing and travel wouldn't be affected one iota.
I believe we have to insist that tax dollars be spent wisely because, otherwise, Americans will refuse to rescue any business struggling in the most difficult economic times since the Great Depression. And believe me, Americans struggling to hold onto their homes and their jobs are already tired of picking up the newspaper and reading about idiotic abuses of taxpayer money.
During these difficult economic times, in which 3.6 million jobs have been lost in just over a year, I believe companies receiving taxpayer assistance should be focused on easing the credit crisis by increasing lending.
Frankly, I wish this legislation wasn't necessary. But too many times, when we hear of these abuses of tax dollars, we get an explanation that the expenses in question weren't specifically paid for by TARP dollars. As we all know, money is fungible. A TARP recipient can't be allowed to fall back on the claim that a given expenditure didn't involve TARP funds.
Removing Management
We should be focused on turning the economy around. We have to face the reality that huge swaths of our banking system are insolvent. We must recapitalize banks, not to help shareholders, but to rescue our economy. We need a clear, concise plan for aiding banks, large and small, that have liabilities that exceed their assets. That plan should include giving federal bank regulators the authority to remove current bank management.
As a condition for getting taxpayer assistance, banks should have their assets reflect current market values rather than inflated values. There will even be rare cases when no value can be ascertained, and those assets should be written down to zero.
A large, aggressive recapitalization of banks will be costly and unpopular. But we have no other choice. Congress will bite the bullet on this tough decision, but it's a lot harder when Americans are reading stories about excessive spending by the very banks we're here to save.
Not Party Time
Clearly, this is no time to party. Economic indicators are deeply troubling. Household debt-to-income levels are at historic highs, and estimates show that homes continue to be overvalued by as much as 30 percent. Many credit-card companies are facing insolvency. And commercial real-estate projects across the nation are quickly coming to their moment of crisis.
What does this have to do with lavish and frivolous spending by TARP recipients? Everything. If Americans continue to lose faith that their tax dollars are being used to rescue the economy, they'll rebel -- at a time when more painful investments and sacrifices must be made to avoid a deeper and deeper recession.
Make no mistake: We need fewer concerts with big-name attractions and more of the hard work to get our economic house in order. This may just be one of those times when Congress needs to save the big corporations from themselves.
(John Kerry, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, is a Democrat and a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee. The opinions expressed are his own.)
#3
Not to be confused with the Animal House party going on in Congress as they stuff constituent special interests with loads of pork money who will in turn stuff reelection funds with loads of kickback. Toga, toga!
Even the Guardian appreciates the irony...
When the Iraqi journalist, Muntazar al-Zaidi, hurled his shoes at the then-US president, George Bush, in December, Iranian officials declared him a hero and hailed his gesture as a mark of Islamic courage. They were presumably less impressed this week when Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was similarly targeted during a visit to the north-western city of Urumiye.
Ahmadinejad found the shoe on the other foot as he waved to the crowd from an open-top car on his way to give a speech at a local stadium. An Iranian website, Urumiye News, reported that a shoe was hurled at the president as his convoy drove through a central square. Security guards waded into the crowds but failed to find the culprit. A hat was also thrown in Ahmadinejad's direction before his car sped away.
The event went unreported on mainstream Iranian news outlets but has been hotly discussed on the country's highly active blogosphere. Some pro-Ahmadinejad bloggers have dismissed the reports as rumours spread by "royalists" and "counter-revolutionaries". However, Ahmadinejad has been on the receiving end of flying footwear before. A shoe was thrown at him during a students' demonstration at Tehran's Amir Kabir university in December 2006.
Urumiye News said the latest protest came when a disturbance broke out after a vehicle in the presidential convoy struck an elderly man who walked onto the road to try and hand Ahmadinejad a letter. People became angry when the driver failed to stop to attend to the injured man. Eventually an ambulance in the motorcade was forced to take him to hospital after jeering crowds blocked its path.
Ahmadinejad travels frequently to Iran's provinces in a bid to boost his popularity. He commonly receives large numbers of letters requesting financial assistance and other help during such trips.
After Zaidi's protest in Baghdad, Iranian officials paid tribute by holding several public shoe-throwing competitions in which contestants threw footwear at caricatures of Bush. Iran's main shoemaking federation also offered to supply a lifetime of shoes to Zaidi, who remains in a Baghdad jail awaiting trial.
But it turns out that one of the features of the 2005 Bankruptcy bill was to put derivative counter parties at the front of the line ahead of other creditors in bankruptcy proceedings.
Actually, from what I can tell, they don't just go to the head of the line. They got to skip the line entirely. As the Financial Times noted last fall, "the 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company's assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors."
If AIG were to go down, derivatives counterparties would be able to seize cash/collateral while other creditors and claimants would have to stand by and wait.
Depending on how aggressive the insurance regulators in the hundreds of jurisdictions AIG operates have been, the subsidiaries might or might not have enough cash to stay afloat. If policyholders at AIG and other insurance companies started to cancel/cash in policies, there would definitely not be enough cash to pay them.
Insurers would be forced to liquidate portfolios of equities and bonds into a collapsing market.
But separate from the immediate financial implications related to AIG, it does point us toward the larger political economy point: the self-reinforcing cycle in which financialization leads to vast sums of money concentrated in the hands of paper-jobbers, who then mobilize that money in Washington to rewrite the laws to privilege them for even greater profits. Put in simple terms, this means the generally unregulated derivatives market, which is about $150T in debt, has first call on all bankrupt company assets even before the judge can divide assets to a bankrupt corporations creditors. This means that when a company goes bankrupt, it will likely drive many or most of its creditors and supplier companies bankrupt as well, because they cannot recover anything, ever.
#1
What is worse is that many derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, though very useful for parties to debt, were exempted by Congress from the gambling restrictions so that parties who had no insurable interest could take them out. Thus rather than being available only to the parties to a transaction, anyone could take them out.
Then AIG when on a massive unhedged gamble to just build profits in an area they didn't understand. Now we have this debacle.
#3
Omoter is right. AIG and others made massive bets on low probability events. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of probability could tell you that they would make a lot of money for an indeterminate period then get wiped out.
This was like gambling with other peoples money, where you got a percentage of every win, but could walk away from the inevitable big loss.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
