joyfulchristian

This is not good at all

We sent tons of lawyers and judges to Iraq.  Did we forget to send accountants?

The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit, in a confidential report delivered to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and reviewed by Knight Ridder, has uncovered widespread fraud and waste in $1 billion worth of weapons procurement contracts involving senior Iraqi officials in the Defense Ministry. The audit report indicates that as much as $500 million may have been lost through three intermediary companies that hid “kickbacks they received from contracts involving the purchase of unnecessary, overpriced or outdated equipment”, Knight Ridder reported.

The Iraqi Defense Minister has ordered the arrest of his procurement chief (who fled) and placed one of his deputies on leave.  Among the audit findings were :

• Senior Iraqi officials kept little or no record of major purchases. Nearly all purchases for which there were records contained a clause that required payment up front in cash for the full value of the contract.
• The Ministry of Defense hired middlemen, who subsequently disappeared, to negotiate contracts leaving officials with no way to complain about problems with fulfillment.
• While internal records indicated that the Ministry of Defense signed contracts with Poland, Arab countries and the United States, in fact all contracts were signed by Iraqi suppliers.

To say the least, this is not encouraging.  One of the reasons the people of Iraq are distrustful of government is that Saddam's regime was as crooked as a mountain road.  (Not to mention the torturing and mass murder.)  If the new Iraqi government is to gain the people's trust it is vital that it's officials not steal from them and/or lose their money.  We're not exactly off to a good start here.

To accomplish this, they're going to need meticulous records and complete transparency in their budgets as well as their historical records.  According to this report, many intermediaries the Ministry hired were actually transitory individuals or groups who subsequently disappeared.  This is simply atrocious.

Unfortunately, it gets worse:

An audit report citing similar problems in Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), Iraq’s oil account, from June 24 to December 24, 2004, was delivered to the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) by KPMG in May. KPMG noted, according to a statement from IAMB, that records maintained by both Iraqi and U.S. agencies were incomplete, and that Iraqi ministries did not explain the lack of competition for contracts.

The KPMG audit also cited “unreconciled quantities of oil and oil products exported indicating a lack of control and possible misappropriation of oil revenues. . . and non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts”, according to the IAMB statement.

This oil money is the future of the Iraqi people.  If that money is going missing, that future is in jeopardy.

If their accounting is that bad, maybe I should be volunteering to go. (Although I don't know what my wife would think of that.)

Random notes

Just so you know, when a parent dies, taking every document they have in their house to the accountant in a box and saying, "Everything you need should be in there," is a REALLY expensive way to get their final income tax and estate tax returns filed.

My boss got an e-mail from his daughter-in-law last night.  It asked if he had a good time at the hotel.  He wrote back that she probably meant to send that to someone else.  There's a good reason not to alphabetize your e-mail addresses by last name if I ever heard one.  Oops!

Yesterday was my birthday.  I got lots of cool stuff.  My sweet wife got me books on WWII and the Civil War along with the DVD for Galaxy Quest. (My VHS has just about had it.)

Next year a whole slew of vehicles will come along with tax credits.  Most of these are alternative energy vehicles (in whole, or in part) and the credits are supposed to help offset the increased costs.  The ACEEE has published estimates of what the credits for various vehicles will be.  (These are estimates only. The IRS has not released its numbers yet.)  Check out the Prius.  It gets 60 MPG and the expected tax credit is over $3,000.  It's ugly as dirt, but still ...

I'm still here

Just haven't had anything to say. (Hard to believe, I know.)

Can someone please tell me ...

... why it seems that everywhere I turn the last week or so, someone on the internet is talking about the Rolling Stones?  Drudge can't shut up about them.  Google News is constantly highlighting stories about them.

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I don't care what the Rolling Stones are doing.  I don't care if they're bashing Bush. (Seriously, lots of other  celebs are doing this too.   It's not like it's news.)  I don't care if they claim that their Bush Bashing song isn't really bashing Bush.  I don't care if they sing it a lot. I don't care if they're selling out or they've still got awesome dance moves.

I do not care if they're on a bus.
I do not care if they're singing to us.
I do not care if they're in school.
I do not care if they buy a power tool.

Sorry, channeling Dr. Suess apparently.  Anyway, I think I've gotten my point across.

(BTW, I just found out that the TypePad spell checker doesn't know the word "internet".  How's that for irony?)

I doubt that

I saw this headline that said," Intuit Aims to Solve Accountants’ Most Critical Needs."  The article goes on to talk about this new Quicbooks support system Intuit is setting up.  Well, let me just say that when it comes to Quickbooks, that's NOT my most critical need.

My most critical need is a version of Quicbooks that doesn't let my clients delete entries, arbitrarily change entries, or make entries to prior years.  They're apparently not doing anything about that.

Big day!

Well, today was a big day in the Collins family.  I adopted Larissa today.  We are now a family of three with the same last name!

I wish more peope understood this

Jonah Goldberg has a great article about people's "right" to speak their mind:

All this can get a little confusing because there are a few other exceptions to the whole say-whatever-you-want free-speech rule. If you're confused, though, here's a nifty little hint for how to figure out if your speech is permitted under our Constitution: If nobody says "it's against the law for you to say that!" it's probably not against the law for you to say that!

Look: It's deep August and Washington is about as hot and moist as the air pocket underneath one of those dudes you occasionally see on the evening news being pried from his bed with the jaws of life. So maybe I'm just being cranky. But, if you want to defend somebody's controversial statements, saying "so-and-so has the right to his opinion" doesn't get you out of the gate. It just sucks up air and fills space. Intellectually, it's got the nutritional value of Styrofoam. You might as well say "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang" instead and then move on to your next point. It's not interesting, not smart, not insightful. Saying Cindy Sheehan has a right to criticize the president is like saying she's a carbon-based life form: True, but utterly beside the point.

Yes, Virginia, you do have the right to free speech.  But so what?

Like Jonah, I get extremely irritated by people who think the right to free speech is the right to not be criticized.

8 years ago

... my sister Lisa got a new dog.  The dog was a bulldog/pointer mix named Sugar.  Sugar was a delightful puppy and I've got several priceless pictures of the two of them playing.

7 1/2 years ago Lisa died.  Ever since then, Sugar has been my dog.  She's been a good dog and I've got a lot of wonderful memories.

Today the vet told me that Sugar has cancer.  They're going to remove a tumor today and hopefully we'll find that they got it all, but you never know. 

It's strange; I'm not one to overly romanticize pets.  I love my dogs and they're important to me, but I don't think of them as "children" like a lot of people seem too.  Today, though, I found myself bawling like a baby.  I'm sure part of it is because Sugar is so intrinsically tied up with Lisa  that it brings the whole thing back.

I've always known that a time like this would cause me some problems, but I find it very surprising how hard this has hit me.  The human heart is a strange thing indeed.

Just about right

Mark Steyn summarizes the problems with the 9/11 commission:

Maybe we need a 9/11 Commission Commission to investigate the 9/11 Commission. A body intended to reassure Americans that the lessons of that terrible day had been learned instead engaged in what at best was transparent politicking and collusion in posterior-covering and at worst was something a whole lot darker and more disturbing.

The problem pre-9/11 was always political: that's to say, no matter how savvy individual operatives in various agencies may have been, the political culture of the day meant that nothing would happen except a memo would get typed up and shoveled into a filing cabinet. Together with other never fully explained episodes -- like Sandy Berger's pants-stuffing at the national archives -- the Able Danger story makes one thing plain: The problem is still political.

Of course, this is Washington we're talking about; politics is almost always the problem.  Except, of course, when money is the problem.

Well, drat

Josh Chafetz is hanging up the keyboard.  He'll be missed.  Of course, it's not like doesn't have good reasons.

Why? The reasons are mostly positive ones. This has been a fantastic year for me. I finished my doctorate. I started law school, which I'd been looking forward to for a long time, and which I'm enjoying every bit as much as I thought I would. I did some teaching this past year, which I enjoyed tremendously, and will teach again this coming spring. I published a couple of short journal articles.  I got a book deal. And I'm dating a wonderful woman whom I adore. With absolutely no disrespect intended to my co-authors or our readers, those things all take priority over blogging. And those things have been taking up a lot of my time.

Still, he'll be missed.  For that matter, he's been missed already.  As Josh points out, he hasn't posted much lately.

By no means have I always agreed with Josh, but I've always valued his opinion and have generally found his positions to be well reasoned.

I've taken some hiatuses from blogging from time to time.  I've had health problems that have gotten in the way and sometimes I've just gotten burnt out.  But I've never been able to pull myself away entirely.  There have always been some blogs I'd read and I've always felt drawn back. 

I don't write as many long pieces as I used to and I don't put as much time into it as I once did, but I guess it's in my blood.  I seriously doubt I'll ever be able to completely give it up.

If Josh can be happy without the blog, more power to him.  Oh, and I hope someone in the blogosphere will be letting us know when Josh's book is out.

Why are we doing this?

For those who are having trouble remembering why we're in Iraq, try reading Mohhamed's letter to Cindy Sheehan:

I know how you feel Cindy, I lived among the same pains for 35 years but worse than that was the fear from losing our loved ones at any moment. Even while I'm writing these words to you there are feelings of fear, stress, and sadness that interrupt our lives all the time but in spite of all that I'm sticking hard to hope which if I didn't have I would have died years ago.

Ma'am, we asked for your nation's help and we asked you to stand with us in our war and your nation's act was (and still is) an act of ultimate courage and unmatched sense of humanity.
Our request is justified, death was our daily bread and a million Iraqi mothers were expecting death to knock on their doors at any second to claim someone from their families.
Your face doesn't look strange to me at all; I see it everyday on endless numbers of Iraqi women who were struck by losses like yours.

Our fellow country men and women were buried alive, cut to pieces and thrown in acid pools and some were fed to the wild dogs while those who were lucky enough ran away to live like strangers and the Iraqi mother was left to grieve one son buried in an unfound grave and another one living far away who she might not get to see again.

We did nothing to deserve all that suffering, well except for a dream we had; a dream of living like normal people do.

May that dream come true.

You've got to be kidding me!

Oh yeah, this is a good idea. 

Not.

CANBERRA Australia, one of the biggest exporters of uranium, said Tuesday that it would hold formal talks to start selling and shipping uranium to China, which plans to increase nuclear energy output fourfold by 2020.

 

The agreement will set up safeguards to ensure that Australian uranium supplied to China is used only for peaceful purposes, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said.

Yeah, and we can trust them because?

Political Humor

Frank J explains why liberal bloggers don't tend to find conservative bloggers funny. (You'd think this would be obvious, but apparently not.)

If there are some liberals reading this wondering why they don't find conservatives funny, let me explain this very simply: It's not fun to be pointed and laughed at.

Why make this complicated? Take liberal and conservative out of the equation. When someone has a completely alien viewpoint to your own, you won't find that person funny.

KEY HUMOR ASPECT NUMBER ONE: Humor involves shared, unsaid beliefs between who tells joke and who hears it.

If your shared belief is that Bush is Hitler, you will not laugh at the same jokes as people who believe Bush is not Hitler. Your viewpoints are just too askew to share a laugh.

Read the rest.

Tax Policy

Yeah, this was over the top, but I liked it: (Subscription Link)

Seven members of the Finance Committee and one senator not on that committee have introduced legislation repealing the AMT. That list includes Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and Senate Finance leaders Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and ranking member Max Baucus (D-MT), who recently equated the tax to evil-doer Darth Vader.

“The AMT has many of the same qualities as Anakin Skywalker,” he said. “The AMT was supposed to bring order and fairness to the tax world, but it eventually got off on the wrong path and became a threat to middle-income taxpayers. Both Skywalker and the AMT started off with great intentions, but eventually they went astray. And now we have the Darth Vader of the Tax Code bearing down on millions of unsuspecting families.”

This is humorous and, in this case, I would tend to agree with Baucus.  I will note, however, that Democratic senators have, of late, shown an alarming tendency to substitute parallels from Star Wars for actual policy analysis in their public speaking.  Very odd.

Oh yeah, this is a good idea!

Not.

As thousands of anxious A-level students await their results this month, a Staffordshire theme park has been criticised for offering free tickets to those who fail.

For those students who get U grades - marks so low they are unclassified - in every subject, Alton Towers is offering free entry for three days, August 18-20.

About four per cent of students who sat their A-level exams this summer are expected to be able to take advantage of the offer. They are invited to scream away their woes with free entry to the theme park if they turn up with their result slip and photo ID.

Marketing manager Mike Lorimer said the offer was open only to "genuine failures".

He said: "Only those students with photo identification and an original exam slip will be allowed in for free. All exams must have been failed comprehensively and we are only interested in exam slips from 2005 - this is for newly qualified failures only."

While I grant that getting a free pass at the local amusment park doesn't make up for completely bombing your exams, this certainly seems to send the wrong message.

For as long as I can remember ...

... I've been against renaming existing streets after famous people.  It doesn't matter how famous they were, how much they accomplished, or how much I like them; I'm against it.  It adds unnecessary expenses and inconvenience to those who live or run businesses on the affected streets and cost the city money reworking signs and maps.  It's just way to much trouble for a purely symbolic gesture.

Which is why I oppose changing a street name to that of a former president; even if that president is Ronald Reagan.

I'm often in a hurry to get off the plane

... but this is ridiculous.

SEATTLE -- A woman was arrested Wednesday for attempting to open an airplane exit door while the plane was still in the air, police said.

The 52-year-old woman from Dania Beach, Fla., left her seat and tried to open the door as the United Airlines flight was descending into Seattle to land, police said. The plane was at an altitude of about 4,000 feet at the time.

She was arrrested for "malicious mischief" which sounds like an understatement.

You know, I'm opposed to the whole "electing Supreme Court Justices thing ...

... but I'm starting to think that  we might want to consider something along the lines of the 25th Amendment (section 4) for Justices.  I mean, if we had some way to remove Justices for health reasons, things like this wouldn't bother me so much:

William Rehnquist developed a fever on Thursday and was taken to a Virginia hospital for evaluation,  U.S. Supreme Court spokesman Ed Turner said.

I respect Rehnquist, but this is getting absurd.  It's time he admits that he can't continue doing this.

Well, this can't be good

It seems the F-18 has got some problems:

WASHINGTON - The front-line fighter jet of the Navy and Marines has suffered a series of recent accidents blamed on brake failure, exposing a problem that has spurred urgent warnings from commanders, military documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

Brake problems affecting the F/A-18 Hornet pose "a severe hazard to Naval aviation" that could kill pilots and ruin valuable aircraft, a Navy air wing commander wrote last year after one of his jets roared off a runway and splashed into San Diego Bay, destroying the $30 million plane.

Many of the brake failures have been traced to a $535 electrical cable — about as thin as a drinking straw — that controls the jet's antiskid brakes, the equivalent of antilock brakes on a passenger car. Investigators say the cable can chafe or break, since it runs close to where heavy tie-down chains secure the jets to a carrier deck.

This is not good.  The Navy is in the process of phasing out the F-14 and the Joint Strike Fighter is still, as I understand it, several years off.  We can't afford for the F-18 to have major problems.  They need to get this fixed soon.

I'd have never known

A little while ago I heard our local NBC affiliate running an ad for their news program.  They were bragging about how they'd exposed local retailers who weren't checking the signature lines on credit cards.  Now I happen to agree that this is a serious problem.  However, the idea that people are unaware that this is happening is just absurd.  All you have to do to find out about this problem is ... pay for stuff by credit card! 

What an exclusive!

Talk about a nasty shock

A famous Australian architect recently found out, much to his surprise, that his citizenship had been revoked nearly 20 years ago.  Thanks for the heads-up guys!

I had a thought

I was e-mailing back and forth with Sarah.  She was telling me about all the bloggers who were going to be at the wedding.  (You know, the one with him.)  I joked that it was going to be more like a wedding and blogger convention.

After a while, I got to thinking, "Hmm . . . maybe they'll have wi-fi at the wedding!"

A while later I thought, "If they do, I could live-blog it!"

Ted Kennedy is either an idiot or a liar ... or both

Part 823,333.

Regarding the recess appointment of John Bolton to the post of UN Ambassador, our esteemed Senator said the following:

"The abuse of power and the cloak of secrecy from the White House continues. ... It's a devious maneuver that evades the constitutional requirement of Senate consent and only further darkens the cloud over Mr. Bolton's credibility at the U.N."

So let me get this straight: Kennedy is claiming that a recess appointment is an abuse of power?  Since when?  If it's so bad, why is it in the Constitution?  It's right there in Article II, Section 2.  In the paragraph right after the one about "Advice and Consent."  Recess appointments in no way "evade" the requirement for advice and consent.  They were designed as temporary appointments until that advice could be obtained.  (On the very sensible grounds that someone needs to be in position to do the job.)