Adventures in Bureaucracy

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The temptation for this gets stronger and stronger with every day of my continued employment with the government. Coincidence?

Remember that scene in "Airplane" where the woman panics and starts screaming, "I've got to get out of here!"? That's similar to how I feel at the end of the average workday.

¶ 20:47

Monday, May 07, 2007

More tales of woe from DHS. The comments make for fun reading. My favorite:

"I've read posts from legacy customs guys and legacy INS guys and they all say the same thing. "The good old days were better". Well, suck it up because the glory days are gone. Inspections is a mess because of legacy customs. Investigations is a mess because of legacy INS. BP and DRO have to sort it out because NOBODY is cooperating. Both agencies, Customs and INS got stuck with duties they were NEVER meant to have and were ill equipped to accomplish."

From reading the comments, it looks like there's still a lot of rancor in the ranks.

¶ 21:29

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Latin American immigrants bring the charismatic movement into the U.S. Catholic Church.

When I say I want to go to Latin Mass, this isn't what I'm talking about.

¶ 22:34

I read something today at Gates of Vienna that I feel I must respond to:

"As far as any citizen without an official security clearance can tell, DHS is huge, unwieldy, expensive, and not measurably more effective than the agencies it gobbled up when it was formed. It has always been a bureaucrat’s dream, an expanded opportunity for patronage, pork, nepotism, and the exercise of unbridled discretionary power."

As a bureaucrat who was there from the beginning, I have to say it was never the dream of any of the bureaucrats involved, and I don't remember too many people who were too happy about the whole reorganization. As for the part about huge, unwieldy and expensive...

I have no comment at this time.

¶ 22:19

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Former Mayor Marion Barry has proposed toll booths for commuters who work in the District of Columbia.

"More than 400,000 nonresidents are on our streets every day, getting police protection, fire protection, causing potholes," Barry said. "We love them, but they ought to pay some money for tearing up our streets."

Damned Virginians and Marylanders -- and all those tourists too -- going around and ripping up the streets in D.C. and then getting police protection for it. They'll need a lot more police protection if they wander outside the standard tourist and business venues.

¶ 21:33

This is why people hate lawyers.

This kind of thing frightens me. A legal system only works when people have confidence that justice will be done, but increasingly the laws seem to be used as a weapon of intimidation. Legal codes are published for transparency, but when a reasonable person can read the laws and STILL not know what to expect from a court case, that's going to erode confidence in the entire system.

¶ 21:25