Friday, February 28, 2014

It's Coming

Fargo premieres Tuesday, April 15, at 10 p.m. ET on FX. It's not Paul Bunyan along side the road this time.






Montana Democratic Party Slings Mud

Steve Daines is Montana's at large representative in the U.S. House and Republican candidate for the United States Senate seat, recently vacated by Max Baucus (D) to spend more time in Montana, which it turns out is somewhere in the neighborhood of Beijing.  




The Daines family framed by the Bridger Range, just outside of Bozeman.

Steve Daines was born in California to Montana parents who returned to Montana when he was still an infant. Daines grew up in Bozeman. He went to grade school, middle school and high school here. He was a student athlete for the Bozeman High School Hawks and president of the student council. He took his post secondary education at Montana State University in Bozeman where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. After leaving Montana for a spell to develop his career and see the world (unlike Baucus, Daines actually spent considerable time in China and understands the country) Daines returned to Montana to partner with his father to operate the most successful residential real estate construction firm in town.  

Steve Daines files "paperwork" for U. S.
Senate run on his iPhone outside RightNow
Technoligies  in Bozeman, MT, with wife Cindy,
 24 February 2014.
Then Daines was recruited by founder Greg Gianfonte to get in on the ground floor as Vice President of RightNow Technologies, a tech startup right here in Bozeman that operates in the cloud. They grew the company from dozens of hires to employ hundreds. The enterprise was ultimately valued at $1.5 billion when it was sold to software giant Oracle Corp.. RightNow still operates in Bozeman today, where it is a backbone of the local economy, bringing in revenues from throughout the world, and supplying outstanding jobs to many of our neighbors. 

Daines has said too many times to count, that while he was born in California, he was bred Montana, raised Montanan, educated Montanan and worked Montanan -- 5th generation if you track back the lineage. Alas, there was a 12 year old press report quoting Daines as saying he was a 3rd generation Montanan.  

So what is the Montana Democratic Party's lead on why Steve Daines should not be elected? Steve Daines needs to produce his birth certificate to clear up this horrific discrepancy. You can't make this up.

Show Your Birth Certificate, Steve!

Steve Daines Makes Contradicting Claims About Montana Roots


As Congressman Grasps At Ties To Adopted State, He Confuses Facts & Himself  
HELENA, Mont. – The Montana Democratic Party today called on Congressman Steve Daines, who claims in his latest TV ad to be a “fifth-generation Montanan,” to clear up confusion about his roots by releasing his birth certificate.
The Daines campaign swung back hard.
The Daines campaign fired back Wednesday, saying that the 2002 statement was simply a misquote by the reporter and that his family has been in the state five generations. “[Democrats] may be able to dictate the way Montanans live their lives, but unless Montana Democrats want to move Steve’s great-great-grandmother’s grave, they can’t change Steve’s strong heritage as a fifth-generation Montanan,” said Daines spokeswoman Alee Lockman. 
Mr. Daines was born in Southern California, after his father—unable to find work in Montana—took a job there while his mother was pregnant. The family moved back to Montana when Mr. Daines was one year old, and he grew up and attended school there, Ms. Lockman said.

The Democrats know better than you. Do what Daines is doing -- make them eat their own dirt.


Thursday, February 27, 2014

Not Going to Happen Here

Here is what the weekend weather forecast looks like for Bozeman, Montana.


The two degrees below zero forecast high on Saturday is notable for being 45 degrees below the normal high temperature for that date. Flip that anomaly and move it to mid-July and the forecast high would be 125 degrees in an area whose all-time record high is 105. That's not going to happen, no way, no how. Global warming is quite the threat, eh?

What's Happening With Glacier Bancorp?

Our To Invest in a Bank post from last October has caught fire. It will easily lead our blog in February page views.

In that post, we wrote about one of our Steady Eddie stock picks. Glacier Bancorp (GBCI) is located up the Flathead valley in Kalispell, Montana. Glacier stock had just hit an all time high of $27.82 per share. It continued to rise. I said the market was acting like it expected another increase in Glacier's dividend when the snows came. Sure enough, Glacier announced a dividend increase on November 26, helping to drive the stock to new all-time high closes, peaking at $30.87 on December 23, 2013.

However, the last week of  January and the first week of February were tough on Glacier, dropping its stock price as low as $25.30 a share on February 4.  Part of the drop was a market hit. Glacier tracked the regional bank index down.


2014 YTD stock prices, GBCI redline and KRE (regional banking index) blue line.

But Glacier dropped more than the regional bank stock market overall largely because GBCI's fourth (calendar) quarter earnings were a meet (says Yahoo) or a miss (says Ticker Report). Glacier's three previous quarterly earnings were a beat, which helped to push Glacier's stock price up much faster than the market in 2013. In the weird world of Wall Street, just meeting earnings expectations often drives stock prices down. Further, a director of of the corporation sold about a third of his large stake in the bank in early February, shaking investor confidence.

Earnings per Share in Cents
Glacier Bancorp
Quarters Ending In

Earnings HistoryMar 2013Jun 2013Sep 2013Dec 2013
EPS Est0.280.300.330.36
EPS Actual0.290.310.350.36
Difference0.010.010.020.00
Surprise %3.60%3.30%6.10%0.00%
Source: Yahoo Finance

Yesterday, Glacier was updated from a neutral to a buy rating by analysts at one of the firms that tracks the bank.
Glacier Bancorp (NASDAQ:GBCI) was upgraded by stock analysts at DA Davidson from a “neutral” rating to a “buy” rating in a report issued on Wednesday, StockRatingsNetwork reports. The firm currently has a $33.00 price target on the stock, up from their previous price target of $31.00. DA Davidson’s target price points to a potential upside of 25.62% from the company’s current price.
The buy recommendation popped Glacier's stock price on February 26th by $0.98, or 3.7 percent, back to $27.25 a share, which means the stock ticked back to recover some of the of the distance it had recently lost to the regional bank index. So it goes.


Another Old Caddie Bites the Dust

Before there was the internet and Match.com, there was a stage, an opaque screen separating the questioner and the questioned, a chair, three stools, a podium and a host. The host was Jim Lange and the milieu was The Dating Game. Jim Lange has left this world at age 81.

Jim Lange was a fellow caddie who earned an Evans Scholarship for his labors.  He is an example of someone who worked like hell in a dirty, tiring, sweaty sub-minimum wage job and welcomed that as a stepping stone and an opportunity, rather than a burden holding him back. He made more than the most of it and relied on the values he learned to lead him through life. 
ABC News reports that legendary game show host and disc jockey Jim Lange, the first host of the popular game show "The Dating Game," died at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 81. Lange died Tuesday morning, February 25th after suffering a heart attack, his wife Nancy told The Associated Press Wednesday.
He was known to listeners in the San Francisco and Los Angeles radio markets with stints at several stations in both markets, racking up over 45 years on the air. Lange was also known to television viewers as the host of several game shows.
Jim Lange (foreground) Dating Game host
Lange began his radio broadcasting career in the Twin Cities after winning an audition as a teenager. He graduated from St. Thomas Academy high school, before going to the University of Minnesota on the Chick Evans Scholarship through the Western Golf Association.
His network television career began in San Francisco with The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show in 1962, where Lange was announcer and sidekick to Ford. Three years later he would sign on to host The Dating Game. While still on-air at KSFO, he commuted to Los Angeles to tape the TV program.
The man had a work ethic. He had a great life. Rest in peace Jim Lange. May all your loops in the great beyond be pleasant, dry and well under four hours.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A Comic Genius is Gone

My two favorite movies of all time are "Groundhog Day" and "Caddyshack." Harold Ramis directed both. He died yesterday at age 69 at his North Shore home in his native Chicago area.

Caddyshack has a special place in my heart.  I caddied from ages 10 through 18 at Glen View Club in Golf, Illinois, about five miles as the crow flies from Indian Hill Club, where Bill Murray and his brothers contemporaneously caddied.  The Murray brothers and Ramis, who also caddied, wrote the script and improvised many of the scenes.  

The movie is a hilarious classic. If it rings true, that is because it is. Every character, everything that happens in that movie, I witnessed a parallel person or experience during my days at Glen View Club. Even the caddie scholarship is real. It is called an Evans Scholarship. It's named after Chick Evans, an amateur golfer who won the U.S. Open in 1916.  Chick was an honorary member at Glen View Club. I had the pleasure of caddying for him a number of times and the honor of winning the scholarship.

Ramis graduated from Senn High School in Chicago, the same as my mother.

Thank you for the memories.  Rest in peace Harold Ramis.




Sunday, February 23, 2014

Hot and Cold, Wet and Dry

You know how the global warming thought police love to lecture dunderheads like myself, who have the temerity to cite contradictory evidence, that weather is local while climate change is not, whenever we point out actual, un-adjusted facts that
Dear President wiping global warming off his brow on a typical
summer day in Georgetown, Washington D.C..
haven't been pre-processed and blessed by climate change "scientists?" Of course, when one of their guys speaks up, it is quite different, particularly when the guy is President of the United States.

The last time California had severe and debilitating drought I lived there. It was the 1970s. Global cooling was the in vogue theory. Now we have another severe California drought and, assuredly, the cause is global warming. Just ask Barack Obama, who in college almost certainly never took a natural science class other than a required freshman survey course, if he didn't get a waiver from that.

"We can't think of this simply as a zero-sum game. It can't just be a matter of there's going to be less and less water so I'm going to grab more and more of a shrinking share of water," Obama said after touring part of a farm that is suffering under the state's worst drought in more than 100 years.
Wisconsin Avenue in Georegetown during
"Snowmaggedon" February 2010.
"Instead what we have to do is all come together and figure out how we all are going to make sure that agricultural needs, urban needs, industrial needs, environmental and conservation concerns are all addressed," he said.
Even if the U.S. takes immediate action to curb pollution, the planet will keep getting warmer for a long time to come because of greenhouse gases that already have built up, he said.
"We're going to have to stop looking at these disasters as something to wait for," Obama said, announcing more than $160 million in federal financial aid. The sum includes $100 million in the farm bill he signed into law last week for programs that cover the loss of livestock.
The package includes smaller aid amounts for the most extreme drought areas and to help food banks serving families affected by the water shortage. Obama also called on federal facilities in California to begin conserving water immediately.
"These actions will help, but they're just the first step," he said. "We have to be clear. A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, are potentially going to be costlier and they're going to be harsher."

It must be because Barack Obama says so.

Meanwhile, here in Montana and Wyoming we are in the west as well. Montana alone (147,164 square miles) is 90 percent the size of California (163,696 square miles). Put together we (244,982 square miles) are 150 percent the size of California. We have a natural water storage system. It's called snowpack. We've got plenty of it.


All the major basins and drainages in Montana and Wyoming are above 100 percent of normal snowpack.  

These data are as of today. We are looking forward in western Montana to what local weather forecasters are describing as our biggest storm of the winter.  By Tuesday some of these basins should have a snowpack that's approaching 200 pecent. The cause must be global warming, don't you think?

Barack Obama is an arsonist in a field of straw men. God help us all. 

  

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Saturday Pictures

Saturday Pictures
February 22, 2014
(Click to Enlarge)

The setting is Southside Park, Bozeman, Montana.





















Friday, February 21, 2014

Third Coldest Winter Ever

It is amazing how helpful it is to look at real facts as opposed to what comes through the "scientific" filter.

When I was working on my Lyndon Foster post this last week, I missed this.

If February ended today, this would be the third coldest winter on record in the US, after 1979 and 1899.



What are HCN stations you might ask? Well,
The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is essentially a subset of the U.S. Cooperative Observer Network operated by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). The approximately 1200 USHCN stations were originally selected according to factors such as record longevity, percentage of missing values, spatial coverage as well as the number of station moves and/or other station changes that may affect data homogeneity. Most USHCN stations are situated in rural areas or small towns...
A requirement for being a HCN station is the "station's potential for heat island bias over time should be low." Currently the HCN data include "no adjustments."

Well over 95 percent of the earth's surface is in areas where the heat island bias is low. That's more than a little food for thought, but Barack Obama and his legions of supporters don't want anyone out there thinking no more. His administration is hard at work finding ways to adjust these inconvenient data.

This is evil; the man is evil. Good luck to all. We are going to need it.

On the Road to Bathgate Act 4f: Lyndon R. Foster -- Veteran, Publisher and Politician

INTRODUCTION

Lyndon R. Foster, known as “Red,” was the fifth of the eleven children of I. J. and Laura Elizabeth Foster. My uncle Lyn was born September 26, 1897 in Bathgate, North Dakota. He died on December 11th, 1974 in Los Angeles, California, which means I missed the opportunity to meet him on my inaugural trip to California in September, 1975, by about ten months. On that trip, I did meet my uncle Bryant for the first time and my father, who drove me out to the west coast, had a joyful reunion, seeing his brother Bryant for the first time since the Great Depression.

Lyndon is buried at Los Angeles National Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA, Section 270 RowZ Site 10. Now that we know where, we will be sure to visit the grave site the next time we get down to Los Angeles.

Though I never met uncle Lyn, I wish that I had. He was a colorful and combative character. His career was explosive -- literally as you soon shall see. A cousin keyed me in on how to search for material on Lyn when he shared a conversation involving Lyn’s sister (my aunt Florence) that went something like this. Florence opened the morning paper, saw a story mentioning her brother and blurted out, “Oh, no, Lyn is running for governor again.” 

Few have run for political office so many times; few have repetitively lost by such consistently huge margins. The man did not know how to give up. Lyndon R. Foster ran for local, state and federal offices, some multiple times. He was an advocate for freedom -- freedom from tyranny, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of religion and freedom from the fraud, abuse, overreaching and waste of big government. He earned the distinction of being the most prolific and yet the least successful of the Foster family politicians. But, as will be seen, he bumped up against more than a little important history along the way. 

Following is what I have knit together of Lyndon R. Foster’s life -- a life long and well lived.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Going Soft Not Permitted In Montana

Sign posted in the fieldhouse, Southside Park, 5th and Alderson, Bozeman, Montana.




Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Stuff It Oregon -- Time To Reverse Engineer Generational Debt

The lying, loony, liberal scum (sorry for the redundancy) latest give away scheme is to open up a $500 savings account (dubbed a universal savings account) for every baby that is born in the United States (and ultimately, Bolivia, El Salvador, Belarus, Indonesia and Bangladesh as well, no doubt). Ron Wyden (D - Oregon), who hopes to soon become Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is the mouthpiece.
Ron Wyden and his wife Nancy at Yankee Stadium.
Wyden's family lives in New York while he
represents Oregon in the United States Senate.
Speaking earlier this month at the University of Southern California School of Law and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Wyden said universal savings accounts for newborns would “really put a dent in the poverty rate.” He described the country’s current tax code as a “dysfunctional, rotten mess of a carcass.” 
These hypocrites cannot open their mouths without lying. To review wacko Wyden's proposal on his own terms, let's look how the the federal government defines the poverty rate. It varies by household size.


 2013 Federal Poverty Guidelines

 Household Size
 100%
 133%
 150%
200% 
 300%
400% 
 1
$11,490
$15,282
$17,235
$22,980
$34,470
$45,960
 2
15,510
 20,628
23,265
  31,020
46,530
62,040
 3
19,530
 25,975
29,295
  39,060
58,590
78,120
 4
23,550
 31,322
35,325
  47,100
70,650
94,200
 5
27,570
 36,668
41,355
  55,140
82,710
110,280
 6
31,590
 42,015
47,385
  63,180
94,770
126,360
 7
35,610
 47,361
53,415
  71,220
106,830
142,440
 8
39,630
 52,708
59,445
  79,260
118,890
158,520
 For each additional person, add
$4,020
 $5,347
$6,030
  $8,040
$12,060
$16,080

Source: http://www.familiesusa.org/resources/tools-for-advocates/guides/federal-poverty-guidelines.html


When a baby is born, a household needs to generate an additional $4,020 in income per year to stay above the poverty line. That accumulates to $72,360 by the time a child reaches age 18 and is no longer considered a minor.  Five hundred dollars puts a dent in that? It barely mars, in fact it doesn't even scratch the surface of the actual challenge. The only way to put a dent in the poverty rate is for the parents to get jobs, real jobs.

Wyden's proposal is a shell game. This country has no money to give anyone. Indeed, when every child is born today he or she assumes $55K in debt

A rational and reasonable proposal would take on eliminating that diabolic inheritance. Let's up the $500 to a still modest (relative to the inherited debt) but easily achievable $1,200 per birth, and reduce the federal deficit by that amount for each child born. Here is how the math works.

Live birth data form CDC.

Even though the annual contribution is modest ($4.7 billion the first year), by the time today's babies reach the age of being fully privileged adults, more than a trillion dollars will have been shaved off the accumulated debt. That's a small down payment on eliminating the immense burden that our spendthrift society is passing along to the next generation.







Sunday, February 16, 2014

A Powerless President

Because he wanted it that way. There was a time when we had a President of the United States who had the maturity and good sense not to use a pen and his phone to get his way. ABC reports:
The Eisenhower Tree, so much a part of Augusta National that not even a sitting U.S. president could have it taken down, was removed from the 17th hole this weekend because of damage from an ice storm, the club said Sunday.
"The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," club chairman Billy Payne said. "We obtained opinions from the best arborists available and, unfortunately, were advised that no recovery was possible."
The  Eisenhower Pine is no more.  Bethcha it's replaced come April. 
With the Masters only two months away, Payne said there was no other significant damage to the course.
The loblolly pine, which sat about 210 yards off the left of the 17th fairway, was among the most famous trees in golf. It forced players to aim away from the tree or try to shape the ball from right-to-left to avoid it.
And it infuriated one of the club members after whom the tree eventually was named — former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.Eisenhower, an Augusta member from 1948 until his death in 1969, was said to have hit the tree so often on his tee shot that he campaigned to have it removed and proposed during an Augusta National governors' meeting that it be cut down. This was in 1956, when Ike was starting his second term as president. Clifford Roberts, the club chairman and co-founder, overruled the president and adjourned the meeting.
It has been known as Eisenhower's Tree ever since.
Barack Obama agrees with the UN -- U.S. needs to
compensate the world for global warming.
Now we have a President who claims to moderate the rise and fall of the oceans and control the weather. We all know, to a scientific certainty (whatever that is) that the thick coating of ice on the Eisenhower Pine was an extreme brought on by human caused global warming. How? Because the guy with a pen and a phone says because something is extreme that makes it so. This President wants money, more money, climate change slush funds galore. God help us all.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Remember, Global Warming Is .....

Making the environment inhospitable for wildlife.



The local environmental reporter for the Bozeman Chronicle said last fall that global warming caused a downward blip in local (Montana) deer populations. She also snarked that our Congressman, Steve Daines, is a moron -- a man who has a degree in chemical engineering, who ran factories for Proctor and Gamble, who partnered to run a successful construction company and who came in on the ground floor to lead the sales and marketing for RightNow Technologies, to the point that it sold out for a billion five to Oracle. I am hoping Laura Lundquist gets a one-way ticket to Texas or Mississippi so she can see first hand the impact of warmer climates on deer population, and reflect on who the actual moron is.


How to Dance the Mazurka on Skates

As you watch Olympic figure skating ... just in case you are wondering.

The Omaha Bee, January 11, 1916.

Definition: The mazurka jump is a half revolution figure skating jump.
First, the skater picks with the free toe. The other leg makes a scissor type motion forward and the skater turns in the direction of the toe that picked and jumps forward in a leaping motion. There is a cross-legged pose in the air. Both legs are straight and the toes are pointed in the air.
The skater then taps the toe of the foot that leaped forward into the ice. Then, the skater lands and glides forward on the foot that was originally tapped into the ice.
Examples:
Figure skating legend, Sonja Henie, did huge mazurka jumps. Today's skaters rarely do the large mazurkas that were once a standard for most figure skaters.
Today, mazurka jumps are usually done as part of footwork sequences or used in jump combinations. Young figure skaters do mazurka jumps in their ice skating programs.

See http://figureskating.about.com/od/glossaryletterm/g/mazurka.htm.


Friday, February 14, 2014

New Obamacare Website Contractor (It's Your Turn)

The Obama administration is replacing the Obamacare website contractor. But it is taking the same contractor selection approach -- picking a contractor off of a federal government buddies list. No open competition, none
If the ObamaCare contractor brought on ..... to fix the back-end of the HealthCare.gov portal doesn’t finish the build-out by mid-March the healthcare law will be jeopardized, according to a procurement document posted on a federal website.
It says insurers could be bankrupt and the entire healthcare industry threatened if the build out is not completed.

The procurement document signed by healthcare officials in late December says that the government determined in mid-December that CGI Federal, the contractor originally tasked with connecting the online healthcare portal to insurers, is not up to the task.

The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) announced .... it was firing CGI Federal, and bringing on Accenture to finish the website.

The document says officials realized in December that the need to bring on Accenture is so urgent that there is no time to go through the “full and open competition process” before awarding them with a $91 million contract.

“There is limited time to build this functionality and failure to deliver…by mid-March 2014 will result in financial harm to the government,” the document says.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/195851-document-obamacare-contractor-faces-mid#ixzz2tFnEzT4sFollow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook
The back (financial) end of the website is not built, so the government not only doesn't know how many people have actually purchased insurance, it also cannot determine how much of your taxpayer subsidy money to forward to health insurance companies. Change management (like if you have a baby to add to a policy), opt out and cancellation processes are also not implemented. As the website stands now, you can sign up but cannot get out. I can't wait until we hear the stories about poor penniless survivors forced to continue to pay for a deceased loved one's health insurance. It's gonna happen.

Supposedly the new contractor will timely rectify website failures. But if you really think there will be something materially different or significantly improved now that Accenture will be managing the website code writing exercise, you may want to think again.

To review, we blogged last October on how Washington, DC operates in connection with the botched roll out of Obamacare. The IT contractor building Healthcare.Gov was CGI Federal in Sterling, Virginia, an operating division of Quebec based CGI . Our ("I'm not a lobbyist") neighbor across the street in Arlington, Nicholas Evans, is the Vice President of Government Relations (i.e., chief lobbyist) of CGI Federal and an aggressive fundraiser for the Democratic Party, including for the newly elected Virginia governor and former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Toni Townes-Whitley, Senior Vice President of CGI Federal, has line authority for the Obamacare portal contract. Ms. Whitely is class of 1985 Princeton classmate, political ally,and student association colleague of Michelle Obama. The Obamacare IT project was a no-bid contract, awarded to a politically (to the Democratic party) and personally (to the Obama's) connected contractor.


In my experience, Accenture is one of the two or three most expensive of the gang of Beltway bandits. The firm hires former federal officials who worm their way back into agencies to roam the halls and glad hand, cajole and manipulate (or worse) contract awards from their former colleagues and subordinates. I saw it first hand when I worked at Postal Service Headquarters in DC, where Accenture's inside marketing lead was a former Deputy Postmaster General, the number two man in the agency (his masked, last nameless, LinkedIn profile is here), who had at one time or another been chief operating officer, chief financial officer and head of employee and labor relations. You or I would get an armed escort out of the building if we roamed around the grounds and into and out of offices the way that guy did, but among the portals of official Washington, DC he is courted with open arms.

The Washington Post reported on the Postal Service's Inspector General's bleak assessment of Accenture's performance as a federal contractor.
The U.S. Postal Service Inspector General’s Office wrote in June that Accenture had “demonstrated an absence of business ethics” and said that the agency should consider terminating the firm’s more than $200 million in contracts. The office cited in part a 2011 settlement with the Justice Department in which Accenture paid $63 million to resolve alle­gations of what the government called “kickbacks” and “bid-rigging” in numerous federal contracts.
The Inspector General concluded,
Accenture’s involvement in several improper contracting practices creates an immediate risk of future fraud and abuse in Postal Service contracts. As a result of prior OIG audits and investigations, DOJ settlements, and the DCAA’s findings of inadequacies in the supplier’s cost-estimating and timekeeping systems, the supplier has demonstrated an absence of business ethics, a lack of transparency, and insufficient internal controls in its business dealings with the Postal Service. The Postal Service should consider Accenture for suspension or debarment and review existing contracts to determine whether the contracts warrant termination. This action would protect the Postal Service’s financial interest from unethical, dishonest, or otherwise irresponsible supplier practices. 
OIG is Office of Inspector General, DOJ is Department of Justice and DCAA is Defense Contract Audit Agency, which is the lead audit watchdog on most major government contracts. Everyone who is supposed to be protecting the government is speaking up here, but the government cannot be protected from the dunderhead politicians who oversee it, and the self-serving bureaucrats who operate it.

It should be no surprise that it is Accenture's turn now, for my former neighbor, a leader in the influence peddling scheme and political gamesmanship that earned CGI the initial Obamacare contract, learned his trade at Accenture.
  • www.linkedin.com/pub/nicholas-evans/4/618/156

Background

Experience




Vice President, Government Relations

CGI Federal
Fairfax, VA



Senior Manager

Accenture

Mr. Evans remains joined at the hip with his buddies at his former employer, co-leading the industry lobbying group.

Legislative Action Network

The Legislative Action Network (LAN) is the hub of PSC’s congressional advocacy efforts. The LAN is a forum for PSC members and staff to share emerging information about key legislative initiatives and to develop strategies for communicating our message on Capitol Hill, and serves as the focal point for PSC’s grassroots activity. More than just a discussion forum, the LAN convenes monthly and as necessary, both physically and virtually, to coordinate and amplify advocacy efforts on behalf of our industry.

Chairs:
Nicholas Evans, Vice President, CGI Federal
Nigel Stephens, Manager of Federal Government Affairs, Accenture

Pay no attention people. Carry on. All is well.