Took an interesting picture in DC this morning

[proud2BlibKansan]

Found it kind of ironic.

Who knew?

[chknltl]

1. Are those cigarette butts on the floor?

Is it me or does anyone else sense the irony of cigarette butts littering the floor around a sign which toots the horn of bush's EPA?

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. I don't see them

But it wouldn't surprise me. This was right next to a Metro station entrance. And you can't smoke in there.

[chknltl]

6. To the left and a bit behind the sign...

I think I see three of them. Of course they might be cheetos in which case those pigeons off in the background, (right side near wall), are obviously fake.

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. Aha I see them

Thanks!

[peace13]

2. In the * world of opposites this sounds about right. n/t

[Nitrogenica]

4. "The President's Management Agenda" sounds like a smoking gun.

Hmmmm

[Nitrogenica]

5. Link to PDF of the "President's Management Agenda"

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2002/mgmt.pdf

[wtmusic]

8. "The first priority of the President’s management reform initiative

is to make government citzen-centered."

Does that mean citizens are now at the center of domestic spying operations? :shrug:

[XemaSab]

9. In other news

XemaSab was highest ranked in the XemaSab performance reviews. :D

[malakai2]

10. As a current Fed employee, let me pick those initiatives apart

1) Improved Financial Performance:
"Refuse to fill vacancies at the field level, force field employees to work upwards of 40 extra hours per week with no compensation to fill the gaps, report the decrease in payroll as success, and chuckle to self as the remaining employees quit in droves, crippling the agency and requiring the use of contractors for basic operations."

2) Expanded Electronic Government:
"Whereas many of the documents used by every office from Washington down the field are easy to access as hard copies, whereas many in the workforce are not the most computer savvy people around, whereas it is much easier to claim ignorance when electronic documents are destroyed than when hard copies are destroyed, we will leave it to staff at various offices to convert every document to a PDF, and whatever we lose in the process is just a necessary evil associated with a technological fix to a non-problem."

3) Competitive Sourcing:
"Because it wasn't broken it was interfering with our insistence that privatization would be better, so we are hereby breaking it via privatization, and whatever the outcome, it demonstrates that we should have attempted privatization sooner."

4) Performance Improvement:
"Crafting position descriptions that have nothing to do with the employee's core duties, but which will prevent the employee from seeking creative solutions to effect real solutions in lieu of seeking creative means to square political decisions with empirical evidence to the contrary."

5) Strategic Management of Human Capital:
"Strategic removal of those managers at Washington and Regional Office levels that honor agency goals when those goals conflict in any way with Administration goal of decreasing public ownership, access, and accountability, while also consolidating and contracting so many services as to render agencies incapable of fulfilling their obligations."

It wasn't enough for people who generally believed in what an agency was doing to crush the agency's discretion with expensive lawsuits, it wasn't enough for people who did not believe in what an agency was doing to assume an adversarial position whenever interacting with the agency, it wasn't enough for everyone else to shirk their civic duty of understanding how agencies work, now we've got some frat boy using Orwellian doublespeak to undo whatever worthwhile works the agencies have accomplished. I wonder if I'll ever look back after I leave and see that I had a hand in any lasting good thing.