Washington Post:
The Defense Department’s independent watchdog has opened an investigation into allegations that acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan violated ethics rules by taking actions to promote Boeing after leaving the aerospace company and accepting a top job at the Pentagon.The agency’s inspector general, in a statement released Wednesday, said it had decided to investigate the matter and had informed Shanahan of its decision.
“The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has decided to investigate complaints we recently received that Acting Secretary Patrick Shanahan allegedly took actions to promote his former employer, Boeing, and disparage its competitors, allegedly in violation of ethics rules,” the statement said.
Shanahan, who spent more than three decades at Boeing before joining the Trump administration in 2017, has denied favoring Boeing during his time as deputy defense secretary — the No. 2 post at the Pentagon, which oversees acquisitions, procurement and technology development across the military.
The probe comes as the former Boeing executive hopes to receive President Trump’s formal nomination to serve in the Defense Department’s top post and replace Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned in December.It is unclear how the investigation will affect his prospects of receiving the nomination and winning Senate confirmation.
Lt. Col. Joe Buccino, a spokesman for Shanahan, said the acting secretary welcomed the inspector general’s investigation and would fully comply with the probe.
[continues]
more from above wapo story:
[…]
The investigation comes after the government accountability organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the inspector general saying that, according to news reports, Shanahan appeared to have “made numerous statements promoting his former employer Boeing and has disparaged the company’s competitors before subordinates at the agency.”
CREW cited news stories saying Shanahan had criticized Lockheed Martin, a chief rival to Boeing and had urged the Pentagon to buy more Boeing-manufactured F-15X fighter jets in defiance of Air Force acquisition preferences. The Washington Post has not independently confirmed those reports.
In the Pentagon’s budget request to Congress this month, the Air Force proposed buying eight upgraded versions of the F-15, which would mark the first time it has bought the plane since 2001. Pentagon plans call for additional purchases of the aircraft in coming years.
Shanahan called suggestions of favoritism “just noise” during his first news conference as acting secretary in January. He rejected the notion that his criticism of the F-35 — which is made by Boeing rival Lockheed-Martin — amounted to a bias.
“I am biased towards performance,” Shanahan said. “I am biased towards giving the taxpayer their money’s worth. And the F-35 unequivocally I can say has a lot of opportunity for more performance.”
Upon entering the Pentagon as Mattis’s deputy in 2017, Shanahan signed an ethics agreement that required Boeing matters to be handled by another Pentagon official, an effort to avoid potential conflicts of interest with his longtime employer.
[….]
During his time at Boeing, Shanahan ran the company’s commercial aviation division, overseeing the turnaround of the 787 Dreamliner, and managed the firm’s missile defense unit. He also served as general manager of Boeing Rotorcraft Systems, which produces the Apache, Chinook and Osprey aircraft for the U.S. military.
In recent days, Shanahan has also faced questions about crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8, because he worked in the firm’s commercial aviation division.
A senior defense official familiar with Shanahan’s career there said he had profit and loss responsibility for airplane programs already in production, but those under development, such as the 737 Max, fell to another Boeing executive.
“I firmly believe we should let the regulators investigate the incidents, and I would just say my heart goes out, condolences to the families and employees involved in the Lion Air incident in the Ethiopian airline incident,” Shanahan said last week during his Senate testimony.
from NYTimes, a different kind of DOD procurement story:
yeah, sure.
meanwhile, putting things in another perspective
Astronomers using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have found a pulsar hurtling through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour — so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes.
seattle times:
FBI joining criminal investigation into certification of Boeing 737 MAX
The FBI has joined the criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, lending its considerable resources to an inquiry already being conducted by U.S. Department of Transportation agents, according to people familiar with the matter.
The federal grand jury investigation, based in Washington, D.C., is looking into the certification process that approved the safety of the new Boeing plane, two of which have crashed since October.
The FBI’s Seattle field office lies in proximity to Boeing’s 737 manufacturing plant in Renton, as well as nearby offices of Boeing and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials involved in the certification of the plane.
The investigation, which is being overseen by the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division and carried out by the Transportation Department’s Inspector General, began in response to information obtained after a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed shortly after takeoff from Jakarta on Oct. 29, killing 189 people, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, citing an unnamed source.
It has widened since then, The Associated Press reported this week, with the grand jury issuing a subpoena on March 11 for information from someone
involved in the plane’s development, one day after the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 near Addis Ababa that killed 157 people.
Representatives of the Justice Department, the FBI and Transportation Department declined to comment, saying they could neither confirm nor deny an investigation. Boeing declined to comment.
A Seattle Times story on Sunday detailed how FAA managers pushed its engineers to delegate more of the certification process to Boeing itself. The Times story also detailed flaws in an original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA.
Two days later, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao took the unusual step of asking the department’s inspector general to conduct a formal audit of the certification process for the MAX. The audit is an administrative action, separate from the criminal investigation.
[continues]
wapo:
‘I’m a political prisoner’: Mouthy Martha Mitchell was the George Conway of the Nixon era
In psychology circles, there’s an unofficial concept called “the Martha Mitchell effect.” It’s the tendency to diagnose someone as mentally ill simply because the story they tell is so bizarre, without checking whether the bizarre story is in fact true.
That’s what happened to Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell. She was dismissed as “crazy” for her wild claims about the Nixon administration and issued a public ultimatum to her husband to choose her or the president.
This week, another marital spat gripped Washington as President Trump tweeted insults about George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, calling him a “total loser” and “husband from hell.” Unlike Mitchell, George Conway isn’t being accused of being mentally ill. In fact, he has lately been tweeting that Trump is the one with mental illness.
Mitchell arrived on the Washington social scene in 1969 as her husband became Nixon’s attorney general and right-hand man. For years, the witty Southerner was the toast of town and television, often calling reporters and appearing on evening talk shows to joke about antiwar protesters and Supreme Court justices she didn’t like, earning her the nickname “the Mouth from the South.” She even did a guest spot on the comedy variety show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” capitalizing on her reputation has a charming gossip:
Lily Tomlin (as nosy phone operator Ernestine): “Tell me, Mrs. Mitchell, do you have any time left over for hobbies?”
Mitchell: “Yes. I like to read the funny papers.”
Tomlin: “The funny papers — which ones are your favorites?”
Mitchell: “The New York Times and The Washington Post.”
For some, her commentary could go too far. In the Slate podcast “Slow Burn,” Leon Neyfakh describes Nixon at one point telling his chief of staff, “We need to turn off Martha.”
In the spring of 1972, John Mitchell resigned as attorney general to become Nixon’s campaign manager for his reelection. And in June, Martha joined her husband in California for several campaign events. It was there, on the night of June 17, that John Mitchell got a call about some arrests made at the Watergate Hotel.
According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Mitchell realized that if his wife found out that she knew one of the men arrested, James McCord, she might become upset and tell reporters about it, thus tipping them off to the connection between the burglars and the president. So as he headed back to Washington, he instructed security guards working for the campaign to keep his wife in the dark in California — and to stop her from calling members of the media.
But find out she did, and just as her husband predicted, she soon called UPI’s Helen Thomas.
“I’m sick and tired of the whole operation,” she said, before telling Thomas she was giving her husband an “ultimatum” — her or Nixon.
“The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared that somebody had taken the phone from her hand,” Thomas reported. “She was heard to say, ‘You just get away.’ ”
Martha Mitchell later said one of the guards discovered her and ripped the phone from the wall. She was kept in the hotel room for days, she said, where the guard held her down as a doctor injected her with sedatives, her young daughter watching the whole time.
“I’m black and blue,” she told Thomas days later. “I’m a political prisoner.”
“Historians disagree on what exactly Martha Mitchell really knew about Watergate,” Neyfakh said. But she intimated to reporters that her public ultimatum to her husband was meant to extricate him from “all those dirty things that go on.”
The Nixon camp fought back, spreading rumors that she was an alcoholic suffering from mental illness.
A week and a lot of phone calls to Thomas later, Mitchell seemed to get what she wanted. John Mitchell tendered his resignation to Nixon, writing, “I have found that I can no longer [carry out the job] and still meet the one obligation which must come first: the happiness and welfare of my wife and daughter.”
Martha Mitchell’s celebration — “I’m going to have a ball in New York!” she told the New York Times — didn’t last. The next year, as her husband remained loyal to Nixon in his Senate testimony, “he walked out and left me with $945,” she told The Washington Post. They separated, and around the time of his 1975 criminal trial, she sued him for back alimony.
Martha Mitchell died of cancer in 1976, at age 57. Her attorney told UPI she had been “desperately ill, without friends and without funds.” She was buried in her hometown of Pine Bluff, Ark.
John Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice related to the Watergate break-in and spent 19 months in prison.
In 1977, Nixon threw Martha under the bus one last time, telling journalist David Frost that Martha’s alleged mental-health troubles in the spring of 1972 distracted John from “minding that store,” thus allowing the Watergate crisis to happen.
“If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate,” he said.
.
LOL – love the Conway cartoon. So appropriate.
bbc:
Brexit: Revoke Article 50 petition crashes Parliament website
A petition calling on Theresa May to cancel Brexit by revoking Article 50 has attracted more than 900,000 signatures.
Parliament’s petitions website crashed earlier because of the high volume of traffic. It is now back up and running.
It comes as the prime minister heads to Brussels to ask the EU for a delay to next Friday’s Brexit date.
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told BBC Radio 4’s Today revoking Article 50 was possible but “highly unlikely”.
Commons leader Andrea Leadsom said she had been made aware of technical problems with the site, but she dismissed the petition as not being on the same scale as the pro-Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum.
“Should it reach 17.4 million respondents then I am sure there will be a very clear case for taking action,” she told MPs.
She added: “It’s absolutely right that people do have the opportunity to put their views and that can then spark yet another Brexit debate.”
[…]
The petition currently has more than 900,000 signatures – well above the 100,000 threshold that means it will be considered for debate.
[…]
A House of Commons spokesperson said the site crashed on Thursday morning because of “a large and sustained load on the system”.
The petition reads: “The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is ‘the will of the people’.
“We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now, for remaining in the EU. A People’s Vote may not happen – so vote now.”
[…]
Will the petition change anything?
Petitions on the Parliament website rarely lead to a change in the law.
They are not even guaranteed to lead to a debate in Parliament – they only get considered for debate if they reach 100,000 signatures. The petitions committee rejects them if it believes the UK government can’t do anything about the issue.
But what petitions can do is put an issue on the political radar – and that is what appears to have happened with the petition to revoke Article 50.
It was previously something of a taboo subject at Westminster.
Even the most ardent anti-Brexiteers know it would be political suicide for any prime minister to overturn a referendum result without going back to the people.
But some Remainer MPs are now calling on social media for the government to do just that.
[continues]
wapo via msn about above anti-Brexit petition: Can Brexit be stopped? 800,000 people are trying so hard that parliament’s website is broken.
[…]
Those attempting to sign the petition on Thursday received the message ‘petitions is down for maintenance. We know about it and we’re working on it.’ Many were angered and some were suspicious of the error message, taking to social media to declare they would continue to try throughout the day and urged their friends and followers to do the same.
“I’ve signed. And it looks like every sane person in the country is signing too. National emergency. Revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU. – Petitions,” wrote actor Hugh Grant on Twitter late Wednesday evening.
The petition, which only British citizens and UK residents have the right to sign, comes after nearly three years of divisive Brexit talks, bickering in parliament and various votes that have done nothing but blanket the nation under a cloud of confusion.
Britain’s government responds to all petitions that gain over 10,000 signatures and considers all petitions that receive over 100,000 signatures for a debate.
On Thursday morning the petitions committee confirmed the website was “experiencing problems” and said they were doing their best to repair the website.
“As many of you have guessed, the number of people using the site has caused problems this morning. It’s a mix of people reloading the front page to watch the signature count go up and people trying to sign petitions,” a Twitter thread from the committee explained.
[continues]
I was fortunate in being overseas during most of the Nixon upheaval; I knew more about happenings in Argentina than the USA. My excuse this time around is in being old; not so welcome except that it brings me closer to my true love. A bit of cheer–I saw a comment by Jamie a few minutes ago!!
I have nothing to base this on… but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn when the trump administration is gone we find out that Kellyanne and George were in cahoots. I read in several places (sorry, can’t remember where) that it was highly suspected that Kellyanne was one of the main leakers for Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury”.
Right now…. it’s just my speculation.
BTW, SFB’s average approval rating has dropped 2 points – from 44.2 to 42.2 in the past 16 days. His insane tweeting doesn’t appear to be helping his standing with the public.
The Condom always watches out for herself
The only people she cares about are the Mercers — would she throw SFB under the bus — she would drive it.
As for her hubs — I think she would drive over him too
Head over to Google to play along with Bach. Lots of composing going on.
BREXIT should never have won in the first place. It was a bill of goods (aided by guess who the Russians) and overloaded with lies to the pubic. A do over would probably turn the vote upside down, but not sure if the EU wants the UK back.
KGC…. just think…. if I’m wrong… we see 2 republicans at each other’s throat… sweet! And if I’m right… we have 2 republicans at trump’s throat… still sweet!
Jamie… great to see you back here. You must be feeling better… SWEET! 🙂
If they want the Royal Navy defending the Baltic from basing in Scotland, they’d be wise to acquiesce.
There’s a great meme going around FB that unfortunately can’t be posted to a blog. It’s a picture of McCain with caption underneath… “Trump is fighting with a dead guy, and the dead guy is winning.”
Somebody must have taken SFB twitter box away. Only one tweet today and it does not read like he wrote it. Maybe the doc gave him sugar pills today and not the other stuff he likes?
Lots of talk about the Mueller investigation wrapping up. Rumour central is D.C. Maybe he does do it tomrrow, starting with unsealing indictments of the SFB mob/cult members. It will be fun times.
Biden is too old. This talk of him running with Abrahm’s as his running mate makes me think he wants to do a stunt play. If they win, he cleans out the stink of SFB and restores some order to the USA, teaches her how to be president. After a couple of years he does the resignation “to be with his family” and voila – a woman president. Cynical me.
*
renee, you may be right about the colluding noodling conways. here’s an excerpt from an opinion piece at think on their marriage By Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families:
Kellyanne and George Conway: A modern marriage in the age of Trump? Or a couple in crisis?
[…]
And when Kellyanne was working for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, she lambasted Trump for victimizing students at Trump University and for claiming he supported “the little guy” when he actually, she charged, built his businesses “on the backs of the little guy.” She has never denied the claim made by “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinki that when Kellyanne first started defending Trump on television, she said she would often feel she had to take a shower afterwards.
Perhaps the couple is playing a competitive political game, with neither caring enough about the real-world impact of the actions they so strenuously defend or condemn to erode their love for each other. But that’s still a dangerous script for a marriage. And either way, it sends an even more dangerous message to their four children about prioritizing power, fame and money over shared core values in their future relationships.
This morning in Lexington, SC a man was struck in the back by a freight train. The crew reported that they were sounding their horn. A short while ago, the coroner reported that the casualty, who died at the scene, had been deaf since birth. SFB says he’s on the right track. I say, bullshit.
It’s sad to hear about the deaf man being hit by the train. That’s a first for me – usually it’s stupid people getting hit by trains. SFB is definitely not on the right track – or if he is, like the deaf man, he’s going the wrong direction.
The criticism of SFB over his latest attack on John McCain is beginning to grow to the ranks of his sycophants.Hell, even the Mooch is calling it what it is.
What a waste of a life.
NUKES – Get ’em while they’re hot !
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/20/brazilian-drug-gang-opens-fire-on-convoy-of-trucks-carrying-nuclear-fuel
Ms Pat and Mr Jace,
I have dropped a tiny topic into the Dashboard Drafts box. I hope that it meets with your approval.
Best wishes,
X
Ms Pat and Mr Jace,
I’m sorry about my goof up. I hope that I didn’t make it harder.
X
new thread