From the Dept. of Totally Unsurprising Things
In the proud tradition of Michael Brown and George Deutsch, meet Tracy Henke:
The Homeland Security official who signed off on funding cuts for New York and extra cash for the heartland is a small-town gal whose back-door appointment to the job was mired in controversy.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
Tracy Henke, 37, assistant secretary for grants and training, wasn’t quickly confirmed by the U.S. Senate after her nomination last year because of allegations she played politics in her previous post.
So an impatient White House appointed her while Congress was in recess, drawing howls of outrage from lawmakers and sparking questions about her qualifications.
Being qualified for your job is *so* pre-9/11. The only thing that matters post-DayThatChangedEverything is loyalty to the executive codpiece.
After six months on the job, Henke is already on President Bush’s radar screen – he thanked her by name yesterday for help on immigration reform, even as her anti-terrorism funding handiwork was being pilloried.
“Henke-y, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.”
Another Missouri native, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, brought Henke to the Department of Justice, where she oversaw a grant program and the Office of Domestic Preparedness.
At Justice, she caused an uproar when she demanded changes to a press release about a study that found minorities were more likely to be arrested or handcuffed during traffic stops.
It’s too bad that Joseph Heller died before he could write a book about this administration. I think it could have really revived his career.
Accusations that she undermined the objectivity of the department dogged her when the White House submitted her name for the high-level Homeland Security job the next year.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) questioned whether Henke had “politicized” the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and he fumed when the White House gave her the job before her nomination was even voted on.
Jeebus. Even HOLY JOE questioned her credentials?! Madre de Dio, she must really be unqualified.
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Henke’s appointment was pushed through because the Senate dragged its heels. “She’s a highly talented individual who has an impressive record,” she said.
“…of kissing the president’s ass…”
Before Henke had her say on funding levels, Homeland Security relied on an anonymous panel of more than 100 reviewers to rate security plans from around the country.
According to sources and documents obtained by the Daily News, the department drew the reviewers evenly from 48 states, 43 cities, three territories and several federal agencies.
Many were officials from emergency management offices or grant experts. They were each given 60 projects to evaluate – with about an hour per project – before meeting for a week in April in Emmitsburg, Md., to hash out the results.
That’s where New York City’s terror plans ended up rated among the nation’s worst. Homeland Security officials refused to discuss how they decided New York City had no national monuments and few major banking institutions.
We still have two-and-a-half more years of this crap. Sigh.
UPDATE: Weeee! There’s more!
The Homeland Security bureaucrat who shortchanged New Yorkers’ safety by $80 million implied yesterday that guarding a Nebraska cornfield from an Al Qaeda attack is the same as putting a cop with a gun on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“When you are protecting agriculture in the Midwest, you are protecting the citizens of New York City,” Assistant Secretary Tracy Henke told C-Span’s “Washington Journal.” […] A senior U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington also scoffed at the insinuation that Al Qaeda is targeting cornfields and grain stores.
“The whole DHS agro-terrorism theory doesn’t hold,” the official said. Asked if he had ever heard of a credible terrorist threat to the food supply, the official laughingly replied, “Never.” John Pike, a homeland security expert at GlobalSecurity.org, said Al Qaeda is purely interested in made-for-TV carnage. “DHS may think that Wyoming is a more lucrative target than New York or Washington, but Al Qaeda seems to have a different view of the matter,” Pike said. “Al Qaeda doesn’t have a track record of attacking the food system.”
Embattled Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff blinked yesterday in his showdown with New York over his outrageous slashing of the city’s anti-terrorism grants. Seeking relief from the spreading political firestorm over the drastic cutbacks, Chertoff told Mayor Bloomberg that he will review the situation this weekend. […]
The Homeland Security boss’ remarks were an about-face from earlier in the day when he publicly defended downsizing the city’s funding by a whopping 40 percent and whined that attacking him wouldn’t help anyone get more funding.
New York leaders in both parties hit the roof on Wednesday after learning that federal anti-terror grants were being cut from $207 million to $124 million next year.
They have also blasted this year’s grant process, which was supposed to dole out the anti-terror dollars to cities considered to be at the greatest peril of terrorist attack – but instead awarded cow towns like Omaha with whopping increases.
It’s hard work.
She is, and i quote: a small-town gal whose back-door appointment to the job was mired in controversy.
i wonder if there’s video of said back-door appointment. i wonder because a friend of mine, you know, nudge,wink, would like some tips
If back-door appointment truly went on, we can impeach him, can’t we?
If back-door appointment truly went on, we can impeach him, can’t we?
Nope. He’s allowed to make recess appointments, like John Bolton. They’re just frowned upon. Not like he gives a shit.
It’s also frowned upon to give a shit during a back-door appointment except by mutual pre-consent.
Note to Brad – could you get your mind back in the gutter?
Sheesh…
🙂
-D…
Nope. He’s allowed to make recess appointments, like John Bolton. They’re just frowned upon. Not like he gives a shit.
Thanks for answering, but I was trying to ride on almostfamous’ joke’s coattails. You know, BJs and Clinton, “Back-door appointments,” “wink-wink, nudge-nudge; say no more,” ect. 🙁
It’s OK. It was my fault for neglecting to think about penises and buttholes for a brief moment. That problem has now been corrected. I guarantee.
PS- I’m not gay. Seriously.
There should be an emoticon for “I want to continue this joke but I’m a noob and they may ban me and I would ever so much like to NOT be banned,” because seriously, the internet needs it.
Henke is another Bush Gem. DHS seems to magnetically draw them.
I guess, however, spending an hour on NYC’s proposal and an hour on Omaha’s proposal allows an equivalent evaluation of the complexity of the problems of the two cities. I’d be surprised if Frostbite Falls didn’t get a huge increase, given that you could probably read its proposal three times in an hour.
I guarantee that Bernie Kerik wouldn’t have allowed this outrage to NYC to happen. He’d have appointed his Guatemalan maid to Henke’s position.
But she seemed so qualified when she was local director of the Sunday church prayer group.
What do they care? NYC is 90% Democrat. The ReThugs may have cried crocodile tears over 9/11, but let’s be honest, they don’t care if that city ends up a pile of flaming rubble. It should be pretty plainly obvious that NYC, DC and LA are by far the three most likely terrorist targets, but hey, those places are filled with liberal jews, darkies and Mexlamonazis respectively. The people of those liberal-leaning cities can just go ahead and die as far as Greater Wingnuttia is concerned.
Then when the NYC subway system is attacked, they’ll all be waving their fucking flags around again.
DHS is the mother of all GOP rip-off scams.
Der Fratboy and his staff didn’t want to create it in the first place and when Congress– under public pressure based in the DayThatChangedEverything Commision’s recommendation– insisted, they said “fine, we’ll learn ya” and turned it into a giant patronage system crammed full of shallow-end GOP operatves, AEI coffee-bearers, and unemployable retards-in-law.
No one should be shocked that none these mouth breathers has clue-one about security or emergency management– that’s not their job. Their job is to make sure that their bosses’ friends get to the head of the line when the contracts and grants are handed out.
Brad, quick, what are you thinking about NOW? Just checking.
What do they care? NYC is 90% Democrat.
Y’know, this is a good point. Somebody should check and see what the per capita level of Homeland Security grants is for Crawford, TX. Somebody who gives a shit, I mean. Anybody? Beuler?
mikey
I thought only Jeff Gannon was doing the back-door appointments.
Somebody should check and see what the per capita level of Homeland Security grants is for Crawford, TX.
Why would that little of corner of Texas need help from the DHS? They have Ted Nugent to keep them safe.
So I wonder how many more “explanations” we’ll get for this decision before the week is out? After all, when the story first broke, the excuse was that NY didn’t get their application properly submitted (they faxed it in instead of doing it on line). Unfortunately, the guy responsible for sending in the application just so happened to have written confirmation of the submittal and written approval that it was proper. Oops!
The next excuse was that DHS uses an extremely complex formula involving thousand and millions of calculations to arrive at its conclusions. Evidently that one wasn’t holding too much water, either, since today we get this bit about how it’s all done by a big committee.
I give the committee excuse a shelf life of under 24 hours because the committee would have to have been made up of certifiable morons to have looked at NY’s application and said, “Uh, yeah–NYC is just perzactlky like Omaha or Sheridan, Wyoming.”
Next excuse: The Ouija board got sticky after someone spilled a Diet Pepsi on it.
Is it like, really quiet in here, or has Spam Karma gone berserk?
If anyone is in the Boston area and is really bored (like I am, obviously), the WB is actually airing candlepin bowling. Have to love the color commentary on that.
Candlepins for Dollars. It’s even better than Curling for Loonies.
A chicken in every pot;
A camera in every cornfield!
Another major terrorist attack on DC, NY or LA assists Republican re-election chances, while conveniently slaughtering Democrat voters, thus funding anti-terror measures for those cities is counterproductive. It seems perfectly logical to me.
The Republican Prime Directive is get and maintain electoral power in order to slaughter as many foreigners as possible while making as much money as possible.
There is no other directive.
One could come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that there is no shortage of rank incompetents out there, but there’s more to this than that. It does seem that blowing the pretzlenit (metaphorically) is the #1 concern when these appointments are made. Oh, and Whee! This week is fag-bash week in Washington. Gotta lurve that.
A chicken in every pot;
A camera in every cornfield!
don’t you mean
A chicken in every pot; A cap in every ass!
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too
But then again, I’m thinking we could use a man in the White House today like Crazy Genral Bill Harrison. (As a side note, did you know that during his campaign, the opposition campaigns went to great pains to point out that his name, spelled BACKWARDS, fer crissakes, is No Sirra? Karl Rove’s ancestors, no doubt.) I mean, for one thing the fucker only lived a month after his innaugeration. That kinda prevents the kind of harm that Bush/Cheney has done, anyway…
mikey
No Sirrah?
Pinot Noir then. But I’m NOT drinking Merlot!
No one should be shocked that none these mouth breathers has clue-one about security or emergency management
Hey! Some of us mouth breathers just have really bad sinuses! We’re not all wingnuts!
Ok, back to snarking…
“The Homeland Security boss’ remarks were an about-face from earlier in the day when he publicly defended downsizing the city’s funding by a whopping 40 percent and whined that attacking him wouldn’t help anyone get more funding.”
I heard this. It was simply astonishing. He was clearly saying that pissing him off wouldn’t get NY more money. He’s that important.
Think about the mindset, the bloated ego of Skeletor as he admires himself in the mirror, thinking how he showed those new york fuckers. Now, if they’d only treated him with the immense respect an Assistant Decider demands…..
And lets face it, that Statue of Liberty is just a French-supplied monument to untrammalled immigration. Al Queda would rather worship it than blow her head off on prime time TV.
Doesn’t Bush know any qualified people for all these government posts? None of them know anything.
It’s simply a matter of priorities. What is worth saving more: the Statue of Liberty or Carhenge? I think it’s pretty obvious that Carhenge wins this battle.
But “It’s hard work” to find grossly-incompetent Rethug ideological-toady lickspittles to fill all these minor positions.
The Bush administration continues to endanger our nation.
Tell me, which poses a graver threat to our nation’s “national security”: and the very foundations of our democracy: the religious fundamentalist al Qaeda terrorists…or same-sex marriage and gays??? Or maybe our nation’s smokers, whether they smoke tobacco or marijuana??? Or a freedom-loving American woman choosing to have an abortion or wanting the morning-after pill available so she won’t need to have an abortion??? Or pornographers??? Or prostitution???
In other words, all the groups I’ve mentioned, in contrast to the grave threat to our nation represented by religious fundamentalists, are groups that represent no danger at all to our “national security,” our U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights. None of these groups are out to overthrow our democratic government in an insane attempt to establish a theocratic dictatorship…or any type of dictatorship at all, for that matter.
I’m not fooled. I wasn’t fooled before 9/11. I am definitely not fooled after 9/11. Religious fundamentalists, of whatever religion, represent the gravest “clear and present danger” our nation has ever faced. And the religious fundamentalists doing the greatest harm to our nation are those within who are a cancer that has metatasized into a virulence that even the al Qaeda probably admires. Why? Because the policies of our own god-forsaking, democracy-forsaking religious fundamentalists sound exactly like policies the al Qaeda would impose on America if they were ever able to take over our country. Once again, I’m not fooled.
[…] Turns out the slashed anti-terror funding for NYC was signed off on by an incompetent, . Shocking, that.World Cup coverage: The WaPo has an excellent WC blog. See Michael Davies p*ss-poor predictions for the tourney. And Soccer Blog has great video feeds of the world’s best, plus a lot of other cool posts. […]
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