Bureaucrats lose things because they are incompetent and stupid.
We all know that.
My posts on the debacle at the US government’s Office of Personnel Management, where they lost over 21 million records of government employees and those who had applied for government jobs, was a good example.
I though at the time I read about this and did my blog posts that this would be a tough one to beat as regards stupidity and incompetence.
I was wrong.
Enter the Irish.
Irish bureaucrats have lost an entire airport.
And it only cost them €27 million to do it.
A bargain one might think in terms of bureaucratic faux pas.
Up until last week you could find Ireland’s Shannon Airport, in Shannon, County Clare.
Sounds logical enough. If I was looking for Shannon Airport, Shannon is the first place I would look for it. They have had an airport there for over seventy years.
Now, however, after the introduction of Ireland’s new €27 million postcode system, the ‘Eircode’, you can now find Shannon Airport in – wait for it – a different county, County Limerick.
If that isn’t funny enough, the system also has a ‘mapping’ option which the bureaucrats say can identify the exact latitude and longitude of 2.2 million individual addresses. They’ll most likely be in the wrong latitude and longitude, but at least you know exactly how wrong the location is.
Naturally there are other problems with the ‘Eircode’ postcode system, ranging from other incorrect addresses to data protection concerns, but the airport one is the star of the show.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, despite the fact that the whole thing is an almighty mess, Communications Minister Alex White defended the new national system.
He even claimed it would make postal deliveries much easier in the long run – the ‘long run’ presumably referring to the distance traveled by your mail going to the wrong delivery address and confused users of the system going to all the wrong places.
Not only do the bewildered Irish users of this new system get wrong addresses for their €27 million, but they are only allowed a miserable fifteen searches per day, meaning you would need to persevere with it for more than a week if you were organizing a big event, like a wedding or anniversary do.
There is an option to search for more wrong addresses but the fee for that dubious privilege is between €60 and €180 a year, depending on the number of searches performed.
I was going to introduce today’s post by saying some like “I hope you are having a pun-tastic week”, but I thought I would sound like a demented DJ from the 1970s.
So I’ll just say hello and welcome and let you get on with the puns.
Enjoy or endure!!
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Lite:
the new way to spell “Light,”
now with 20% fewer letters!
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I was asked to man the phones
at work the other day.
So I went round and drew a
little mustache on all of them.
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Spelling…
It’s not brian surgery.
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Hamlet:
A small pig.
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According to my Spanish doctor
I have Hepatitis Yes
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My doctor told me to quit my helium addiction
before I got carried away.
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2B or not 2B?
I don’t think I’ve ever put this much thought
into which shade of pencil to use before.
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‘UK Man has first hand transplant.’
Surely that’s a second hand transplant.
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I was taking a short cut across a field the other day,
I was halfway across when the farmer approached me and said,
“Did you leave that small wooden step at the edge of my field?”
I replied, “No, it wasn’t me, that’s not my stile”
I ended a post last week that ended with the line, “If you want a liar in the White House there’s always Hillary.”
Some people may have thought it a little harsh, particularly those who were considering voting for her, but harsh or not it is a fact.
Her wayward husband Bill was a liar and he made President and impeachment. Now she is trying to carry on the tradition.
Hillary simply cannot tell the truth.
Everyone knows it.
And everyone includes the representatives from other countries that she would have to interact with, if – God help us – the American people are stupid enough to make her President.
Unfortunately, such is the attention span of people nowadays they only seem to remember the last thing they see and hear. If something happened in the past it is as if it never occurred at all.
With a position as important as the US Presidency at stake it is surely necessary to examine the candidates more closely than that.
Hillary Clinton’s lies are many and they cover almost every aspect of her life. She is an opportunist, always willing to try to enhance her position by lying. Nothing is sacred.
And it isn’t a recent occurrence. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a liar for her entire political life, probably longer than that.
Take a look for yourselves.
Going waaaaay back to 1974, when Hillary Clinton was 27, she worked for the House Judiciary Committee which at that time was investigating Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Strictly against House rules, she met with Teddy Kennedy’s chief political strategist and then manipulated the system, wrote a “fraudulent legal brief” and “confiscated public documents”.
They had no choice but fire Hillary Rodham. When asked why she was fired, Jerry Zeifman, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation, said in an interview, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer, she conspired to violate the Constitution, the Rules of the House, the Rules of the Committee, and the rules of confidentiality.”
Zeifman later wrote in a 2006 book titled ‘Hillary’s Pursuit of Power’, that “Hillary Clinton is ethically unfit to be either a senator or president.”
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When she made it to the White House as First Lady, she was still a stranger to the truth. Trying to distance herself from another gaff, Hillary said she didn’t know that her staff would fire the travel office staff after she told them to do so.
Hillary lied.
Staff do what you tell them to do. That’s why they work for you and not you for them. The memorandum relating to the firings went “missing” for two years.
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The “missing” lie was a trait that was to continue. Documents regarding Hillary’s work at the Rose Law firm in Arkansas, specifically regarding a savings and loan company run by the Clintons’ business partner in the Whitewater land venture also went “missing” for two years.
Eventually they miraculously reappeared when a White House aide found them, in the White House, in a storage area on the third-floor, which is the private residence of the President and First Lady.
Hillary said that she had no idea the documents were there, which would have been fine except for the fact that the FBI found Hillary’s fingerprints on the documents. Hillary is still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI.
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Lying to take advantage of national tragedies is also a depth to which Hillary Clinton will gladly stoop.
For example, when everyone else was in shock and sympathizing with the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack tragedy, Hillary tried to take some of the attention for herself. She said her daughter Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 at the time of the airplanes flew into the twin towers.
Hillary lied.
Chelsea was in bed watching it on TV.
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To try to aggrandize herself on another occasion, Hillary said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest.
Hillary lied.
Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest five years AFTER Hillary Rodham was born. Nobody knew who he was and therefore wouldn’t have named their children after him.
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When she was on a visit to Bosnia, Hillary said she came under sniper fire as she disembarked at the airport.
Hillary lied.
Video taken at the time shows a girl presented her with flowers and she and Chelsea can be seen on video walking across the Bosnian tarmac smiling and greeting well-wishers. Not a sniper’s bullet in sight. Here’s a nice video report to prove it.
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As regards finances, Hillary said she learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market.
Hillary lied.
The Wall Street Journal didn’t even cover the market back then.
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Hillary said she didn’t know about the pardons given to members of the violent Puerto Rico nationalist group FALN or that her brothers were being paid to get pardons that her husband Bill Clinton granted.
Hillary lied.
Her husband and her brothers knew and she didn’t? A likely story! With an ill-advised stroke of a pen President Clinton made a mockery of the pledge to “wage an all-out war against terrorism” by pardoning 14 FALN terrorists.
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Still on the subject of pardons, Hillary also said she had nothing to do with the New Square Hasidic pardons that reduced the prison terms of four New York Hasidic Jews convicted of defrauding tens of millions of dollars from the government.
Hillary lied.
In fact, of all the pardons that President Clinton granted as he was leaving the White House, this one has Hillary written all over it. She attended a meeting at the White House about the pardons and got repaid in votes, 1,400 to 12.
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To try to excuse her greed, Hillary said taking the White House gifts was a “clerical error”.
Hillary lied.
The “error”, clerical or otherwise, was getting caught and she came up with the best excuse she could think of at the time.
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To try to make herself look more statesmanlike Hillary said she negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia.
Hillary lied.
They were released the day before she even got there.
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In a pathetic attempt to get sympathy where none was deserved, Hillary said her family was broke when they left the White House.
Hillary lied.
And they only made a paltry $12 million the year after Bill Clinton’s Presidency.
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Never noted for her humility, Hillary said she was “instrumental” in the Northern Ireland peace process.
Hillary lied.
She and President Bill visited Northern Ireland and did some PR work for the deal that ushered terrorists into government in Belfast, but those actually at the negotiating table say Hillary was nowhere to be seen.
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Hillary said the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other officials was a “spontaneous protest” gone wrong.
Hillary lied.
Based on State Department documents we know that, not only was Benghazi a terrorist attack, but that Hillary was well aware of that fact and deliberately misled the public.
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Then there is the private email server she set up the day before her nomination as Secretary of State, and used for her entire tenure in that office. Hillary said the whole thing was innocent and that access would be given to scrutinize her emails.
Hillary lied.
The whole procedure was far from innocent. For one thing it is in direct violation of a 2009 Federal Law. Hillary set up her private email server and used it when she was Secretary of State so that there would be no official government records of those emails. She could pick and choose what to release and what to delete. Her aides also used private email addresses. Actualy both the Clintons loved email for that very reason, because it was so much easier to hide stuff, when she was asked to turn over 1.8 million emails to Judicial Watch, Congress, and federal investigators.
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What do you call someone with a record like that except a liar?
How are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden she has had a “road to the White House” conversion and become honest and straightforward, rather than a schemer and a liar?
I’m reminded of that old joke,
Question: “How can you tell when a politician is lying?”
Answer: “When his/her lips are moving.”
It needs to be updated for Hillary.
She can lie even when her lips aren’t moving, or get emails or other people to do it for her.
fasab 