He'll never get a "scandal" to stick. Bless his heart.

can't stick two good Democrats up against Issa in the open primaries that state has. It would be perfect to not have the bastard Issa on a general election ticket.

now it is well within their purview, but development was well bellow it.

what does that say about the chain of command?

If I had a subordinate reporting to me who didn't have the trust of his/her subordinates, whose subordinates would rather let things crash and burn than let their boss know that things were going to hell in a handbasket, I'd have their ass in a sling. Either they have allowed or hired incompetence and left it be--or they've encouraged it. Or perhaps they've bred a culture of fear and insecurity so nobody feels safe giving bad news.

"Below her pay grade" doesn't cut it. If a major program is about to snafu, it *has* to be the leader's decision to whether to proceed or not, and for that the leader needs accurate information.

And when a leader prefers sacrificing his/her reports to save his/her own butt, I'd say that pretty much answer which problem exists. Too much insecurity for reliable information sharing, meaning too much insecurity for meaningful responsibility and reasonable levels of managerial competence.

that a number of Bush appointees were embedded in civil service positions during the last portion of the Bush presidency. Who knows what they may have been doing since then?

And Snowden.

Do you think the Director of NASA didn't get reports on progress of the space program during the 1960's? As we were launching the Mercury missions, they were well into planning of the Gemini missions, and looking ahead to the Apollo missions. They had to because you had deadlines to meet.

Now, if things were run as you said, it would be July 1969, and then suddenly everyone would realize we didn't have a Rocket on the stand because no one mentioned that the thing had problems and wasn't ready. Imagine the surprise in that situation. The launch date approaches, and no rocket because the problems haven't been ironed out. Nobody checked with Grumman to see if the LM would be ready, and the Command module is still at North American's plant undergoing another test.

The idea you propose is frankly stupid. At the minimum Sibelius should have been briefed in on prospective designs, projected completion, initial beta testing of the parts, initial beta testing of the whole. Your idea is that once the order is given, nobody reports until it is ready. That's is frankly, the worst possible way to run a project, any project, I can imagine.

If that is in fact, the way our Government is operating. Nobody checks to see if things are being done, as instructed, I think I see a problem that deserves serious scrutiny. Can you imagine if the President was due to fly out on Air Force One, and Marine One flutters down and lands and the President steps out and finds no big blue and white airplane? The Air Force General steps up and explains that they're not done getting it repaired but it's going to be fine in a little while. No, there isn't anyone who should have reported this, because we only report success, not problems or potential solutions, we only report success. Schedules are problematic for success based reporting, but hey, what are you going to do? So everyone stands around for a while, waiting for the big blue and white plane to show up. What would happen? A whole bunch of people would be fired, court martialed, and the President would be furious because your way, isn't the way it works in the real world. And you know it.

Nuts and bolts reports don't get that high usually.

Regardless the Director of NASA is not, probably should be, but it's not even a sub cabinet level position.

You are asking for nuts and bolts.

all tuned into the network news.

Don't tell me Obama never listens to Fox News blowing a gasket over it. Or Diane Sawyer grimacing! How could he miss knowing there were problems? It must be damn lonely up there.

On the other hand I didn't realize the extent of the problems until I heard that McAfee Security guy was in charge of the website. That explained a lot.

Presidents live in one too.

You can't be taken seriously on this issue. Frankly, I don't know why I bothered to take you seriously at all. Never mind. My mistake, I apologize. Please continue explaining how nothing ever gets to the top.

But not nuts and bolts.

And you can take anything and anybody as seriously as you want to. Facts are what they are. Belief is a whole different matter.

Every attempt to spin this makes it look worse.

If they get it working halfway in the next few weeks, this will all be forgotten. And if they don't, their efforts to control the media reporting won't do them a damned bit of good.

I'll admit it - watching our President handing out nonsense to reporters about volume issues on a clearly non-functional website was a highly embarrassing experience, and the news conference was even worse, but having someone come out and say that he just didn't know what was going on is more fresh hell.

They just need to stop talking. They are giving political opponents and comedians way too much fodder with this stuff.

at the same time, I don't expect Obama to roll up his shirt sleeves and start writing javascript.

No one expects a president to be in the trenches - it is his role to direct and lead. A leader cannot lead if he does not know what is going on.

or the week before. Meaning: I bet he was PISSED that he had no foreknowledge of just how much of a clusterfuck they were walking into (and she probably did).