McClatchy now doing HR work for DHHS?
I’m generally not one to argue with scrutinizing the government bureaucracy. However, it DOES tick me off when our lazy, shiftless legacy media monopoly runs all of these “horror stories” about a Republican administration in Raleigh when the same types of stories earned yawns while Democrat governors were in office.
I’ve been watching politics in this state for quite some time and I CANNOT recall any prior administration in Raleigh having its appointees subjected to such invasive public scrutiny. It’s pretty clear that Creepy Chris Fitzsimon and his team of Blueprinters want NCDHHS secretary Aldona Wos GONE. They’ve been feeding negative stories to North Carolina’s mainstream media for months now. If you didn’t know any better — if you didn’t do any research — these folks would have you believe that state government simply imploded minutes after Pat McCrory was sworn into office in January of this year.
Today, McClatchy subjected an unfortunate McCrory employee to a virtual colonoscopy — dredging up details of her divorce and basically calling her an incompetent kook. Her offenses? Getting divorced, leaving her medical school teaching job to raise her children, and being a Tea Party activist.
The headline IDs her as a “McCrory donor.” How much did she give? According to the article, her total was $1,250. North Carolina law allows individuals to give up to $4,000 per candidate, per election. Not exactly a bagman — er, bagwoman.
I don’t know what this woman’s divorce has to do with her fitness for the job. If marital relations are important to evaluating employment fitness — let’s look at a few from the McClatchy newsroom. Rob “Rielle Who?” Christensen’s wife retired in 2010 after 30 years as a mouthpiece for the welfare state. One could argue that — because of his wife’s employment — Rob was so blinded by his love for the welfare state that he could not see Mike Easley’s corruption or the blonde with the camera following John Edwards around. That clearly would have impacted his effectiveness as a guardian of the public’s right to know.
Columnist Ruth Sheehan left the newsroom in 2010 to head off to law school. She gained notoriety for her cheerleading against the Duke lacrosse guys in that whole faux-rape scam in 2006. Ruth clearly damaged the credibility of the news operation during that whole affair, but was allowed to hang around through 2010.
Sheehan is married to Harry Payne – longtime Democrat legislator, former Labor Secretary, and current big-wig at the far-left NC Justice Center, which gets a lot of ink in McClatchy’s pages.
Of course, this current McClatchy hit piece rehashes the story about the two 24-year olds Wos hired at DHHS. It’s funny. We never heard a word about 28 year old Ruffin Poole — aka Mike Easley’s “little governor” — until he got indicted, taking the fall for his boss’s shenanigans. Where was all the shock over a 28 year old obtaining such an incredible amount of power — at the right hand of the governor — in state government?
The current piece also dredges up Democrat complaints about IT problems at DHHS causing inefficiencies at getting payments out. Let’s check with our friend Google, to read what happened during the reign of Easley and Perdue DHHS appointee Lanier Cansler:
[…] Perdue raised eyebrows when she named Cansler as her HHS Secretary shortly before her inauguration in 2009. The former Republican lawmaker’s credentials weren’t in question: he had served as deputy HHS secretary under former Dem Governor Mike Easley. But he left the public sector in 2005 to start a lobbying firm, Cansler-Fuquay Solutions, that consulted for various interests in the health-care sector.
Just days before Cansler’s appointment, one of his firm’s clients, Computer Sciences Corporation, had won a $265M contract to overhaul the state’s Medicaid claims system. As Secretary, he would be in charge of overseeing that contract.
Cansler said he had never actively lobbied for CSC, claiming he had just “introduced” executives to some lawmakers. And he set up firewalls within HHS, naming a deputy secretary to oversee the contract to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.
But the controversy, which never quite went away, re-emerged in recent weeks after lawmakers got a preview of an upcoming state audit that said lax agency oversight had contributed to the ballooning of CSC’s contract cost, from $265M to $495M, and its delayed implementation date, nearly two years behind schedule.
Cansler fiercely denied any conflict of interest and defended his agency staff and CSC, pointing the blame instead at constantly changing federal guidelines that kept moving the goalposts for the system redesign. The federal health care overhaul only made it worse, he told lawmakers at a December meeting.
But other states – notably New York – have also had battles with CSC over Medicaid upgrade contracts. And when the official audit was finally released this week (delayed, auditor’s staff said, by foot-dragging at DHHS), it wasn’t kind to Cansler or his agency. […]
Cansler didn’t work for McCrory, did he? He worked for the *beloved Democrats.*
McCrory warned all of us about what a mess the state bureaucracy was in, shortly after he took office in January. But — somehow — the mainstream media is peddling the meme that state government started collapsing in January 2013 and it’s ALL PAT’S FAULT.
I also pointed out how ol’ Bev packed the bureaucracy with a bunch of appointees just before she left office in January. if McClatchy is so concerned about qualifications of people in power, they need to check out some of the stuff my sources told me HERE.
But I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.
Maybe the McClatchy gang is branching out into HR because they know almost no one reads them any longer. They have to get a new revenue stream from somewhere. Although it will dry up if we ever get another democrat in power because all it will be crickets and yawning at that point.
McClatchy – the voice of BLUEPRINT! They are spewing partisan political propaganda as usual instead of real news. I cringe at some of the other hires at DHHS, but this one is exactly the sort of person they should be turning to. Some liberal bureaucrat would likely muck up, intentionally or otherwise, a key program of the governor, but someone you can depend on being on your side and has the background to know what she is doing is exactly what is needed in a position like this one.
Please! Show some love for McClatchy. I feel they are only trying to make it up to the Democrats for losing the election. Many believe it was McClatch’s poor reporting that cost the Dems the election. At least they now have a new star reporter………..Rev. Barber.
It is has been hard on the N&O reporters. That “West Coast Offense” is tough for a redneck to learn. One N&O reporter told me secretly, “I ain’t even ever been to California. And the bosses are on me because I still eat collards.”
Be kind.
From the Potential Buckets of Work in Blueprintnc.org secret memo:
“Relentless earned media efforts: operatives with relationships to statewide media and developed strategies for getting the message out in non-traditional ways”
Obviously the N&O, CO, News&Record, Winston Salem Journal and WRALTV accepted their bucket of work very seriously.
I personally do not believe that the memo was secret nor do I believe that it was accidentally leaked to the Charlotte Observer.
I believe that it was intended as a warning by the Democrats to the Governor and the Legislature of their only remaining power to influence legislation…the liberal media.
We, as Conservatives, should not feign surprise that the media is biased. We know they are.
We have to keep exposing their tactics as you are doing here along with so many other blogs that are gaining readers every day.
Thanks for all that you do!