No experience necessary at Department of Homeland Security senior positions

One of the positions that Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson has taken is that the Department of Homeland Security should be abolished.

Now, current Janet Napolitano seems to be making his case for him.

Janet Napolitano: Naw, Senator, I
don't see why anyone in charge of
Honeland Security really needs
experience . . . .

If Homeland Security is such a critical department--and indeed the life of the nation is in daily peril from people stuffing explosives into their underwear--then why don't the senior people she's hiring need any relevant law enforcement experience to get their jobs?

The Daily Caller gives us several examples.

First, there's Jordan Grossman:

Jordan Grossman was a special adviser and deputy to the deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, for instance, yet his resume shows no law enforcement experience. Before Grossman got his post in January 2009, he was a “special assistant” at the Obama-Biden presidential transition team after working for Obama’s 2008 election campaign.

Before that, Grossman worked as a research assistant at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, a communications think tank at the University of Pennsylvania. Grossman also interned for the left-wing Center for American Progress, and for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He lists no law enforcement experience on his resume, even though the Obama administration had hired him into a senior law enforcement role. Grossman has since left his government position for to attend Harvard Law School.

Then, there's Vladmir Skoric:

Apparently working
for Obama for
America is all
the qualifications
Vladimir needs.

Vladimir Skoric serves as a “special assistant” to the Homeland Security “deputy under secretary for cybersecurity.” Skoric began his career in politics in May 2007 as a “volunteer coordinator” at Obama For America. He then interned for Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray and served as Obama For America’s Washington, D.C. youth director.

Skoric has also worked for The Small Business Project, Inc., as a business development analyst for a little more than two years. That organization describes itself as a company that “brings knowledge and expertise in starting small business programs to intermediaries, which in turn serve to strengthen small businesses locally,” focusing specifically on “providing forestry sector expertise.” Its mission does not have anything to do with law enforcement.

Even so, Skoric scored a senior level position in Obama’s Homeland Security Department.

Sadly, there are actually more examples in the article.

The two most immediate thoughts I have in response to this are Golan "McGreevy thought he was hot" Cipel and Michael "Brownie's doing a hell of a job in New Orleans" Brown.

The reality is that the Department of Homeland Security has been a pork-laden, civil-rights-trampling, alarmist entity since the first days of its creation.

In 2003 I did some consultancy work with the Office for Domestic Preparedness (for which I had an actual military background) in training DHS State and Local Readiness Officers. There I met a young lady who had just been been appointed to a senior assistant position in cyber-security. Her previous job had been as a personal assistant to actor Tom Hanks, while he was filming The Green Mile. So it has happened with DHS since the very beginning, under both Republicans and Democrats.

It needs to go.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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