Copyright by John C. Dvorak
UPDATE
Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony?
This is the sort of question you might ask after trying to actually verify his supposed MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland, College Park campus. The registrar has no record of it. After initially posting this article the degree has cropped up apparently at the nearby University Campus in 2001. This was found by Nextgov.Com. But his degree in biology has yet to appear as his record shows a degree from College Park Campus for Psychology and nothing more.
I have queried the White House for clarification and still have received no response. The internet has answered the MS question. But other issues remain. Regarding a number of interesting and questionable facts, most in regard to Kundra’s bio. The most ridiculous is his assertion that he was formerly a CEO of Creostar. While records for this company are hard to come by a small Dun & Bradstreet service did turn up the following information: there was indeed a Creostar in Arlington, VA. It was founded in 2004 with the contact being Vivek Kundra. The last record for the company (online) showed sales of $67,000 with one employee – apparently Kundra, the CEO.
In fact the only job that I could find within the various Kundra bios was that of a Sales Manager and/or a VP of Marketing at a software firm called Envincible. It was sold in 2004, the same time Kundra set up Creostar. Envincible was a small security software company that sold to Exostar. Note how Kundra used a similar name with Creostar.
Most revealing is a bio of Kundra that was redacted from the Washington, DC municipal site. Luckily it was archived by the web sweeper Archive.org. In that bio Kundra added even more icing to his University of Maryland career saying he “served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland, teaching classes on emerging and disruptive technologies.”
In a conversation he had with Om Malik he confirms having a teaching job at the University College. I have not verified it, but it’s probably true.
On that old bio he also said he “was with SAIC, providing consulting services at the Health and Human Services (HHS). His work focused on growing SAIC’s $1billion business at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kundra has worked on the World Cities Alliance initiative to advance business and economic development in Arlington, Zurich, Paris, Berlin, and Wales. Within the private sector, he worked with multiple clients to build operations in the United States, Canada, and India.”
He finishes with “He received his master’s in information technology and his bachelor’s in psychology and biology from the University of Maryland.” The biology bachelor’s comes and goes from his bio, but the University has no record of his biology degree either.
I first suspected something was fishy about this fellow by listening to him on CSPAN where he simply did not sound like someone who studied computers or technology. His common referrals to Twitter and Google Docs as some sort of high-tech breakthroughs and a way to save money and empower the public stemmed from pure cornball pop culture and the blogosphere, not from computer science or Information technology.
During one of his testimonies before a Congressional committee he even talked about the future being something like the Star Trek holodeck. His clichés and commentary was that of a 18 year-old blogger who just got their first Macintosh.
And his sketchy background was disconcerting. It included a 1997 bust for stealing shirts from JC Penny’s and the later bust of his former staff by the FBI at the DC office during a bribery investigation.
But, to be honest about it, and despite the possible fraudulent bios and non-existent degrees, the kicker for me was that even if he was squeaky clean he has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts.
He hasn’t done anything to warrant this appointment. There are no great policy papers. There are no books. There is no invention. There is nothing but vague tech positions in city and state governments. How does this make him a “techno-whiz” as he was portrayed by the New York Times? It took him six years to get a simple undergrad degree in psychology! Was it just because he uses Facebook and likes Twitter?
So what have we got so far from this person? Well, for starters we are looking at the Recovery.gov website that will cost the taxpayers around $18 million. This news was released recently. What websites costs $18 million? And that’s with no warrantee.
The incredibly popular Digg.com, one of the most advanced news gathering sites in the world was initially coded from scratch for between $1200-2500 according to one of its founders. Tools to develop fancy websites have improved drastically over the years and now it costs less for fancy sites, not more. So where is the $18 million going? I can assure you that people who pay attention bugged out their eyeballs at a website expense of $18 million.
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Picture actually taken Nov. 2008 after the election. [photo removed by request of JD Kathuria. Can be viewed here.] |
The emergence of Kundra is something that needs more research. There is some indication that Kundra got his jobs in Virginia after being recommended by Aneesh Chopra another professional bureaucrat in Virginia who was apparently his friend from campaign work. On one blog there is a pic of Chopra and Kundra at a boxing match with Indian bigwig Shudkaer Shenoy. The photo was taken in 2008 before either of the two men began with the Obama administration. Since then Chopra was given the job as USA Chief Technology Office (CTO).
It would be logical to assume that Kundra managed to get his buddy Chopra the CTO job despite the fact that Chopra’s technology background is essentially nil.
According to the Chopra bio he’s really never done much outside of government committee work. His academic background shows a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997. He graduated with a B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University in 1994. There is virtually nothing about him anywhere on the net. He has zero technology background except for perhaps using an iPOD, and he is now the country’s Chief Technology Officer.
This seems to be a team of self promoters working together. But exactly how they can be given these jobs along with responsibility for actual technology decisions that involve billions of US taxpayer dollars is incredible. And if Kundra has indeed pumped up his bio with BS, then what does that say about the Obama administration in general. After all, this guy was highly promoted by Obama himself.
But who is noticing? While the country is focused on health care protests and other distractions, this sort of betrayal of the public trust must be going on at many levels. I just happened to spot this and with the help of some researchers, namely John Stec, we quickly dug up these anomalies while they were still on the Web. Where was the mainstream media? Where was the right wing media? Is anyone doing due diligence on these important appointees holding the purse-strings to billions? Apparently not.
This lack of oversight in the public interest doesn’t get any better when you look to the technology community itself. You’d think they would be able to spot a phony a mile away. Nobody seemed to notice. In fact the opposite was true as many tech mavens gushed over both men. But why? They each have little to show except odd bragging about supposed improvements to this and that. It’s all vague. Where are the documents? The papers? The reports? They both apparently show up at a lot of meetings and conferences. I have to assume they are quite the charmers.
Look at this excerpt from the USA Today announcement for Aneesh Chopra:
“The response to Chopra is resoundingly positive. Craig Newmark (of Craig’s List) says Chopra is ‘really good for the country.’ Eric Schmidt said in a statement (via WSJ ), ‘Aneesh built one of the best technology platforms in government in the state of Virginia.’ John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins said (also via WSJ ), ‘Aneesh is an inspired appointment. His smarts and experience in technology, health care and investing will serve us well.’ Tim O’Reilly is ga-ga over the choice calling Chopra ‘a rock star’ and says, ‘We couldn’t do better.’”
Really? We couldn’t do any better?
Or do all these guys just think that Obama can do no wrong? O’Reilly, a publisher of books about computer programming, in particular, went into a euphoric fugue with a laundry list of rationales, all clichéd and dubious including classic fuzzy-headed groupthink nonsense such as: “Chopra grasps the power of open source software, Web 2.0, user-participation, and why it’s better to harness the ingenuity of a developer community than to specify complete top-down solutions.”
OK. Am I supposed to down a whiskey now? On his website O’Reilly admits that Chopra is very charismatic.
I hope there is some real explanation for what is going on here. I hope the University of Maryland can find Kundra’s records and show he taught there. I hope he has a biology degree from Maryland. And I hope Kundra can produce some records for his CEO tenure at Creostar indicating that it became a multimillion dollar company that was somehow ignored by Hoovers and D&B once it became successful. I hope the both of these men are not just drinking buddies taking advantage of dummies. I hope.
We did uncover the MS from a related campus with a different record keeping system. That’s a start.
–end
Further details of this investigation will be found there and will be discussed in great detail on the No Agenda Podcast with co-host Adam Curry. No Agenda can be found at http://noagenda.mevio.com and http://noagenda.squarespace.com as well as http://cagematch.dvorak.org.
Speaking requests regarding this story will be accepted by email to john@dvorak.org.
I do not believe this at all…not so because I am an Indian but because there should be proper and sufficient proof for everything which I think is not enough here.
What does Orly think?
#180, ego,
Of course, Dvorak just ran a “special report” without doing the same amount of research that well, everyone else that covered the story did
Who else researched this story? Dvorak went with the information provided. That information turned out to be incorrect. Dvorak did ask the White House AND the UM to clarify / verify.
This is just another case of shooting the messenger that the two office holders appear incompetent (an opinion based upon fact) , the resumes’ academics are wrong (a fact), and the work history appears fudged (a fact).
. Clearly not his fault. it works when he says completely incorrect and unqualified stuff about software….
Now it appears you are accusing Dvorak in the same manner of what you accused him of. Please learn the difference between opinion and facts. Your complaint reminds me of a completely user unfriendly software program where the problem lay with the users not knowing they had to dig down three layers to perform something a similar program did automatically. If it isn’t readily apparent then it isn’t there, which is why I hate Office 2007.
If you have specific complaints about what Dvorak does, then be a little more specific. Just painting his comments as “incorrect and unqualified” only demonstrates your own ignorance.
#190 – “Who else researched this story?”
Um, the other people that covered the “story” after Dvorak and managed to call another campus? Kundra HAS an MS. Period. Full stop. Backpedaling and amping up the “facts” about him being unqualified doesn’t cover running with a poorly researched story.
“Dvorak went with the information provided. That information turned out to be incorrect.”
Yea, I think that’s called “screwing up.” But apparenty I don’t know the difference between opinion and fact, so I could be wrong.
“Dvorak did ask the White House AND the UM to clarify / verify.”
Yeah, and the White House didn’t answer fast enough (I guess the guy in the press office that handles PC Magazine was stuck in traffic?) and UM, gasp, didn;t have records for the other campus around. A poorly organized University? Whouda thunk that?
But here’s the money quote from you, numbnuts:
“This is just another case of shooting the messenger that the two office holders appear incompetent (an opinion based upon fact)”
Read the story. After we get past the INCORRECT assertion about the Master’s degree, it boils down to Dvorak not liking his resume and thinking that the government paid too much for website.
As other people have pointed out, Dvorak isn’t aware of the fact that most CIOs are not the best geek in the house, they are business people. If I didn’t think he’d end up on the dole, I’d recommend he get a real job for a few years.
As for you calling me ignorant for criticizing Dvorak’s record….you did it a few sentences after defending Dvorak’s opinion as being based on fact….when his main “fact” was wrong. Did you give yourself whiplash pulling that bonehead maneuver?
Why don’t you go check it out? His career is writing borderline polemic about software and technical issues that’s completely wrong as often as it is right. He’s like Jim Cramer, without the entertainment.
Speaking of qualifications, what qualifications does Dvorak have in reporting? Clearly none, since “fact checking” never made it into his vocabulary.
I always thought Dvorak was an idiot, this crazy rant confirms it. It’s a wonder any magazine is paying him!
>> Ah_Yea said, on August 12th, 2009 at 7:52 am
>> Greg Allen, how about actually reading the article instead of being an Obama shrill? Then tell me just where the article got it wrong.
I didn’t agree or disagree with the article. I just gave a cultural spin on it.
BTW1: I think you mean “shill”
BTW2: Most of we libs don’t shill for Obama they way cons shilled for Bush.
>> The Elite Establishment said,
>> Get over it Greg Allen. Bush bungled nothing,
That’s right. Bush did a FANTASTIC managing the economy.
(and getting bin Laden, and after Katrina, and managing the housing bubble, and privatizing the military, and balancing the budget, and protecting our privacy, and preventing 911, and… and… and…)
Absolutely FRIGGIN’ FANTASTIC! Well done. Ducky for America!
Good article. Much meat. Dvorak’s long history as a technology BS revealer seems to have uncovered one of those “Catch Me If You Can” chimeras.
To JKD54: What. The. Hell? Are you over 12?
#191, big ego,
“Dvorak went with the information provided. That information turned out to be incorrect.”
Yea, I think that’s called “screwing up.” But apparenty I don’t know the difference between opinion and fact, so I could be wrong.
No, most people call it “being lied to”. His attempts to verify demonstrated that he did dig a little deeper. Most politicians have earned themselves a reputation for stonewalling when they are called on a screwup. How long should Dvorak have waited before publishing? I understand the Department of Defense still has FOI requests they haven’t answered from 2006.
“This is just another case of shooting the messenger that the two office holders appear incompetent (an opinion based upon fact)”
Read the story. After we get past the INCORRECT assertion about the Master’s degree, it boils down to Dvorak not liking his resume and thinking that the government paid too much for website
The MS is not an assertion. Dvorak tried to verify the degree and teaching, from the information in the resume. The resume was wrong as he did not get a degree or teach at UM College Park. And Dvorak explained his OPINION. He didn’t just pull something out of the air. $18 million for a website (fact)? Yes, and that is a lot (opinion). Please, point to one (1) opinion in this piece that Dvorak did not explain.
Why don’t you go check it out? His career is writing borderline polemic about software and technical issues that’s completely wrong as often as it is right.
I read Dvorak’s writings quite often. I am neither a fan boy nor a hater. Some opinions I enjoy and others I disagree with. Yet once again you cast blanket accusations while criticizing Dvorak for being a lousy journalist. Your ranting shows more about you and your mental processes than it does about Dvorak. Normal people would stop reading someone they totally disagree with all the time yet you appear to continue to read him.
No one specifically invited you to visit Dvorak Uncensored. Nor were you expected to pay or even register before posting. If he is such a bad person and his writing is so reprehensible, then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
[John, please send that $25 to my home address 😉 ]
For those of you bending over backwards to make excuses for this “anointed by Obama tech guy”… let’s talk seriously.
FIRST: Do you really think it is fine to fudge on your resume, to mislead people, to inflate your accomplishments?
Hello? It’s LYING. It’s CHEATING.
It’s so 90’s.
Look around at the economy….hey, how much of it is BECAUSE OF LYING AND CHEATING?
The blame doesn’t just ride on the banks, or the government, or some backroom dealers who ruined our economy…it was the overall mindset of the country. Each and every one of us have to take some blame. Especially those who think you are somehow “special” and could bend the rules, and game the system for your gain.
I realize it is a difficult reality to face, especially, for the generation who was suckled at the “game cheat” “positive esteem” and “super-sized golden rule” world.
Perhaps you don’t understand:
a.) not okay to cheat,
b.) you aren’t that special
c.) if someone doesn’t agree with you that it is not an intelligent argument to slap them with labels and resort to personal attacks and/or use the racist card, or put your fingers in your ears and shout “lalalala”.
I realize you were spat out of the thighs of Boomers — who were the leaders of the self-indulgent, lying, lazy, and perennial adolescent generation.
Are we really a nation of 12 year olds?
The man in question (Vivek Kundra) inflated his accomplishments (a one-person business does not make one a CEO). He allowed and/or had a hand in misleading people to believe his degree was from one institution, when it was from another (one that many agree is inferior). He may not be the man he claims to be. A simple lie, is still a LIE. Do we think liars are okay?
Lies are lies. We are lied to all the time. Does it feel good for corporation to lie? (i.e.low introductory rate, no finances for three years) They lie to us to the point of being predatory. Do you like that there is a thin film of bullshit on everything you see, feel or taste? The food is crap, the water is adulterated, the warranty doesn’t really work, the gift card isn’t honored, the money your worked to earn is siphoned away with insane fees, taxes, and gotchas, bullshit bounce fees, and other outright scams. Do you like that laws are being enacted to favor big business at the costs of all of us? Do you like the fact that everything is designed to screw you?
In a time when we’ve changed presidents — because we all knew the last one lied and cheated, to say the least — and the country did so with great HOPE. I had the distinct impression that we were looking for some truth and honesty, and for this president and his appointees to have some INTEGRITY. What happened to the PROMISE OF CHANGE? What happened to transparency? What happened to the promises? Didn’t Obama talk about “using cutting-edge technologies” to create “a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens.” Isn’t that exactly what Dvorak was asking for?
Or, is Obama just another Bush(a “minstrel Bush”)? I don’t like the idea that this president is the Al Jolsen of our generation…belting out songs that aren’t his own.
Lying and excuses: It’s why we’re so screwed in so many ways. Stand up America, get a spine. Use your brains. Be HONEST. Demand that others be honest to you. The passive attitudes, the excuses, the justification bullshit is not what is going to HELP this country. It’s helping to destroy it.
We need to — in unison — stop making excuses, start asking questions, researching, and becoming MORAL people and demanding that our leaders become accountable.
Take a long, good look in the mirror. If you really think it is OKAY to lie (even weesny ittie bittie ones) then you should slap yourself, right now, for me.
#198, meetsy,
Good rant.
You just gave me the idea that maybe all these pro Kundra rants are because the commentators also cheated on their resumes.
Second comment – John, I used to look up to you when I worked at CNET but this is not indicative of the high-quality journalism that earned you your reputation. You seem to have a grudge against Kundra, what gives? Why not be objective and let the facts speak for themselves?
You certainly seemed to have drummed up a lot of publicity for yourself over this issue. Is this perhaps an attempt to reverse the declining readership on your site?
#169, Dude, if you want to dick around with fringe parties like the Greens and the Libertarians, go ahead. But until we change our winner-take-all electoral system to proportional representation, the real power will be with the Democrats and the Republicans. And I say that as someone who would love to see smaller parties have more power.
It’s that attitude that keeps those two parties in power.
One thing I hate to hear is (and I’m not accusing you of this), “I would vote for him but he doesn’t stand a chance.”
#201, Loser,
OK, so something we can agree on.
The one I hate hearing is “why vote, they are all the same and only take our money”.
“I am neither a fan boy nor a hater.”
“No one specifically invited you to visit Dvorak Uncensored. Nor were you expected to pay or even register before posting. If he is such a bad person and his writing is so reprehensible, then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”
Oh I get now. Never mind. Fan boy with cognitive dissonance, tough load to bare. Sorry for making it worse.
#198, Meetsy.
“Are we really a nation of 12 year olds?”
Yes, apparently so. Sorrowfully so.
“What happened to the PROMISE OF CHANGE?”
Politics. I also hoped that Obama would be the best President since Washington, and I also have been let down by the reality.
I now firmly believe that in 6 months the majority will be wishing for the good’ol days of George W. Bush. (Not saying that those days were good, but people have short memories).
#199 Fusion.
I’ll bet your right.
I’m with you #201.
Anyone who votes Democrat or Republican is the reason why our country is in the bad shape it is in. The voters are the bosses. The bosses like Rs and Ds. As long as this is so is how long we’ll continue our decline. We need to BREAK the machine by never re-electing another R or D.
Rs and Ds can and should be extinct in 6 short years. I don’t have high hopes for this because it is like getting someone to change their religion. Voters are more likely to f*** our country down the toilet than to start to vote a third party. In the mean time, I will vote a third party and know with a clear conscience that I have nothing to do with the devastation.
If you go to Univeristy of Maryland, Baltimore County, you state you went to UMBC.
If you went to University of California, Irvine, you state you went to Cal-Irvine.
If you went to University of Maryland, College Park, you say you went to UMCP.
So someone, who is hailed as a genius by Techinsider, doesn’t understand that? Or is it simply SPIN on Mr. Kundra’s part to make us all believe he went to a better school then he did?
Regarding what connection there is between Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra, its very simple. Aneesh Chopra got Vivek Kundra his first government position with the State of VA. Chopra is very much in favor with Tim Kaine. Based on Chopra’s recomendation Kundra was given a shot in the Virginia government.
This is what politico’s call returning a favor, I believe?
Isn’t this what white people do everyday?
Tstorm
What in the world does race have to do with the current discussion?
The fact you bring race up only shows just how much it means to YOU and only you.
This is a tempest in a teapot. I’m not a big fan of Kundra or Chopra, but their jobs have no ‘qualifications’ per se. Kundra does not oversee ANY government IT projects, although his office does have the power to call into question IT projects that seem to be going off-course. His office didn’t write the RFP for the Recovery.gov site–the General Services Administration is running that contract. Chopra probably has even less influence over actual government IT spending.
These two were hired simply to use the bully pulpit of a “White House position” (and neither actually works in the White House) to go around publicizing how tech-savvy the Obama administration is supposed to be. They have both managed moderately-sized IT operations. They don’t need to know anything about coding or development environments to do that. (I know plenty of good private sector CIOs who don’t have IT degrees, by the way.)
The CIO and CTO positions were created by Obama to answer to complaints from the tech industry that they had been shut out of the Bush White House. The posts are largely symbolic. Chopra in particular is working in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which has an actual budget of less than $20M per year–and his part is one of maybe 5 or 6 departments in that office.
If the criticism is that they don’t do anything useful, make that criticism. Much of the criticisms about their past experience are either unsupported or have been refuted, so they just serve to muddy any substantive debate.
Wonk,
What you said does make lots of sense, both positions are more policy and “ra-ra” Obama Technology.
But the fact that its the title of Federal CIO, doesn’t that mean at least someone remotely qualified should be in them?
The fact that Kundra ran a business and called himself CEO while making 64k isn’t disengeous?
The fact he tried to sell a University College degree as a U of Maryland degree isn’t deceitful?
If his charachter is so shady and shabby, can’t I, as a taxpayer, ask for someone who might be just as “highly” qualified as Kundra, but also maybe more trust worthy? I’m asking too much?
then why didn’t the White House promote that they are do-nothings, with some background…and not have an embellished, inflated bio?
I can see “puppet figure head” as a good title, or “grand muckymuck”. But, to present these positions as tech…why not get some known tech person to take the position? Maybe someone with some credentials that are accurate?
Does the IT industry have a ‘Ted Stevens’ award yet??
VK: “And think about this, I know there are people on Second Life right now, but imagine a Universe where you have the Star-Trek holodeck where you could literally ask the computer, err, to act or ask questions to get answers. In the same way, if you look at some of these software companies they’ve made it sooo complicated to interact with their technologies. Ah and, err, at the same time the underlying architecture and the platform, it’s almost a chicken and egg question because alot of it was built and architected around bandwidth constraints therefore you had to deploy technologies that were much more complicated in terms of interacting and communicating. Now, as broadband deployment, and more importantly, err, if you look at the megabits-per-second, err, how much, err, how much information can we get through the pipeline is going to be so important and, as new and new software and techologies are being introduced, what you going to see is huuuge-change from how applications are architected from skip-logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than, err, binary or COBOL ways of interacting.”
In addition to the factual problems in the original story, there are some large omissions. Dvork, when questioning the guy’s qualifications, pretty much glosses over the fact that he served as CTO in DC, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology in Virginia, and director of infrastructure technology in Arlington County, Virginia.
Those all sound like CIO qualifications to me. Are there people more qualified for the job? Perhaps, but there were some reports that some tech heavyweights turned down the CIO or CTO job.
Instead Dvork focuses on whether Kundra should be able to call himself CEO of a small company, and as we all know now, falsely implies that he has no master’s degree. There’s no there there to this story. It’s a bunch of old-man grumbling. “Hey, you young Indian guys, get out of my yard!”
I just don’t get why people are still praising this report. Are people just that blind with partisanship?
There is clearly something fishy with this appointment, as there is with most political appointments. Why accuse Dvorak of partisanship for criticising him? Criticising a Democrat does not make you a Republican or make you partisan.
Umm, you’re rather ageist, aren’t you? Worse than being sexist, and certainly akin to racist. Shame on you!
Sam, I assume you are a young snot and need to dry behind the ears! (I’d pinch your cheek and pat you on the head and tell you to “run along now”. Isn’t that your Mommy calling?) Yeah, how does ageism feel? Just as hurtful as calling someone a nigger, a cracker, a whore, a slut, a kike, a hebe, a rag head, a mick, etc., etc., etc. So, basically, you are a name caller, huh? Classy.
Kundra has over stated his accomplishments, misled people regarding his education, and appears to blather — at length — about things which seem rather mundane. I think he’s been reading his own press releases? Seems to be an ego problem — youth and recklessness.
I don’t blame Dvorak for calling him on it. It’s bull, and there is no room in the Obama Administration for it. People are wary enough, after the last 8 years. And, given that Obama just put some lobbyists into key positions (breaking a campaign promise) I’d say let the scrutiny begin!
Step aside, kid. Show some respect for your elders!
Omar–re #211
The unfortunate fact is, other people with more experience and expertise WERE asked to take the position of Federal CIO (as well as Chopra’s job of CTO). They turned it down. Why did they do that?
– Job has no clear, formal authority over budgets or management. The CIO’s influence is mostly due to the fact that the job is at the Office of Management and Budget. He has the right to review IT spending plans but cannot, by himself, change them.
– Job is not mandated by statute, and so can be eliminated at any time (by contrast, Chopra was given a second post in addition to CTO which requires Senate confirmation, and thus has some statutory legitimacy)
– Job involves duties which are, in fact, duplicative of other positions in government.
I don’t really have a problem with Kundra’s credentials. He WAS the CEO of his own one-man firm–people do that all the time. Also, he did some really innovative things as CTO of the DC government. I just think he was given a bogus job, with a salary and staff that could probably be put to better use elsewhere.
#219, Tunnel Rat,
Corruption, greed, and deceit are ingrained in the Indian DNA.
Say what??? They’re all Republicans?
😛
Reference above, “So sanctimonious finger wagging by conservatives _now_ is just a pisser.”
I was however someone who was asking questions about Obama and his associates credentials along time before this — and was called every slanderous name in the book to discredit me by Obama’s supporters who insisted on supporting him blindly with the faith of the Sunday converted. All politicians are scammers, it matters not their staring points, or even their final destination, (they are notoriously party switch any way), it is their nature that is the problem. They are all confidence men, and women — and therefore, if you wish to maintain a civil society, you should approach all of them, their associates, and their appointees with healthy doses of skepticism.
What is particularly shame now, is the degree to which the Obama convered are refusing to hold their man accountable, the degree to which they have become an army of apologists for his morphing into George the III, indeed, for the degree to which they have sudden become Neo-cons themselves once “they” are back in control of the power.
If there is any finger wagging going on, I serious doubt it is being done by conservatives, at least not by Neo-con. They are likely perfectly happy with Obama’s performance. It is the rest of us, the non-aligned, the independents, the women, the sexual minorities, the libertarians, the greens, the non-progressive democrats, who were suckered into supporting Obama who are hopping mad. We are the ones out here yelling “where is the change?” — and those wagging fingers are mighty close to becoming fists in the air.
Rather than whining about it, sir, you should be demanding a little accountability yourself, and thanking Mr. Dvorak for doing the job your man should have done in the first place.