90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998

George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

As reported by the Washington Examiner in early October, the Department of Health and Human Services reviewed only CGI’s bid for the Obamacare account. CGI was one of 16 companies qualified under the Bush administration to provide certain tech services to the federal government. A senior vice president for the company testified this week before The House Committee on Energy and Commerce that four companies submitted bids, but did not name those companies or explain why only CGI’s bid was considered.

On the government end, construction of the disastrous Healthcare.gov website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.

Update: The Daily Caller repeatedly contacted CGI Federal for comment. After publication of this article, the company responded that there would be “nothing coming out of CGI for the record or otherwise today.” The company did however insist that The Daily Caller include a reference to vice president Cheryl Campbell’s House testimony. This has been included as a courtesy to the company.

5 Crazy Machines Smugglers Use To Get Drugs Across The Border

1. A Pot Catapult

The easiest way to get drugs over a fence? Catapults! It's a medieval technology, but a strong one. Without a need for fuel or anything more than basic kinetic energy, this drug catapult captured by Mexican authorities in early 2011 does one thing, and one thing well: hurl packages of marijuana over a 21-foot-tall fence. The problem with using a catapult for drug smuggling? It only does the one thing. People still have to get the drugs close to the border place, make sure someone on the other side knows where to pick it up, and do all of this without being caught. On upside, a catapult is pretty cheap to make, being mostly wood, and can safely be left out in broad daylight without specific risk of detection.

2. Pneumatic Pot Cannon

Mexicali Public Safety Department
Catapults are soooo 1008. If you really want to step up the "launching drugs over a border with antiquated technology" game, best to go with a significantly more modern cannon. Not a gunpowder cannon—that'd destroy the payload in a dank fog of mistakes. Instead, it's a pneumatic cannon, which uses carbon dioxide cartridges to propel a package in this case at least 500 feet. Why a cannon over a catapult? It has a longer range, which gives a few hundred feet in advantage over the catapult for where it places the elicit package. The disadvantages remain the same—the cannon has to get pretty close to the border, and pick-up inside the country needs coordination. The cannon just shoots packages of drugs slightly farther.

3. Cocaine Seized from a Go-Fast Boat
U.S. Navy, via wikimedia commons

The United States/Mexico land border isn't the only way to get drugs past interdiction efforts and to the stateside dealers. The Caribbean has long been a home to ne'er-do-wells, pirates and smugglers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the preferred technique for getting cocaine from South America in the hands and noses of people in Miami and elsewhere in the United States. Basically converted spedboats, they are small enough so that it's hard for radar to find them and fast enough to avoid many patrol ships. Because they carry a very expensive per-ounce drug like cocaine, their minimal cargo space means they can more than pay their cost back in sales on the ground. Use of fast boats to evade the U.S. Coast Guard dates back to the existence of both fast boats and the Coast Guard, so this is a pretty dated technique, and the Coast Guard has spent its entire existence figuring out how to stop them. They've gotten quite good at this job, which has led to more clever innovations.

4. Submarines
DEA, via wikimedia commons

With go-fast boats a known quantity, drug smugglers needed another way to get drugs, primarily cocaine, from Central and South America into the States without detection. If the Coast Guard can find smugglers above the water, drug runners were going to have just go underwater. Narcosubs have followed a similar evolution to perfectly legal submersibles, but on a much shorter time scale. The first drug smuggling submersibles from around 1993 are barely what we'd call a submarine but would probably be familiar to Confederate soldiers. Semi-submersibles, which keep most of their body under water, have to stay just below the surface for almost the entirety of operation, only submerging to attack to escape an attacker. In smuggling operations, they proved even harder than go-fast boats for the coast guard detect. But these early narco subs had their fair share of problems. Made as they were by amateurs in jungles and away from the prying eye of the law, their construction was rudimentary, and their design accommodated cargo, not people. As technology tends to, the design of narco subs have improved immensely from the early semi-subs. And it helps that their mission is highly profitable. Costing about $1 million to make, a 100 foot long sub can be filled with enough cocaine to make back that investment 150 times a trip. These new subs are fully submersible, improving their chances of evading detection and increasingly the value of that investment. Given how hard they are to detect in the water, the DEA and local authorities have taken to hunting them down at the jungle drydocks where they are made.

And Number 5.....