Thank you very much. Thank you for calling this hearing, mr. Chairman, and trying to get to the bottom of some of these questions. I appreciate the line of questions. I want to follow up, i believe mr. Pummill made a statement to the extent i think you said it was virtually impossible to fire a gs employee . Could you clarify and explain that a little more from your experience . In my experience its not very much. Ive been with the va for five years. The Civil Servants i believe this is federal government wide have incredible protections and safeguards so the process of taking care of a problem employee takes an incredible amount of documentation and oversight and time and energy and taxpayer dollars and normally ends with somebody outside of our organization coming back and saying you missed a step, reinstate the person with back pay or i personally find it very, very hard and impossible to navigate through. So it is virtually impossible in your opinion. Thats my opinion, yes, congres
Problem after problem after problem and nothing we seemed to do seemed to be able to fix it. Moving antoine there was the right call. Hes dramatically improved production in almost every aspect of baltimore since hes been there. Its kind of like if you want to replace an infantry commander at ft. Riley, kansas, you dont go out and look at a bunch of applicants, you say who is my best infantry colonel or general promotable that i can put in that position. Antoine was the person in that case. If you could go back in time would you still have signed off all the moves highlighted in the Inspector Generals report . If i could go back in time i still would have made all the moves, yes. Thank you, mr. Chairman, i yield back. Mr. Pummill, is there any reason why you could not inform this committee of what the proposed actions are . Im sorry, congressman . Is there any reason you cant inform this committee as to what the proposed actions are . I was told by our Legal Advisers right before this
Whitman, after posting better than expected quarterly revenues, of course, driven by strong numbers amidst personal systems group, including sales of pcs and the like. A mixed picture for the rest of the businesses, but a lot to get to. Bank of america, though, you can lose sight, jim, of the numbers themselves, almost 17 billion. We talked about this, speculated on for so long. Ranked up as one of the worst deals of all time. 17 billion on 4 billion. By the way, almost have they paid . I dont know how much you attribute seoully to countrywide and accusation of merrill as well. Its a mortgage machine i reported on. Years and in house of cards documentary on it, a book i wrote, that was going on for years in which, of course, you had borrowers not qualitied put in loans, packaged up, sold, and made into c degredos, and now, years later, seven, eight years later, we are seeing some of the settlements. I think they made a decision at bank of america. I think there was a faction that just
Starting at eight eastern on cspan. Cspan2, providing live coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and key Public Policy events. And every weekend, booktv. Now for 15 years the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a Public Service by your local cable or satellite provider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Iraq war veteran Travis Fugate says he may have gone p blind because his v. A. Center doctor didnt have the right information. Mr. Fugate says the v. A. s failure to fix issues was depressing. Veterans Affairs Department officials also testified at this hearing with members questioning why it was taking so long for the departments records to mirror the defense departments. This is just over two hours. [inaudible conversations] good morning. This hearing will come to order. I want to welcome everybody to todays hearing titled assessing inadequacies in v. A. Dat
Low prices continue. More Domestic Production and that means coming from alaska. I will say in addition to the price, one of our biggest concerns you see, and we think it has gotten to the point where it is willful and every project senator senators talk about and everything is delayed. Delayed. We think it is willful and the weapon of choice of this administration to actually kill projects. It is a big problem. We have time for one more. What sort of assureance has been given that new Mapping Technology will not place the animal life in harms way in an war . It has been proven. The new and old crude oil is that big. The only person who hurts the wildlife is the human being who is shooting them. I know a little like that. They are domestic kateated now. We have wolves sleeping with the sheep. And you guys believed it. In New York Miami philadelphia, and San Francisco people say we have to save those poor little animals. It doesnt affect them. It never has. It is all a myth easily sold