ObamaCare Website Company Had Ties to Obama Fundraising, Michelle Obama

by JASmius

Fascinating, isn't it, that we don't have to devote an instant's thought to pondering the viability of making this assumption?:

CGI Federal, which secured a $678 million no-bid contract to build the Obamacare exchange web portal, has come under increased scrutiny for ties between senior executives and the Obama administration following the disastrous rollout of the healthcare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of First Lady Michelle Obama, the Daily Caller reported. In addition to being college classmates, both Obama and Townes-Whitley are members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

According to Federal Election Commission Records, Toni Townes-Whitley gave $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama's reelection, and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund.

Close access to the White House was also enjoyed by other senior CGI officials, reports  the Washington Examiner.
The Examiner reported that visitor logs show that "CGI Federal President Donna Ryan visited the White House six times prior to her company being selected to do the IT design work behind the high-profile website."

"Two of the meetings attended by CGI executives were with Vivek Kundra, Obama's chief information officer. Kundra was a key figure in Obama administration information technology initiatives across the government," the paper reported.

In addition to the $88 million contract awarded to CGI Federal for the health-insurance exchange website, the company has received a total of $422 million in contracts related to ObamaCare since the legislation was signed into law, according to Bloomberg News.

Admit it, as soon as you heard about CGI you thought something along the lines of, "Hmmph, I wonder how much THEY coughed up for Obama's reelection campaign?"  Given the degree to which corruption is written into The One's DNA, there is no other rational conclusion to draw.

In much the same way, given his penchant for picking losers, it's equally as unsurprising that CGI is perhaps the most incompetent IT company on the planet:

CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique. Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.

Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on January 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the government of Ontario canceled another CGI registry that never saw the light of day — just for one disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.

But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. federal government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. Pizza and Mountain Dew isn’t very Montreal, and on the evidence of three years of missed deadlines in Ontario and the four-year overrun on the firearms database CGI doesn’t sound like they’re pulling that many all-nighters. Was the government of the United States aware that CGI had been fired by the government of Canada and the government of Ontario (and the government of New Brunswick)? Nobody’s saying.  But I doubt it would make much difference.

Indeed.  Incompetents of a feather flock together, and all that.  Especially if the kickback price is right.  That's all that mattered to Red Barry.  Besides, remember, gods don't make mistakes.  But they sure do also like that cold, hard cash.