Task Force is not doing diddly, ...

or is it; Task Force is doing diddly?

Photojournalist Mark Bralley and I chatted with Rep Jeannette Wallace, a member of the Government Restructuring Task Force, before the afternoon session began. It was her impression that, the Task Force wasn't doing diddly.

Which brings me back to my question, is a Task Force that is accomplishing "nothing", "not doing diddly" or is it doing diddly? urban dictionary link

The answer is, I suppose, if you are a poor dumb taxpayer watching your hard earned tax dollars leaking through the holes of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, what difference does it make?

Wallace has been a legislator since 1991, and a good person to ask if the Task Force was going anywhere.

Her impression was that if any good at all came out of the work the Task Force was doing, it would come in the form of individual legislative proposals that members would submit independent of the final product of Task Force endeavors.

Whether it is doing diddly, or not doing diddly, I concur,
the Task Force is going to fall far short of any meaningful
restructuring of state government. They might create an
efficiency or two, they might address an ineffectiveness or
two, but the government riddled with incompetence and
corruption is going to remain fundamentally unchanged.

Even the most basic reform of all, opening government to the
scrutiny of stakeholders, will apparently go unaddressed.

I sat at the public forum and reminded them that the first
step in eliminating inefficiencies is to expose them, and that,
the first step in eliminating ineffectiveness is to expose it.
I argued that there is a direct, and causal, correlation between transparency and the ending of inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

If government was as open and transparent as the spirit of the law requires, it would be impossibly difficult to hide inefficiency and ineffectiveness. They would disappear.

I went on to point out that there are only two reasons to not put "open government" on the table for candid, forthright, and honest discussion; a lack of courage, and a lack of character; either they don't want to take on the corrupt and the incompetent by eliminating the secrecy that hides their mis, mal, and non- feasance, or, they are afraid to.

I asked the Task Force members to offer a third reason if they knew one; any good and ethical reason to not talk about the fecklessness of Open Government Laws, the NMIPRA and OMA, and the failure to begin robust webcasting of governmental deliberations.

There were no takers.

No one offered any other reason to not discuss transparent accountability, except that they cannot find the character and the courage to tell the people the truth about their spending of the people's power and resources.

They will instead, do diddly.

Not insignificantly, diddly describes the attention that
the fourth estate, wikilink, has given to
the diddly going on, on the Task Force.

So, one could ask, how's a voter to know?




photo Mark Bralley