If they'd talked to us here in NJ, we could have told them

The one good thing that Jim McGreevey did as governor of New Jersey was to address the $85 million in cost overruns perpetrated on New Jersey taxpayers by Parsons Corporation, the company perpetrated on us to perform motor vehicle inspections by Christine "The Air At Ground Zero Is Fine" Whitman when she was governor.

Cost overruns and mismanagement are nothing new for Parsons, and now the rest of the country joins New Jersey in shoveling millions of dollars into the pockets of this company that seems ineffective at anything other than getting government contracts.

If you hired a contractor to build an addition to your house, would you put up with having human waste dripping from the ceiling into your nice new family room? I didn't think so. So why are we as taxpayers having to put up with this kind of shoddy work for our tax dollars in Iraq?

The contractor that botched construction of a $75 million police academy in Baghdad so badly that human waste dripped from the ceilings has produced shoddy work on 13 out of 14 projects reviewed by federal auditors, the top official monitoring Iraq's reconstruction told Congress yesterday.

In a House hearing on what has gone wrong with reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Parsons Corp. quickly became the focus, taking bipartisan heat for its record of falling short on critical projects. The Pasadena, Calif., firm was supposed to build facilities at the heart of the $21 billion U.S.-led reconstruction program, including fire stations, border forts and health-care centers. But inspectors have found a litany of flaws in the firm's work. The one project reviewed by auditors that was being constructed correctly, a prison, was taken away from Parsons before its completion because of escalating costs.

In a report released yesterday, inspectors found that the Baghdad Police College posed a health risk after feces and urine leaked through the ceilings of student barracks. The facility, part of which will need to be demolished, also featured floors that heaved inches off the ground and a room where water dripped so heavily that it was known as "the rain forest."

The academy was intended as a showcase for U.S. efforts to train Iraqi recruits who eventually are expected to take control of the nation's security from the U.S. military. But lawmakers said yesterday they feared it will become a symbol of a different sort.

"This is the lens through which Iraqis will now see America," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said. "Incompetence. Profiteering. Arrogance. And human waste oozing out of ceilings as a result."

How appropriate: Trust the U.S., and the U.S. will take a dump on you.

Remember when George W. Bush said he would run this company like a corporation? Well, he is -- he's running it like Parsons Corp.

(hat tip: Americablog)