One Thousand Reasons

Articles filed under Government

A sharp contrast with Bush
Salon
I watched President Obama detail his administration's review of missed signals in the Christmas Day bomb attempt, and one thought was inescapable: Imagine President Bush doing the same thing after 9/11. I know, you can't. I couldn't either. In almost eight years, he never did.

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22 Million E-Mails Missing From Bush White House Found
Wired
White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the Associated Press.

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More Evidence of a Scandal
New York Times
Documents released by Congress, including testimony from Karl Rove, offer powerful new evidence that the Bush administration fired top prosecutors who refused to use their offices to promote the electoral fortunes of Republicans.

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OUR BROKEN GOVERNMENT
Center for Public Integrity
As America approaches a historic transfer of power, it is becoming ever-clearer what a daunting set of tasks awaits the new administration. When Barack Obama takes the oath of office at noon on January 20 he will inherit an economy collapsing before our eyes and a pair of ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he will also inherit a federal government whose machinery should bear an “out of order” sign.

Obama has often stated his desire to have a more efficient government — one that is open, transparent, and accountable. “We are not going to be hampered by ideology in trying to get this country back on track,” he said in December. “We want to figure out what works.”

The Center for Public Integrity’s Broken Government project makes clear what an imposing assignment that will be by cataloging what hasn’t worked. In a comprehensive assessment of systematic failures over the past eight years, the Center found more than 125 examples of government breakdown. The failures occurred in areas as diverse as education, energy, the environment, justice and security, the military and veterans’ affairs, health care, transportation, financial management, consumer and worker safety, and more. While some of the failures are, by now, depressingly familiar, many are less well-known but equally distressing.

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Exit, Stonewalling
New York Times
True to its mania for secrecy, the Bush administration is leaving behind vast gaps in the most sensitive White House e-mail records, and with lawyers and public interest groups in hot pursuit of information that deserves to be part of the permanent historical record.

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The World According to Cheney
New York Times
Vice President Dick Cheney has a parting message for Americans: They should quit whining about all the things he and President Bush did to undermine the rule of law, erode the balance of powers between the White House and Congress, abuse prisoners and spy illegally on Americans. After all, he said, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln did worse than that.

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The Next President's First Five Things To Do
Time
Whatever else waits inside the protective cocoon that the Secret Service will erect quickly around the 44th president on Tuesday night, there isn't much to read on the topic of How To Lead The Country Now. Nor is there any crystal case on the hall table at Blair House which reads, "Break Glass In Event of Collecting 270 Electoral Votes." And despite what you might imagine after seeing those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies, there is no secret binder of special instructions awaiting the president-elect in the National Archives.

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A Last Push To Deregulate
Washington Post
The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

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Administration to Bypass Reporting Law
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security.

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Arduous Transition Awaits Next President
Washington Post
If Sen. Barack Obama wakes up as the president-elect on Nov. 5, he will immediately assume responsibility for fixing a shredded economy while the Bush administration is still in office. If Sen. John McCain wins the election, he will face an imminent confrontation over spending with a Democratic Congress called back into special session with the goal of passing a new economic stimulus package.

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Cheney Rules
Washington Post
Vice presidential power was a term of mirth in governments past. Not anymore. Vice President Cheney may be the nearest thing we have had to a deputy president, and that hasn't escaped the notice of the candidates vying to succeed him. At the vice presidential debate, Sen. Joe Biden called Cheney "the most dangerous vice president" in U.S. history for his efforts to "aggrandize the power of a unitary executive." Gov. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, praised Cheney for "tapping into that position" and the Founding Fathers for "allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president."

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Report Details Bush Officials' Partisan Trips
Washington Post
When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006 elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy jumped to the task. Director John Walters was called a "superstar" by a Rove aide after carrying half-million-dollar grants to news conferences with two congressmen and a senator.

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Lords of Misrule: Thomas Frank Takes on the GOP
The Nation
In 1928 Homer Ferguson, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce, took to the pages of the Nation's Business to complain about the federal government. The problems he addressed were not the usual bugbears of red tape, inefficiency and waste. Rather, Ferguson argued that government sometimes worked too well. "A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive," he said. "He eats holes in our liberties." Even worse was an "enthusiast," that "bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world." Ferguson was candid about his animus toward good government. He was a military contractor, building warships for the Navy, and he feared that bright and talented public officials might figure out how to build boats faster and cheaper than he could. Much better a government unworthy of that trust. "The best public servant," he concluded, "is the worst one."

In The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank argues that the spirit of Homer Ferguson is alive and well in the Republican Party.

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Judge: Palin must preserve e-mails on private accounts
McClatchy Newspapers
ANCHORAGE — An Alaska state judge on Friday ordered Gov. Sarah Palin to preserve e-mails she's sent from or received at private e-mail accounts until a lawsuit demanding that the e-mails be made public is resolved.

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Cheney's paper trail
Los Angeles Times
In three months, the Bush-Cheney administration will be history. Scholars who want to study that history won an important victory last month when a federal judge ordered Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the National Archives to preserve all of Cheney's official papers pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought by a citizens' group and individual historians and archivists.

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The Cabinet: Who Will Fill These Seats?
CQ Politics
Seventy-seven days will separate Election Day from Inauguration Day, not much time for the president-elect to prepare for the enormous challenges of the next four years. But that is not to say he won’t be making any executive decisions. In fact, either John McCain or Barack Obama will spend much of those 11 weeks forming the core of the new administration, starting by picking the people to run the executive departments and most prominent federal agencies — the group known colloquially as the Cabinet.

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Dick Cheney, Role Model
New York Times
In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

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Bailout follows the 10 normal principles for how our government functions
Salon
The word being used most frequently to describe the bailout package that is about to pass is "extraordinary." That adjective may apply to the amounts of money being transferred from taxpayers to Wall Street, but the process by which this is all happening is anything but "extraordinary." All of the "principles" that drive how our Government functions in general -- what explain the last eight years at least -- are perfectly evident in what has happened here:

(1) Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.

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The cult of unfettered private enterprise
Baltimore Sun
The high priests of capitalism are in sackcloth and ashes, their belief in markets shattered, their catechism of risk-taking renounced. From Wall Street to Detroit, once-devout believers in unfettered private enterprise are running from their religion. Now that their greed has brought the economy to the brink of depression, they want government help.

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Visible Hands
The New Republic
When Hank Paulson, a successful investment banker turned Republican treasury secretary, caps his career by nationalizing two financial institutions so large that even Norman Thomas in his socialist heyday would have paused before taking them onto the government's balance sheet, and a conservative central banker agrees to bail out an insurance company to the tune of $85 billion, you know that a fundamental change is underway. The day when that engine of capitalism, the financial market, was allowed to operate more or less unimpeded by government has passed. We are entering an era in which a high tolerance for risk is being replaced by the eager embrace of regulation, and where the overriding imperative, efficiency, has been replaced by an increasing desire for equity.

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Federal judge orders Cheney to preserve VP records
New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Saturday ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president.

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No Laughing Matter
New York Times
Of all the points raised by different analysts about the economy last week, surely the best was Representative Barney Frank’s reminder on “Charlie Rose” that Ronald Reagan’s favorite laugh line was telling audiences that: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

Hah, hah, hah.

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McCain Misfires
Washington Post
John McCain has just demonstrated his vulnerability as a presidential candidate. Speaking from prepared remarks at an Iowa rally today, he said that he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This outburst demonstrates McCain’s ignorance, his impetuousness and his vindictive streak. Not bad for one remark.

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McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition
Washington Post
A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

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Wall Street crisis is culmination of 28 years of deregulation
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — No one cog in the federal government's machine of financial regulation let down the country by failing to prevent the latest shakeout on Wall Street. The entire system did.

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Poll: Public opposes increased presidential power
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Americans strongly oppose giving the president more power at the expense of Congress or the courts, even to enhance national security or the economy, according to a new poll.

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America's broken infrastructure
Los Angeles Times
When the World Trade Center went down in 2001, it led to two wars, hundreds of billions in expenditures and the creation of a Homeland Security bureaucracy. When the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis went down last year, it led to a $1-billion House bill to mandate repair of federal bridges, which will probably be vetoed by President Bush if it gets past the Senate.

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Bailout Hide and Seek
New York Times
On Friday, less than a week after the government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the White House announced that there is no reason at this time to account for the companies in the federal budget.

That is great news for officials who prefer to hide the cost of the bailout since it is due, in large part, to their failure to adequately regulate the financial markets and steward the economy. But it is an insult to taxpayers, whose money is at risk, and it is a reckless gambit.

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Anything Goes, Apparently
New York Times
It seemed inevitable that bad things would happen when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney packed the top posts at the Department of the Interior with lobbyists who had spent their careers representing the very industries they were now being asked to regulate. But it was left to Earl Devaney, the department’s inspector general — and the busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy — to demonstrate just how bad things could be.

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Lawsuit to Ask That Cheney's Papers Be Made Public
Washington Post
Months before the Bush administration ends, historians and open-government advocates are concerned that Vice President Cheney, who has long bristled at requirements to disclose his records, will destroy or withhold key documents that illustrate his role in forming U.S. policy for the past 7 1/2 years.

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It's Our Constitution, Too
Pottersville
Politicians of all stripes, regardless of party or ideological affiliation, have demonstrated a disturbingly proprietary attitude toward the Constitution. Our elected officials in both the legislative and executive branches seem to think that they and they alone are the sole stewards of said document and that they, because they and not us, are sworn to honor it, can parcel out the civil liberties like tiny food pellets into an endless rat maze.

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Politicized hiring has no place in government
Miami Herald
By OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
Below are excerpts from a federal inspector general's report on political hiring in the Justice Department. The report is entitled: ``An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and other staff in the Office of the Attorney General.''

In March 2007, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of the Inspector General began a joint investigation of allegations that in 2006 several U.S. attorneys were forced to resign for improper reasons, including improper political purposes.

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225 Days of WH Emails Missing
Time
(WASHINGTON ) — The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

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Anti-Regulation Aide to Cheney Is Up for Energy Post
Washington Post
A senior aide to Vice President Cheney is the leading contender to become a top official at the Energy Department, according to several current and former administration officials, a promotion that would put one of the administration's most ardent opponents of environmental regulation in charge of forming department policies on climate change.

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Feeding the Beast
In These Times
When President Bush exits the White House in January, he will leave behind a federal government in shambles.

Since his first term, Bush has pressed forward with a radical view of the executive branch. Beyond adopting autocratic positions on foreign policy and taking broad liberties to subvert the Bill of Rights, Bush has waged a quieter — and perhaps more damaging — war at home against the very agencies under his charge.

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Our Idea of Gold
New York Times
Halfway into the Summer Games in Beijing, Chinese athletes had won a lot more gold medals than Americans had. It was enough to make some sports nationalists yearn for Washington’s intervention — but not this page.

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Mukasey Won’t Pursue Charges in Hiring Inquiry
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday rejected the idea of criminally prosecuting former Justice Department employees who improperly used political litmus tests in hiring decisions, saying he had already taken strong internal steps in response to a “painful” episode.

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The Pitfalls of Republican Leadership
Huffington Post
The current leaders of the Republican Party, particularly those in the Bush administration, have run roughshod over the brilliance of the American founding principle of checks and balances, which was specifically crafted to prevent excess and maintain stability. Not only have they allowed corporate interests to dictate health care, energy, and fiscal policy, they took it upon themselves to test lessons already learned... such as the need for actual enforcement of the laws already in place (curious that said enforcement has been absent for the last 8 years) as well as the benefit of Congressional oversight (which abruptly resurfaced in 2007 after a 6 year hiatus).

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US disregarded experts over biolab
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations of government experts and named Mississippi -- home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency -- as a top location for a new $451 million, national laboratory to study some of the world's most virulent biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

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The President and Product Safety
New York Times
American consumers, who have suffered years of neglect from government agencies created for their protection, could soon be in for some genuine help.

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DEMOCRATS UNRELENTING IN OVERSIGHT OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - The Democratic-led Congress appears intent on using its oversight powers to investigate the Bush administration until the day the latter packs up and walks out of the White House.

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The partisan injustice at Justice
Miami Herald
`What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?''

I have gone forward and back for awhile now trying to figure out where today's rant should begin, but I find that I cannot get past that question. It was posed by Monica Goodling, an aide to then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to job seekers at the Department of Justice.

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Long Overdue Crane Safety
New York Times
The Bush administration generally prefers to fiddle, not regulate, as problems approach a crisis, but its failure to address accidents involving construction cranes is particularly hard to grasp.

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Rep. Barney Frank Offers Legislation to Legalize Marijuana
US News & World Report
The federal government should stop interfering with people's "leisure" activities, including using marijuana, Rep. Barney Frank said Wednesday, unveiling a bill to remove federal criminal penalties for possessing the drug.

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For White House, Hiring is Political
New York Times
WASHINGTON — On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

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Immigration Judges? Huh?
The New Republic
While the House Judiciary Committee was voting this morning to hold Karl Rove in contempt of Congress for ignoring its subpoena, its Senate counterpart was exploring what's perhaps the most puzzling question surrounding this week's report on the politicization of hiring at the Justice Department: Exactly how did Monica Goodling, a 32-year-old party hack with no legal experience, come to wield effective veto power over the hiring of career, non-political appointees at department?

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Dems wield oversight cudgel on Bush administration
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Across Capitol Hill, Democratic-led committees are considering punishments for past and present Bush administration officials for a range of alleged misdeeds, from discriminating against liberals at the Justice Department to blowing off subpoenas and lying to Congress.

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The putsch that imperiled America
Los Angeles Times
A report released Tuesday by the Justice Department has documented the Bush administration's unprecedented -- and illegal -- effort to politicize the ranks of the agency's prosecutors and civil service employees with conservatives and true believers in the religious right's agenda.

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Goodlings Amok
Washington Post
The improbable topic of today's column is Monica Goodling and the federal budget deficit.

You might think that the two of these have nothing in common save the happenstance that both are the subject of devastating new reports: Goodling about the stomach-turning politicization of the Justice Department; the deficit about the stomach-turning state of the federal treasury.

But the linkage goes beyond the adjective. The ousted Goodling and the lingering deficit are twin manifestations of the Bush administration's overarching contempt for government and blind adherence to ideology.

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Justice Besmirched
Washington Post
THE LATIN phrase on the seal of the Justice Department loosely means "he who prosecutes on behalf of justice." During the reign of Monica Goodling and D. Kyle Sampson it also should have read, "Democrats need not apply."

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EPA limits staff from talking
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press.

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Goodling Rejected Job Applicant Because He Was Married to a Democrat
TPM
The OIG report released today on the politicized hiring at the Justice Department, details a number of the candidates that were de-selected for positions under Monica Goodling's watch. One of them, was an "experienced terrorism prosecutor. . [who] had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General's Award for Exceptional Service."

Unfortunately for him, he had a wife who was a Democrat:

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What White House Staffers Make
Washington Post
President Bush's highest-ranking aides got $4,200 raises this year, bringing their annual salaries to $172,200.

The latest White House staff list is out, and you can browse the whole thing here. There are 447 people on the list, their salaries ranging from $33,400 to $172,200. (Bush makes $400,000 and Vice President Cheney makes $221,200.)

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LOAN RANGERS
The New Yorker
Just before the start of last week’s All-Star Game, Jim Bunning, a Major League Hall of Fame pitcher and, for the past decade, Kentucky’s junior Republican senator, served up a high inside fastball to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was on Capitol Hill defending the Bush Administration’s latest effort to bolster the ailing financial system. Cutting Paulson off in mid-sentence, Bunning said, in effect, Mr. Secretary, come next January, you will be gone, but some of us will still be here, and we will have to pick up your tab. I, for one, am not willing to give the federal government a blank check.

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Are Fannie and Freddie Screwed? Bush Hopes So
AlterNet
In January, I wrote a cultural analysis of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more casually known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how the Bush administration might be trying to take them down.

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Food industry fails at safety
Baltimore Sun
Would we accept it if the federal agency charged with highway safety allowed cars on the road without brakes - and then warned drivers to exercise extreme caution in order to avoid injury and death? Of course not. But that, in effect is the U.S. government's approach to something that affects all of us on the most basic level: the safety of the meat, poultry and produce that we eat.

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Cosmic Markdown: EPA Says Life Is Worth Less
Washington Post
Someplace else, people might tell you that human life is priceless. In Washington, the federal government has appraised it like a '96 Camaro with bad brakes.

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Mukasey the Obstructionist
Washington Post
Michael Mukasey has President Bush's back.

Mukasey succeeded toady Alberto Gonzales as attorney general last fall. But the notion that he would restore independence to that post took a big hit yesterday when he refused to turn over to a House committee key documents related to the CIA leak investigation.

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Bush claims executive privilege on CIA leak
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush has asserted executive privilege to protect information that a House panel has subpoenaed on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, the White House said Wednesday.

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The Real Legacy of the ‘Reagan Revolution’
Truthdig
McCain campaign co-chair Phil Gramm is right: We have “become a nation of whiners.” But who is whining more than the bankers that former Sen. Gramm’s financial deregulation legislation benefited? The very bankers who now expect a government bailout, such as those at UBS Investment Bank, where Gramm found lucrative employment.

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U.S. lags on food regulation
Los Angeles Times
This isn't the only developed country to have experienced serious problems with food contamination. We've just been extraordinarily lackadaisical when it comes to doing something about it. A new federal report on the common-sense steps taken by Japan, Canada, Ireland and several other nations provides a practical guide to food safety. The only question remaining is: What's taking the United States so long to follow it?

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Wall Street's Great Deflation
The Nation
Phil Gramm, the senator-banker who until recently advised John McCain's campaign, did get it right about a "nation of whiners," but he misidentified the faint-hearted. It's not the people or even the politicians. It is Wall Street--the financial titans and big-money bankers, the most important investors and worldwide creditors who are scared witless by events. These folks are in full-flight panic and screaming for mercy from Washington, Their cries were answered by the massive federal bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the endangered mortgage companies.

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History Deleted at the White House
New York Times
After watching wholesale lots of the Bush administration’s most important e-mails go mysteriously missing, Congress is trying to legislate against any further damage to history. The secrecy-obsessed White House is, of course, threatening a veto — one more effort to deny Americans their rightful access to the truth about how their leaders govern or misgovern.

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Court Chips Away at White House Secrecy
Washington Post
A federal appeals court dealt a blow yesterday to White House efforts to keep secret the names of people who visited Vice President Cheney.

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Setback for White House on Visitor Logs
New York Times
WASHINGTON —The Bush administration was dealt a setback on Friday in its efforts to keep records of White House visitors under wraps when an appeals court refused to throw out a lawsuit seeking access to the material.

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Report: Makers knew Katrina trailers tainted
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - Manufacturers say they are not responsible for FEMA trailers that had toxic levels of formaldehyde, despite Democrats' findings that companies knew about the dangers yet sold them to the government anyway after Hurricane Katrina.

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Taking aim at the next Karl Rove
The Hill
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has primary jurisdiction over the executive branch, is considering legislation to eliminate Karl Rove-type advisers in future administrations.

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Justice Dept. Sued Over Political Bias
Washington Post
Armed with solid grades, glowing recommendations and a pair of internships, Sean M. Gerlich confidently applied to the Justice Department honors program two years ago, only to get a rejection letter.

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Secretive Agency Under the Spotlight
Washington Post
Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

"CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject," he said in an internal memo to his staff in 2006.

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After Deaths, U.S. Inspects Electric Work Done in Iraq
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR, a major military contractor, after the electrocutions of several United States service members.

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More Waste, Fraud and Abuse
New York Times
Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?”

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Why Vice Presidents Are Important to Governing
US News & World Report
Not Exactly a Crime is the title of a book on America's vice presidents published in 1972—a year before Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for actually committing a crime. The office of vice president has long been the butt of jokes—you know the punch lines—but as we await Barack Obama's and John McCain's choices for vice president, we do so with the knowledge that vice presidents in the last five administrations have been important officers of government. (Yes, including Dan Quayle; see Bob Woodward and David Broder's book). How the vice presidency has been transformed is an interesting story that takes us from the Founding Fathers to recent history.

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When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short
Washington Post
Throughout the Bush presidency, he toiled in secrecy deep within the White House, a mysterious and feared presence who never stepped into the sunlight of public disclosure.

Until yesterday.

There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president -- Cheney's Cheney, if you will -- and the man most responsible for building President Bush's notion of an imperial presidency.

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Even the interns are political
Boston Globe
LAST YEAR, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had to resign after he could not explain why the Justice Department had fired nine US attorneys, all Bush appointees, who had prosecuted Republican officials or declined to pursue flimsy cases against Democrats. Now it turns out that the politicization of the Justice Department under President Bush went even deeper. A report by the department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility finds that officials used political litmus tests in the hiring of staff lawyers and even interns.

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Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds
Washington Post
Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.

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Lawsuit could be power shake-up for Obama, McCain
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Barack Obama and John McCain, two senators who want to become president, are trying not to pick sides in the White House's court fight with Congress over executive privilege.

That's ironic, since they have the most to gain -- or lose -- depending on the outcome of a hearing held Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington.

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So Many More Questions
Washington Post
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's congressional testimony on Friday didn't produce many answers, but it served as a potent reminder of how little we know about the inner workings of the Bush administration -- and of how much this secrecy has eroded the public's trust in the president.

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Census Damage Control
New York Times
Preparations for the 2010 census are a shambles.

Committees in the House have been holding hearings to vet the problems and monitor progress. But with each hearing, it becomes more obvious that prospects for a robust census are unlikely to improve considerably unless and until the next president brings in new leaders.

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Fight over White House subpoenas heads to court
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for the White House and Congress are headed to court Monday in a dispute over whether top aides to President Bush must provide evidence in a House investigation.

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The Executive Power Awaiting the Next President
New York Times
President Bush’s drive for the greatest expansion in executive power since the Nixon era is slowly grinding to a halt after years of challenges by the courts, Congress, and now, the political calendar. Yet that hardly means that he has been pushed all the way back to Sept. 10, 2001.

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As 1984 Draws to a Close...
Pottersville
...this is what passes for normal in Oceania Amerika.

The Bush administration wants to rewrite the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees, allowing it to shore up its cases before they come under scrutiny by civilian judges for the first time.

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A Heretic's Advice To Obama
Washington Post
Today, I shall commit an act of heresy so offensive to cherished Washington beliefs that revocation of my citizenship in the nation's capital is quite likely to follow.

Nonetheless, I press on.

My offense? I contend, contrary to accepted Washington doctrine, that should Barack Obama be elected president, he ought not to allow his administration to fall into the clutches of Washington insiders.

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Abramoff Used White House To Help Get Rid of Roadblock
Washington Post
If lobbyists find the path to their clients' riches obstructed by an implacably hostile federal official, they might achieve success by an end run or an appeal to more senior authorities. But a more extreme solution -- if the foe has high-level support -- is to pull strings at the White House and orchestrate the official's removal.

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GOP Insiders Fret About What Former White House Spokesman Will Say
US News & World Report
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, scheduled for Friday, has some Republican insiders worried.

McClellan is expected to talk about his charges—made in his new book and in media interviews—that President Bush ordered the 2003 leak of portions of a classified intelligence document in order to discredit Iraq war critics.

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Consider the Constitutions of Obama and McCain as You Choose Sides
Village Voice
On the blessed day when George W. Bush leaves office, he will have left behind a largely hidden parallel government within this nation, a rogue apparatus that allows a President to be the law, with a holy patriotic mission to ignore the Congress and the courts when decisive action is needed.

And if the other branches of the visible government act up—brandishing the separation of powers inscribed in the Constitution—this president-czar works, mostly in secret, to maintain his authority.

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The check to US executive power hangs in the balance
Guardian
Between them, Barack Obama and John McCain participated in more than 40 televised debates with their respective Democratic and Republican competitors over the course of 2007 and 2008. They were asked questions about topics from the serious (Iraq) to the frivolous (flag lapel pins). But to my knowledge, and I watched as many of these confabs as a normal human could be expected to endure, the men and woman bidding to be the next US president weren't asked a single direct question about the current administration's use, and misuse, of executive power.

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A Fix-It List for The Spies
Washington Post
VERGENNES, Vermont -- If the U.S. intelligence community were a business, it would be obvious that there's something wrong: It's in the middle of a misguided reorganization that makes the AOL-Time Warner merger look good; its most famous brand name, "CIA," has been badly tarnished; and it has lost the confidence of its three shareholders -- the executive branch, Congress and the American public. This bear market in intelligence is not helpful for a nation that is fighting two major wars.

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Bad Cow Disease
New York Times
“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”
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That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

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Why Tomatoes Hate America
Washington Post
The tomatoes attacked us brutally and without warning. Yesterday, our leaders struck back against the pernicious produce.

"As we hold this hearing, grocers and restaurants nationwide have been pulling tomatoes from the shelves and menus," announced Rep. John Shimkus, the ranking Republican member of the House Commerce subcommittee assigned to skewer the tomatoes.

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Interrogation for Profit
New York Times
Congress is finally moving to ban one of the Bush administration’s most blatant evasions of accountability in Iraq — the outsourcing of war detainees’ interrogation to mercenary private contractors.

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Report Faults F.D.A. Action for Safe Food
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration has failed to carry out much of its own plan to protect the nation’s food supply, Congressional investigators say in a report that is to be released on Thursday.

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Republicans deserting Bush on unemployment vote
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—John McCain is just one of dozens of Republicans abandoning President Bush to join Democrats who want to extend unemployment payments for people whose benefits have run out.

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Our History, Off-Limits
Washington Post
Giving Americans back their history may not rank with ending the war in Iraq or balancing the budget, but it should be high on the to-do list of the next president. Our declassification system has broken down. Historians are waiting an average of seven years for replies from presidential libraries to their Freedom of Information Act requests. The White House cannot locate millions of e-mail records created during the months immediately before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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How HUD Mortgage Policy Fed The Crisis
Washington Post
In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

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An intelligence postmortem
Boston Globe
THE SENATE Committee on Intelligence issued two reports last week, one on the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war and the other on meetings in Rome and Paris, in 2001 and 2003, between US officials and dubious Iranian contacts. The reports are valuable both for what they reveal and for affirming the oversight responsibilities of Congress.

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No Time for 'Nobody Home'
Washington Post
The early months of 2009 may well be the most precarious period in recent American history. As the next president takes office, some 350,000 U.S. military personnel deployed overseas will await orders from their new commander in chief, the first wartime transition since Johnson-Nixon 40 years ago. The next administration will not only take charge of two wars but will also inherit daunting national security challenges: a global struggle against violent extremism; the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons to hostile states; growing challenges associated with energy security and climate change; an overstretched military under enormous strain; an economy sliding toward recession; and U.S. global standing at an all-time low.

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Don't Let Cheney Ruin It
Washington Post
As the prospective presidential nominees ponder choosing their running-mates, the specter of Vice President Dick Cheney looms large.

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After Failing To Protect 9/11 First Responders From Toxic Threats, Thompson Awarded Contract To Treat Them
Think Progress
Tommy Thompson served as President Bush’s Secretary of Health and Human Services from January 2001 to 2005. It was during his tenure, after the 9/11 attacks, that the Bush administration largely ignored the health risks facing first responders at the World Trade Center site.

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The Presidential Death List
Esquire
Should the Democratic Party work its usual presidential election magic, John McCain will be 72 when he takes office, breaking Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest person to enter the White House. McCain’s release of more than a thousand pages of medical records reveal a man in excellent physical condition... except for a recurrence of melanomas so frequent his dermatologist called it “remarkable.” (NOTE: in general, when a physician expresses amazement at how frequently you get cancerous growths, that’s bad.) What are his odds of surviving the term? While only Nostradamus and Pat Robertson know the exact future, it is possible to use history as a guide. Of the forty-two men who’ve held the presidency, here are the chief executives who failed to leave the office alive.

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If Presidents Faced Question Time
New York Times
After years of watching President Bush ignore Congress, at best, or disdain it, at worst, there is relief in listening to the British prime minister face questions in Parliament. As seen on C-Span, these events feature literate parries and thrusts, complete sentences, artful arguments, all to a chorus of noisy yeas and brays.

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Monster's Ball
Washington Post
Bush loyalists watching Scott McClellan kick off his media tour yesterday must have felt a revulsion akin to Dr. Frankenstein's.

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For Future White House Aides, Required Reading
Washington Post
The people who should sit down and read Scott McClellan's blockbuster new book are the people least likely to take the time to do so right now. They are the aides to Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton -- and perhaps the candidates themselves.

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Sticker Shock and Awe at the Pentagon
New York Times
A lot more spending and far too little oversight, those are the bottom lines of two disturbing new reports on the Pentagon’s flawed-to-broken budgeting process. The Pentagon’s inspector general plaintively reported this week that his staff is overwhelmed. For good reason. The Pentagon’s budget has doubled since 2000, while the number of auditors has remained static.

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'What Happened' To Scott McClellan?
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - One thing’s for sure: President Bush and Scott McClellan won’t be kicking back on those rocking chairs in Texas like Bush predicted when McClellan left the White House two years ago. “I certainly don’t expect it any time soon,” the former press secretary said Thursday morning on NBC’s “Today.”

Here are 10 other things we know for sure following the release of McClellan’s harsh new tell-all, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House And Washington's Culture of Deception.”

• Bush is toxic.

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I Knew It All Along
New York Times
There are several kinds of Washington memoirs: “I Reveal the Honest Truth,” a kiss-up-and-tell designed to settle scores (nod to honesty optional). “I Was There at the Start,” designed to make the author appear to be the linchpin of history. And, most tedious: “I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract.”

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The Man Who Wasn't There, Still Here
Washington Post
"Anybody seen Steve Hadley? Anybody seen Steve Hadley?"

Jane Purcell, part of the American entourage at yesterday's meeting of President Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative at the Washington Hilton, was trying urgently to find the national security adviser.

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Late in the Term, an Exodus of Senior Officials
Washington Post
With eight months left in President Bush's term, scores of senior officials already are heading for the exits, leaving nearly half the administration's top political positions vacant or filled by temporary appointees, federal statistics show.

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The Bush Definition of 'Transparency'
Washington Independent
The Bush administration has a pet word to describe its regulatory policy. The word is "transparent." Last Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen Johnson used it to describe an ozone ruling in which the White House at the last minute reversed EPA recommendations for limiting smog. “It’s been a very transparent process,” Johnson told Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Ca.) and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

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British U.F.O. Shocker! Government Officials Were Telling the Truth
New York Times
LONDON — They were shaped like cigars, saucers, coffins and amorphous blinking blobs. They hovered in a menacing manner, traveled at impossible speeds and vanished into the netherworld, or, in one instance, a hedge in Cornwall.

The reports, released this month, also included a sketch of a vehicle on skis.

In another sketch, the edges of the vehicle were described as “not fuzzy.”

A few carried humanoid life forms, or so it seemed. A few materialized courtesy of the observers’ possibly having had a drink too many, as in the case of an unidentified flying light cluster witnessed loitering in the sky by the patrons of a pub in Kent.

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America's faux government
Boston Globe
I LOVE Hollywood sets of perfect streets that turn out to be nothing but fronts. It's so clever.

Alas, I think that's what we're going to find when we open the doors of the White House in 2009.

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How telecoms are attempting to buy amnesty from Congress
Salon
One of the benefits from the protracted battle over telecom amnesty is that it is a perfect microcosm for how our government institutions work. And a casual review of the available evidence regarding how telecom amnesty is being pursued demonstrates what absurd, irrelevant distractions are the pro-amnesty justifications offered by the pundit class and the Bush administration.

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30 Former Officials Became Corporate Monitors
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has appointed at least 30 former prosecutors and other government officials as well-paid corporate monitors in arrangements that allow companies to avoid criminal prosecution, according to government data released Thursday by Congress.

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What Ever Happened to (the Good Kind of) States’ Rights?
New York Times
In February, the day after his infamous encounter at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Eliot Spitzer, then the governor of New York, published a remarkable opinion piece in The Washington Post.

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Keeping Secrets: In Presidential Memo, A New Designation for Classifying Information
Washington Post
Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."

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A Regulatory Agency in Need
New York Times
Prodded by Congress, the Food and Drug Administration has finally acknowledged that it needs a lot more money than the Bush administration has been willing to give it to protect the public from unsafe drug and food imports and other dangerous products.

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The To-Do List Facing the Next President
US News & World Report
Grim and grimmer. That was the outlook presented by a group of academics and big thinkers at Harvard University as they analyzed the challenges facing the next president.

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Farm Bill Passes by Veto-Proof Margin
Washington Post
The House yesterday passed a final version of a new five-year farm bill by a vote of 318 to 106, a margin large enough to override President Bush's promised veto of the nearly $300 billion measure.

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McCain and the 'Unitary Executive'
Consortium News
If John McCain wins the presidency – and gets to appoint one or more U.S. Supreme Court justices – America’s 220-year experiment as a democratic Republic living under the principle that “no man is above the law” may come to an end.

To put the matter differently, if a President McCain replaces one of the moderate justices with another Samuel Alito – as McCain has vowed to do – then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo’s extreme vision of an all-powerful Executive could well become the new law of the land.

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Information That Doesn’t Come Freely
New York Times
NINA BERNSTEIN, a Times reporter, wrote a front-page article last June about the deaths of prisoners in the fastest-growing form of incarceration in America, immigration detention.

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Film Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy
CQ Politics
In a riveting new documentary called “Secrecy,” former CIA operative Melissa Boyle Mahle tells the damnedest story about how a spy agency can outfox itself by over-classifying its files.

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Bush and House G.O.P. Team Up to Present Show of Strength
New York Times
WASHINGTON — It was just like the old days. President Bush and House Republican leaders strode purposefully out of the White House to the waiting microphones, where the president celebrated their mutual views on housing, energy, war spending and terrorist surveillance bills taking shape in Congress.

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In F.E.C. Moves, Some See Effort to Aid McCain
New York Times
For months, the White House and Senate Republicans have been content to let a political impasse over vacancies at the Federal Election Commission persist, sidelining the regulatory agency in the throes of a heated presidential campaign.

But on Tuesday, President Bush suddenly announced three new nominees to the commission.

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Government in secret
Los Angeles Times
The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA's controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law -- and it is law -- we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key.

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
One Utah
The news media often uncritically report federal government national economic indicators, without explaining how they are calculated. Well, it seems Mark Twain was right when he noted (quoting Benjamin Disraeli), “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The unsurprising truth, according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (SGS): “Inflation and unemployment reports are understated, while employment and other economic data are overstated, deliberately.”

The government began fudging the numbers during the Reagan administration, although the Clinton administration continued doing it. SGS calculates economic indicators according to the original criteria, so that the real trends become evident.

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The Lurita Doan Story
New York Times
It has been 11 months since investigators found that Lurita Doan, chief of the General Services Administration, violated the Hatch Act’s ban on politicking on the job, asking her staff how they could “help our candidates.” This week, the White House finally got around to ousting Ms. Doan from the government’s principal agency for awarding rich contracts in goods and services.

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The Bush Administration's Shroud of Secrecy
CounterPunch
More than any other Administration in recent history, this Administration has a penchant for secrecy. To an unprecedented degree, it has invoked executive privilege to thwart congressional oversight and the state secrets privilege to shut down lawsuits. It has relied increasingly on secret evidence and closed tribunals, not only in Guantanamo but here in the United States. And it has initiated secret programs involving surveillance, detention, and interrogation, some of the details of which remain unavailable today, even to Congress.

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Making Credit Safer
Harvard Magazine
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance your home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting your family out on the street—and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact.

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Tracking the Spoils of the Private Sector
New York Times
There are so many barn doors to be closed on the Bush administration’s wasteful, murky world of government contractors that Congress barely knows where to begin. The House has made a start in plugging the multibillion-dollar loophole that the White House let slip into its promised crackdown on fraudulent contractors.

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Bush Plan To Contract Federal Jobs Falls Short
Washington Post
Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

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Republican: Lawmakers feel 'used' by WH
Chicago Tribune
The senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence said that lawmakers felt "used" by the White House after finally getting briefed today on alleged North Korean nuclear assistance to Syria.

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White House Appealing Visitor Logs
Time
(WASHINGTON) — The Bush administration is challenging a court ruling that White House visitor logs are public documents, saying releasing the records would infringe on the separation of powers.

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Whose Privilege?
New York Times
In the name of fighting terrorism — and with a clear goal of avoiding accountability — the Bush administration has imposed a level of secrecy on its operations that has no place in a democracy.

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Rove Asked To Testify Over Siegelman Prosecution
Huffington Post
A House committee Thursday asked former White House political adviser Karl Rove to testify about allegations that Bush administration officials pushed for federal prosecutions of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and other Democrats.

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Not Much of a Watchdog
New York Times
It is probably safe to say that regulation — especially when it comes to its friends in business and industry — is one of the Bush administration’s least favorite government responsibilities. So it should come as no surprise that even as the financial sector’s recklessness is tipping the economy into crisis, the Securities and Exchange Commission seems to be bending over backward to not discomfit the banks and firms it regulates.

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Record-Keeping Bill Is Criticized As 'Anemic' by Watchdog Group
Washington Post
Citing "significant deficiencies" in the preservation of e-mail by the White House and federal agencies, House Democrats yesterday introduced legislation to strengthen and modernize electronic record-keeping requirements. But a private watchdog group called the bill inadequate and issued a report describing federal record-keeping as antiquated and chaotic.

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Bush administration backs down on fraud and abuse
Salon
As a rule, Americans probably don't expect government officials to go out of their way to protect waste, fraud and abuse, but then again, the Bush administration includes a special group of people.

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American Airlines and American Plutocracy
Huffington Post
Travelers who just suffered from the cancellations of thousands of flights, their families and friends, and anyone who plans to travel by air should pay attention to the ways elections are financed in the United States. Most voters consider this a boring subject; they get a much greater rise out of debating the war in Iraq, the economy, health care and other such "substantive" issues. The ways elections are conducted is considered by the majority of the public a dull, "process" issue.

The fact is that as long as we allow those with deep pockets to have a great influence over Congressional elections as well as presidential ones, and allow those industries that are supposed to be regulated to offer high paying jobs to those who are supposed to regulate them, we shall have
the kind of safety scares and unneeded suffering many thousands of Americans just experienced.

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Dems fault Bush on executive privilege
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—President Bush's refusal to let two confidants provide information to Congress about fired federal prosecutors represents the most expansive view of executive privilege since Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee told a federal judge Thursday.

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Another Heck of a Job
New York Times
Any remaining hope for a modern, efficient and precise census in 2010 has cratered, brought low by managerial incompetence and the administration’s relentless antipathy for effective government.

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Toward Monarchy
Anti-War
As if we didn't already know, we have yet another piece of evidence that one of the major "accomplishments" of the Bush administration (and you didn't think there were any) has been a relentless push for more executive power.

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U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion'
Wired
A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

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Fear of Regulating
New York Times
To understand the White House’s blueprint for regulating the financial markets, start with what the Bush administration did not do. It did not offer America a plan to respond to the ongoing credit crisis or to the Federal Reserve’s dramatic intervention to prevent the collapse of Bear Stearns. It certainly did not provide a roadmap for avoiding this sort of meltdown in the future.

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Plum Positions
Pottersville
Have you ever wondered where George W. Bush finds the unqualified lackeys that he does and what percentage of them make up these federal positions? The answer to the second one may surprise you.

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HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson's Resignation -- A Window Into Bush Administration's Corruption, Indifference, and Incompetence
Huffington Post
The involuntary resignation of HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson this week provides an opportunity to underscore and distinguish the three major failings of the Bush administration: corruption, indifference, and incompetence.

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The Presidency
Slate
President George W. Bush's successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence. Among other things, the 44th president of the United States should do the following promptly upon taking office:

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Wasting and Wanting at the Pentagon
New York Times
If ever there was an indictment of the wanton ways that the Pentagon wastes money, a new report by government auditors is it. Dozens of the Pentagon’s most costly weapons programs are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

President Bush and a far-too-compliant Congress have already wasted more than $600 billion on the disastrous Iraq war. Since Mr. Bush took office, the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition budget has doubled from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year.

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Put the Housing Back in HUD
New York Times
As relieved as we were to see Alphonso Jackson resign on Monday as the secretary of housing and urban development, it was a sad comment on the Bush administration’s low regard for HUD’s mission that Mr. Jackson was permitted to remain in office so long.

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HUD chief's departure a blow to Bush
USA Today
WASHINGTON — For the first time in President Bush's tenure, one of his Cabinet members is stepping down amid a criminal investigation.

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My Way or the Highway
New York Times
President Bush likes to talk about not being swayed by public opinion, especially the views of Democrats. At a news conference last December, he said the most important criterion for picking a president is “whether or not somebody’s got a sound set of principles from which they will not deviate as they make decisions.”

Unhappily for the country, we have learned that Mr. Bush has no idea when standing on principle becomes blind stubbornness and then destructive obsession. So it goes with his choice to run the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury.

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A Power He Didn't Really Like
Washington Post
Was there ever an executive power that President Bush wasn't eager to take for a spin? The answer may be yes -- the one the Supreme Court denied him yesterday.

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White House Official Tells Judge Searching for Missing Emails Requires Too Much Work
OpEd News
The White House’s chief information officer said the Bush administration should not be compelled to search for millions of emails on individual computers and hard drives that may have been lost between 2003 and 2005 because it would be too expensive and require hundreds of hours of work, according to a filing the White House made with a federal court late Friday.

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Were Karl Rove’s Emails Destroyed?
Harpers
Another round in the saga of the vanished . . . reappeared . . . no–vanished White House emails. As last noted, U.S. magistrate John Facciola has now twice given the White House short deadlines to produce the missing emails or explain why they could not be produced.

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Accounting for the Full Ante in Washington
New York Times
Among the titillating details in the criminal downfall of former Representative Randy Cunningham were the friendly Washington poker games he attended — not just with other members of Congress, but with some sporting gamblers from the Central Intelligence Agency.

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Judge: White House Has Three Days To Explain Email Collection Gap
Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — A federal court on Tuesday gave White House officials three days to explain why they should not be required to make copies of all e-mails on computers in the Executive Office of the President.

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Audit: Bush barely trims FOIA backlog
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Despite ordering improvements more than two years ago, President Bush has barely made a dent in the huge backlog of unanswered requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

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HUD Has Mail
New York Times
The Housing and Urban Development secretary, Alphonso Jackson, was properly on the Congressional carpet this week for a cynical e-mail exchange by two of his assistants about a dispute Mr. Jackson was having with Philadelphia’s housing commissioner.

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HUD E-Mails Refer to Retaliation
Washington Post
After Philadelphia's housing director refused a demand by President Bush's housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.

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Drug Office's Budget Tactics Faulted
Washington Post
Despite congressional demands for transparency, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has a murky budget that understates its emphasis on popular law enforcement efforts over treatment and prevention programs, budget and drug policy experts say.

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Drug Firms Woo Democrats, Helping Defeat Their Bills
Washington Post
The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats' top prescription-drug initiatives.

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Fallon resigns as chief of U.S. forces in Middle East
CNN
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Adm. William Fallon has resigned as chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia after more than a year in the post, citing what he called an inaccurate perception that he is at odds with the Bush administration over Iran.

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Rules Issued For Oversight Of Fraud Cases
Washington Post
The Justice Department yesterday imposed new restrictions on government-sanctioned contracts with outside experts to implement and monitor corporate fraud settlements, an issue that has come under scrutiny because of a multimillion-dollar contract given to former attorney general John D. Ashcroft.

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Beating the Clock
Washington Independent
In the week that was in congressional investigations, the House oversight committee demanded information on Iraq from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice that it has been asking for since July. A Senate committee sat in exasperation as Steven Johnson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wouldn’t explain why he was ignoring a Supreme Court mandate to curb global warming. And Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatened a civil lawsuit against President George W. Bush for not allowing two former advisers to testify about the firing of U.S. attorney’s.

In other words, it was business as usual.

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Dear Taxpayer: This letter cost you $42 million
MSNBC
WASHINGTON - At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.

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Group seeks e-mail explanation from White House
USA Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — A private group told a federal court Thursday the Bush administration made apparently false and misleading statements in court about the White House e-mail controversy.

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Expert: White House derelict with e-mail
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—For President Bush, who expresses disdain for e-mail, the White House system of electronic record-keeping is a good match.

Even if Bush used e-mail, it might get lost in the problem-plagued White House computer system.

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White House E-Mail Gone Missing
New York Times
Historians eager to search through the daily minutiae of the Bush administration can expect scandalously little help from the White House’s shoddy and suspiciously gap-ridden e-mail archives. Estimates of the number of missing e-mail messages range into the millions.

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George Bush Is Engaged in an Epic Battle to Cover His Ass
AlterNet
Something astonishing happened the other day in the House: The Democratic leadership found some courage. After over a year of demoralizing, often inexplicable capitulation, they actually gathered the fortitude to push back slightly against Republicans on so-called national security issues. The Republicans' response was swift: They took their ball and went home, after a brief stop at a prearranged press conference on the Capitol steps.

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Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail
Washington Post
The Bush White House has made a mockery of the Presidential Records Act and its requirement that official White House records -- including e-mails -- be preserved for posterity.

At a congressional hearing yesterday, it became clear for the first time that top White House officials knowingly adopted a new e-mail system in 2002 that was riddled with technical problems that not only risked data loss but could easily be exploited by those who wished to keep their e-mails from public scrutiny.

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Alabama TV station red-faced after blackout
MSNBC
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Malfunctioning equipment blocked an Alabama TV station's broadcast of a "60 Minutes" report suggesting that imprisoned former Gov. Don Siegelman was the victim of a Republican conspiracy, station officials said.

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A Little Help for His Friends
New York Times
Congress is looking into the decision by the United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher Christie, to hand former Attorney General John Ashcroft a hugely lucrative job monitoring a wayward company.

The issue, however, is larger than any one appointment.

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Power Grab
American Prospect
Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage (Little, Brown and Company, 400 pages, $25.99)

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration by Jack Goldsmith (W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $25.95)

If purity of the heart is to will one thing, as Kierkegaard believed, then Dick Cheney, his chief of staff David Addington, and law professor John Yoo are like the driven snow. These men have worked for years toward a singular goal: expanding the power of the presidency.

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Mr. Cheney's Government
Washington Post
THE BUSH administration has long taken the position that if you're not with it, you're against it. This holds true, it seems, for everyone except Vice President Cheney, who gets to have it both ways.

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Bush Pentagon
TPM
It would appear that we have another case where the Bush Pentagon, particularly the Office of Public Affairs is forcefully inserting itself into the civilian election process.

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Department of Malicious Falsehoods
Harpers
The Public Affairs Office at the Department of Defense has long figured as a redoubt for the Neoconservatives. At times, I’ve wondered about the name “Public Affairs.” Don’t they really mean something more along the lines of “Department for the Political Instruction of Cadres”?

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Bush Administration Hides More Data, Shuts Down Website Tracking U.S. Economic Indicators
Think Progress
The U.S. economy is faltering. Family debt is on the rise, benefits are disappearing, the deficit is skyrocketing, and the mortgage crisis has worsened. Conservatives have attempted to deflect attention from the crisis, by blaming the media’s negative coverage and insisting the United States is not headed toward a recession, despite what economists are predicting.

The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data.

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Congress Unlikely to Avert Medicaid Cost Shift
CQ Politics
The Bush administration is poised to issue a slew of new Medicaid rules that would shift billions of dollars in costs for the program to the states — and there may be little that the financially strapped states or their congressional patrons can do about it.

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Watchdogs Undermined by Political Appointees
Washington Independent
The inspectors general for 64 federal agencies are the government’s frontline against waste, fraud and abuse. It sounds like a salutary public service. But the performances and experiences of inspectors general vary alarmingly and now Congress is reassessing an office created after Watergate to rein in the executive branch.

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Unworthy Nominees
New York Times
President Bush staged an event in the East Room last week for his unconfirmed appointees and repeated a story line so tired that it’s hard to imagine even he believes it. His nominations — of judges, top Justice Department officials and others — are stalled, he said, because of undue Senate delay. The real problem, of course, is that 15 months after American voters put the Democrats in control of the Senate, Mr. Bush is still trying to muscle far-right ideologues with troubling records into important positions.

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The Road To a GOP Minority
Washington Post
LEE COUNTY, Fla. -- Coconut Road near Fort Myers looks like any other concrete ribbon near housing developments, golf courses and shopping malls in this state's booming southwest. But like another fragrant slab of recent pork, the $223 million "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska, Coconut Road leads to somewhere darkly fascinating. It runs straight into Washington's earmark culture of waste, corruption and anti-constitutional deviousness.

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The Pirates of Privatization
Huffington Post
Matt Rothschild's astonishing expose of the FBI's decision to "deputize" 23,000 representatives of private industry reflects a frightening alignment of authoritarian forces, as well as another apparently deliberate flouting of constitutional norms. The sad thing is, we can probably expect an almost total silence from the loyal opposition party, which once again suggests we have reached the near-total corporatization of government over the past few decades.

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The Cult of Secrecy at the White House
New York Times
There’s no end to President Bush’s slyness in subverting new Congressional law and clinging to the secrecy that has been the administration’s executive cloak. When a vital measure to strengthen the tattered freedom-of-information law won unanimous approval by both houses of Congress, the president was forced to soften his stand and quietly sign it into law on New Year’s Eve.

But, of course, even as open-government groups celebrated, the White House had another trick up its sleeve.

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Leahy criticizes Bush on open records
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—A Senate committee chairman accused the Bush administration on Monday of undercutting open government with a budget proposal that would have the Justice Department oversee a new office devoted to promoting greater freedom of information.

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Congress Seeks to Limit 'State Secrets' Privilege
Anti-War
Alarmed by the George W. Bush administration's increasing use of the so-called "state secrets privilege" to keep politically embarrassing lawsuits against the government from ever coming before a judge, Congress is stepping in to help ensure that people with grievances can have their cases heard.

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The dynastic question
Seattle PI
In a presidential campaign that has involved battles over everything from Iraq to driver's licenses, one sweeping topic has gone curiously unexamined: Does it diminish American democracy if we keep the presidency in the same two families that have held it since 1989?

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The Fine Print
New York Times
With President Bush, you always have to read the footnotes.

Just before Monday night’s State of the Union speech, in which Mr. Bush extolled bipartisanship, railed against government excesses and promised to bring the troops home as soon as it’s safe to withdraw, the White House undermined all of those sentiments with the latest of the president’s infamous signing statements.

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Candidates In Pissing Contest as Washington Burns
Huffington Post
This week the U.S. Senate Democrats caved in again....twice. Once on re-authorizing illegal domestic spying by giving immunity to the Telcos' past criminal offenses. Next on the spare change hand-out which patronizes most of America.

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Two Presidents Are Worse Than One
New York Times
Evanston, Ill.
SENATOR Hillary Clinton has based her campaign on experience — 35 years of it by her count. That must include her eight years in the White House.

Some may debate whether those years count as executive experience. But there can be no doubt that her husband had the presidential experience, fully. He has shown during his wife’s campaign that he is a person of initiative and energy. Does anyone expect him not to use his experience in an energetic way if he re-enters the White House as the first spouse?

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Iraq war hawk to head arms control panel
News (AU)
PAUL Wolfowitz, an architect of the war in Iraq in the Bush administration who became World Bank president only to resign in a pay scandal, has been named head of a US government advisory panel on arms control.

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How Long Will They Play Nice?
Washington Post
The sudden, smiling truce between President Bush and congressional Democrats is unlikely to last beyond what appears to be their agreement on a massive election-year tax-dollar giveaway.

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Where Are the White House E-mails?
Time
When histories of the Iraq war are written, scholars will want to know how the Bush administration came to grips with one of the nation's costliest intelligence blunders: inflated estimates of Saddam Hussein's arsenal and his links to Al-Qaeda. But they may have to reconstruct some pivotal moments without access to a key channel of official communication, e-mails flowing to and from the President's closest White House aides. According to one official analysis, there were 12 days without archived e-mail from the President's inner offices during a troubled period, December 2003 to February 2004, when it became clear that the central premise of the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq — had collapsed.

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Justice Nomination Seen as Snub to Democrats
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department lawyer who wrote a series of classified legal opinions in 2005 authorizing harsh C.I.A. interrogation techniques was renominated by the White House on Wednesday to a senior department post, a move that was seen as a snub to Senate Democrats who have long opposed his appointment.

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Rummy Resurfaces, Calls for U.S. Propaganda Agency
Wired
One of the many things I love about Donald Rumsfeld is that he's totally unrepentant. Back in 2001, the Pentagon under his leadership created the controversial Office of Strategic Influence, which was closed down just a few months later after its existence became public. Rightly or wrongly, the Pentagon was accused of creating a propaganda office. Now, the former defense secretary has a bigger vision: he is advocating a "21st century agency for global communications."

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Consequences for ignoring congressional subpoenas: None
Salon
Back in July of last year -- more than six months ago -- the Senate and House Judiciary Committees were investigating the U.S. attorneys scandal and, as part of that investigation, they issued subpoenas to current Bush Chief of Staff Josh Bolton and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, "compelling" them to appear before the Committee to answer questions.

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White House Has No Comprehensive E-Mail Archive
Washington Post
For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.

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The nation's problems solved, Congress can now focus on steroids
Baltimore Sun
Having successfully extricated us from the president's disastrous war in Iraq and with the economy humming along seamlessly, Congress was finally able to turn its attention last week to what really matters in America: whether baseball players are telling the truth about using steroids. Apparently, our legislators are feeling especially sanctimonious these days because with more than a week left to go, no member of Congress has been indicted this month.

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The Truth About Ethics Reform
New York Times
We’ve long grown used to candidates’ cherry-picking each other’s records to score points in a campaign. But the new Congressional ethics law, and the role Senator Barack Obama played in passing it, have been belittled in troubling ways that are worth noting.

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In Legal Cases, C.I.A. Officers Turn to Insurer
New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. came under investigation for ordering the destruction of Central Intelligence Agency interrogation videotapes, one of his first calls was to a small Virginia insurance company that thrives on government trouble.

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Wexler: Election Can't Distract From Holding Cheney to Account
The Nation
This work of electing a new president is important, indeed.

And it is exciting, especially as the contests for both the Democratic and Republican nominations remain unsettled.

But is vital to remember that the current president and vice president hold a lease on something akin to absolute power that does not expire for a year.

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Could Congress Be Waking Up?
New York Times
AMID the clamor of the presidential campaign, it’s sometimes easy to forget that all 435 House seats and 35 of the Senate’s seats are up for election this year, too. So how should Congress under its new Democratic leadership be judged?

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White House missing CIA, Iraq e-mails
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON—Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

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