Why Does John Ashcroft Get The Time of Day, Much Less A HUGE No Bid DoJ Contract?

John Ashcroft ("let the eagle snnnnnnnnnore") was such a shit that it took an even bigger turd, also former Attorney Bushie General Alberto Gonzales to make him look not so bad; so why the hell would Ashcroft deserve millions of our taxpayer dollars?

And no, the question is NOT purely rhetorical, NOR is the $26-52M he's posed to get exactly chump (except that we're the chumps) change; see Think Progress for more.

Last fall, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Chris Christie awarded his former boss, John Ashcroft, a lucrative no-bid contract to “monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal charges out of court.” Ashcroft’s consulting company is set “to receive payments of $28 million to $52 million” in the deal, one of the biggest payouts ever reported for a federal monitor.

In an interview today, former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said the case is suspicious because no-bid contracts are generally awarded only if there’s a strong “reason why there isn’t” a competitive process

Speaking Of The Government Investigating Itself For No Good End...

[See my previous posting on the Justice Department now "suddenly" wanting to investigate the Bush Administration's/CIA's willful and most criminal destruction of two videotapes depicting the torture of uncharged suspects "in our name".]

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent comprehensive piece about how the 9/11 commission - with its strangely picked crew by Bush and Cheney who fought the idea tooth-and-nail - had its work obstructed by... well, I bet you can guess that right on the very first try.

Another Government Probe Of Itself That, Like The 9/11 Commission And the Torture Probe, Won't Amount To Jack Shit

My only question here is, "Why even bother?"

While some seem ready to applaud that the Justice Department announced this evening it WILL (ha!) investigate the willful destruction of the two known CIA torture tapes a judge ordered those under the Bush Administration involved in the matter NOT conveniently destroy, to me it's just another sad, piss poor example of the fox being allowed to investigate the case of chickens murdered in the hen house when it was one of the Fox's minions (in this case, the CIA with marching orders from the fox) who arranged not just the initial crime but the destruction of the evidence.

We see this again and again - hardly new to the Bushies yet they have taken it to ridiculously extremes as they have everything else - as when the Pentagon investigates its own.

This, my friends, is beyond criminal. And, as Bush would smirk and smug-it-up as he tells you, there's not one damned thing we can do to stop it while, at the same time, we know exactly what the results will be: nada, zap, ZERO. At best, they'll point to some very insignificant, powerless peon, throw the book at him while they feed him to the wolves, and then pretend it never happened.

Some democracy. And the new Attorney General Michael Mukasey can control everything this special prosecutor does and, as we've seen with his strange ignorance regarding torture and the American Constitution, he'll prove himself a loyal Bushie regardless of his distinctly token status as an alleged Democrat.

Hate IS Terrorism

Today, Washington is crowded with those protesting a number of different issues that come together under one major topic: how few hate crimes have been charged and prosecuted under the Bush Administration. Sadly, it's not that hate crimes are down... but the same people who support the Bushies are the same types, too often, who feel that any crime deliberately committed against a person of color, a homosexual, etc. are "justified."

In some of the most vicious crimes possible, where it's clear that the expression of hate toward someone just because of their color, sexual presence, race, etc., the feds allow for only simple charges to be brought rather than the much more serious charges inherent with hate crimes.

I'm with those marching which include some of those affected by the terrible "Gena 6" case. We must "recover" from the hate-filled Bush years and those who feel they get an automatic free pass to hang nooses, to threaten blacks and gays and others, to go after "towel heads" just because our president seems to feel that every Muslim is an evil one.

And, btw, HATE *is* terrorism.

The LIE Of Rudy Giuliani's Moderate Progressive Nature

Lies and damned lies.

The myth that Rudy Giuliani is not only the most progressive of the GOP wannabes running for his party's 2008 Republican presidential nomination but SOOOO moderate even Dems would vote for him is one big lie. Glenn Greenwald in his Salon blog tackles this and is brave enough to call a heinous lie just that. Here's a snip:

The most transparent and destructive fallacy being recited by our Beltway media class is that Rudy Giuliani is a moderate or centrist Republican. Examples of this fallacy are everywhere.

The Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman yesterday twice asserted during his "chat" that Giuliani was a moderate -- first rejecting the notion that the GOP is purging moderates by citing the fact that "the frontrunner in the presidential campaign is Rudy Giuliani, an abortion rights, gay rights, gun control advocate," and thereafter claiming that GOP political operatives want Giuliani as the nominee because "they think Giuliani will mobilize moderate Republicans and independents who lean Republican." Today, his Post colleague, "mainstream" enforcer Shailagh Murray, insisted that while Ron Paul is well outside the mainstream, Rudy Giuliani is squarely within it.

The very idea that Giuliani is a "moderate" or a "centrist" is completely absurd. Regarding the issues over which the next President will have the greatest influence -- foreign policy and presidential powers -- Giuliani is as far to what is now considered the "Right" as it gets. His views on foreign policy are far more radical and bellicose even than Dick Cheney's, and his view of presidential powers makes George Bush look like Thomas Jefferson.

This whole "moderate" myth is grounded exclusively in Giuliani's non-doctrinaire views of social issues. But that's pure fallacy. Political ideology doesn't function like mathematics, where two numbers situated on opposite extreme poles can be averaged together to produce a nice, comfortable number in the middle.

That isn't how political ideology works. A warmonger with authoritarian impulses and liberal positions on social issues isn't a "moderate" or a "centrist." He's just a warmonger with authoritarian impulses and liberal positions on social issues.

Even Giuliani's allegedly "liberal" positions on social issues are completely overblown. Outside of judicial appointments, Presidents actually have very little impact on issues such as gay rights, abortion and gun control. Other than judicial appointments, what impact has George Bush had on those areas? Virtually none.

Yet when it comes to the one instrument Presidents can actually use to shape social issues -- judicial appointments -- Giuliani's decisions will be anything but liberal. He has said repeatedly that he would "appoint judges like Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas" -- the most conservative justices on the Court. And his closest legal confidants are the by-product of relationships he formed at the Reagan DOJ -- people like Ted Olson and Michael Mukasey -- and his appointments are almost certainly going to comport loyally to Federalist Society dogma.

"I Cannot Answer Your Question Because To Do So Might Require The Truth; We Can't Have That"

And, as we all know too well, the truth (and accountability, and responsibility, and words with more than one syllable) is the worst and scariest form of terror to the Bush Administration.

If you missed the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing this morning where Karl Rove was supposed to appear, yet did not (big surprise, eh?), but where his deputy (J. Scott Jennings) did show up just to say, "Screw you!", here's a Recap for Dummies:

Chairman Patrick Leahy: What is your name?

Rove's ASSistant: I respectfully (chortle) decline to tell you this because it might endanger national security, cause terrorists to stop fighting us over there and come fight us over here, AND possibly make the president mess his pants (again) at a time when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not available to change his ultra-small Pampers.

Leahy: You're trying to tell us you can't even state your name for the record?

ASSistant: No, I'm stating I won't. I mean, who the fuck elected you and gave you any constitional right to question the authority of the Absolute Monarch, God's boss and mine, George Bush?

Leahy: Moving on, please state your job title and your specific responsibilities.

ASSistant: I can't tell you that.

Leahy: Why?

ASSistant: Because I don't like you. Nobody likes you. Remember when Vice President Cheney, the only man who can tell God to take a freaking hike, told you to go fuck yourself? Just as promised, sir, the Bush Administration restored much needed maturity, accountability, and leadership - not to mention a colorful disregard for just about everything without a billion dollar check attached - to Washington.

Leahy: I see. So your job is to stonewall?

ASSistant: Did I mention that in the latest revision of the Patriot Act, we plan to place all Democrats and just about anyone who earns less than a cool three million a year on a list of terrorists to be denied jobs, services, constitutional protections, AND breathing privileges? Now, if you'll excuse me (and it's not like you've got a fucking choice, you old shit), I need to go so I can get Karl's Starbucks and his daily 50 lb bag of Skittles. It's a tough job subverting democracy and making a mockery of all America claims to hold dear, but Karl and Cheney are damned good at it!

Oh, one more thing: Impeach this! [holding crotch, jiggling it]

The Latest Fed Privatization-To-Skirt-Civil-Protections Ploy

While the concept of outsourcing the work of government is hardly brand new with the Bush Administration, the Bushies have no less than a hundred-fold used what I can only see as appropriately called "the privatization ploy" not just to reward companies eager to subsidize the Republicans under Bush/Rove, but to deliberately and egregiously circumvent certain protections and liberties afforded not just by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, but by other federal charters.

Notable examples include former Defense Secretary (and he's not only still on their payroll at a much-inflated "contractor" rate, but maintains a major desk at the Pentagon) Rumsfeld's extremely lucrative privatization of the military to the likes of Blackwater, Bechtel (Rumsfeld's former hunting ground), Halliburton and others; bringing in contract interrogators and soldiers of fortune; IRS collections to private agencies that can do even worse things than the IRS, hiring data mining companies like ChoicePoint to improperly bounce voters (especially those of color), dig into our most private affairs (and those of people in other countries), et al. The list goes on ad nauseum, I'm afraid.

Now the Bushies are set to launch a NEW privatization ploy, according to ABC News: contract with companies to keep sophisticated and detailed records on all our communications via phone and Internet that federal laws prevent the government from keeping themselves. The feds can then use this info, regardless of whether there is any reason whatsoever to monitor us (as in, due cause), while completely circumventing the very laws put in place to protect us from domestic spying/eavesdropping.

When and where the hell does this end? [And yes, I think it can end, but we have to stand up and MAKE it STOP!] Clearly, the Bush Justice Department exists only to persecute citizens.

Patriot Act Follies

Yet another thing US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has lied about; claiming there are no verified reports of abuses of the U.S. Patriot Act when he has them piling up.

The Horror in Iraq - The Huh? Factor At Home

Strangely, there was fairly little coverage over the long weekend of a single suicide bomb that took out no less than 104 people - and desperately injured hundreds of others - in the Diyala province of Iraq. What mention it did get blamed Iraq again for its troubles, as if the Bush invasion and occupation - a debacle that has now surpassed the evil of Saddam Hussein - has not created the entire four-plus-year nightmare there. (And, oh yeah, the media noted, too, parenthetically, we're seeing a huge surge in American soldier deaths in just the first week of July - happy Fourth! Yeesh.)

Instead, we heard about President Bush's birthday plans, how easy it was for Scooter Libby to fork over a quarter million dollar "nuisance" fee for obstruction of justice in the PlameGate affair (actually, much of the MSM barely questioned how Libby came to have so much in his coiffers, largely put there by Bushies), and how First Lady Laura says that creating hope in others is a wonderful thing. [Unfortunately, since we're under the oppressive, tyrannical rule of her husband, we wouldn't know one damned thing about inspiring hope.]

Our founding fathers - and mothers - would have their heads explode.

The Department of Corrupt Incompetence Department

Not only have both George Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales completely shattered all possible records for how we define corrupt and massively partisan incompetence, they flagrantly wave their duplicitous dealings in our faces, such as when almost all official White House email goes not by government mail servers but by those of the RNC where more than 50 out of 87 Bush Administration officials have had their incoming and outgoing emails purged to be sure they did not fall into the hands of citizens via the Presidential Records Act.

Really; these folks make Nixon look like a ridiculous amateur and Watergate like a silly little dispute between three-year-olds.

From Think Progress:

House investigators have learned that the Bush administration’s use of Republican National Committee email accounts is far greater than previously disclosed — 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone — and that the RNC has overseen “extensive destruction” of many of the emails, including all email records for 51 White House officials.

For the last several months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been “investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act” by using email accounts maintained by the RNC and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign for official White House communications. Today’s findings confirm that the accounts were used “for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.”

Pretty Please?

[Could someone please bring back the nicer Monica? The one who wanted to get screwed by a president (heretofore known as a Lewinsky), rather than the one wanting to screw with every damned one of the rest of us who aren't to the far right (Badthing... er... Goodling)? Pretty please?]

Turning The Face Of American Justice Into A Partisan Clown Parade

Anyone who watched (or read the transcript from) today's "testimony" (what Washington calls what any of us would call a bullshit session) from former Dept of Justice White House liaison Monica Goodling, who cried "5th Amendment" (and damn, I'm not sure DoJ honchos RATE that right given how they hold our lives in their filthy talons) then ran and hid, only coming out under "limited immunity", should be far more than infuriated. [bhfrik did a good piece on this here.]

What U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the White House, particularly Karl Rove and George Bush, have done is turn the highest level of justice of our nation into no less than criminal and leans heavily toward treasonous. For if the American people cannot believe in the possibility their duly elected government will behave responsibly, then we won't be much beyond where we said the Iraqi people were under Saddam Hussein.

In this case, there was no one simple infraction. We have a huge staff hired with a heavy tilt toward a law school which is considered among the worst possible in the nation (where the fundamentalist fascist form of Christianity is what they teach rather than law), that staff administered by people with no competency and then used exclusively to suppress investigations into corrupt Republicans (lawmakers, election fraud, lobbyist payoffs, et al) while forcing investigations (even when their own people reviewed the facts and found no reason to proceed with cases) of Democrats and Democrat supporters.

If we let this slide, we say, "Fine. Turn the DoJ into another wing of the extreme fascist right. It's just dandy with me if they decide to toss up a charge on me with nothing but partisan hate to back up their claims, prosecute me, and then give me the only right of ultimate appeal being the now completely partisan Supreme Court which Bush and Rove and Cheney already rigged."

Personally, I'm not willing to say that. You? [Scary part is how many Americans are far more concerned tonight with who won American Idiot... Idol.]

"Bush Won't Fire Alberto Gonzales, But YOU Can Impeach Him!"

I don't usually hand out press releases verbatim, but hey, some folks are noticing that Vermont has been the most vocal and demanding of accountability on the Iraq War of ANY state in this damned nation. Is Vermont small? Hell, yes! There aren't a million of us total, not even if you count moose and fishers (fishers is not the kind with rods but the kind with four feet and a taste for kitties). [Black fly season, however, we probably match mainland China. ::cough::]

Viral Video and Nationwide petition Call for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's Impeachment Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films and Democracy for America launch impeachgonzales.org and lead major Movement for Impeachment

Petition States: "President Bush won't fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales... but YOU can!"Los Angeles and Vermont? A nationwide campaign calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's impeachment was launched today by Filmmaker Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films and Democracy For America.

A viral video about Gonzales and a petition calling for the House Judiciary
Committee to begin the Impeachment process are being circulated across the
internet, YouTube and at the website impeachgonzales.org today in a
nationwide movement for his removal.

The petition at impeachgonzales.org calls for the House Judiciary committee, the committee that can begin the impeachment process, to "Impeach Gonzales and restore accountability and ethical leadership to the United States Justice Department." Both Democratic and Republican leaders and citizens across the country have been calling for the Attorney General's removal over the firings of U.S. attorneys. Evidence against Gonzales has continued to mount and today's launch marks the start of an organized, nationwide effort to remove the Attorney General by Impeachment.

"Americans around the country are standing up to voice opposition to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his politicization of the Department of Justice," said Democracy for America chair Jim Dean. "Our message is clear: Impeach Gonzales."

"President Bush will not fire the Attorney General, but the American people can call for his Impeachment" said filmmaker Robert Greenwald who directed the Impeach Gonzalez video "the video shows Gonzales has no respect for the truth, for the rules of Congress and for the people of this country- how can he lead our Justice department?

The petition will be sent to all members of the House Judiciary committee, who can begin the impeachment process as outlined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. This massive call for impeachment comes at a time where Senate leaders Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer are calling for a Senate No Confidence vote against the Attorney General.

Democracy for America is a political action committee dedicated
to supporting fiscally responsible, socially progressive candidates at all
levels of government?from school board to the presidency. Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films uses film and viral video to create social
change.

Karl Rove, GonzalesGate, And The Plot To Turn Justice Department Into Kangaroo Republican Courts

JP at Welcome to Pottersville has an excellent piece up covering many of the big - and oh so shameful, criminal, and unconstitutional let alone completely unhealthy for the America we like to believe in - issues surrounding Bush's "brain" Karl Rove, US Attorney General Alberto ("Sorry, don't ask me, ask my underlings because I gave all my power to them and cannot be held responsible for what they did.") Gonzales.

Here's a generous bit, but please, visit Pottersville to read the post in its entirety:

What kind of a country do we live in where psychopaths like Ann Coulter get free interference run for them by the FBI and the Department of Justice gets its marching orders from Karl Rove? As Blue Girl puts it in “How Very Soviet of Him?”, “What, in the name of all that is sacred and holy, motivated Karl Rove to turn the Department of Justice into the enforcement arm of the Republican National Committee?”

You have to admit that Rove has yet to exhaust his powers of breathtaking audacity in siccing Alberto’s goons on four US attorneys who’d been accused of being lax in prosecuting cases of alleged voter fraud, at least one of which (David Iglesias in New Mexico) turned out to be bogus or trumped up.

Where was Karl the Krusader when we needed him in the wake of the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, in which massive amounts of evidence pointed to voter fraud and attempted voter fraud? Oh, right. That would’ve led the eagle-eyed hounds of the DOJ straight to Rove’s self-bugged office.

Think about it: The Department of Justice have to take its cues from a blubbery-lipped Inner Party hack like Karl fucking Rove in order to catch lazy US attorneys who couldn’t or wouldn’t prosecute ginned-up cases of voter fraud for a massive Aha! moment in time for the mid-term elections. But nary a word or an investigation into the most massive corruption of our electoral system since the good old days of Tammany Hall.

And not a single African American attorney was hired to work in the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.

Democrats and suspected Democrats were sniffed out like escaped chain gang criminals by Monica Goodling and the other legal beagles milled out of Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

And all under the dead nose of Alberto Gonzales, a man who has done for American jurisprudence what Rush Limbaugh has done for figure skating.

When It's Dirty, Deluded, and Downright Despicable, Safely Assume Karl Rove Did It

[Ed. note: Hmmm... rather than the much-used excuse of "the dog ate my homework", perhaps we should just all have t-shirts which read, "Karl Rove ate our democratic government (and then shat it out all over us while ordering us to smile about it)!"]

From my posting at All Things Democrat with details provided at TruthOut:

New evidence is out that Bush's "brain" (or is it balls?), Karl Rove, not only played an already documented heavy role in the firing of federal prosecutors in remote control mode from the White House to the Justice Department (at least in theory) led by U.S. Attorney General Alberto ("I lie at the pleasure of the president") Gonzales.

It looks like Rove, besides trying to hide thousands of emails send illegally from Republican National Committee (RNC) mail servers rather than official federal government ones, also coached witnesses to lie before Congress to protect Gonzo and the Bush White House.

Frank Rich: "Iraq Is The Ultimate Aphrodesiac"

I don't happen to quite appreciate how Iraq could give types like John "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb - Bomb, Bomb Iran" McCain a big stiffy, but here's what Frank Rich noted in Sunday, April 22nd's OpEd in The Times.

President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to show his face - and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

But he couldn't inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the "surge" was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg's. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.

At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

Mr. Gonzales's politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration's legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America's image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn't end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales's reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.

Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik's longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president's spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had "no reason to believe" that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.

Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan's spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed - by Mr. Gonzales - and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to "questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption," not to mention a "friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime." Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.

Read the rest at Chez Rozius Unbound.

Re: GonzoGate, President Bush Takes Another Extended Vacation From Reality

From the White House spokesweasel re: Dubya's reaction to U.S. Attorney General's downright pathetic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday (nods to Talking Point Memo):

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses. The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

"Heluva job there, Brownie... er... Jugs... er... Brownie."

Paul Krugman: "For God's Sake"

Somehow, I believe that God, if He gave press conferences, would completely disavow any relationship with Bush, the Bush Administration, or any of his so-called pals: but here's Krugman in The Times on April 13th (I know, I know: I'm catching up):

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement - the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right - suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. "Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure," he wrote, "and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order."

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university's law school. She's the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda - which is very different from simply being people of faith - is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It's also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to "dispel the myth of the separation of church and state." And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge.

Kay Cole James, who had extensive connections to the religious right and was the dean of Regent's government school, was the federal government's chief personnel officer from 2001 to 2005. (Curious fact: she then took a job with Mitchell Wade, the businessman who bribed Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham.) And it's clear that unqualified people were hired throughout the administration because of their religious connections.

For example, The Boston Globe reports on one Regent law school graduate who was interviewed by the Justice Department's civil rights division. Asked what Supreme Court decision of the past 20 years he most disagreed with, he named the decision to strike down a Texas anti-sodomy law. When he was hired, it was his only job offer.

Or consider George Deutsch, the presidential appointee at NASA who told a Web site designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, to leave open the possibility of "intelligent design by a creator." He turned out not to have, as he claimed, a degree from Texas A&M.

Read the rest here.

More Benefit To Corrupt Bushie Friends Than Kids In "No Child Left Behind" Reading Program

Read all about the Justice Department probe of a $6 billion windfall to those providing "reading" materials under Bush's "No Child Left Behind (in a Public School) initiative. Too bad the head of the DoJ, U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales, cannot read or make a single decision not surely Bush-profitable and partisan.

Got Memory? Senators Question U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Though His Answers Are Pretty Equivocal

OK, which of you could/was quite at utterly incredulous about the testimony of the U.S. Attorney General Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales today. The whole damned thing was damned pitifully worm-lame, from the 74+ times he suggested HE couldn't quite recall or quote or do much as else.

Mr. Gonzales has no big fans among even the Republicans, one of whom suggested he either resign or re-acquaint himselfith rules and ethics OR "go homr to spend more time with his obligatory family.