The sprawling new American embassy complex in Baghdad will cost at least half a billion dollars to build, probably much more. It will be by far our largest foreign service installation in the world, practically a self-contained town with its own power, sanitation, dining and housing. The size reflects the security situation, of course, but …
Qui Custodet Ipsos Custodes
If anything illustrates the Bush league style of management strikes again, it has to be the amazing cavalcade of crooks, cronies and fools whom he has appointed to key oversight posts. Commerce Department Inspector General Johnnie E. Frazier retired yesterday in the face of multiple investigations and a formal report recommending that President Bush punish …
Job Well Done
The saga of disgraced Interior official Julie MacDonald takes another amusing turn in today’s Nature. Last seen altering documents, overruling scientists, openly collaborating with friends in regulated industries and generally violating departmental rules with almost comic abandon, MacDonald shows up again in a recent Endangered Species & Wetlands Report: The latest chapter comes from Steve …
About Those Painted Schools
Smartly, Iraq boosters gave up the tired cliche about painted schools and women’s clinics a long time ago. The work got too dangerous for us, contracting with Americans became a near death sentence and our government’s pathological hatred of oversight guaranteed that money spent largely disappeared to shoddy work and unaccountable fraud. These days the …
Pants On Fire
Let’s stipulate that in any normal administration AG Gonzales would have committed the firing error weeks ago. To be fair, in a normal administration the idea a president tapping his own lawyer as AG would have been a firing error in itself. Recall the endless hysterics from rightwingers over Janet Reno’s insufficient independence. Where have …
Contractors
For various reasons I don’t automatically think that contracting government work is a bad idea. If a reasonably empirical analysis suggests that we would benefit from transferring a job to the lowest bidder then I’m all for it. So that’s not why it concerns me that the GOP has shunted government jobs to a record-breaking …
Lot’s of Stupid Stuff Today
Seems like my birthday seems to be a focal point of stupidity (no surprise there), so here are several stupid things all wrapped up in one post. 1.) The first comes via Misha and is a visual: Syrian journalists on Monday, June 20, 2005, make TV images of the fence built by Syrian border soldiers …