I bet you learn some new things from this. I did.

From the Politico:

Have top political appointees at the Justice Department politicized the hiring of new career employees there? That’s what a number of longtime Justice Department employees want to know as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to testify about the sacking of eight U.S. attorneys.

Calling themselves “A Group of Concerned Department of Justice Employees,” they have penned an anonymous letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees asking them to look into “the politicization of the non-political ranks of Justice employees, offices which are consistently and methodically being eroded by partisan politics.”

The controversy is related to the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which is how recent law school graduates get hired by DOJ, as well as through the Summer Law Intern Program.

The Attorney General’s Honors Program is the “only way that the Department hires entry-level attorneys,” according to the website for DOJ’s Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management.

“Selection for employment is based on many elements of a candidate’s background, including academic achievement, law review or moot court experience, legal aid and clinical experience, and summer or part-time legal employment,” the website says. Eligibility is usually restricted to new graduates or those who have just entered clerkships or additional legal-study programs.

Under normal circumstances, the various divisions at Justice review applications from potential hires, set interviews and send the list to the Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management, which gives the green light to proceed.

But recently, a number of divisions’ requests to interview certain applicants were turned down, and the career employees started to wonder why. They were told that the interview approval now must be made by the office of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and “when the list of potential interviewees was returned this year, it was cut dramatically.”

These career employees got a meeting with Michael Elston, McNulty’s chief of staff and a central figure in the prosecutor purge. This meeting took place on Dec. 5, and it didn’t go well. According to the career employees’ letter, obtained by The Crypt, Elston “was offensive to the point of (being) insulting.”

Elston has since taken a personal leave from the Justice Department.

“Claiming that the entire group had not ‘done their jobs’ in reviewing applicants, (Elston) said that he had a ’screening panel’ to go over the list and research these candidates on the Internet; he refused to give the names of those on his ‘panel,’” the career employees wrote. “Mr. (Elston) said that people were struck from the list for three reasons: grades, spelling errors on applications and inappropriate information about them on the Internet.”

So, in their own words, the career employees did some checking of their own. They reportedly detected a “common denominator” for “most of those” struck from the interview list: They had “interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a ‘liberal cause’ or otherwise appeared to have ‘liberal’ leanings. Summa cum laude graduates at both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews.” [But apparently a degree from Regent University was a big plus: 150 Regent University grads in the Bush Administration. - LG]

According to these career employees, Harvard’s Career Placement Office “called DOJ personnel to ask why their students were not getting interviews,” although this could not be independently confirmed.

The Justice Department had no comment.

The GOP’s attitude toward women is clearly revealed in this decision:

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has upheld a nationwide ban on “partial birth” abortion, “marking a shift on the high-profile issue and underscoring the impact of President George W. Bush’s two high court appointments.”

The justices “refused to invalidate the 2003 law even though it lacks an exception for cases posing a risk to the mother’s health. The court also rejected claims that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is so vaguely worded it would force doctors to forgo a commonly used, constitutionally protected abortion technique for fear of prosecution. ”

UPDATE: In the majority were swing vote Anthony Kennedy, along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas.

UPDATE II: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg penned a scathing dissent:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking out in the courtroom for the dissenters, called the ruling “an alarming decision” that refuses “to take seriously” the Court’s 1992 decisions reaffirming most of Roe v. Wade and its 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart striking down a state partial-birth abortion law.

Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

UPDATE III: Justice Clarence Thomas authored, and Justice Antonin Scalia joined, a 137-word concurring opinion, which appears to have the sole purpose of stating: “I write separately to reiterate my view that the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), has no basis in the Constitution.”

UPDATE IV: The nation’s leading group of professionals providing health care for women, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, opposed this law because the banned procedure is often the best option for women:

The intact variant of D&E offers significant safety advantages over the non-intact method, including a reduced risk of catastrophic hemorrhage and life-threatening infection. These safety advantages are widely recognized by experts in the field of women’s health, authoritative medical texts, peer-reviewed studies, and the nation’s leading medical schools.

Just what we want: the government making medical decisions, based not on the individual patient’s needs and condition, but on ideology. [Heavy-handed irony, in case you didn't get it. - LG]

It looks as though the US military has decided that, given its long history of lying and covering up, to simply abandon any effort to have any credibility:

Since the end of the Vietnam war, the military’s public affairs officials have tried to rebuild the Defense Department’s credibility by putting distance between themselves and Pentagon efforts that use deception, propaganda and other methods to influence foreign populations.

A 2004 memo by Gen. Richard B. Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, codified the separation between public affairs, which communicates with the press and public, and “information operations,” which attempts to sway people in other countries.

But Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has asked for changes that would allow the two branches to work more closely. His request has unleashed a debate inside the Pentagon between those who say the separation has made the Defense Department less agile and those who believe that restructuring the relationship would threaten to turn military spokesmen into propaganda tools.

A senior military officer close to Petraeus said the memo now in place prevents coordination between the information operations officers and public affairs officers.

“The way it is written it puts a firewall between information operations and public affairs,” the officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the internal debate. “You shut down things that need to be done.”

Petraeus, who is considered adept at handling the American media, asked in mid-March that the 2004 memo be rescinded or revised. A Defense official said Tuesday that Myers’ memo would not be revoked, but that the Pentagon would begin work on a new policy outlining the relationship and interaction between information operations and public affairs.

Pentagon officials have told Petraeus’ aides that while the new policy is being developed, they should not interpret Myers’ memo as a prohibition against coordination between public affairs and information operations.

Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon’s top military planning group, considered a new version of the memo that would have stripped much of Myers’ language on the need to keep the two functions separate. Instead, the proposed rules would have stressed the need for coordination.

“Conflicting efforts could impede operational success,” the proposed new wording warned, emphasizing the need for the two branches to “be aware of each other’s activities.”

Although the proposed guidelines will not take the place of the 2004 memo, they could form the basis of a new policy. However, such policies typically take months to develop because they must be widely reviewed and vetted within the military.

During the Vietnam war, military press conferences were derided as the “5 o’clock follies” because of misleading or irrelevant information provided to the press. Since then, Army public affairs officers adopted new practices that disavowed the use of misleading or deceptive information.

Lots more at the link. Continue reading.

Big Brother has come to visit, and perhaps to stay. Glenn Greenwald shows how, beginning with this ominous bit:

The expansion of the Surveillance State is endless. Buried within an ABC report on the Virginia Tech shootings is this paragraph (h/t reader DT):

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

Is there any good reason whatsoever why the federal government should be maintaining “files” which contain information about the pharmaceutical products which all Americans are consuming? The noxious idea has taken root in our country — even before the Bush presidency, though certainly greatly bolstered during it — that one of the functions of the federal government is to track the private lives of American citizens and maintain dossiers on what we do. If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what data bases the Federal Government has created and maintained and the vast amounts of data they contain — everything from every domestic telephone call we make and receive to the content of our international calls to “risk assessment” records based on our travel activities to all sorts of information obtained by the FBI’s use of NSLs. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history.

Continue reading.

TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel:

There’s no better example of the painstaking review process that went into the Justice Department’s selection of U.S. attorneys to be fired: In the case of Nevada’s Daniel Bogden, it was a 90 second meeting that made the difference.

It’s never been clear why Bogden’s name was added — and apparently it wasn’t even clear to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who wrote in an email on December 5th, two days before the firings, that he was “skittish about Bogden.” Bogden had been with the Justice Department for more than 16 years, McNulty wrote. What was he going to do now? “I’ll admit have not looked at his district’s performance,” he added.

Here’s what happened next, according to leaked details from Kyle Sampson’s private testimony to Congress. From The Las Vegas Review-Journal:

A former high level department executive has told congressional investigators that a Justice Department team held a last-minute discussion after McNulty said in an e-mail on Dec. 5 that he was “skittish” about firing Bogden.McNulty; his chief of staff, [Michael] Elston; Monica Goodling, a senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; and possibly one other official gathered in the office of Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff.

McNulty said he was concerned about Bogden, 50, getting a job outside government after 16 years at Justice and being able to care for his family.

When it was pointed out that Bogden was not married, McNulty withdrew his concern and the conversation ended after about 90 seconds, according to the account gathered by investigators. Bogden was dismissed on Dec. 7.

Sampson couldn’t say who had put Bogden on the list (even though he was the “keeper of the list”) or why. He’d never looked at Bogden’s performance, and neither did Alberto Gonzales. The only thing he can remember is that there was “a general feeling among senior staffers at the Justice Department that a ’stronger leader’ could be put in Nevada.” So he was fired. And then the Justice Department told Congress that he’d been fired for “performance” reasons.

All that remained, apparently, was to find out what those were.

Update: The Las Vegas Sun has a more detailed rundown of Sampson’s testimony.

I had a primary school teacher—let’s call him Lonnie–who worked summers reading meters for OG&E (Oklahoma Gas & Electric). He was stopped one day by an elderly pensioner who wanted to complain about her electricity bill. She lived on a fixed income, she said, and the electricity was too high. Wasn’t there anything she could do? Lonnie pointed out some obvious ways to cut back on her use of electricity, but she wasn’t having any of that. What became clear was that she wanted to continue to use as much electricity as she ever did, but somehow put the fix in with the meter man.

Lonnie had a certain sense of humor, so after getting her solemn pledge of secrecy, he revealed a trick known only to certain meter men. Again, he cautioned her, tell no one—it could cost him his job. She nodded with a certain breathless excitement, and he told her The Secret: put a brick on top of the meter, and it would slow the meter down. She was ecstatic.

Lonnie said that the following month on his rounds, he found a brick atop every meter in town.

Now what would be interesting would be to follow the sequence of brick placements, which would map the communication channels in the town.

Glenn Greenwald has done this exercise for the Right-wing propaganda machine, tracing a typical smearish story from its origin through the Right-wing noise machine. The sequence is interesting and informative, and its enlightening to see who picks up the story to repeat. Take a look.

Here’s another:

The White House threatened on Tuesday to veto a Senate bill proposing to allow the U.S. government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs under the Medicare program.

The Senate was expected to cast a test vote on Wednesday, when Democrats try to end debate and go forward with consideration of the bill. Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, who opposes the bill, has vowed to filibuster or talk the bill to death.

In a statement, the White House said the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate bill “would have a negligible effect on federal spending and provide no substantial savings to the government or Medicare beneficiaries.”

President George W. Bush previously vowed to veto the House of Representatives version of the bill. It has tougher language that would require — not just allow — direct negotiation of prices by the government with drug companies.

What possible justification is there for opposition to this bill? The only reason I can see is to protect Big Pharma profits—in fact, not even that: the bill merely requires the prices to be negotiated. Of course, Bush hates to negotiate. In his tiny brain, that means “weakness,” and, being weak, he’s quite fearful of anything that might reveal it.

Still, it’s an outrage. The savings may not be much to the government (though I doubt that, as sensible people doubt anything that comes from this White House), but they would mean a lot to the elderly.

What a steaming mess.

Today I tried Woods of Windsor shaving soap—a soap that is new to me. I bought it, along with a few other things, from Barclay Crocker. Lathered up with the Rooney Style 2, and it made a very good lather. Shaved using the Gillette Fat Boy and, now that I’ve found the right setting for me (5 of 9), got a very smooth shave with no nicks or irritation. It’s quite a gentle razor, in fact. But the result is a totally smooth face.

Alum block and Taylor of Old Bond Street No. 74.

Megs trying to get comfortable, preferably without having her photo taken.