For White House, Hiring Is Political: "Sometimes crossed legal limits," "unprecedented"

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: 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.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of an internal Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, which was the subject of a Senate oversight hearing on Wednesday, provided a window into how the Bush administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility — and how those efforts sometimes crossed customary or legal limits.

Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania who studies how presidents administer power throughout the executive branch, said that while presidents of both parties over the last half-century had sought ways to impose greater political control over the federal bureaucracy, the Bush administration had gone further than any predecessor.

“The Bush administration is unprecedented in how systematic the politicization is and how it extends both across the wider organization chart and deep down within the bureaucracy,” Professor Rudalevige said. “They’ve been very consistent from Day 1 in learning the lessons of previous administrations and pushing those tactics to the limit.”...

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/washington/31capital.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

[bemildred]

1. There is nothing unprecedented about this sort of crap.

It's what you get when you elect partisan self-serving assholes to Congress and the Presidency. You get corrupt bought-and-paid for Supreme Courts that way too.

[Peace Patriot]

2. It was a fascist coup. Date: October 2002, same month as the Iraq War Resolution,

but a different, lesser noticed bill--that almost all the Democrats voted for: The so-called "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA), which created a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle to fast-track voting machines, all over the country, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls.

(S)elected officials thus became beholden to far rightwing corporations, not to the people. And they're all still playing to Howard Ahmanson, major investor in ES&S (brethren to Diebold), who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals(among other things). And to the major Bush/Cheney donors at Diebold. And to the Republican operatives at Sequoia.

Who is counting the votes, and how, changes all political dynamics. It confers power on a rightwing minority to do whatever the fuck it wants to do.

Our election system is a complex affair, certainly--saturated with money, and slavishly attendant to rightwing political narratives in the corporate 'news' monopolies. These anti-democratic developments are bad, and have been building up for a long time, to prevent necessary reform, and to prevent restoration of "the balance of power" that our Constitution-writers designed, when it goes awry. But 'TRADE SECRET' vote 'counting' is the final blow--the coup de gras--that makes reform impossible. And it gives permission to a Karl Rove to run wild through the government, installing fascists everywhere. THAT WAS THE COUP. "TRADE SECRET" vote 'counting.'

Money and corporate 'news' monopolies can be overcome. SECRET vote 'counting,' by private rightwing corporations, cannot be overcome, except in two ways, neither of which have occurred: 1) A paper ballot for every vote, and a 100% handcount as a check on machine fraud; or 2) Throw the goddamn machines into 'Boston Harbor'!

Until we fully audit these machines, or throw them out, NOTHING CAN OCCUR that has not been approved by the global corporate predators and associated war profiteers who rule over us.

And you only have to look at this pathetic Congress--which has an approval rating worse than Bush's, and which, in the face of a whopping 70% American majority opposed to the Iraq War and wanting it ended, instead ESCALATED the war and larded Bush-Cheney with billions MORE of our non-existent tax dollars to keep killing Iraqis until they signed the oil contracts--to know that the fundamental mechanism of our elections is not working. And you don't have to look far to know what's wrong with it. It's staring us in the face.

[ladjf]

3. The ability to control the electronic vote counting is the greatest

scam ever carried out by any political entity. Until that system is discarded, will will live under the dictatorship of the "overlords".

[lala_rawraw]

4. white house emphasized?

odd, i did not know buildings could communicate. surely those emails list names, no?

[Supersedeas]

5. amazing how quickly news of law breakers in the Admin fizzles: LAW BREAKERS and the powdered faces

are more concerned with bogus controversies over whether the race card was in fact played

Scooter Libby and Monica Goodling couldn't wish for a more dishonorable media

[Supersedeas]

6. there will have to be a Bathist style - Bushist purge once a new President is elected....so day