Conservatives are inherently short-sighted and cheap.

Remember when, back in February, three Republican "centrists" pulled the $870 million from the Economic Stimulus bill because "It didn't belong there?"

Typical conservative thinking. It wasn't happening right then and the rather ignorant trio didn't understand it, so don't prepare for it. It looks a bit different now, doesn't it?

One thing government does that private enterprise cannot afford to do is to essentially stockpile individuals with in-depth training and expertise in anticipation of a foreseen but not yet current need. That is the exact reason why back in the 15th century is became clear to governments that a trained, long-term professional army would almost always defeat mercenaries who were called up only during an emergency. How long does it take to train a special forces soldier, for instance?

Xe (renamed from Blackwater) doesn't do it. They wait until the government has selected and trained the soldiers, then they go hire them when they have a contract and let them go after.

The CDC is another government function that is set up in anticipation of a major life-threatening set of threats that we hope is not current, but have to be ready for when it does occur. That's a major reason why modern industrial nations suffer less from pandemics than do third-world and developing nations.

And yes, it can be overdone. You can't be ready for every eventuality. So there is a balance, but the trio were too conservative with money and foresight. Disease and epidemic is almost as easy to predict as someones death (a certainty.) It pays to be ready.

Maybe the election happened a month or so too soon

Americans are beginning to understand what the Republican party really means for the nation.

PRINCETON, NJ -- The Republican Party's image has gone from bad to worse over the past month, as only 34% of Americans in a Nov. 13-16 Gallup Poll say they have a favorable view of the party, down from 40% in mid-October. The 61% now holding an unfavorable view of the GOP is the highest Gallup has recorded for that party since the measure was established in 1992.

By contrast, the public's views of the Democratic Party remain as positive after the election as they were just prior to it. More than half of Americans, 55%, currently hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party and only 39% an unfavorable view, highly typical of views toward the Democrats all year.

As the surviving Republican extremists in Congress do their best to obstruct every effort to help the nation get through the economic catastrophe they created with their Reagan Revolution market fundamentalism policies, is the drop in their approval ratings any surprise?

If retiring Republican Congressman Tom Davis thought the Republican brand was as bad as tainted dog food before the election, what does he think it is now? Let's hope that that the public understanding of the nature of conservative Republicans lasts for four decades or more as it did after they lost control of the House of Representatives the last time in 1954.

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If you want to understand what is wrong with the conservative Republican Party, go read this article about the two tribes in America by Digby. Lincoln described the petulant refusal of conservative Southerns to be convinced that those who disagreed with them could compromise and let them alone to live in their error. This was, and remains today, a major characteristic of Southern American conservatives.

Here is the immediate future for the Republican Party

What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

That's what Paul Krugman thinks, and the eight-year-long temper trantrum ending by the ridiculous impeachment of Clinton thrown by Congressional Republicans when Clinton won the Presidency in 1992 makes it appear very likely. He continues:

Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

Steve Benen points out that

...the [Republican] party's base has already staked its claim -- conservatives firmly believe that Republicans lost in 2006 and have struggled in 2008 because the party just isn't reactionary enough. Indeed, the party's activists are out for blood: "Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as 'cocktail party conservatives' who 'give aid and comfort to the enemy'. He told The Sunday Telegraph: 'There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party.'"

America is entering the worst economic period since the Depression, and it is going to be saddled with a super reactionary angry right wing party who refuses to admit they caused much of the economic crisis. They will also attempt to block any effective efforts to resolve the economic problems they have left after Bush/Cheney leaves office.

It's tough enough to fix a bad mess when things break down anyway,but it's a lot harder when someone slaps you every time you try to pick up a tool to fix the mess and tells you "It'll fix itself!" That's the future of the Republican Party, though. Slapping anyone who tries to fix the disaster they left behind them.

Thomas Frank shows where taxpayer taxes now flow - and they don't benefit of the taxpayers

Thomas Frank takes a short tour of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area to show where government power has moved. Power no longer resides in government buildings.

As you look at the palaces that Frank videos, remember that is our tax money going to build them. Most of the fortunes are not the result of contractors bidding for contracts. They result from contractors hiring lobbyists to bribe and cajole short term government employees to hand out no-bid contracts as they did to Halliburton and KBR. Then once the government employees hand the contracts out they move to jobs with the contractors at multiples of their government salary.

Is it any wonder that the Bush administration White House has presided over the most incompetent federal government since the 1920's?

Why do Republicans claim government cannot help? Because, under Republicans, it refuses to help.

This is an example of Conservative Republican Chutzpa. From CNN:

(CNN) -- Louisiana officials are demanding that hurricane supplies the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave away be returned to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Their request comes after a CNN story Wednesday revealed that FEMA had given away $85 million in supplies that lingered on storage shelves while hurricane victims suffered without the items they needed.

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Sen. Mary Landrieu demanded answers from FEMA.

"While I understand the stated need to save taxpayer money being spent storing these materials, I am concerned that there are still ongoing needs for these type of goods in my state," Landrieu wrote Chertoff, whose department includes FEMA.

She asked for Chertoff's assistance "in reviewing this situation and redistributing these goods."

The Louisiana Recovery Authority announced that it was asking the federal government to return goods "that were intended to help disaster victims in Louisiana but were marked as surplus and remain unused." iReport.com: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast

"Many of these items are believed to be household goods that could help residents moving out of FEMA trailers re-establish their homes," the agency said.

But government under the Republicans only refuses to help the average Americans like residents of New Orleans after Katrina or like homeowners facing foreclosure because the lenders sold them bad loans. They hop to it to shovel money to the wealthy in tax cuts and bail outs to failed big businesses like Bear Stearns.

For the Republicans, only the very wealthy need government support. The rest of us are just out here for the very wealthy to exploit so that they can get more wealthy.

Military finds no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda

ABC News reports:

ABC News has obtained a comprehensive military study of Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism. The study, which is due to be released Wednesday, is based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion. It is also based on thousands of hours of interrogations of former top officials in Saddam's government who are now in U.S. custody.

The headline: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."
whj
Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.
[Highlighting mine - editor WTF-o]

Compare this to the statement from Doug Feith (reported by Ricks and DeYoung of the Washington Post) defending his belief that the peremptory invasion of Iraq was the correct decision

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was "politicizing" intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

Doug Feith is clearly one of the conservative "true-believers" who will resist acknowledgment of the truth even when it is shown by overpowering evidence. Feith is representative of the decision-makers in the Bush administration who initiated the Iraq war and occupation, demonstrating their mindset.

Consider this in support of my earlier speculation about why the Bush Administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq from day one of Bush's inauguration and why it is realistic to believe that they would consider any actions they took, no matter how despicable, to be justified in invading Iraq. They simply don't let facts interfere with what they believe.

With such an attitude, it is no surprise that they have great disdain for the CIA and the Intelligence Community and why Doug Feith set up his own Intelligence evaluation unit inside his Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon, from which Feith's own warped views of what raw Intelligence reports meant were "stovepiped" (so that they could not be contradicted by others with better judgment and more facts) to the Office of Vice President Cheney. Dick Cheney, also a committed conservative true-believer, had a similar disdain for the CIA and the Intelligence Community, for the same set of reasons. They kept contradicting his strongly-held but inaccurate conservative-dogma-based beliefs.

Doug Feith clearly wanted to get out ahead of his critics and present his side of the arguments before they did. Unfortunately, real research conducted by the military debunks him at every step. General Tommy Franks was correct. Doug Feith really is the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth. This new military report - not something from Feith's "enemies" in the CIA - demonstrates that conclusively.

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Addendum March 13, 2008 4:27 PM
The report that the Bush administration decided at the last minute yesterday was too explosive to release can be found in .pdf form here on the ABC News site.

The conservative opposition to government planning

The conservative opposition to government planning has long puzzled me. Everyone knows that if you want to take a nation to a better place then you build a vision of that better place, put plan for the resources needed and get them to where they have to be when they have to be there, and keep track of how the plan is progressing. Everyone know that except the conservatives, who have fought a thirty year battle to stop all government planning. For the most part they have succeeded.

But why?

It turns out to be that vision thing that starts the process out. The conservatives have a vision that most Americans don't want. The government was conducting the planning for most Americans, not for the wealthy or the evangelicals. Those conservatives have their own plans for America and to achieve them, they have to prevent the government from planning for the rest of us.

think not? Sara Robinson describes what has been done to America so that the wealthy can get richer and the evangelists can build their theocratic state.

Sara describes how the conservatives are stealing the America that was built around the vision of 1776 and built into the Constitution. They have taken away the America that planned, fought and won WW II and given us the Bush administration who not only could not anticipate the 9/11 terrorist attack after being repeatedly warned by the Clinton administration, but also could not adequately conduct a war and occupation in a third rate middle eastern county, then could not anticipate the problems that would occur in New Orleans when a Cat V hurricane hit there. And all the promises Bush made about rebuilding New Orleans? Unfulfilled. Why?

Because if the government were allowed to work by conservatives, then the conservative visions of a theocratic state run by wealth families (the Latin American model practiced in Mexico and Brazil) would not be possible.

Why didn't the CIA give the tapes to the 9/11 Commission when asked? Coverup!

Marty Lederman at Balkinization discusses jut how badly the CIA and the Bush administration did NOT want the 9/11 Commission to get the torture tapes.

If the CIA had destroyed its interrogation tapes during the pendency of the 9/11 Commission investigation, that almost surely would have constituted felony violations of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(1). So they retained the tapes during that investigation. However, as the New York Times reports ..., the CIA very carefully avoided informing the 9/11 Commission of the existence of the interrogation tapes -- which would have been extremely valuable information for the Commission to use. "A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes" . . . but the Commission never said the magic words!: The Commission repeatedly sought "documents," "reports" and "information" related to the interrogations from the CIA -- but "staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos."

At one meeting, Lee Hamilton told George Tenet that "the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents 'even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.'" How infelicitous of Representative Hamilton -- you see, a videotape isn't a "document"!

I urge you to read the entire report from Phil Zelikow,, and ask yourself whether the concerted effort by countless government officials, up to and including Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Cambone, to assiduously avoid mentioning the videotapes to the 9/11 Commission -- in countless meetings and in response to numerous requests -- when obviously those videos would have been the motherlode of the evidence that the Commission was seeking, can possibly be justified. Zelikow wonders whether this didn't violate 18 U.S.C. 1001(a)(1) (prohibiting the knowing and willful concealment of "material facts" in an investigation by any "trick, scheme, or device"). Even if it did not, is there any scenario in which such stonewalling would not have constituted utter contempt for the Commission -- bad faith at a very high and sustained level?

Here's the really amazing bit, however: "Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," said a CIA spokesperson. In other words, they knew the tapes were relevant -- indeed, the most relevant evidence possible -- and that they would be required to produce them if only the Commission and its lawyers somewhere down the line used the word "tapes," or "recordings," or "evidence." But they failed to mention the tapes.

This is clearly criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration. There should be a rapid, broad investigation and criminal charges brough quickly.

You want to know that the conservatives will say to defend this criminal behavior? They will claim that bringing charges in court against the criminals who conducted this criminal behavior is criminalizing politics.

Then they will complain that illegal immigrants should be arrested and because they violate the law by their very presence in America, or a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks back in 1995 should be arrested in the New York Airport, carried out in chains, held overnight, then deported - again in chains - the next day back to Iceland.

So violations of really important laws should not be criminalized by bringing charges in court if the culprits are conservatives, but a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks 12 years ago gets treated like a terrorist.

How in God's name to Republicans live with themselves and sleep at night?

The Mortgage Crisis is conservative ideology insanity greed played out to the end

The Savings and Loan crisis was a direct result of deregulating the Savings and Loan industry. The collapse of Enron (and Enron's rape of the California energy industry and energy consumers) can be traced directly back to the rewriting of SEC regulations by Wendy Graham (wife of Sen. Phil Graham) that excluded the operations of Enron from SEC regulation. These deregulations of financial industries were both triumphs of the conservative philosophy that government regulation handcuffed the productivity of the economy. The identical ideological flaw led to the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover's refusal to take any actions to clean up after it and to regulate the ability of banks to create money.

Now Bill Sher explains that the failure is the mortgage crisis, once again caused by failure to regulate a financial industry.

Greenspan received several direct warnings about the looming crisis, but did nothing to regulate irresponsible corporations:

Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

....

And leaders of a housing advocacy group in California, meeting with Mr. Greenspan in 2004, warned that deception was increasing and unscrupulous practices were spreading.

John C. Gamboa and Robert L. Gnaizda of the Greenlining Institute implored Mr. Greenspan to use his bully pulpit and press for a voluntary code of conduct.

“He never gave us a good reason, but he didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Gnaizda said last week. “He just wasn’t interested.”

...

An examination of regulatory decisions shows that the Federal Reserve and other agencies waited until it was too late before trying to tame the industry’s excesses. Both the Fed and the Bush administration placed a higher priority on promoting “financial innovation” and what President Bush has called the “ownership society.”

...

Mr. Greenspan and other Fed officials repeatedly dismissed warnings about a speculative bubble in housing prices. In December 2004, the New York Fed issued a report bluntly declaring that “no bubble exists.” Mr. Greenspan predicted several times — incorrectly, it turned out — that housing declines would be local but almost certainly not nationwide.

The Fed was hardly alone in not pressing to clean up the mortgage industry. When states like Georgia and North Carolina started to pass tougher laws against abusive lending practices, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency successfully prohibited them from investigating local subsidiaries of nationally chartered banks.

Virtually every federal bank regulator was loathe to impose speed limits on a booming industry.

It was not always this way. As John Atlas and Peter Dreier explain in The American Prospect this week, our government once practiced regulation. And it was good.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Washington did regulate banks. The Depression triggered the creation of government bank regulations and agencies ... After World War II, until the late 1970s, the system work[ed]. The savings-and-loan industry was highly regulated by the federal government, with a mission to take people's deposits and then provide loans for the sole purpose of helping people buy homes to live in. Washington insured those loans through the FDIC, provided mortgage discounts through FHA and the Veterans Administration, created a secondary mortgage market to guarantee a steady flow of capital, and required S&Ls to make predictable 30-year fixed loans. The result was a steady increase in homeownership and few foreclosures.

Those glory days became a distant memory once Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to town:

...by the early 1980s, the lending industry used its political clout to push back against government regulation. In 1980, Congress ... eliminated interest-rate caps and made sub-prime lending more feasible for lenders. The S&Ls balked at constraints on their ability to compete with conventional banks engaged in commercial lending. They got Congress -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- to change the rules, allowing S&Ls to begin a decade-long orgy of real estate speculation, mismanagement, and fraud...

...The deregulation of banking led to merger mania, with banks and S&Ls gobbling each other up and making loans to finance shopping malls, golf courses, office buildings, and condo projects that had no financial logic other than a quick-buck profit. When the dust settled in the late 1980s, hundreds of S&Ls and banks had gone under, billions of dollars of commercial loans were useless, and the federal government was left to bail out the depositors whose money the speculators had put at risk.

The stable neighborhood S&L soon became a thing of the past. Banks, insurance companies, credit card firms and other money-lenders were now part of a giant "financial services" industry, while Washington walked away from its responsibility to protect consumers with rules, regulations, and enforcement. Meanwhile, starting with Reagan, the federal government slashed funding for low-income housing, and allowed the FHA, once a key player helping working-class families purchase a home, to drift into irrelevancy.

Into this vacuum stepped banks, mortgage lenders, and scam artists, looking for ways to make big profits from consumers desperate for the American Dream of homeownership. They invented new "loan products" that put borrowers at risk. Thus was born the sub-prime market.

Bill also refers to recent articles that explain the problems of the mortgage crisis:

• Alan Greenspan on the mortgage crisis: "I didn't do it!" in Salon.com and
• Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread in the New York Times.

The problem is that the conservatives object to government restrictions, yet without those restrictions, the very industries the conservatives work in collapse every so often. Major efforts that had to be implemented to bring America out of the Great Depression include creating the Securities and Exchange Commission, regulating the ability of banks to make loans without having the assets to survive if those loans go into default, and regulations that require that the financial statements of public companies receive independent audits.

The failure of Enron was, in part, the failure of the accounting industry to conduct truly independent audits. The failures of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco International and Peregrine Systems among others required the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The dangers of accounting firms that were paid by major companies to both audit the company's financial statements and also provide consulting services were reported for years before any of the above companies went bankrupt. Not only were the above companies destroyed by deregulation, so was Arthur Anderson, one of the accounting industry's "Big Five firms until it's collapse as a result of the Enron debacle.

These are just a few samples of the damage done to the economy by conservative greed. And the conservatives are proud of their actions, as Rick Perlstein documented:

Federal regulators once held a press conference in 2003. To symbolize their commitment to cutting red tape for bankers, they held up gardening shears. The head of Bush's Office of Thrift Supervision, James Gilleran, did them one better. He brought a chainsaw.

As I indicated in the title to this article, the conservative greed of which they are so proud is also a from of insanity (attributed both to Benjamin Franklin and to Albert Einstein) "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

The Mortgage Crisis is just the next example of the insanity of accepting the conservative idiocy of deregulation of so many forms of business in which the seller makes a larger profit by shaving on the quality of the product - auditing, banking and financial reporting are just some examples.

One final thought, though. Poorly done regulation can be very destructive to an industry, so that has to be considered also. Properly done regulation can actually make an industry grow. As it is, the life insurance industry would be much smaller than it is if the states did not guarantee through regulation that insurance companies had sufficient financial assets to pay off when required, that life insurance contracts are written so that customers can understand them, that the contracts are sufficiently standardized so that consumers can compare the differences between the offerings of different companies, and that insurance companies do not simply take a customer's money during his or her life and then refuse to pay off upon the death of the insured. Without the standardization and financial assurance provided by government regulation, there would be a lot less life insurance sold.

Why Paulose has suddenly moved to Washington

The Washington Post weighs in on the Rachel Paulose case this morning. They report that Ms. Paulose is going to a job where she "will be one of several counsels in Justice's office for legal policy." The new Attorney General was involved in the decision:

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate and sworn in 10 days ago, was aware of the decision, the source said. Paulose "has come to realize, and the new attorney general and others, that management was a challenge for her there," the source said. "She felt it was best for her office for her to . . . get out of this management position and into a place where she could excel."

This is an acknowledgement that her management skills are, to put it charitably, somewhat inadequate.

An obvious question considering the suddenness of Ms. Paulose' move is "Why now?" The answer is that her interview with the National Review Online and the efforts to defend her tenure brought about a major reaction in her office in Minneapolis.

In an interview with a blogger last week, posted on National Review Online, the usually press-shy Paulose denied saying anything racist to the staff member and added that "the department is defending me against this outrageous and defamatory lie."

She also decried "the McCarthyite hysteria" that surrounded her.

The brief interview provoked some of Paulose's staff, according to her predecessor as Minnesota U.S. attorney, Thomas W. Heffelfinger. He said in an interview last night that "at least one and as many as three of her current staff managers either had resigned or were threatening to resign today."

Such defections would have been the second in Paulose's office in less than a year. This spring, her top assistant and two other senior prosecutors stepped down from their management responsibilities, saying they no longer could work with her.

[See yesterday's post The defense of Paulose steps up the rhetoric on this interview and the NRO defense of Paulose.]

It appears that the ham-handed and perhaps desperate defense of Ms. Paulose' position as U.S. Attorney caused a counter-reaction that forced her out as U.S. Attorney. So why does she still have any job in the Department of Justice at all? At a guess, I suspect that her conservative ideology, membership in the Federalist Society, and her political status as an ardent Christian Fundamentalist are what caused Mulkasey to give her an alternative job at DoJ instead of just firing her. In this administration those are strongly desired characteristics, and to simply fire her would anger all those political groups. That tells us a lot about the Bush administration as a whole.

Ms. Paulose is representative of why the Bush administration is so incompetent in running government. People are appointed to office not because they are competent to do that job, but because of strong conservative ideology and strong Christian Fundamentalist beliefs. Ms. Paulose was not appointed as U.S. Attorney because of her skills running an office of federal prosecutors. She was appointed because of her conservative and religious beliefs. She is a poster child for strong conservatives and for devout Fundamentalist Christians, while at the same time being a poster child for technically incompetent Republican political appointees. She represents the ideal Republican Movement Conservative.

Ms. Paulose has proven that she is worse than incompetent as a U.S. Attorney. In fact, she has been destructive to the office she was appointed to manage. So she was removed. But she is the ideal movement conservative, so she is still being protected, being given a safe position out of the limelight back in Washington after her total and very public failure as U.S. Attorney.

That makes Rachel Paulose an excellent metaphor for the disaster inflicted on the Department of Justice when Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. she is ideologically pure, but highly incompetent and quite unable to work with those who do not fall in line with her ideology.

US Atty Rachel Paulose being hounded out of office for being too aggressive against sex-trafficking and prostitution

One of the more obvious and severe problems caused by Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General is the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose. New Attorney General Michael Mukasey is being urged to act quickly to deal with the damage Ms. Paulose has caused.

Rachel Paulose - a short history

Rachel Paulose was born in Kerala, India and raised in Ohio. She obtained a B.A. (Summa Cum Laud) from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from Yale Law School where she also excelled academically. Her great-grandfather, Cheruvallethu Mathunni Abraham (Avarachan Upadeshi), founded the Indian Brethren Christian Evangelical movement in Kerala and she remains an evangelical Christian. She bagan working for the Department of Justice in 1997 until 2002, then entered private practice where she worked until returning to Alberto Gonzales' Department of Justice in January 2006.

A month later she was appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, to replace Thomas Heffelfinger. Her appointment exposed the new provision of the Patriot Act that allowed the Department of Justice to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys for an indefinite period. Heffelfinger had apparently been placed on a list for dismissal because he spent too much time focusing on Native American affairs and because he failed to prosecute anyone to intimidate Native Americans out of voting. She was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote on the last night before the Senate adjourned for Christmas in December 2006. This was most unusual because she had never undergone Senate hearings or being voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead her confirmation was moved out of committee through a rarely used procedure called a "discharge resolution."

Ms. Paulose was the youngest woman ever appointed as a U.S. Attorney. For all her academic (and ideological) qualifications, she had limited legal experience and had no management experience when appointed. Her appointment was very probably based on her academic record, her evangelical Christianity, and her membership (beginning in 2001) in the ultra-conservative Federalist Society.

Rachel Paulose' unusual appointment as U.S. Attorney shows that she was on the conservative fast-track. It is very likely that the legal conservatives surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez intended to provide her the credentials needed so that she could be appointed to a life-time position as a young, very conservative, very religious federal judge as soon as they could get her to a Senate nomination hearing. Not only would she then be able to skew legal decisions to both the political and legal right, she would block the appointment of a liberal judge for many years. This was also the intent when Clarence Thomas was appointed as a very young Supreme Court Justice.

Unfortunately, the entire group at the Department of Justice responsible for her appointment and protection has resigned or been forced out of office, along with Alberto Gonzales, in the wake of the scandal over the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. So her boosters and protectors are now gone. She will have to depend on her own political acumen to survive. That makes her survival problematic. Her tenure suggests that she has little or no political acumen.

Rachel Paulose - The controversial tenure

Dismissal of U.S. Attorney's - Ms. Paulose took over management of the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney office upon the resignation of her predecessor, Thomas Heffelfinger. Monica Goodling later testified to Congress that Heffelfinger had been put on a list for dismissal because of "his preoccupation with Indian Affairs issues." Since Bradley Schlozeman is named as a participant in forcing Heffelfinger out, it is reasonable to assume that he, as head of the Civil Rights Division at DoJ, was unhappy that Heffelfinger was not prosecuting more Native Americans for vote fraud. [The Wikipedia article cites Schlozeman's participation in The Georgia Voter ID Law, the Missouri Lawsuit and the ACORN voter registration prosecutions, all intended to use the power of the Department of Justice to cause the state to restrict voting or to actually manipulate the outcome of a close election that Schlozeman was involved in.] Schlozeman's participation suggests that Ms. Paulose was appointed interim U.S. Attorney with, among other things, a brief to work to suppress Native American voting.

The Coronation - Upon being finally confirmed in as U.S. Attorney, Ms. Paulose conducted an elaborate swearing-in ceremony that included a processional, a professional photographer, a color guard and a choir. Such an elaborate swearing-in ceremony was not only out of the norm for U.S. Attorneys, it very likely grated on the nerves of many Minnesotans. Culturally, Minnesotans tend to be very suspicious of elaborate ceremony. It certainly caught the notice of the news organizations who were less than flattering in how they reported the event.

Such public grandstanding does not indicate that Ms. Paulose has a lot of political awareness. With the departure from the Department of Justice of the individuals who appointed her and who would normally be her political protectors, this does not bode well for her ability to survive politically on her own.

The list of "problem reporters" - Ms Paulose' reaction to the negative press coverage was to blame individual reporters for attacking her. Emulating an earlier conservative politician, Richard Nixon, who is known to have hated the press, she developed a six-page, single-spaced list that "identified Problem Reporters." Someone in the U.S. Attorney's office apparently leaked the list to the reporters. That leak suggests that Ms. Paulose does not have the total support of the workers in the U.S. Attorney's office she is attempting to manage. We have a strong indication of how much less that "total" that support is.

The Staff Resignations - On April 5, 2007 her second in command, John Marti, the civil division head Erika Monzangue and criminal division head James Lackner all resigned their management positions working directly for Ms. Paulose and returned to their civil service positions of Deputy U.S. Attorney. A fourth immediate subordinate would not comment on whether he had also resigned his management position. This was not a surprise. A representative from the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorney in Washington had already traveled to Minneapolis and tried to talk them out of resigning.

Anyone familiar with personnel management recognizes that a high turn-over rate among employees is a key indicator of management failure. Apparently Ms. Paulose is known for dressing down subordinates in public and for quoting Bible verses on the job. Neither practice is good management, especially when attempting to manage civil service professionals. What do these problems demonstrate?

We know that Ms. Paulose had a sterling academic record, outstanding ideological credentials and the connections with the Federalist Society that have been the key for advancement for so many conservative federal judges. She was being fast-tracked to a lifetime federal judgeship. It is a political plus that she is an attractive young woman and an Indian-American. Those two characteristics alone guarantee her a large number of political supporters. Unfortunately, in her first real management position she has proven that she has few political or management skills. She simply does not play well with others and her first reaction to those who disagree with her or question has been to identify who are her enemies. But she has defenders.

Defenders of Rachel Paulose

Eric reports that University of Rhode Island Women’s Studies Professor Donna M. Hughes claims that (unnamed) DoJ officials are attempting to hound Rachel Paulose out of her job as U.S. Attorney because she has been too active is too active in trying to prosecute human trafficking cases. She offers no evidence or details to support these accusations. She is circulating for signatures a letter she sent to Michale Mukasey making this clam. It can be read at Powerline, a well-known ultra-right-wing blog. The letter was posted by Scott Johnson Bio who strongly supports Ms. Paulose and claims he has known her for ten years.

The investigation of these allegations

Eric responds to this rather breathtaking but unsupported allegation:

Paulose’s job is indeed in jeopardy, but until this breathtaking new theory was introduced by Hughes and Powerline, the jeopardy was attributed to several other causes:

• She was promoted by the now-discredited circle of Justice Department officials who were implicated in the forced resignations that caused several openings for new U.S. attorneys who were considered to be “loyal Bushies.” She had little administrative/managerial experience to run a large office and has alienated most of the staff in the Minneapolis office.

• Several of Paulose’s highest-ranking subordinates voluntarily took demotions to non-management positions to protest against her leadership style. Her staff has been in nearly open rebellion against her, on one occasion bursting into applause, in her presence, to honor those who demoted themselves.
• She is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the federal Office of Special Counsel into allegations that she mishandled classified material and mistreated employees. She received a very negative job review by a team of Justice Department specialists, focusing on her shortcomings as a manager and administrator. A pending Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint alleges that Paulose created a hostile working environment by making a racist remark about an administrative employee in the office — a remark that has been corroborated by two witnesses.
• The morale of the office has been in the toilet for many months. One of her predecessors, former U.S. Attorney Todd Jones who hired her for her first federal job, told the New York Times that his former colleagues described the office as “dysfunctional” and said that that there was “an inability to have effective leadership move forward in a nonpartisan way.”
• The same New York Times article portrayed her situation as “representative of much that went wrong at the [Justice] Department under” former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and as representing “what [Mukasey] is up against in restoring stability to the Justice Department.”
• Sen. Norm Coleman, who sponsored Paulose’s appointment, has become a critic, and extracted a promise from Mukasey to look into the problem and take corrective action. Her original sponsors and patrons at Justice and in the White House are gone.

So, yes, as Prof. Hughes letter suggests, Paulose’s tenure is in some jeopardy. But the idea that her problem derives from powerful dark forces in Washington who are soft on human trafficking, child prostitution and related crimes is a breathtakingly new explanation for Paulose’s problems since taking office. It is offered without any names, facts or other form of substantiation. Hughes is careful to describe her theory as a “suspicion” and a “surmise” but she offers not even a theory as to why — in a Justice Department in which the prosecution of human trafficking and child pornography have been officially declared to be priorities — these unnamed department officials have decided to hound from office anyone who implements the stated policy.

Eric, as a good reporter should, then followed up by asking Professor Hughes what evidence she had for her allegation. Professor Hughes has not responded. Eric also contacted Rachel Paulose' predecessor. Here is Eric's report:

I also asked Paulose’s predecessor, Tom Heffelfinger, to assess the Hughes theory about the possible dark reason that Paulose might be in danger of losing her job. He made three points.

• Yes, Paulose has aggressively pursued human trafficking prosecutions, and he salutes her for it.
• No, during his years in the Justice Department, he never heard of any element that was opposed to cracking down on these crimes. On the contrary, this policy unites several important departmental factions: those who favor cracking down on street crime; those who want to emphasize crimes against women; and those who want to emphasize border security (since many human trafficking crimes involve women who have come illegally across the border).
• No, from everything he has heard from his former colleagues and subordinates in the U.S. attorney’s office, “there’s no link” between Paulose’s troubles and the priority that she has placed on trafficking cases. Her problem is not based in Washington. Her problem is based in Minneapolis.

Paulose will speak at noon Tuesday at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. Her talk is titled: “End Slavery Today: Policy Responses to Human Trafficking.”

So it appears at this time that the the rather extreme allegation that some cabal of supporters for sex trafficking and prostitution is attempting to get Rachel Paulose removed as U.S. Attorney because he is too effective is merely a smokes screen designed to defend her and paint those who want her gone in the worst possible light.

See also:

• The defense of Paulose steps up the rhetoric
  November 19, 2007 4:12 PM CDT
  
• Paulose has lost her U.S. Attorney position
  November 19, 2007 5:26 PM CDT
  
• Why Paulose has suddenly moved to Washington
  November 20, 2007 9:38 AM CDT