Via Rolling Stone:

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good -- four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life. Read more...

This article was posted August 23rd, but I thought it was worth passing along. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi narrates a related video, you can watch it here.

Booman Tribune:  Everyone in Congress wants to deal with the emerging crisis of depressed veterans tempted to take their own lives. Everyone, that is, except Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma.

ArmsControlWonk:  A good story from this non-proliferation blog, which doesn't get many,  More often, it's stuff like this

The Reality-Based Community: Great timing department...

War and Piece: This is troubling...and in a couple related stories, it appears there are still a few people in our government who want Americans to hear the truth but it's a cinch the media aren't pressing for answers to vital and obvious questions.

Martini Revolution: How full of sh*t can one man be?

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Americans for Informed Democracy, Nuestra Voice, BlueGrassRoots, ePluribus Media Community

Today’s Paul Krugman column is a must read. Shorter version: We are all New Orleans now.

Today, much of the Gulf Coast remains in ruins. Less than half the federal money set aside for rebuilding, as opposed to emergency relief, has actually been spent, in part because the Bush administration refused to waive the requirement that local governments put up matching funds for recovery projects — an impossible burden for communities whose tax bases have literally been washed away.

On the other hand, generous investment tax breaks, supposedly designed to spur recovery in the disaster area, have been used to build luxury condominiums near the University of Alabama’s football stadium in Tuscaloosa, 200 miles inland.

Keep reading ...

Des Moines Register:

A Polk County judge on Thursday struck down Iowa's law banning gay marriage.

The ruling by Judge Robert Hanson concluded that the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and he ordered Polk County Recorder Julie Haggerty to issue marriage licenses to several gay couples.

"It's a moral victory for equal rights," said Des Moines lawyer Dennis Johnson, who represented six gay couples who filed suit after they were denied marriage licenses.

Camilla Taylor, an attorney with Lambda Legal, a New York-based gay rights organization, said the ruling requires "full equality for all Iowans including gay and lesbian Iowans and their families."

"The Iowa Constitution has lived up to its promises of equality for everyone," she said.

UPDATE: We have our first legally married gay couple in Iowa now!

As if we needed even more bad news from Iraq, an independent examination of the Iraqi police shows a force that is so far gone, it might need to be scrapped altogether.

An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.

This is a mess of the highest order. The Iraqi police force, which presumably is responsible for helping keep local communities safe and orderly, is reportedly corrupt to its core and overrun by Shiite militias. We could disband the police force, but when we disbanded the Iraqi Armey in 2003, it generated a backlash that helped create the insurgency. The prospect of putting 26,000 well-armed, angry young men out of work, at our request, is, shall we say, unappealing. For that matter, Iraq would be left with no police force for a few years while we tried to build a new one from scratch.

We could also try to retrain the police, and remove sectarianism from the ranks, but we’ve tried that before and it hasn’t worked.

As Kevin Drum put it, "This is becoming a comedy of the absurd."

Welcome back from hiatus to the blogosphere, Falafel Sex, Katrinacrat, and The Quaker Agitator....

From her July 2004 Appearance at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. (Part 2 of this is here.)

On Countdown, Keith Olbermann reveals that the latest, damning GAO report on Iraq was leaked by government officials who were afraid that much like previous negative reports, would be watered down by the Bush administration. As usual, chaos rules the day as Olbermann talks with retired Gen. Wesley Clark about President Bush's impending $50 billion request for continued operations in Iraq and reports that the Pentagon wants to re-write parts of the GAO report to fit their view of conditions on the ground in Iraq.

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Via The Guardian:

A military cargo plane carrying three senators and a House member was forced to take evasive maneuvers and dispatch flares to avoid ground fire after taking off from Baghdad on Thursday night.

The lawmakers said their plane, a C-130, was under fire from three rocket-propelled grenades over the course of several minutes as they left for Amman, Jordan.

"It was a scary moment," said Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who said he had just taken off his body armor when he saw a bright flash outside the window. "Our pilots were terrific. ... They banked in one direction and then banked the other direction, and they set off the flares."

Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., as well as Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., were also on the plane.

"We were jostled around pretty good," said Cramer, who estimated the plane had ascended to about 6,000 feet. "There were a few minutes there where I wondered: 'Have we been hit? Are we OK?'" Read more...

Former Republican Congressman and poster child for government corruption Tom Delay appeared on Hardball today to talk with Chris Matthews about the Larry Craig sex scandal. I knew this was going to be bad when Matthews introduced him as Mr. Leader. Matthews has a strange fascination with Delay and allows him an extraordinary amount of time to rehash every scandal to involve a Democrat in the past twenty years while denying the stench of hypocrisy that emanates from the Republican Party. Delay's basic argument is that Republicans deal with their bad apples while the Democrats rally behind theirs and re-elect them. Try not to laugh too loud or throw anything breakable...tear it up in the comments...

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Why Matthews and MSNBC continues to let garbage like Tom Delay darken their network is beyond me. On the other hand, if you're looking for an expert on corruption, scandals and disgraced members of Congress, Tom Delay is your Huckleberry. What's next, Mark Foley hosting an episode of To Catch A Predator?