Ashcroft, Evans Resign From Bush Cabinet

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites), a favorite of conservatives, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, one of President Bush (news - web sites)'s closest friends, resigned Tuesday, the first members of the Cabinet to leave as Bush heads from re-election into his second term. Both Ashcroft and Evans have served in Bush's Cabinet from the start of the administration. Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." "Yet I believe that the Department of Justice (news - web sites) would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration," said Ashcroft...

Let's see... how many people did he prosecute successfully in the war against terror? Zero. Yes we were well served by you.

Not exactly a surprise, is it? This administration has set new records for greed and self-interest:

WASHINGTON — Shortly after leaving his job as U.S. energy secretary in early 2005, Spencer Abraham took a $60,000-a-year post as a director of Occidental Petroleum, which soon became the first firm in 20 years to ship oil to the U.S. from Libya.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge accepted director's fees and consulting work from several firms seeking contracts with his old agency.

Tommy Thompson, the former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has consulted, lobbied or worked as an employee for 42 companies since leaving office in January 2005.

All told, 17 of 24 former Bush Cabinet members have taken positions with at least 119 companies, including 65 firms that lobby the government and 40 that lobby the agencies they headed, a liberal-leaning watchdog group said in a report Monday.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that the group's six-month investigation "has shown that most of these former Bush administration officials have cannily leveraged their time spent in the public sector'' and "made a mint on the backs of American taxpayers."

"It may be legal, but it is certainly not honorable," she said.

Picking the single worst, most ineffective, most scandal-ridden Bush cabinet agency isn’t easy. Sure, Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department has to get the top spot, but there’s Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Paige’s Department of Education, and Chertoff’s DHS.

But let’s not overlook Alphonso Jackson’s HUD, for my money, every bit as corrupt and ridiculous as any cabinet agency in decades.

We learned last month that Jackson, who has a history of allowing political considerations to dictate policy matters, demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a friendly developer at a substantial discount. When the housing authority balked, Jackson retaliated, including threats about the availability of federal funding.

Today, there are some additional details, which make Bush’s HUD look even worse.

After Philadelphia’s housing director refused a demand by President Bush’s housing secretary to transfer a piece of city property to a business friend, two top political appointees at the department exchanged e-mails discussing the pain they could cause the Philadelphia director.

“Would you like me to make his life less happy? If so, how?” Orlando J. Cabrera, then-assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, wrote about Philadelphia housing director Carl R. Greene.

“Take away all of his Federal dollars?” responded Kim Kendrick, an assistant secretary who oversaw accessible housing. She typed symbols for a smiley-face, “:-D,” at the end of her January 2007 note.

Cabrera wrote back a few minutes later: “Let me look into that possibility.”

The similarities between Bush administration agencies and organized-crime families are routinely striking, but this is ridiculous.

When it comes to scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Reagan-era controversies would appear to take the cake. As Joe Conason explained not too long ago, Reagan’s HUD scandal included “politically connected Republicans criminally exploit[ing] the same housing assistance programs they routinely denounced as ‘wasteful.’”

As it turns out, Bush’s HUD scandals aren’t generating nearly the same amount of attention, but the controversies are nearly as serious.

Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a developer at a substantial discount, then retaliated against the housing authority when it refused to do so, a recent court filing alleges.

The authority’s director, Carl Greene, contends in a court affidavit that Jackson called Philadelphia’s mayor in 2006 to demand the transfer to the developer, Kenny Gamble, a former soul-music songwriter who is a business friend of Jackson’s. Jackson’s aides followed up with “menacing” threats about the property and other housing programs in at least a dozen letters and phone calls over an 11-month period, Greene said in an interview.

Greene and his colleagues have alleged in the court filing that Philadelphia is now paying a severe price for disobeying a Bush Cabinet official. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently vowed to strip the city’s housing authority of its ability to spend some federal funds, a move that the authority said could raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people. […]

“The secretary was determined that we turn over this land to this specific developer,” Greene said in an interview. “I refused. . . . He didn’t have the ability to remove me. So he resorted to these extraordinary measures to extract what he wanted.”

Mark Kleiman notes that Bush and Jackson have effectively turned the Department of Housing and Urban Development into “an extortion racket,” which, under the circumstances, sounds about right.

Rober Novak makes a persuasive case against Condi Rice for Secretary of State !

In his article in today's Sun Times:

"Ironically, the most politically popular member of the Bush Cabinet is perhaps the least popular with the conservative Republican base. In contrast, Powell will be missed in foreign ministries around the world, where Rice is distrusted precisely because she is so close to President."

Also via Atrios:

Bob Somerby reminds us that Condi Rice did, in fact, without any doubt lie while under oath to the 9/11 commission.

Richard Clarke on CNN's "Larry King Live:

"If Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser when she had information that there was a threat against the United States ... [the information] would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001," he told King.