People often comment that the British government has one big advantage over the US government in running its operations. They have many more professional government officials rather than political appointees, which offers them a much more stable and consistent public service bureaucracy as administrations change. Certainly it seems to enable their public officials to be much more honest about, oh, say whether Saddam Hussein was a real threat to the West. Here's Eliza Manningham-Buller, a.k.a. "M" of MI5:

The former MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller today delivered a withering assessment of the case for war against Iraq, saying it had significantly increased the terrorist threat to Britian.

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Manningham-Buller said the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion in 2003 was low.

But the toppling of Saddam allowed Osama bin Laden to gain a stronghold in Iraq and radicalised young Muslims in Britain, she said.

In evidence that undermined the case for war presented by the former prime minister Tony Blair, she was asked whether it was feared Saddam could have linked terrorists to weapons of mass destruction, facilitating their use against the west.

"It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or the medium term to me or my colleagues," she replied.

And it shouldn't have been of concern to the United States leadership. Some people think I'm a broken record on this topic. But until the CheneyBush administration officials admit that invading Iraq was a complete boondoggle and the Republican party admits that it was not an adventure for democracy and glory, then I'm going to keep on saying it. The US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with WMDs, although that was the main drum being banged by CheneyBush officials (and yes, some misguided Democrats) between June 2002 and March 2003.

The BBC has a longer article on this same story.

The right wing movement in all its forms (well, there really is only one at this point) has been trying to equate the BP oil spill catastrophe to Hurricane Katrina and President Bush's mishandling of it.

Kevin Drum dispatches that notion effortlessly:

This conflates two very different things. Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them. But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed. Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsourced. When Allbaugh left after less than two years on the job, he was replaced by the hapless Michael Brown and the agency was downgraded and broken up yet again. By the time Katrina hit, the upper levels of FEMA were populated largely with political appointees with no disaster preparedness experience and the agency was simply not up to the job of dealing with a huge storm anymore.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite. There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts. There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes. There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this. There never has been. For better or worse, it's simply not something that's ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government.

FEMA's job was to handle disasters like Katrina, but Dan Bartlett had to make a DVD for Bush to watch because he didn't even know what every American knew as the tragedy was unfolding.
Newsweek:

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One. How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

I take issue with how Axelrod and his team approached the spill because the president should have been out there sooner, but to draw a parallel to the Bush's Katrina disaster is completely ridiculous. The White House knew what was happening and didn't need a DVD of news reports made for them by Robert Gibbs to help alert them to the crisis. If conservative governance proved anything, it was that without competent oversight, regulations, and a willingness to then implement those tools, horrific things result.

I made the same argument to the very unstable Andrew Breitbart on last Friday's LA Weekly panel discussion, but he was too busy drinking beers on stage to engage in a real dialogue about anything other than the ACORN thugs who helped cause the global financial meltdown, as he phrased it.

I keep talking to people about this, and they keep responding, "Oh, Obama probably did it because they don't have enough evidence to win in civilian court." And that's not true, and it's not even the point. The point is, George W. Bush pushed the dangerous idea that the 9/11 attacks were acts of terror by states, not individuals - and that was the rationale for invading Iraq. Trying the 9/11 attackers in military tribunals is saying the Bush-Cheney doctrine was right, and lays the groundwork for bipartisan support of pre-emptive attacks:

The Justice Department's restoration was among the most important tasks facing the Obama administration: The Bush administration's political appointees had dismantled the hiring practices that allowed career attorneys to make hiring decisions, and gave more weight to ideological conformity than legal expertise. The result was a Justice Department where incompetent ideologues with political interests in mind were given more power than career attorneys concerned with upholding the law. Michael Mukasey began the process of de-politicizing Justice after he replaced Alberto Gonzales; Eric Holder has continued it.

In light of this, I think Andrew Sullivan's observation of the conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Holder over the prosecution of the alleged September 11 conspirators is especially important:

But whatever your view, this must not, it seems to me, be a politicized decision. It should be a matter of justice. And to go from a Rove-driven Justice Department to an Emanuel-driven Justice Department is not the change most of us who supported Obama wanted to see. Or believe in.

I'm not interested in going from a Justice Department whose behavior is driven by Republican political interests to one whose behavior is driven by Democratic political interests. That's going nowhere at all. Retreating on the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court won't undo all the important changes the administration has made to the Justice Department, but it would reinforce the idea that the Department is a political fiefdom rather than an entity that exists to enforce the laws of the United States and secure the rights of its citizens.

A separate point is that Republicans won't budge on Gitmo anyway, no matter what Lindsey Graham says, so Emanuel's choice isn't even smart politics.

I saw this article the other day about how Tim Geithner is swamped with work because he doesn't have enough aides to help:

Compounding the strain on the Treasury, almost all the top posts beneath Mr. Geithner are still vacant. Though he has hired about 50 senior advisers — about half the number he hopes to recruit — the White House has become so worried about potential tax problems and other issues in the backgrounds of candidates that it has nominated only a handful of people.

On Sunday, the White House announced that it would nominate Alan B. Krueger, an economist at Princeton, to be assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy. It will also nominate David S. Cohen to be assistant secretary for policy on terrorist financing and Kim N. Wallace as assistant secretary in charge of Congressional relations.

That still left many positions, including the No. 2 post at Treasury, without even a nominee.

Mr. Geithner, as a result, has been pulled in many directions at once and remains virtually the only public face of the Treasury. He is the sole person who can go before Congress to promote and defend the department’s decisions to provide billions of dollars for General Motors, Chrysler, the nation’s banks or the millions of homeowners facing foreclosure.

But this post on FedBlog makes a very relevant point:

So, Tim Geithner doesn't have a lot of people helping him out at the Treasury, and he's overstreteched. This is obviously a bad thing. A lot of the debate over Geithner's overstretch has focused on how the Obama administration got spooked by some early confirmation scares, and as a result, has moved far too slowly to fill some positions at arguably the most important department in government at the moment.

It's hard to argue that it's in any way a good thing that Obama hasn't filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn't have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That's what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

You know, I usually have sympathy for anyone in this position but I'm having trouble tapping into the empathy for this bunch:

The jobless rate is hanging high -- for many of the roughly 3,000 political appointees who served President George W. Bush. Finding work has proved a far tougher task than those appointees expected.

"This is not a great time for anyone to be job hunting, including numerous former political appointees," said Carlos M. Gutierrez, Mr. Bush's commerce secretary. Previously chief executive of cereal maker Kellogg Co., he hopes to run a company again because "I have a lot of energy."

Only 25% to 30% of ex-Bush officials seeking full-time jobs have succeeded, estimated Eric Vautour, a Washington recruiter at Russell Reynolds Associates Inc. That "is much, much worse" than when Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton left the White House, he said. At least half those presidents' senior staffers landed employment within a month after the administration ended, Mr. Vautour recalled.

A handful of Bush cabinet officers have accepted academic appointments. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson joined Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies as a fellow. Condoleezza Rice, previously secretary of state, resumed her Stanford University roles as a political-science professor and senior fellow at its Hoover Institution think tank.

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.

DownWithTyranny!: Who will be the next Gay Republican hypocrite to be dragged out of the closet screaming about mediaa witch hunts?

Majikthise: Tancredo to Gulf Coast--Drop Dead

The Orstrahyun: Nine stolen anti-tank rocket launchers are still missing as world leaders begin flying in to Sydney, Australia for next week's APEC summit. President Bush is set to arrive on Tuesday, amidst a net of ultra-security set to lockdown the centre of the city, for most of the working week.

Horses Mouth:  It'll be interesting to see if this gets any attention...

The Carpetbagger Report: Stop me if you've heard this one: career Bush administration officials had an idea that would benefit the public; affected corporations balked and hired lobbyists, political appointees ("loyal Bushies") scrapped the idea.

HOLY CRAP: Not everything in this feature should be construed as anti-religion.  I think our readers can separate the chicken salad from the chicken sh*t.  Fr'instance here's slacktivist, Fred Clark on Obama and theolgian Reinhold Niebuhr...G-Dub snubs a War widow, because she's a Wiccan...A week's worth of updates on Christianist fringe-dwellers...A PG-rated rant telling religious zealots to mind their own bidness...What do I mean by religious zealots?  These assh*les.  Indeed, religious extremism is the source of a lot of the world's trouble, but apparently last week's program on CNN, "God's Warriors", did not make some members of the Am-Taliban very happy...Hitchens and Donohue duke it out on Hardball...Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes thinks Answers in Genesis has the funniest posts...

When the Bush White House was confronted with questions about an unprecedented purge of eight U.S. Attorneys, one of the key responses was, “Clinton did it, too.” It was false, Bush aides knew it was false, but they used it anyway.

Now the same officials are confronted with questions about an unprecedented initiative from Karl Rove’s office to give blatantly partisan campaign briefings to 15 federal agencies, on government property, shortly before the 2006 elections, despite a federal law prohibiting these kinds of activities. What’s the new excuse? Take a wild guess.

When one reporter asked Perino whether the briefings were a “White House idea, initially, or was it the agencies,” Perino dodged the question and replied that “the Clinton administration had similar briefings.”

Perino’s “Clinton did it too” is wrong. Bush White House officials went to federal agencies on at least 20 occasions and conducted private briefings for large groups of political appointees. They gave presentations focusing on “Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election.” The Hatch Act explicitly prohibits the use of federal property for partisan political purposes.

ThinkProgress contacted Doug Sosnik, Clinton’s Director of Political Affairs, directly. Sosnik explained, “We never went to agencies and briefed political appointees.” In fact, no one in the Clinton administration — from Sosnik’s office or anywhere else — ever conducted similar briefings for federal employees.

It appears that, for the second time in as many weeks, Perino simply made it up, fabricating a story to get herself out of a jam. It's called "lying" -- and Perino has been doing it quite often lately.

The Opinion Mill: The Warrior Wimps

Vox Verax: For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to former department lawyers and a review of written records.

Liberal Rapture: The news ordinary citizens didn't get this week

Get In Their Face! John Doolttle's Greatest Hits! The heat is on this corrupt congress critter, so let's take a trip down Memory Lane...

A Tiny Revolution: The ramblings of crazy people are often merely an exaggeration of what some may consider normal.

Balkinization: If you think that the Gonzales case will affect only one infrequently used medical procedure, intact dilation and evacuation (D&E)...Think again.

Mercury Rising: The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case. Robert Reich asks a very good question...

Truthdig: Two Who Got It Right: Scott Ritter in conversation with Robert Scheer

Danger Room: A blogger shares his frustrating experiences attempting to gather information using Freedom Of Information Act, which is supposed to ensure public access to U.S. government records.

No More Mister Nice Blog: The "Hillary 1984" video isn't the first time Phil De Vellis has attacked a fellow Democrat.

essays & effluvia: Rageh Omaar embarks on a unique journey inside what he describes as one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, looking at the country through the eyes of people rarely heard - ordinary Iranians.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: New Pairodimes...Tom Flannery...Soup Kitchen...Open All Night