http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6941The Republicans' grand experiment
by Sidney Blumenthal | Apr 20 2007
snip//
While vice-president Dick Cheney and former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld installed neo-conservative ideologues throughout the national-security apparatus, sidelining the senior military, diplomatic corps and intelligence community, and creating parallel operations to avoid assessment by professionals, Rove was handed the rest of the executive branch to arrogate for political purposes.
Consider the reports surfacing only within the past month:
* that scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency have again been forbidden to discuss climate change
* that nine newly appointed US attorneys are political cadres
* that the new US attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose, cites Bible verses in the office, harshly orders underlings around and, according to one of four assistant US attorneys in her office who voluntarily demoted themselves, treats disagreement as "disloyalty"
* that the Election Assistance Commission in 2006, giving credence to Republican talking-points of widespread voter fraud, ignored experts' testimony to the contrary
* that between 2001 and 2006, the Civil Rights Division of the justice department has purged 60% of its professional staff and not filed a single voting discrimination case on behalf of African-American or Native American voters
* that the US attorney in Wisconsin, Steven Biskupic, kept his job, after the state Republican Party complained to Rove that he was not attacking voter fraud, by filing corruption charges against an aide to the incumbent Democratic governor on the eve of the 2006 elections. (The 7th circuit court of appeals ruled on 5 April that the aide was "wrongly convicted" on evidence that was "beyond thin").
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