Obsidian Wings

Close Your Eyes

by hilzoy

Is there any corner of the Bush administration -- any at all -- that isn't hopelessly corrupt? Actually, don't answer that...

"Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.

But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.

In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.

That same year, Medicare officials told Congress that they had succeeded in driving down the cost of fraud in medical equipment to $700 million.

Some lawmakers and Congressional staff members say the irregularities that the inspector general found were tantamount to corruption and raise broader questions about the credibility of other Medicare figures.

“This is outrageous,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who has repeatedly credited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with reducing improper expenditures. “If heads don’t roll, you can’t change the culture of this organization,” he added."

If you don't so much as try to detect fraud, you won't catch it. If you don't catch it, it will increase -- and why not, when you can get free money without risking anything? If it increases, not only do our costs go up, the apparent cost of expanding government programs to help the uninsured goes up as well, expanding those programs looks more expensive than it really is, and so the likelihood that we will actually do something to help people who are reduced to pulling out their rotting teeth with pliers goes down.

I want these people out of my government now.

Crooks

by hilzoy

From the Times of London, via ThinkProgress:

"A lobbyist with close ties to the White House is offering access to key figures in George W Bush’s administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.

Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.

Payne, who has accompanied Bush and Cheney on several foreign trips, also said he would try to secure a meeting with the president himself. (...)

During an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, Payne was asked to arrange meetings in Washington for an exiled former central Asian president. He outlined the cost of facilitating such access.

“The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library,” said Payne, who sits on the US homeland security advisory council. (...)

Payne said the balance of the $750,000 would go to his own lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP).

Asked by an undercover reporter who the politician would be able to meet for that price, Payne said: “Cheney’s possible, definitely the national security adviser [Stephen Hadley], definitely either Dr Rice or . . . I think a meeting with Dr Rice or the deputy secretary [John Negroponte] is possible . . .

“The main thing is that he [the Asian politician] comes, and he’s well received, that he meets with high-level people . . . and we send positive statements made back from the administration about ‘This guy wasn’t such a bad guy, many people have done worse’.”"

You can watch the video here: the sound is soft, but it's clearly audible. Payne also says that he should be able to get not just meetings, but positive statements about the unnamed politician and his record, from the administration, in exchange for this money. The politician who allegedly wants the meetings is not named, but seems to be an exiled former President of Kyrgyzstan. I don't think there is more than one such person. (Note that the article presents no evidence that that former President had any knowledge of this offer.)

ThinkProgress also has a useful rundown of Payne's background: he was Bush's personal travel aide during his father's 1988 Presidential campaign, serves on the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, was a Bush Pioneer (raised over $100,000) in 2000, and a Ranger (raised over $200,000) in 2004. And according to his biography (this text appears on a whole bunch of websites):

"Mr. Payne often travels officially in advance of and with the President and Vice President, including trips to Europe, the Mid-East, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Korea."

So he's not some random guy throwing out promises. He is absolutely in a position to arrange access for people. To my mind, though, the fact that he claims to be in a position to arrange statements from the administration about the situation in Kyrgyzstan, and the record of the unnamed former President, is worse.

***

There's also this bit: Payne says that he doesn't think he can arrange a meeting with Bush, since "he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days; I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone." That would explain a lot.

Politicizing the Department Of Justice

by hilzoy

When I first saw this story, about how "Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs", I didn't immediately flag its importance. I suspect that this was because of the phrase "the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs", which suggested small, unimportant programs, a sort of DoJ analog to the Congressional Page program. It was only when I sat down to read the DOJ Inspector General's report (pdf) that the story is based on that I realized that I was wrong.

According to the report (p. 3), "The Attorney General’s Honors Program is the exclusive means by which the Department hires recent law school graduates and judicial law clerks who do not have prior legal experience." That is: it's not some minor program; it's one of the main ways in which DoJ lawyers get hired. Their appointments are permanent. Moreover, the people who are hired under this program are career, not political, appointees, which means that it is against the law to take politics into account when hiring them. But according to the report, for two of the five years it covers, political considerations were huge:

"The documentary evidence and witness interviews also support the conclusion that two members of the 2006 Screening Committee, Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law. For example, the evidence showed that McDonald wrote disparaging statements about candidates’ liberal and Democratic Party affiliations on the applications she reviewed and that she voted to deselect candidates on that basis.

We also found that Elston, the head of the 2006 Committee, failed to take appropriate action when he learned that McDonald was routinely deselecting candidates on the basis of what she perceived to be the candidates’ liberal affiliations. The evidence also showed that Elston himself deselected some candidates – and allowed the deselection of others – based on impermissible considerations." (p. 99)

Or, to quote the member of the screening committee whom the IG found to have acted in good faith:

"I'm still kind of reeling from the résumés that you . . .showed me . . . people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford who were deselected. There were a lot of them. And I am shocked and very disappointed about that. . . . I didn't know that this was going on. I thought that this was being conducted in good faith. I was conducting my reviews in good faith and making my recommendations based on merits and what I thought were the people [who] were going to be the most qualified candidates for the Department. And I'm sickened by this. And I'm not happy that I'm associated with this." (p. 75)

If you read the whole report, or even just the part that focusses on 2006 (the worst year), it is sickening. You can see some of the data from the report here; it's really worth looking at. (Percentages of identifiably liberal vs. identifiably conservative candidates who were rejected, etc.) Some other highlights below the fold.

Jackson Will Resign

by hilzoy

Via TPM, the WSJ:

"Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to announce his resignation Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, a decision that will deal a blow to the Bush administration's efforts to tackle the housing and mortgage mess.

The exact reasons for Mr. Jackson's decision couldn't be learned. The secretary has been beset recently by allegations of cronyism and favoritism. Earlier this month, two Democratic senators, Patty Murray of Washington and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, sent a letter to President Bush urging him to request Mr. Jackson's resignation, arguing that the distraction has made him ineffective.

Mr. Jackson has consistently denied wrongdoing."

This is excellent news. (For background, see here.) On the other hand, much as it delights me to see Jackson leave office, it's a pretty bad time not to have a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:

"The news is a setback for the Bush administration and its efforts to combat the housing and mortgage mess. HUD, usually out of the spotlight, has been at the heart of the administration's attempts to ease problems for homeowners. Although Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has taken the lead on many initiatives, Mr. Jackson has been a partner on many, including programs such as Hope Now, an administration-backed industry plan to loosen the terms on hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages.

HUD also runs the Federal Housing Administration."

Take-home lesson: don't appoint dreadful people in the first place. Then they won't have to resign at the worst possible moment.

Chain Of Fools

by hilzoy

This is pretty extraordinary:

"Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation."

That's a pretty impressive list of problems, if I ask me. Could it possibly get worse? Well, yes. I left out the entire domestic violence angle, and the bit about the head of the company having a forged driver's license that would have made him ineligible for contracts if he hadn't gone into a diversion program for first offenders. That's a tangent. This is the main point:

Schadenfreude

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"In the tiny world of people who keep the books for Washington's multitude of political committees, Christopher J. Ward was considered the Republican "gold standard," in the words of a former co-worker -- one of the few people with so much expertise in election law that everyone wanted Ward's services.

The quiet workaholic is listed as treasurer for 83 GOP fundraising committees over the past eight years, according to Federal Election Commission records. In the past five years alone, he oversaw the accounting for committees that raised more than $400 million, $368 million of it at the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to a Washington Post review of those records.

But in late January, Ward, 39, was dismissed as the NRCC announced that it had found financial "irregularities" that "may include fraud." The FBI is investigating what appears to be "a significant amount of money" missing from the House Republican fundraising arm, according to a law enforcement official.

Now the dozens of GOP lawmakers who had clamored for Ward's help are apprehensively poring over his work along with FBI investigators, trying to learn more about the finances he oversaw. Several lawmakers have told Rep. K. Michael Conaway (Tex.), head of the NRCC's auditing subcommittee, that they think money may be missing from their political committees, as well. (...)

The first inkling of trouble came when Conaway took over the NRCC's auditing subcommittee in early 2007. A certified public accountant himself, Conaway said in interviews that he asked for something considered routine in the corporate world: an audit of NRCC books for the previous year by an outside firm and a meeting with the auditors.

"My expectation was that that frank meeting would take three minutes," Conaway said.

Instead, Ward kept putting him off, he said. "Okay, we'll get it for the next meeting, we'll get it for you," Ward said, according to Conaway, who became suspicious of what he described as Ward's "passive aggressive" behavior.

He said Ward avoided the issue for months, until January, when Ward told Conaway that he and GOP lawmakers would meet with auditors. But Ward canceled the meeting 30 minutes before it was scheduled to begin.

Republicans called the outside firm and found out that no audits had been done since 2003. After looking at the documents Ward had given them for each year, they determined that he had fabricated them, according to Davis and other officials with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

The NYT reports that "hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen."

Tom Cole, the head of the NRCC, has tried to reassure his members that this scandal "will not adversely affect fundraising in the long term." He'd better hope it doesn't. After all, the NRCC is going to have to defend dozens of seats left vacant by all those Republicans who have decided that it's time to head for greener pastures. And besides:

"The investigation into the NRCC's finances is another in a series of blows to House Republicans. The NRCC, for the first time in any political observer's memory, raised less money in 2007 than its counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The Democrats raised $67 million to $49 million for the Republicans.

At the end of January, the DCCC had more than $35 million cash in its accounts to the NRCC's $6.4 million."

And that was before they dropped $1.2 million on their failed attempt to hold onto Dennis Hastert's old seat.

Criminality: no fun at all when you're the victim, not the perpetrator.

***

UPDATE: Oops: it seems the NRCC has restated their figures, and their cash on hand is just $5.7 million. Also, they think Ward might have stolen around $1 million. If I were a donor, this would certainly make me feel confident.

Your Government In Action

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"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." (...)

On the date these e-mails were sent, HUD notified the housing authority that it had been found in violation of rules requiring that 5 percent of housing be accessible to disabled residents. The department later argued that because the authority refused to acknowledge it was in violation and to agree to a specific remedy, it was in violation of a broader agreement that put $50 million in federal funding in jeopardy."

Rick Renzi Indicted

by hilzoy

Reuters:

"Republican Rep. Richard Renzi of Arizona was indicted on 35 criminal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and official extortion stemming from land deals in his state, Justice Department officials said on Friday."

The indictment, if true, is pretty damning. Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker summarizes the charges:

"The charges boil down to this, basically. Renzi (who's already said he won't seek re-election) is charged with doing everything he can as a congressman to strong-arm others into buying land from his buddy James Sandlin -- Sandlin then allegedly kicked back sizable chunks of cash back to Renzi in a series of complicated financial transactions (thus the money laundering charge). The main details of these charges were reported by the Arizona papers and The Wall Street Journal last year.

Update: Yikes. In a completely separate matter, the indictment charges Renzi with a conspiracy to "embezzle and misappropriate client premiums [from his insurance company] to fund his congressional campaign.""

According to the indictment, the extortion connected with the land swap was pretty blatant: at one point, Renzi told one of the companies he was trying to pressure into buying a property from his friend (Sandlin): "No Sandlin property, no bill." I don't think it gets more obvious than that. (I should note here that I love legal language: the indictment describes this as being, among other things, "a scheme or artifice to defraud the United States of its intangible right to the honest services of RENZI, free from deceit, bias, self-dealing, and concealment".)

The misappropriation of insurance premiums also seems pretty appalling, according to the indictment: Renzi basically took over $400,000 in premiums without bothering to actually buy any insurance with them. (The money seems to have gone to his Congressional campaign.) When the people he had supposedly insured got cancellation notices, the indictment claims that he sent them fake insurance certificates from another company, a company that did not, in fact, issue insurance policies. (He says this was a clerical error.) The indictment also notes (p. 21, 61 e, f) that Renzi mailed two checks to people he had insured, one listed as "Donation Towards Claim Expenses" and the other as "Donation Towards Claim Settlement". That suggests that he might have been paying out claims to the people he had insured.

All in all, it's pretty astounding. If the allegations are true, I hope he has a nice long time to reflect on conscience, integrity, and the meaning of public service from his very own cell.

***

As Paul Kiel reminds us, the US Attorney who oversaw this investigation was Paul Charlton, one of the Attorneys fired in the, um, US Attorney firing scandal. From the WSJ:

"People briefed on the case said investigators in Arizona asked Washington for clearance -- among other tools -- for a wiretap of Mr. Renzi's telephones, a highly unusual step against a sitting member of Congress, months before Election Day. The wiretap eventually was approved, and was in place by late October, these people said.

On Oct. 26, just days before the election, two political Web sites carried the first public word of the probe. In subsequent news accounts, an unidentified Washington law-enforcement official described the matter as "preliminary." Few details emerged, but the leak disrupted prosecutors' wiretap.

Meanwhile, Mr. Renzi, first elected to Congress in 2002, was fighting to hold on to his seat. In September, President Bush hosted a fund-raiser in Scottsdale on his behalf. About the same time Mr. Charlton was added to a list of prosecutors "we should now consider pushing out," wrote Mr. Gonzales's then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, in a Sept. 13, 2006, email to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers."

What an unfortunate series of coincidences. Stranger still, when the investigation was made public, one of Renzi's aides called Charlton to ask about it; Charlton reported that contact to the DoJ, as required, but oddly enough, the DoJ report of that contact was left out of the document dumps the DOJ made in response to various Congressional requests.

Politics As Usual: Who Engages In Voter Supression Again?

One of the strongest objections to the Clinton candidacy is that it represents an unhealthy continuation of politics as usual.  Clinton's supporters in Nevada exhibit this in their recently filed lawsuit in which they attempt to destroy a voting procedure they helped create once it becomes apparent that it won't help Clinton.  In a process worked on since March, the Democratic party designed a number of at-large caucus locations on the Las Vegas Strip. 

A lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court seeks to stop the Democratic Party from holding caucus meetings at nine Strip hotels, which would diminish the influence of casino workers and hamper Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign.

The complaint, with the state teachers union and some party activists as plaintiffs, came as Obama accepted the endorsement of the Culinary Union. The timing seemed designed to cloud the good buzz from his campaign, which could only help Sen. Hillary Clinton’s efforts in the state.

The lawsuit claims that those voting in at-large precincts being held on the Strip would have too much weight compared with those voting at their polling places, violating the equal protection law of the U.S. Constitution. It also claims the at-large precincts violate state statute in the way they were drawn.

State Democratic Party officials disputed the lawsuit’s contentions.

“This has been a fully transparent process,” party spokeswoman Kirsten Searer said. “These rules have been approved by the Democratic National Committee and the campaigns have been fully informed throughout this process, which started in May.”

The party decided to set up polling places at the nine casinos to accommodate those working on the Strip.

But Lynn Warne, president of the Nevada State Education Association, noted that janitors who have to open schools in which caucus meetings take place will be unable to participate if that is not their polling place.

“Why are extraordinary accommodations being made for people on Strip but not the other workers?” she said.

She acknowledged that she did not approach the state party about the problem.

“We’re approaching them now,” she said.

The Nevada State Education Association has not endorsed any candidate, Warne said.

The other plaintiffs are Dwayne Chesnut, John Cahill, Vicky and John Birkland, and Patricia Montgomery.

Some of them were active backers of Sen. Dina Titus’ 2006 bid for governor. Titus, of Las Vegas, has endorsed Clinton.

Mark Ferrario, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, would not comment on how he got the clients, other than to say they care about the fairness of the caucus process.

--Las Vegas Sun

The institutional plaintiff is the  Nevada State Education Association.  It has committed to not formally endorse any candidate, but its high level members have endorsed Clinton.  The NSEA's deputy executive director--Debbie Cahill--formed Clinton's Nevada Women’s Leadership Council.  Her husband, John Cahill is an individual plaintiff in the suit. 

The rules for the at-large locations were agreed to unanimously by the delegates to the Nevada Democratic Party on 3/31/2007.  Four of the six named plaintiffs (Vicki Birkland, John Birkland, Dwayne Chesnut and John Cahill) attended that meeting and voted for the plan.  The suit was filed only two days after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama. 

The campaign's official response can be found here:

Hillary Clinton's Nevada chairman Rory Reid traveled to Reno with her today. Asked what he knew about the lawsuit before it was filed, he simply said he'd heard chatter about people being angry at the unfairness of the at-large precincts. But he denied the Clinton campaign had anything to do with its filing.

"Nevada is a small state and sometimes people are inclined to always try and connect the dots," he said. "But this shouldn't be a process story. It should be a story about whether the process is fair."

Reid said the campaign hasn't read the lawsuit, but that the campaign will follow whatever the judge decides.

Asked about the lawsuit Clinton said:

"I know about the lawsuit. I hope it can be resolved by the courts and by the state party. Obviously, we want as many people as possible to participate."

In a later interview, I asked Clinton again about the lawsuit. She repeated her criticism of the caucus process, that it leaves too many people out and said she wants as many people as possible to participate. Does she support the lawsuit?

"I have no opinion on the lawsuit."

Does she have an opinion on the at-large precincts as a way to make the process more fair?

"I don't. I just don't know."

Essentially, this is yet another example of why election decisions absolutely have to be made before you know exactly who the rules are going to help and hurt.  The plaintiffs were perfectly fine with the rules when they thought it would help Clinton.  Now that it looks to help Obama, they are going to court to destroy the procedure they themselves helped create.   Pure slime, which is to say: politics as usual.   

 

Faking It At FEMA

by hilzoy

A couple of weeks ago, in one of the many stories I didn't blog about at the time, FEMA held a fake press conference in which all the questions were asked not by actual reporters, but by FEMA staff pretending to be reporters. In the aftermath, FEMA"s director for external affairs resigned, and said that it was all a mistake:

"John "Pat" Philbin, the now former director of external affairs for FEMA, told CBS News that he should have stopped the press conference that the agency held last week without any media present.

“I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening,” he told CBS News in a telephone interview.

Philbin himself was heard off-camera asking Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, his boss, a question. He now says he feels terrible about what happened adding that the FEMA press office was under considerable pressure to get information on the California fires out to the press and was working on little sleep.

“I can definitively tell you that there were no discussions or conversations about setting up a fake news conference.”

Philbin said that Adm. Johnson, the second-in-command at the agency, did not realize it was FEMA staffers and not reporters who were asking questions, despite the fact that Johnson called on members of the FEMA staff by name during the press conference.

“I am not aware that he knew what was happening and all of sudden staff were asking questions,” Philbin said. “When the staff began asking questions I should have intervened and I didn’t.”"

This sounded a bit dodgy to me at the time -- for instance, it's a bit odd for Philbin to say "When the staff began asking questions I should have intervened and I didn’t" about an occasion when he himself was one of the staff asking questions, unless he normally has to "intervene" to keep himself from doing things, the way Dr. Strangelove has to intervene to keep his own arm from strangling him. It turns out that it was. CBS got a photo of the event, and identified the people in it. Here's the photo:

And here's CBS' description of who's in it:

"At the podium on the left is Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, the second in command at FEMA. (...)

Identified in the photo are staff members that Johnson works closely with on a daily basis.

From left to right: Nathaniel Fogg, Counselor to the Director and Deputy Director; John "Pat" Philbin, former Director of External Affairs; Michael Widomski, Public Affairs Specialist; Eric Heighberger, Special Assistant, Office of the Administrator; Cindy Taylor (in tan suit), Communications Deputy Director; Dan Shulman (red tie), Director of Legislative Affairs; Debbie Wing (curly blond hair), Media Response Liaison; Aaron Walker (back to camera), National Spokesman."

Unless Vice Admiral Johnson has some sort of serious cognitive defect that prevents him from knowing who he works with on a daily basis, the idea that he just didn't know what was going on doesn't hold water. Moreover, it's not as though the room was full of reporters on the one hand, and staffers on the other, and suddenly -- who knew? -- the staffers started asking questions. Of the people present, only two -- the small heads above the blonde curly hair of Debbie Wing -- are not identified by CBS as FEMA staffers. I suppose they might be reporters, but since FEMA only gave reporters 15 minutes' notice that there was going to be a press conference at all, even that number of reporters seems unlikely. They might also be FEMA staffers whom CBS either could not identify, or who did not work with Vice Adm. Johnson "on a daily basis." [UPDATE: No reporters were present. H/t Gary.]

So unless we are to believe that all these FEMA staffers found themselves in a room full of FEMA staffers they knew and worked with, and at most two journalists, sat down in the chairs where journalists normally sit, and asked the questions that journalists normally ask, all without noticing a thing, I don't see how we can conclude that this is anything other than a deliberately staged fake press conference about which FEMA staffers subsequently lied.

Not that that's anything new; it's just that every so often I think it's important to keep track even of the smaller examples of this administration's mendacity. Because in an administration that had genuinely introduced a new moral tone" into Washington, as Bush promised to do, people would know that to pull a stunt like this would cost them their jobs whether or not anyone found out about it.