Cabinet turnover (all inclusive)

[BFrank]

Too many to keep track of in individual threads. I thought we might as well consolidate and let it fly in one place.

+++

12/3/04
Thompson to Leave Cabinet, Rumsfeld Stays
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — scarred by postwar violence and prison scandal in Iraq (news - web sites) — accepted President Bush (news - web sites)'s request Friday that he remain for the second-term Cabinet. Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Secretary Tommy Thompson resigned, warning as he left of a possible terror attack on the nation's food supply.

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," Thompson said as announced his departure. "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."
>>>For the life of ME, I can't understand why a cabinet official would make a statement like this as he's leaving office!


Thompson's resignation broadened the exodus that has emptied more than half of Bush's Cabinet before he takes the oath of office for a second term. In all, eight members of the 15-person Cabinet have said they will leave.

The decision to keep Rumsfeld resolved a major question about the post-election reshuffling in the Bush administration. In an Oval Office meeting, Bush informed Rumsfeld he considered him the right man for the job, and the Pentagon (news - web sites) chief — widely thought to want to keep his job, at least for a time — agreed to remain, a senior administration official said.
>>>Yep, let's keep the most inept where they are.

A former congressman, as well as White House chief of staff and defense chief under President Ford, Rumsfeld kept Bush's confidence despite U.S. deaths in Iraq that have spiraled above 1,250. A hawkish, sometimes acid-tongued official, Rumsfeld has a long history of influential support from Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) from their days together in the Ford administration.

Meanwhile, a longtime Bush loyalist from Texas — Medicare chief Mark McClellan, who also has served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) and is the brother of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan — is considered to be Bush's top choice to replace Thompson.
>>>It's a family affair, after all!

[tippy]

>>"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," Thompson said as announced his departure. "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."<<

Geezus, please tell me that this story is really from The Onion.

[BFrank]

I wish ...

[BFrank]

(December 03, 2004 -- 11:59 PM EDT)
If there was ever a subject for the Sunday shows, certainly this is it.

By Kevin Drum's count there are seven cabinet secretaries now left standing. Four of them are at second-tier posts (Interior, Labor, HUD and VA) and another, Treasury Secretary Snow, is just (briefly) being kept around for humiliation value -- like the goofy kid in the club whose role and utility is to provide a ready target for the application of wedgies.

And that leaves Don Rumsfeld who, according to this report tonight on CNN, is not only still standing, but will keep standing probably for the rest of the Bush presidency ...

The official said the president asked Rumsfeld, 72, to stay during a weekly meeting on Monday because the nation is at war and he is the best person for the job. Rumsfeld has said he wants to finish his reforms at the Pentagon and continue overseeing the Iraq war and that country's hoped-for transformation.

And of all these people -- Powell, Ashcroft, Paige, Abraham, Thompson, Veneman, Evans -- does any of them hold a candle to Don Rumsfeld when it comes to the number of screw-ups, debacles and disasters that have happened on his watch?

I mean, it's not even close, is it?

One criticism of the president that loomed large in the last election -- and not just among Democrats but with many Republicans too -- was that this president either does not recognize or will not admit mistakes. And whichever it was, there was no accountability for them. In most cases those 'mistakes' people were talking about were ones under Rumsfeld's purview. And he would seem to be the only one -- certainly the only one of the principals -- that the president insists on keeping in place.

In this administration, the buck may not stop at the Oval Office, but the hard line against accountability sure does start there.


-- Josh Marshall

[BFrank]

December 3, 2004
Guest: Benjamin Wallace-Wells

STOP ME BEFORE I QUIT AGAIN!....My nominee for the best line in this morning's New York Times comes midway through a profile of Bernard Kerik:

When Mr. Kerik was appointed to a top job in the New York City Department of Correction in the mid-1990's, one official told the department's commissioner: 'Congratulations. You've just hired Rambo.'

Bernie Kerik gives good schtick. He's got a thick-necked, Sopranos kind of charm and a terrific tough guy biography — after his prostitute mom was killed, he dropped out of high school, became a military policeman, then a jail warden, and then a New York City cop, a charismatic, long-haired narc, whose rise through the ranks began after he was assigned to a detail as Rudy Giuliani's personal bodyguard.

So, fascinating guy. But is he really ready for his new gig, as Director of Homeland Security, leading a tender, evolving and urgently important government agency? His new job will require mastering the knotty bureaucracies and power structures of Washington. He's never worked in the capital. It will require him to be a nimble consumer of intelligence, deciding which threats warrant action for local police departments, when he has never before worked with intelligence. It will demand that Kerik figure out a way to fix our nation's porous borders (he's never dealt with immigration or border security) make sure our planes and transportation routes are safe (nope) and master the coordination of what were once 22 separate federal agencies, none of which he's ever worked for.

Bush, sensibly, gave Kerik a pre-hire tryout in the summer of 2002 in a gig that his experience prepped him much better for, training Iraqi police. So how'd Kerik do? Pretty poorly. Kerik's credited with upping the equipment of the forces, but he also neglected to run any background checks, meaning that, after Kerik left, the Iraqi police were so corrupt and insurgent-friendly that American leaders eventually demanded a purge. I write "after Kerik left" because he only stayed in Iraq for three months, leaving with no public announcement and for reasons which remain a mystery and which Newsday, among other outlets, has been trying to uncover ever since. The job, of course, was far from finished. In October, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi complained that the American training of his force was insufficient: "[The police's] capabilities are not complete and the situation is very difficult now in respect to creating the forces and getting them ready to face the challenges." That's not all Kerik's fault, but the problem he was assigned to fix probably deserved a stay of more than ninety days.

So what does Kerik have going for him? Mostly, his experience in New York. "As Mayor Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner," Bush said in nominating Kerik, "he had great success in reducing crime in New York City." But that's a little misleading. The dramatic reversal in the city's crime rate happened in the early nineties, when then-Commissioner Bill Bratton instituted computer models of crime, "broken-windows"-style community policing and focused enormous resources on particular neighborhoods and troublespots. (Also the crack epidemic ended). During this period, Kerik was a beat cop, Giuliani's bodyguard, and then a senior officer in the city's corrections department, in all of which he performed admirably. But he wasn't yet a department policy-maker, and it's a stretch to give Kerik much credit for the city's drop in crime. By all accounts Kerik did a competent job in his sixteen months running the NYPD, in 2001 and 2002, but he was hardly a reformer, or a legendary star.

Kerik was, of course, in office on September 11, and he deserves credit for sounding calm and brave on television in the days following the event. But what has been less reported, and is to my mind more telling, is what he did after 9/11. The police department at that point was in a tough spot: facing hundreds of retirements, a city in economic difficulty, skyrocketing homeland security requirements, and a federal government busy cutting its funding for local cops. And so what did Kerik do? He quit. He traded on his 9/11 celebrity, taking a fat contract to write his memoirs and, as he would do a year later in Iraq, left someone else to do the dirty work.

For liberals, there's a lot of other stuff to raise eyebrows about Bernie Kerik. He once worked as a security chief for the Saudi royal family's hospital system. He was one of the Bush campaign's most aggressive and irresponsible attack dogs, telling the press that if John Kerry were President, the U.S. would see another 9/11. And his nomination reeks of an attempt by the administration to permanently associate the GOP's connection with 9/11. But even for conservatives, it seems hard to understand what professional qualifications this man has for leading the nation's homeland defense. The President didn't mention Kerik's experience much yesterday in the short speech presenting him, choosing instead to focus on his "leadership" qualities. But the record doesn't give much evidence of leadership: he's prematurely quit the two biggest jobs he's ever been handed, just when they got difficult.

I've never met Kerik, and so perhaps there's something I've missed, some brilliant-fix-it-all plan for homeland security that explains why the Democrats appear, so far at least, to be supporting his nomination. But in the absence of such a plan, I hope the press and Senate put his record to some rigorous, tough-minded scrutiny as the confirmation process unfolds.

—Benjamin Wallace-Wells 4:12 PM

[BFrank]

(December 05, 2004 -- 11:41 PM EDT)

Kerik on critics of the war: "Political criticism is our enemies' best friend."

(As quoted in Newsday, Oct. 20, 2003)


-- Josh Marshall

[Dr Dave]

So where are we today? A Cabinet full of nutballs and martinets, plus Don Rumsfeld, who, like George W. Bush, has never made a mistake.

I think they're holding Snow in abeyance just in case the dollar really does take a big, sudden dive--as opposed to simply sinking quietly, which is what is happening now. Then they'll boot him to show that Bush has Done Something About The Dollar.

[BFrank]

Doesn't look like Snow has much time left (not that he did anything, anyway). But Andrew Card??? Since when is the "chief of staff" qualified to be Secretary of the Treasury?
Is ANYBODY in that cabinet qualified for his/her job?

+++

NY Times
December 6, 2004
Treasury Secretary Is Likely to Leave Soon
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 - President Bush has decided to replace John W. Snow as treasury secretary and has been looking closely at a number of possible replacements, including the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., Republicans with ties to the White House say.

With the White House having said on Friday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld would stay on for Mr. Bush's second term, Mr. Snow is the only secretary at a major cabinet department whose fate has not been publicly addressed. Administration officials and advisers had been signaling for weeks that Mr. Snow was likely to depart eventually but left open the possibility that he might stay on well into next year.

But in recent days, administration officials have been hinting that Mr. Snow will go sooner rather than later. And an adviser to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said on Sunday that a firm decision had been made to replace Mr. Snow as soon as Mr. Bush could settle on a successor.

Mr. Bush has already announced plans to thoroughly overhaul his cabinet. Eight cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft, have announced their resignations, and more, like Norman Y. Mineta, the transportation secretary, are expected to go in the next week or two.

Treasury secretary is a high-profile job, and one likely to be especially prominent in the next few years if Mr. Bush makes good on his pledge to press for big changes to Social Security and a rethinking of the tax code.

The White House has announced plans for an economic forum on Dec. 15 and 16 in Washington to focus attention on the president's second-term agenda, and administration officials have made no secret of their belief that they need a reconstituted economic team to sell Mr. Bush's plan on Capitol Hill and to voters.

Conservative interest groups and some other Republicans in Washington have been pressing the White House to consider Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas who was an economics professor before getting into politics.

The adviser to the White House said Mr. Gramm was under consideration, but that the prospects of him getting the job were unclear. Mr. Gramm is currently an executive with UBS, a securities firm.

Mr. Card, who was transportation secretary under the president's father, has been at Mr. Bush's side almost every working moment for four years, having been appointed chief of staff even before the disputed 2000 election was settled.

It was Mr. Card who whispered into Mr. Bush's ear on Sept. 11, 2001, that the nation was under a terrorist attack, and since then he has had a hand in nearly every big political and policy decision made by the White House.

Mr. Bush announced immediately after Election Day that Mr. Card would stay on as chief of staff, but Mr. Card is said by some Republicans to be very interested in the treasury job. Mr. Bush has already nominated several loyalists in White House staff positions to top cabinet posts, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, as secretary of state, and Alberto R. Gonzales, who would shift to attorney general from White House counsel.

Republicans who have spoken to administration officials said other candidates are also being considered to replace Mr. Snow, including Gerald L. Parsky, a wealthy lawyer and venture capitalist who served as an assistant treasury secretary in the Ford administration.

It is not clear how close Mr. Bush is to a decision on a replacement for Mr. Snow or if he has already made one.

Mr. Snow, an economist and formal railroad executive who was named treasury secretary two years ago after Mr. Bush ousted Paul H. O'Neill from the job, has deflected all questions in recent weeks about a possible departure, with he and his aides saying he serves at the pleasure of the president.

"The secretary views his service to the president as an honor and a privilege," said Robert Nichols, Mr. Snow's spokesman. Mr. Nichols added, "We don't comment on personnel speculation and rumors."

As speculation that Mr. Snow will leave has intensified, the White House, when asked about him by reporters, has pointedly declined to give him a public vote of confidence.

Mr. Snow has been a workhorse for the White House this year, selling Mr. Bush's economic plan nationwide during the presidential campaign and to Congress during legislative battles.

But he upset some White House officials with a remark this fall in Ohio, the most important battleground of the campaign and a state that had suffered especially intense economic woes in recent years, that job losses were a myth.

Mr. Snow later said he had been misinterpreted.

Under Mr. Bush, economic policy has been made largely within the White House, and cabinet secretaries, including Mr. Snow, have been primarily salesmen. But the president's plans for revising Social Security and the tax code give the next treasury secretary a chance to put an imprint on two of the most important economic issues facing the nation.

Mr. Bush plans to appoint a commission this month to suggest changes to the tax code and to deliver a report to the treasury secretary next year. Under Mr. Bush's plan, the treasury secretary would then make recommendations to the White House on how to proceed.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Have you ever heard Gramm talk?

I prefer Card.

I was wondering about Kerik myself. Homeland Security is 180,000 people strong, 22 agencies wide. He' supposed to run that?

As for Rummy, if he were to get the boot that would be an admission that maybe things in Iraq haven't worked out just right. That ain't happening.

[BFrank]

Phil Gramm....marble mouth?
Besides, his wife was on the Board of Directors of Enron when it collapsed. Could get sticky. (not that anyone cares anymore)

[BFrank]

(December 06, 2004 -- 02:01 AM EDT)

In the course of his confirmation hearings, Bernard Kerik may be able to shed some unique light on decision-making in the early days of the Iraq occupation.

Here's what interests me most.

In an article in the New York Daily News on May 16th 2003, Kerik confirmed that he'd been tapped to be the American in charge of the Iraqi Interior Ministry (formally, he'd be the chief 'advisor'). Principally, that meant he'd be in charge of domestic security and specifically in charge of standing up a new Iraqi police force. This was just after Bremer had arrived on the scene. And he told the Daily News he'd be leaving for Iraq within three days. As for how long he'd be in the country, he said he'd be in Iraq "in excess of six months, but no one really knows . . . as long as it takes to get the job done."

As Kerik suggested, six months seemed optimistic. In mid-July, according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Robert C. Orr, who the Pentagon had just sent as part of a fact-finding mission to Iraq, said that "former New York police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik, is training an Iraqi police force but his work won't be completed for at least another 18 months, and the need for help is urgent and immediate (italics added)."

If you review the newspaper reportage over the next couple months you'll see Kerik quoted in various articles about security and policing in Iraq. He even showed up in walk-along columns by the Post's Jim Hoagland and the Times' Thomas Friedman.

But little more than two months into his tour, just as Iraq was slipping the first few rungs down the ladder into chaos, something happened -- something that I've never seen explained.

Remember that on August 7th, the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad was bombed -- the first high-profile terrorist act since the war. Then on August 19th a truck bomb destroyed the UN compound in the Iraqi capital killing seventeen, including the head of the UN mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello.

Then, only a few days later, a few press reports noted for the first time -- in most cases just in passing -- that Kerik was preparing to leave the country. The earliest of these that I'm aware of came in a Times article by Dexter Filkins in which he notes in passing that Kerik was "wrapping up his tour in Iraq" and later that Kerik's "time here is to end in a week."

[ed.note: If there are earlier references to the timing of Kerik's departure I'm not aware of them. But if you are, I'd be obliged if you could let me know.]

Then just a few days later, on August 29th, a bomb exploded outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf killing upwards of a hundred people including Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of SCIRI.

Tracking down the precise date of Kerik's departure is difficult. But he apparently left the country either two or three days later. The first word of Kerik's departure that I could find comes in a September 3rd article by John Tierney in the Times, which reported on the truck bombing of the central office on the Iraqi police in Baghdad. In that report Tierney notes that the leader of the effort to reconstitute the Iraqi police force had been "Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner [who] finished his three-and-a-half-month tour here this week."

The question, I suppose, pretty much asks itself: what happened? Kerik arrived in Iraq with a rather open-ended committment. By his own account, it should have carried him at least through the end of 2003. There was even some suggestion that it would keep him in the country through 2004. Yet just after the first two major terrorist attacks in Baghdad reports surfaced that he was about to leave. And only a week later, after major terrorist incidents numbers three and four, he was gone.

At the time, the Pentagon and Kerik (or rather people speaking on his behalf) made rather unconvincing claims that Kerik's departure was simply part of the original plan.

As TPM noted a week after Kerik left, the Pentagon said the Kerik was actually supposed to leave in the summer and "extended his stay to finish his ongoing projects." That was a bit hard to figure since that would have meant his entire tenure in the country would have lasted only a few weeks. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Kerik's employer, Giuliani Partners, said the plan had always been that he'd only stay in the country for 90 days. But that of course directly contradicted Kerik's own statements.

We now know that the many of the key security-related decisions that have haunted the occupation for the last year and a half happened in those first few months. Kerik also left at a time when there seemed to be plenty of police work to go around in Iraq.

So again, what happened?

-- Josh Marshall

[tippy]

balk, balk, balk

Tippy has turned into a chicken!

[tippy]

balk, balk, balk, balk, balk

[Dr Dave]

BALK PENALTY: The ball is dead, and each runner shall advance one base without liability to be put out, unless the batter reaches first on a hit, an error, a base on balls, a hit batter, or otherwise, and all other runners advance at least one base, in which case the play proceeds without reference to the balk.

When the going gets tough, Berik gets going--out the door. He did it in NYC, too.

[groover]

Originally Posted by BFrank

Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Secretary Tommy Thompson resigned, warning as he left of a possible terror attack on the nation's food supply.

"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," Thompson said as announced his departure. "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."
>>>For the life of ME, I can't understand why a cabinet official would make a statement like this as he's leaving office!

I think he also said "I can't believe the terrorists haven't thought of this yet! God, it would be so easy to do! If I were a terrorist, that's the first thing I'd try! You could kill millions with little cost or effort! Osama, are you taking notes?"

Thanks, Tommy! Good to know that Republicans in public service are so concerned about looking out for the average American! I'm sure Bush, in his great wisdom, will replace him with someone at least as conscientious and competent.

Fox News kept playing this on Saturday, and then following with Bush's response, a vague platitude, avoiding mention of the food-poisoning issue brought up by Thompson. Damn, that W's a slick one!

Maybe Thompson didn't get the memo saying to ease up on the fear-mongering post-election?

[BFrank]

(December 07, 2004 -- 12:51 AM EDT)
More to consider ...

In prepared remarks praising the new nominee last week, President Bush ranged across the whole of Kerik's career, from his days as a beat cop in Times Square, to his hands-on work at Ground Zero on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet the President was oddly — and utterly — silent on Kerik's work in Baghdad, and perhaps for good reason. Though Kerik presided over the hiring of thousands of recruits for the reconstituted Iraqi police force, most were hired without background checks, and many turned out to be hardened criminals. As a result, some 30,000 of them, or roughly 25 percent of the entire force, are now reportedly being let go, with the U.S. footing the bill for $60 million in severance payments.

There's also Kerik's never-fully explained role in the 1990s as head of a New York City Corrections Department foundation that was secretly funded with roughly $1 million of tobacco company rebates from departmental purchases of cigarettes using city funds. Kerik's hand-picked treasurer for the foundation, Frederick Patrick, is now serving a one-year prison sentence after admitting in court that he pilfered nearly $140,000 of the foundation's money to pay for collect-call phone sex from inmates.

And heck, that's from the New York Post ...

-- Josh Marshall

[BFrank]

Up for ongoing Cabinet rotation.

New Energy chief, anyone?

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Bush Picks Bodman for Energy Secretary

By Mark Stencel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 10, 2004; 11:40 AM

President Bush today named Samuel W. Bodman, a business executive and former professor who has served as the top deputy to the departments of treasury and commerce, to lead U.S. energy policy and nuclear weapons programs as the next energy secretary.

Bodman has served as deputy treasury secretary since February. If his nomination is confirmed by the Senate, Bodman would replace Spencer Abraham, the former Michigan senator who announced his resignation as energy secretary on Nov. 15.

"In academics, in business and in government, Sam Bodman has shown himself to be a problem solver who knows how to set goals and he knows how to reach them," Bush said in remarks at the White House today. "He will bring to the Department of Energy a great talent for management and the precise thinking of an engineer."

As energy secretary, Bodman would inherit a billet of complex and controversial issues, including the Bush administration's push to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. efforts to stop the international spread of nuclear weapons, and an ongoing debate about plans to build a permanent repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Bodman also would become the lead person in the administration's drive for comprehensive energy legislation, which has stalled in Congress because of environmental concerns and disagreements about proposed tax incentives for nuclear energy production.

In his remarks today, Bodman praised Bush's energy proposals, which he said promise "affordable, reliable and secure energy supplies through conservation, investment in new technology, and finding and producing new domestic sources of energy."

At the Treasury Department, Bodman's focus included operations at the Internal Revenue Service, including a Bush administration proposal to use private debt collectors to pursue billions of dollars in unpaid federal taxes.

Bodman came to Treasury from the Commerce Department, where he was deputy to Secretary Donald L. Evans. Previously, he was chief executive of Cabot Corp., a Boston industrial products firm, and chief operating officer of FMR Corp., the holding company for Fidelity Investments. Bodman, who has chemical engineering degree from Cornell University, also taught that subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Mr. President, the job as energy secretary in many ways combines all aspects of my life's professional work," Bodman said.

Bush's nominee made headlines a year ago, when a trade journal obtained a transcript of remarks in which Bodman said the Commerce Department had little power or budget to have a significant aid the ailing manufacturing sector. Bodman's comments at a June 2003 manufacturing symposium were controversial because Bush had charged his department with helping U.S. manufacturers, whose job losses loomed as a major issue in the presidential campaign.

"I will tell you, it is very hard for this government to have a vision on anything," Bodman said, responding to a comment on the government's vision for manufacturing. "We are totally stove-piped, and we live within these compartments. This is not by way of a complaint. This is not by way of an excuse. It is by way of a fact."

Bodman added, "Congress likes it this way, and making organizational changes in the federal government is, as many of you know, a massive undertaking, a several-year job. It is not a several-month job. It is a several-year job, and so you don't do it very often, because it's certainly not worth it."

Before today's announcement, Bodman had been mentioned as a possible successor to White House chief economic adviser Stephen Friedman.

With Bodman's selection, the president has only one remaining Cabinet-level vacancy to fill: the secretary of health and human services. Tommy G. Thompson, the current secretary, announced his plans to resign a week ago. Nine Cabinet members have resigned since Bush reelection last month. The remaining six Cabinet members are keeping their jobs.

[Gentle Giant]

I have to say that while I normally wouldn't care too strongly about who is picked to be Energy secretary, in this case I'm pretty excited because I know the guy.

For a little over a year in the early 90s, I was the writer for the Corporate Communications/Investor Relations department of Cabot Corporation, a global manufacturer of specialty chemicals (nothing too scary: carbon black, which gives strength and hue to tires; fumed silica; tantalum - I don't even remember all their uses, but it's like the BASF commercial: we don't make the balls, we make them bouncier; that's Cabot's business, too).

Anyway, during that time, Sam Bodman was the CEO of Cabot and as the writer of several of his speeches and other high-level corporate communications pieces, I had numerous opportunities to interact with and observe him.

I don't know the cat's political leanings or anything, or how he'll be as Energy secretary, but I'll tell you one thing: he's one of the most brilliant people I've known and without question the finest CEO I've ever come into contact with. He has zero tolerance for bullshit, sees the big picture, and makes only informed decisions.

The main reason I left the company (for a 4-year stint at public broadcaster WGBH) was because I hated my supervisor and just didn't feel comfortable in either the suit-and-tie corporate environment or the chemicals industry. But I regretted leaving the opportunity to work with Bodman.

[BFrank]

The Rice "No"s:
Akaka, Hawaii
Bayh, Ind.
Boxer, Calif.
Byrd, W.Va.
Dayton, Minn.
Durbin, Ill.
Harkin, Iowa
Kennedy, Mass.
Kerry, Mass.
Lautenberg, N.J.
Levin, Mich.
Reed, R.I.
Jeffords, Vt.


OTOH, it looks like Gonzales faces a tougher vote for Atty Gen.

[Dr Dave]

Douglas Feith, co-architect with Paul Wolfowitz of our Iraq Policy, is leaving in June. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Feith for his service to the United States, and to inquire as to his whereabouts once he has left government, so that I might encounter him on the street and rub feces into the various orifices of his head.

[Root Doctor]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

Douglas Feith, co-architect with Paul Wolfowitz of our Iraq Policy, is leaving in June. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Feith for his service to the United States, and to inquire as to his whereabouts once he has left government, so that I might encounter him on the street and rub feces into the various orifices of his head.

I'm guessing he's about ready to be indicted in the Plame case.

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Root,

No way.

He's sheduled to get one of those Medal of Freedom thingies that Tenet got.

[Root Doctor]

Originally Posted by Darryl G. Thomas

Root,

No way.

He's sheduled to get one of those Medal of Freedom thingies that Tenet got.

If he's indicted, Darryl, he gets two of them.

[BFrank]

... and then appointed Secretary of Defense (if/when Rummy leaves)