Federal government. Washington at work might be considered an oxymoron by those more pessemistic than I, but I've always been surprised at just how well Washington does work. Things get done, not always the things we personally want and not always in the order we'd judge prudent, yet this great machine that is America runs and it runs 365 days a year and it runs when the World Trade Center comes down.

Amazing, truly amazing.

• Didn’t Martha Go to the Slammer for This?
  As it turned out, Martha did indeed get carted off to the clink, amid cheers from the hating those rich folks crowd and boos from those who saw her as a high-profile victim.
• Resurrect J. Edgar Hoover
  He wasn’t a perfect guy. He was gay in a time when gay meant nothing more than high-spirited merriment and he angered his share of presidents. All of them, actually.
• Congress, America’s Tajikistan
  I am fascinated by a quote from Donald Rumsfeld. The Donald has just been to Tajikistan and, in talks with the Tajik foreign minister, worried about the money generated by opium poppies coming from Afghanistan through Tajikistan on their way to other markets.
• Driver’s License, American Express and National ID
  It’s an absolute laugh that Americans continue to see a National Identity Card as a huge, dark, big-brothery menace. Casually allowing their e-mails and phone calls to be monitored, unbothered by the feds tracing down their bank transactions, ready and willing to give up all kinds of information (including photo ID and, in some states, fingerprints) in order to get a driver’s license, Americans go ballistic when national ID is proposed.
• A Constitutional Right to Thievery and Deceit
  All you need do is A) be a member of Congress and B) keep all the paperwork of your misdeeds in your Senate or House office, including the computer.
• It’s Never About What It’s About
  Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives was reported to have been ‘white hot’ with President Bush on Air Force One coming back from a Chicago meeting.
• Taxes Are No Longer About Income For Government
  The myth is that taxes support government’s ability to provide essential services. Further, the myth would have us believe that tax burdens are distributed equitably, everyone doing their share.
• A Leak in Everything, That's How the Light Gets In
  It’s an age-old profession, turning in the boss. But we are seldom personally allied with the turners-in, because most of us are fully booked by the day-to-day responsibilities of our own lives and jobs.
• Needing the Cash To Keep On Needing the Cash
  But we don’t have those campaign limits today. The Supreme Court threw them out. Claiming free speech violations, the Court gave us the most expensive speech on the face of the planet.
• Whoa Now, Let's Back Up a Bit
  Is there a collective consciousness from the days before September eleventh?
• Hacked To Death, New Notes On the New Terrorism
  Tapping away on a keyboard, deep within the maze of a Muslim city, Omar has just walked in to Homeland Security’s documents archives.
• The Smoke and Mirrors Behind the Smoke and Mirrors
  Lots of posturing going on as those embarrassing fiscal numbers the Congress dutifully avoided crunching all year are coming down to the wire.
• Vaudeville and the Great White Way Comes to Washington
  Hang up your tap-shoes, boys, we don’t need another ‘office’ of anything. Second thing you got wrong is naming it for ‘public integrity.’ We have run-of-the-mill integrity amongst the run-of-the-mill public, it’s our sorry-assed elected officials who’ve crossed the Rubicon.
• Re-Defining Exclusive
  This present administration, indeed this entire government of both political parties, has come to be exclusive in the most elemental definition of the word. It ain’t pretty.
• Trade Gaps, Tax Cuts and Deficits, Details at 11
  Albert Einstein had a thing or two to say about infinity, but this particular wise quotation of Al’s has to do with what next? “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
• Eliminate the "State of the Union" Address? What's Left Then?
  It’s a comfort, stage managed or not, to see our president come into the Congress once a year to the Marine Band playing ‘Ruffles and Flourishes.’ Yeah, it’s theatre. Maybe we need a little theatre from time to time to re-establish in our minds the grandeur and magnificence of what is too often the partisan and vicious.
• The Man Offered Me Money, the Crook
  Tens, and probably hundreds, of legislators, staff of legislators, appointed officials and staff of appointed officials—at the highest levels of government—possibly and quite probably including White House staff, have been paid-off by this guy.
• Senator Proxmire and the Golden Fleece
  Fifty years ago a Wisconsin Senator by the name of William Proxmire took his seat in that hallowed chamber called the United States Senate and for the next 31 years no free-spender was safe.
• Circling the Wagons in Washington
  Vice is a handy word in the United States Senate, handier by the day it seems. In addition to the Webster definition designating an officer or an office that is second in rank or authority, it is also defined as moral weakness, a specific form of evildoing.
• Innocent is Nice, But Take a Hike
  Alarian Sami Amin al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, is the latest of the Justice Department’s failed cases against what they keep on claiming to be high profile terrorists.
• A Snowball in Hell
  Four members of the House of Representatives have taken it upon themselves to actually represent for a change
• Corporate Ethics vs Congressional Ethics, There Is a Difference
  There is a sense of absolute wrong about various corporate misdoings and yet, somehow a kind of natural entitlement to money-contributions in the Congress.
• Deeply Split By the Mid-Term Axe
  Makes me chuckle to pick up the paper and read a headline “Republicans Are Deeply Split Over How to Apportion New Tax Cuts”
• The First Shoe to Drop
  Ah well, what we’ve come to know and wait for is the first guilty plea. Smaller fish trade prison for bigger fish, it's the way of the oceans.
• We Tried “Limited Government” and it Failed
  A hundred years ago, Mark Twain said “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That was correct in his day and there has been a sharp decline in the intervening years.
• Leaky Government is the Safest Kind There Is
  When I look back on this presidency, or almost any that preceded it, I’m stunned by just how close we may have come to total disaster were it not for the leakers.
• Judiciary's Hilarious Take on Recusal
  Life is indeed stranger than fiction and, if you’re looking for laughs in the increasingly humorless politics of Washington, the Senate is a good place to look.
• A Correctly Chosen Nominee
  So, Sam Alito Jr. got the nod this time around and one cannot but wonder what races through a jurist's mind at such a moment.
• The Freedom of Speech Manipulated
  If there is a foundation stone to the edifice that is America, I guess it is freedom of speech and of the press.
• All in a Government Day's Work
  There’s a certain zeitgeist that conspires to land government embarrassments on the same day’s newspaper pages and yesterday was one of those.
• Second Term Syndrome
  I don’t know what it is about second terms. Maybe George The First was lucky not to have had one.
• I'd Love the Job, How About the Liability?
  Eight months, ten appearances, $50,000 in legal fees and countless sleepless nights later, Washington has stopped being fun any more.
• Insurance Coverage, Conveniently After the Fact
  Last time I had a home mortgage, my lender required natural disaster insurance that included every possibility short of war, and a life-insurance policy in his name as well.
• There's No Business Like No-Bidness
  Happy Days Are Here Again and There’s No Business Like No-Bid ness are heard in the halls of a Congress giddy with money.
• Our Constitution, Kicking Up Its Heels
  There’s just so much talk these days about what can or can’t be done interpreting the Constitution, that it’s as if we had no say at all beyond good old Tom Jefferson’s brilliant mind.
• If You Can't Change the Judgment, Change the Judge
  After nine years of obfuscation and delay and outright lies, Justice is asking for the replacement of the long-suffering judge who’s had to listen to all this clap-trap on the part of the Interior Department’s handling (or failing to handle) 260,000 Indian trust accounts.
• Elmore Leonard and the Supreme Court
  Read my lips folks; what an attorney argues for a client is not necessarily or even usually what he believes in his heart.
• Advocacy Trumps Philosophy
  There’s a mistaken view that nominee John Roberts’ advocacy on behalf of his various clients tells us something useful about how he will acquit himself as a justice on the nation’s highest court.
• Too Ready for Too Long to Back Down Now
  My inbox exploded with e-mails this morning as perhaps yours did.
• Another Paranoia Presidency
  George Bush is the back-slapping, joke-telling, nickname-giving antithesis of the dour Richard Nixon.
• Any Old Road Will Do
  Everywhere you look these days someone is putting together a ‘roadmap’ for solving this or that issue.
• A Woman Standing Down Requires Women Standing Up
  The fifty-percent of the American population that is women is going to have to stand up and be counted in the run-up to two Supreme Court nominations.
• Exactly What Is It You Guys Do?
  Does it make you sleep better at night to know that these high-profile government and military organizations, all with ‘intelligence’ prominently displayed in their titles, are depending upon a rug-merchant for their fieldwork?
• Picking Up Our Marbles and Going Home
  Strange things happen to those ordinary twerps who wrangle their way into the House of Representatives.
• Bad Tax Policy Strikes Again
  I’ve twice in my life wrangled with the Internal Revenue Service and both times we went to court and once I won and once lost.
• Send a Surrogate to Prison
  Lots of people off the hook. Much covering of tracks.
• Tangled Webs
  The White House is going ballistic over Newsweek’s article alleging abuse of the Koran by interrogators in various prisons where terrorist suspects are held.
• Homeland Security's Insecurity
  Dick Falkenrath, former deputy homeland security advisor (whatever the hell that means), says ‘the federal government currently lacks the ability to generate and broadcast specific, geographically tailored evacuation instructions’ across the country.
• The Case of the Timid Prosecutor
  I try and try to understand what Patrick J. Fitzgerald has in his mind as a Special Prosecutor, but then I was never able to figure out Ken Starr either.
• Bolton Might Be Bright or He Might Be Nuts
  I don’t know John Bolton, but I know his type and that he probably has a very high IQ, thinks himself right when he’s thought something through and is aggressive, perhaps too aggressive making it happen.
• Doesn’t Cost All That Much to Influence Your Senator or Representative
  It’s stunning how cheap influence comes in Washington.
• And You Thought Social Security Was a Hard Sell
  John Linder, a Georgia Republican member of the House of Representatives wants to get rid of the Income Tax.
• Spying is a Risky Business
  It seems we stiffed some Soviet era spies after the communist countries became less interesting and CIA attention turned elsewhere.
• What is it With the Clothes?
  Robin critiqued Condoleezza Rice’s choice of clothing at her Wiesbaden Army Airfield tour on Wednesday and (apparently) found it soaked in sexual meaning.
• Sometimes You Just Gotta Laugh . . .
  . . . because otherwise it hurts too much to read what’s actually going on inside what passes for Homeland Security.
• Privatizing? Maybe Not All Bad.
  Very interesting story a couple of days ago about Lockheed getting the contract for providing flight services that were the territory of the FAA.
• My Gut Seldom Lies
  Not to say it’s never been wrong, but over a number of decades my gut has a pretty good track record judging people, places, things and stuff.
• Quick to Denounce the Wrong Issue
  No grass growing under Senator Grassley’s feet as he moves quickly to stamp out a tax break for façade easements.
• Coronating a King
  They don’t do it all that often in England, but I wouldn’t be surprised if settling the ever-waiting Prince Charles into the throne would cost less than the $150 million or so George W is going to spend on January 19th.
• Time For the Landscape Architects
  It’s past time for my profession to be invited in to ameliorate the “bunkerization” of Washington, as well as our embassies and corporate entities around the world.
• The Have-Nots
  We call them disadvantaged, a word more comforting than poor, a word that makes us somehow not responsible, able to discuss their plight or more often not-discuss it, dispassionately
• Education
  By international comparison, our primary and secondary schools fall far below the quality of many developed nations and yet our universities are recognized as among the best in the world
• Drugs
  Aside from the fact that national prohibitions are proven by a long and dismal history not to work and aside from the fact that a huge amount of capital, both financial and human, is wasted on such efforts, the striving in the direction of drug control is actually harmful to its solution
• The CIA
  The Central Intelligence Agency appears to be out of control, answerable to no one from a practical standpoint and even its funding is "black," that is, hidden from all public disclosures
• Lobbyists
  The problem with lobbyists is not their point of view, but the financial contribution that senators and representatives have skillfully allowed them to use in the furtherance of their goals
• Gun Control
  Every public poll in recent times shows over sixty-percent of the population in favor of gun control
• Abortion
  Abortion is a hot-button issue, one that touches deeply the innermost questions of man's religious and moral beliefs and government is at its worst when it argues its right to legislate such matters

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