your tax dollars hard at work. . .

. . . once again lining Bush family pockets.

President George W. Bush’s brother, Neil, is in the news again. You remember Neil: Neil, whose Silverado Savings and Loan cost US taxpayers over $1 Billion in bailout baksheesh. Neil, who drew $300,000 in salary from a company called Apex Energy that never found any energy to sell, and went belly up, defaulting on its federally backed SBA loans. Neil, who used family connections to start Ignite! Learning, a company that makes the Curriculum on Wheels (known as “the Cow”—I swear!), which is basically a modern-day AV cart that plays a dumbed-down version of social studies to middle school students.

The Cow teaches the Seminole Wars as a football game between “the Jacksons” and “the Seminoles” (witty, I know!), and recounts the Continental Congress in rap form:

It was 55 delegates from 12 states
Took one hot Philadelphia summer to create
A perfect document for their imperfect times
Franklin, Madison, Washington -- a lot of the cats
Who used to be in the Continental Congress way back.

(I promise you, I did not make that up.)

Ignite! got a big boost last year when Neil’s mother, Barbara, donated six of the $3,800 Cows to Texas schools that were populated primarily with children that had to flee the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Shortly after accepting the gifts Cows, the schools got an e-mail from Neil, informing them that they would have to pay an annual $1,000 “maintenance charge” if they wanted to keep using their “gifts.”

No problem! The New York Times is reporting that the Katy School District west of Houston has used a quarter-million dollars of state and federal Katrina relief money to buy more Cows from Ignite! (!)

But that’s not what got Neil back in the news. As the Times reveals:

The inspector general of the Department of Education has said he will examine whether federal money was inappropriately used by three states to buy educational products from a company owned by Neil Bush, the president’s brother.

John P. Higgins Jr., the inspector general, said he would review the matter after a group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, detailed at least $1 million in spending from the No Child Left Behind program by school districts in Texas, Florida and Nevada to buy products made by Mr. Bush’s company. . . .

(I suppose this would be a good point to make some joke about Cows milking us.)

Of course, it’s not just that Neil has exploited his connections to once again suck on the federal teat (no more cow jokes, I promise), his educational products also just plain suck:

Jay Spuck, a former curriculum director for the [Houston Independent School] district, has criticized spending on the Ignite product, saying: “It’s not helping kids at all. It’s not helping teachers. The only way Neil has gotten in is by his name.”

But, perhaps I am being a bit shortsighted, criticizing the Bush clan just because money for No Child Left Behind isn’t going to American children. It is quite possible that Neil’s share is helping kids abroad, like the young Thai and Chinese girls that apparently just show up at Neil’s door whenever he travels to their countries. . . .

Like I said up top: your tax dollars hard at work.

(cross-posted to Daily Kos)

well of course they are. . .

Weapons for Iraqis Are Missing, Study Says
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 — The Defense Department cannot account for 190,000 weapons, including more than 110,000 AK-47 rifles, issued to Iraqi security forces, a new report by government investigators says.

The study, issued last Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, also said that because of missing and incomplete records, the United States military cannot confirm that Iraqi security forces received 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets.

The report is not the first to criticize Defense Department procedures for tracking equipment distributed to Iraqi forces by the department. A report last October by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found major discrepancies in American military records involving hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces.

Since 2003, the United States has spent about $19.2 billion to equip and train Iraqi forces, the G.A.O. report said, and recently the Defense Department requested another $2 billion.

Now, that’s the whole story as published in today’s New York Times. I was just alerted to the story by a BBC radio report. But, I notice that the GAO report was released last Tuesday—almost a week ago—so, I gotta ask, why are we just hearing about this?

I also gotta ask: Hey, Congress, you gonna do anything about this? Henry? Nancy? Harry?

And, I’ve also gotta ask: When will we ever learn?

going, going. . . Gonzo!

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate thinks that AG Alberto Gonzales actually, sorta, kinda, did a bang-up job, from the administration’s point of view, when he stammered and fumphered through a day’s worth of evasion testimony on Thursday. Her rationale is that by refusing to answer practically anything asked of him, by behaving with a sort of churlish arrogance, he was confirming the over-arching view of the Bush White House, often given the overly legitimating name of “the theory of the unitary executive,” but more appropriately summed up by the quote, "l’état, c’est moi."

I, of course, think Abu-G looked like an idiot—which is why I both agree and disagree with Lithwick. Yes, from the standpoint of the loyal Bushies—as we now know they are called (believe it or not, to them, that’s a compliment)—Gonzo did sort of, kind of hit a home run. . . but he hit it by taking one for the team.

By appearing on Capitol Hill to be every inch the un-prepared, in-over-his-head hack that he might in “real life” actually be, the Attorney General has allowed everyone—leading Republicans included—to chalk up the whole US attorney purge scandal as a story about incompetence. . . shall we say, unitary incompetence.

Now, at least as far as this story gets told at this time, Gonzales must resign because he is a bad manager or an ineffective bureaucrat—or maybe even because he is a bit of a jerk—but few of his newest detractors are even intimating that maybe, just maybe, Gonzales was doing his job (politicize the US attorneys to stop corruption probes and manipulate elections) as instructed by his bosses in the executive branch.

That would be Rove. That would be Cheney. And yes, that would be the singular, solitary, unitary President George W. Bush.

outsourcing responsibility

Since I started this blog, I have many a time touched upon the Bush Administration’s great love of outsourcing, thinking that they must see it as a win-win: win #1 being that they get to line the pockets of friends, cronies, and campaign contributors with taxpayer dollars, and win #2 being that, should anything go wrong (should anything go wrong—doesn’t that now sound hysterical?), the administration can always say, hey, it’s not us, we didn’t screw up, we were let down by the folks we trusted. Be it Medicare drug “reform,” Iraq security and reconstruction, Hurricane Katrina—both the before and the after—homeland “security,” and many, many more, the Bush-Cheney gang has sold America a bill of goods without a warranty, a receipt, or a consumers’ bill of rights (or any other Bill of Rights, for that matter).

But the confluence of Easter and current events got me to thinking more about all of this. . . a lot more.