Life in the Emerald City

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The Bush Admin has been firing several prosecutors who were looking into government corruption charges, including Carol Lam, who oversaw the Duke Cunninham investigation. This is Sen. Feinstein's statement on the floor of the Senate a few minutes ago:

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It's pretty long, but worth hearing. The full transcript can be found here at TPM Muckraker. We were struck by this bitlet:

The most well-known case involves a U.S. Attorney in Arkansas. Senators Pryor and Lincoln have raised significant concerns about how "Bud" Cummins was asked to resign and in his place the administration appointed their top lawyer in charge of political opposition research, Tim Griffin. I have been told Mr. Griffin is quite young, 37, and Senators Pryor and Lincoln have expressed concerns about press reports that have indicated Mr. Griffin has been a political operative for the RNC.

This is the passage we just finished reading in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, regarding life in Iraq during the "reconstuction."

Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system fell ot Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., a physician with a Master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrato at the U.S. Agency for International Developement. He taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues. During the first Gulf War, he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq.... A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government.

A week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture of himself with the president.

Burkle's job was handed to James K. Havemen, Jr., a sixty-year-old social worker who was largely unknown among international health experts.... Prior to his stint in govermnent, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.