Here’s another reason all the fraud and abuse involving the U.S. in Iraq is slow to emerge: the DOJ has a 10-year backlog of whistleblower cases.
Fugitive hedge fund manager who faked his suicide surrenders to authorities in Massachusetts.
While working on his new book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Steven Greenhouse interviewed hundreds of workers across America.
Yesterday at TPMCafe, he gave us a taste. At the plastic factory where Kathy Saumier worked in upstate New York four of the 190 employees had fingers amputated over a 13-month period. “I got tired of being treated like dirt,” she said.
Today he digs into the plight of the young college graduate– A warning: The up-escalator may be broken.
The Politico is reporting that chief McCainster Rick Davis is being kicked up stairs and replaced by Steve Schmidt as the guy in charge of day-to-day operations — i.e., the campaign manager. There’s a lot of unclarity, even in the article, about just what’s up. So we’ll be bringing you more shortly.
Via Jeff Stein, who catches this marvel of U.S.-Iraqi ineptitude, from today’s David Ignatius column:
[T]he Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.
We have some scary, awful news to report; but happily a story that appears set to have a happy ending.
Brian Beutler, a friend of ours here and known to many of you for his progressive blogging and journalism, was shot early this morning in Washington, DC, in what appears to have been a botched mugging. The wounds were serious. But surgery was successful and he’s now recovering in a DC hospital. He’s expected to make a full recovery. Greg Sargent has the story.
I think we’ve now got the tell on the ouster of Rick Davis at the McCain campaign.
It’s not just that Davis is being replaced by Steve Schmidt as campaign manager. They are reportedly also scrapping their system of 11 largely autonomous regional managers to run the campaign, an approach to running a national campaign that I do not believe has ever been tried before.
That sounds a lot like they’re scrapping the whole operation and starting again from square one, thus squandering the huge advantage they got by sealing up the nomination months in advance of the Democrats.
No doubt, they’ll talk about retooling and logical evolutions. But this sounds much more like scrapping the whole org chart and starting from scratch.
Late Update: The Trib discusses what appears to be another key part of this. The McCain hands getting their walking papers to make room for Rove’s crew to take over.
Obama’s Axelrod administers a gentle smackdown to CNN’s John Roberts …