More on All Politics, all the time.

That just happens to be the title of the relevant post by Josh Micah Marshall in Talking Points Memo, but it sheds even more light on the M. O. of the Bush Administration under Karl Rove.

This TPM post focuses more on the possible violations of The Hatch Act than other posts. (*Link to Wiki for your convenience)

I have had to enforce Hatch Act Provisions in my career and the Compliance Officers to whom I reported were so strict, so ethical that I can't imagine how anybody could violate those provisions so wanton....but apparently they did...here is a snippet or a few....

With a few details we haven't seen before, the Post explained that Rove
established an "asset deployment" team in the White House early in Bush's first
term that was responsible for coordinating official announcements,
high-visibility administration trips, and declarations of federal grants based
on Republican congressional candidates in need of a boost.

and quoted from "The Washington Post" front page article.....

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the House Government Reform and
Oversight Committee are investigating whether any of the meetings violated the
Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using federal resources for election activities. They also want to know whether any Bush appointees
pressured government for favorable actions such as grants to help GOP electoral
chances.

"What we are seeing is the tip of a whole effort to make the
federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party. It was all politics,
all the time," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight
committee, said last week.

For those of you who have not worked in Government before, this kind of
information is breathtaking. Over the years, our governments at all levels have
passed laws and regulations to keep Government resources from being used to
benefit individual political careers, or, the benefit of a single political
party. Those provisions have been, at best, bypassed, and quite possibly openly
ignored by the Bush Machine.

Add comments if you like....I may riff on it over at "the other blog" in a bit...

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