Tom Frank Quote(s) of the Day (morning)

On Katrina:

Bosner told me that standard disaster procedure had previously been to hire recovery workers locally, because doing so helped the people most affected. This time, though, the idea was apparently to help the people most connected. The no-bid reconstruction contracts poured out like gravy, and clients of Bush' buddy Joe Allbaugh just happened to be among those who won them. An emergency housing contract went to the engineering conglomerate CH2H Hill, a client of a different lobbying shop that also featured a detachment of former top Homeland Security officers.

On where all the money's ending up:

Although the Bush administration presided over one of the greatest expansions of federal spending in hisstory, the number of federal employees actually decreased during Dubya's term of office. Bush administration documents even boast about the government having "achieved its lowest level of of civilians on the payroll since 1950."

On a growth industry:

Fully 43 percent of the senators and representatives who have left Congress since 1998 have become lobbyists, one good-government group has determined; that's up from about 9 percent in the seventies.

But that's not all:

it is almost impossible to study the revolving door systematically anymore. An early, little-noticed act of the Republican Congress that took power in 1995 was to discontinue record-keeping on the subject.

But don't go thinking this has made Washington any more "conservative" in their own eyes:

They may rule in Washington, but they do so, remember, as an 'occupying army of insurgents.' As tenacious as it is ludicrous, this myth has many functions, but its primary purpose is evasion. Never again will conservatives shoulder the blame for catastrophes like the Great Depression or even the many blunders of the Bush years; no matter how much of it they control, the government is never theirs, and they cannot be held responsible for its actions.

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