In order to refresh my memory and yours and keep their names and misdeeds well illuminated, I’ve compiled the a final list of Bush administration officials who resigned under at least questionable if not dishonorable conditions. Most commonly the resignations are ethically based, sometimes criminally based, while others are just a matter of sheer ineptitude.

Not all resignations are a result of impropriety and not all resignations of controversial appointees are a result of the controversy. For example, Karl Rove has number of controversies surrounding his tenure at the White House but his resignation does not appear to be related to any them. Not everyone who has resigned will be found below. I also did not list those who did resign under controversy but who were later found to have done nothing wrong. Only the resignations that were nothing but cover for being fired or attempting to escape a controversy or indictment are listed below.

The descriptions below are mostly, but not entirely, quoted or paraphrased from the referenced source reporting. This list also does not address resignations that fall outside of the scope of the Bush administration, such as those in Congress or elsewhere.

Of the 42 resignations, there have been nine criminal convictions thus far.

In no particular order, here is the rogue’s gallery.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby- Office of the Vice President Chief of Staff
As reported by the New York Times:

• He resigned after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on five charges related to the Valerie Plame CIA leak controversy.
• Mr. Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
• His sentence was commuted by President Bush shortly before he was to report to prison.

David Safavian- Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President
As reported by the Washington Post:

• He resigned and was arrested the same day on charges resulting from the Jack Abramoff corruption investigation.
• He concealed his efforts to help Abramoff acquire control of two federally managed properties in the Washington area.
• He also made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002.
• Mr. Safavian was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

J. Steven Griles- Deputy Secretary, Department of Interior
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Mr. Griles is the highest ranking administration member to be convicted as a resulted of the Jack Abramoff corruption probe.
• Pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate about his relationship with Abramoff and was sentenced to 10 months in prison and a $30,000 fine.
• An 18-month investigation by the department’s inspector general found that he had dealings with energy and mining industry clients of National Environmental Strategies Inc. even as he continued to receive payments from his former firm. The report did not accuse Mr. Griles of violating any laws or federal ethics rules.

Kyle “Dusty” Foggo- CIA Executive Director
As reported by the Washington Post, MSNBC, & San Diego Union-Tribune:

• Mr. Foggo resigned while he was being investigated for using his seniority and influence at his prior CIA job in Europe to steer business deals to his longtime friend Brent R. Wilkes, a California businessman and top Republican fundraiser.
• He was charged with fraud, conspiracy and money laundering and pled guilty and admitted he used his position to steer millions of dollars in lucrative government contracts toward the company of his best friend.
• Foggo is slated to be sentenced Feb 19, 2009.

Eric Keroack- Dept. of Health & Human Services, Chief of U.S. Office of Population Affairs
As reported by the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post

• Oversaw the population affairs office which is responsible for providing women with access to contraceptives and counseling to prevent pregnancy and has a $283 million annual budget.
• Served for more than a decade as medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a Massachusetts nonprofit group that discourages abortion and does not distribute information promoting birth control.
• Massachusetts’ Office of Medicaid has taken actions against his private medical practice within the state ordering him to refrain from prescribing drugs to people who are not his patients and from providing mental health counseling without proper training.
• He resigned only five months after he was appointed.

Randall Tobias- Deputy Secretary of State
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

• Mr. Tobias was the director of U.S. foreign assistance and U.S. Agency for International Development administrator and previously had been the White House coordinator for global AIDS relief.
• His name surfaced in connection with the so-called D.C. Madam investigation involving Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who is accused of running an illegal escort service in the nation’s capital.
• He abruptly resigned and stated that he had used the service to provide massages, not sex.

Kyle Sampson- Attorney General Chief of Staff
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Kyle Sampson, proposed selective removal of US attorneys based on performance reviews pegged to how closely the prosecutors adhered to administration policy.
• Mr. Sampson strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation.
• He acknowledged that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress.
• He resigned after his memos outlining a political strategy for the dismissals were disclosed.

Monica Goodling- Senior Counselor to the Attorney General & Justice Department liaison to the White House
As reported by the Washington Post:

• She refused to answer questions from Congress about the U.S. Attorney firings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
• Mr. Sampson and Ms. Goodling worked closely together on the firings, particularly in the case of an Arkansas prosecutor removed to make way for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove. Both participated in briefings for Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and others prior to testimony before Congress that has since been shown to be inaccurate.

Michael Battle- Dept of Justice Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys
As reported by the NY Times & AP:

• Mr. Battle carried out the U.S. Attorney firings and had contradicted Attorney General Gonzales’ assertions that he had limited knowledge of the dismissals and that the firings were based on performance, according to Sen. Charles Schumer
• Mr. Battle told congressional investigators that a memo about the firings was distributed at a Nov. 27 Justice meeting that Gonzales attended. Battle also said he “was not aware of performance problems with respect to several of the U.S. attorneys” when he called to fire them, according to Schumer.
• Generally believed to have not played a significant role in the decision to remove the United States attorneys, although Justice Department officials said he had accepted it.
• Mr. Battle stated that his resignation had no link to the controversy. He resigned in March 2007 during the height of investigation into the firings.

Paul McNulty- Deputy Attorney General
As reported by the NY Times:

• Mr. McNulty took one prosecutor off the removal list but acquiesced to the removal of seven others, according to Congressional aides’ accounts of his private testimony to Congress on April 27, 2007.
• He blamed himself for failing to resist the dismissal plan when Mr. Sampson brought it to him in October 2006, according to associates.

Michael Elston- Deputy Attorney General Chief of Staff
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Mr. Elston was closely involved in deliberations over the fate of a group of U.S. attorneys last December. He assembled one of the lists of prosecutors to be considered for removal.
• Four of the dismissed prosecutors said they later received inappropriate telephone calls from Elston, who allegedly warned some of them that they would suffer retaliation if they spoke publicly about their firings.
• Mr. Elston and his attorney have denied the allegations.
• He resigned June 2007.

William Mercer- Associate Attorney General (Acting)
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Mr. Mercer was nominated by President Bush as Associate Attorney General September of 2006.
• He also has had a permanent job as U.S. attorney in Montana since 2001
• Mercer was accused of spending much of his time in Washington over the past two years rather than in his permanent job as U.S. attorney in Montana. Mr. Mercer spent an average of three days a month in Billings, according to testimony.
• Montana’s chief federal judge often criticized Mr. Mercer’s absences and asked Attorney General Gonzales to replace him. The attorney general refused and assured the judge in a November 2005 letter that Mercer’s appointment was lawful.
• On the same day that letter was written, however, Mr. Mercer instructed a GOP staff member to insert language into a USA Patriot Act re-authorization bill allowing federal prosecutors to live outside their districts to serve in other jobs, according to documents and interviews. The provision — which retroactively applied to Mercer’s tenure in Washington — was passed by Congress.
• He withdrew his nomination for the job just days before he was scheduled to appear at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in June 2007 and returned to Montana and his U.S. attorney position.

Sara Taylor- Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs at the White House
As reported by the Washington Post & PBS:

• Sara Taylor resigned from her position as the White House Political Director during the height of the U.S. Attorney firings controversy in May 2007 and appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee after being subpoenaed on the matter.
• Most of her testimony was either claiming to not remember events and conversations or claiming to have to adhere to the President Bush’s claim of executive privilege.
• In a revealing moment that displayed her frame of mind about her duties, she claimed to have taken an oath to the president after which Senator Leahy corrected her by pointing out that she took an oath to uphold the Constitution and not the president.

Paul Wolfowitz- World Bank President
As reported by the CNN & the Washington Post:

• A World Bank committee concluded Mr. Wolfowitz violated staff rules when he arranged a raise and transfer for his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, a longtime bank employee.
• After Mr. Wolfowitz took over at the bank in 2005, Riza was transferred to a U.S. State Department job at a tax-free government salary of almost $194,000 a year.
• Mr. Wolfowitz said an ethics panel approved the deal, but the panel denies it. An investigative committee found that the deal was a conflict of interest.
• He resigned only after the bank board accepted his contention that he acted “ethically and in good faith.”

Harvey Pitt- Securities & Exchange Commission Chairman
As reported by the USA Today & Forbes:

• Mr. Pitt’s 15 month chairmanship occurred during the wave of accounting scandals that undermined global confidence in the transparency and ethics of corporate finance and the markets in general.
• Mr. Pitt was widely viewed as sympathetic to the accounting industry and took steps to undermine the effectiveness of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which was designed to prevent future corporate accounting ethical lapses.
• Selected a man to head an accounting oversight board without telling his fellow commissioners that the man he was hiring was also the chairman of the audit committee of an Internet company itself under question for accounting improprieties.

Julie MacDonald- Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior
As reported by the NY Times & Contra Costa Times :

• Ms. MacDonald oversaw the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
• Inspector general investigation found she bullied biologists and improperly leaked documents to friends, political allies, and industry lobbyists including the California Farm Bureau, someone at ChevronTexaco and the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento property rights law firm.
• Federal biologists will reconsider several decisions affecting endangered mice, flies and the Canada lynx after an internal review found eight instances where MacDonald improperly altered scientific findings to change key decisions made in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional offices.

Francis Harvey- Secretary of the Army
As reported by CNN & Fox News:

• Mr. Harvey resigned after reports of substandard conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a key facility treating troops wounded in Iraq, came to light.
• Troops recuperating from wounds they suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan were discovered to be living in substandard conditions in Building 18, an adjunct structure at Walter Reed that was once a hotel. There also were complaints of too much bureaucratic red tape.
• Senior defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Secretary of Defense Gates was displeased that the officer Harvey had chosen as interim commander of Walter Reed – Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the current Army surgeon general and a former commander of Walter Reed – has been accused by critics of long knowing about the problems there and not improving outpatient care

Donald Rumsfeld- Secretary of Defense
As reported by every news agency on the planet:

• Mr. Rumsfeld was 9 days shy of being the longest serving Secretary of Defense when he resigned.
• Numerous controversies surrounded his tenure as secretary. Only a few are listed below.
• Stated desire to attack Iraq and Usama Bin Laden at the same time in a meeting a few hours after the 9/11 attacks.
• He had a reputation for not tolerating dissent and ignoring advice from the military. This was most notably demonstrated when he publicly named the replacement for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Shinseki more than a year before he was to retire because of his public statements about the need for a much larger invasion force in Iraq than Mr. Rumsfeld wanted. This was just one of the many disagreements they shared about the Army of the future. Retired military leaders increasingly called for his resignation as the Iraq war wore on.
• The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal as well as some of the interrogation techniques used at the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility that critics charge are torture have occurred during his tenure.
• Criticism of his handling of the Iraq war has been bipartisan and has come from both military and civilian circles. The criticism has focused on Mr. Rumsfeld not planning a post-invasion strategy, making several strategic mistakes, being unrealistic in his expectations, alienating national allies, and failing to bring the insurgency to an end, if not preventing it altogether.

Michael Brown- Dept. of Homeland Security Undersecretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response
As reported by Time:

• Mr. Brown’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe can be at best described as anemic and at worst as criminally negligent. His inaction and bungled actions as FEMA Director turned a huge natural disaster into a national catastrophe highlighted by bureaucratic ineptitude which led to his resignation shortly thereafter.
• He was appointed as FEMA director despite not have any significant experience in emergency management.
• He lied several times on his resume and official biography claiming to have served as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight for Edmond, OK when in fact he was an administrative assistant with no managerial duties or authority. He was a student at Central State University at the time.
• He claimed to have been a Political Science professor at University of Central Oklahoma but the university states that Mr. Brown was never a faculty member and was only a student.
• He claimed to have been a director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond yet no one in that organization has ever heard of him before.

Alberto Gonzales- Attorney General
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Mr. Gonzales resigned as a result of the controversy surrounding selective U.S. Attorney firings that appeared to be politically motivated.
• He was also mired in controversy regarding the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, his redefinition of what legally qualifies as torture, and other applications of the Patriot Act.
• He has been accused of destroying the credibility of the Justice Department’s political independence by politicizing the department’s hiring and prosecution priorities
• Repeated calls for his resignation came from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.
• Mr. Gonzales repeatedly angered lawmakers by saying that he could not recall key episodes and details related to the U.S. attorneys’ dismissals, testifying nearly 70 times at one hearing alone that he could not remember specific events.
• Justice investigators have said they are examining whether Gonzales purposely misled Congress or attempted to improperly influence a witness in his employ.

George Deutsch- NASA Public Affairs Officer
As reported by the New York Times:

• Mr. Deutsch told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang.
• Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.
• Allegedly played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.

Susan Orr- Dept. of Health & Human Services, Chief of U.S. Office of Population Affairs
As reported by the Washington Post and the blog Think Progress:

• In October 2007, the Bush administration appointed Orr to be acting head of the Office of Population Affairs, a post whose responsibilities include U.S. contraception programs. Her appointment was on the heels of the controversial resignation of her predecessor, Eric Keroack, which is listed earlier.
• Orr’s appointment was controversial because she was senior director for marriage and family at the Family Research Council, a conservative group that favors abstinence-only education and opposes federal money for contraception, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• There was no implication of legal impropriety surrounding her resignation but rather due to the controversy that she was appointed to oversee the administration of Title X, the only federal funding program providing contraceptive services to low-income women and men and yet she publicly opposes the use of contraception and has called it part of a “culture of death.”

Alphonso Roy Jackson- Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

As reported by the Oakland Tribune and the Deseret News:

• Senator Chris Dodd, said an inspector-general’s report recently stated that Jackson had advised staffers to “take political affiliation into account in awarding contacts,” and “serious allegations about his impropriety” are under investigation in three cases, although Dodd did not name them.
• Jackson had been under fire for months amid charges that he had politicized his department. The Philadelphia Housing Authority filed suit alleging that Jackson threatened to withdraw federal aid because it failed to hire one of Jackson’s friends as a contractor, allegations that Jackson denied.
• Jackson also was under investigation by the FBI, which was looking into ties between the HUD Secretary and a friend who was paid $392,000 by the department as a construction manager in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, according to press reports.
• Jackson also stirred questions about his leadership at HUD after a speech in Dallas in which he said he canceled a contract with a company because its boss didn’t like Bush. He later apologized for the remarks and said he made up the story.
• In another instance of alleged favoritism that came to light in February, the Philadelphia housing authority alleges that Jackson retaliated against the agency because it refused to award a vacant lot worth $2 million to soul-music producer-turned-community developer Kenny Gamble for redevelopment of a public housing complex. Advised staffers to “take political affiliation into account in awarding contacts

William J Haynes- Department of Defense General Consul

As reported by the The Nation:

• Shortly after the February 2008 publication of an article in The Nation detailing his controversial tenure as the Pentagon’s chief legal officer and overseer of Guantanamo’s Military Commissions, William Haynes abruptly resigned amid mounting controversy over the tribunal process.
• Haynes infamous memos and public statements advocated torture and the denial of habeas corpus for detainees. In a 2002 memo, he recommended techniques such as “twenty-hour interrogations, isolation for up to thirty days, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli…and stress positions such as the proposed standing for four hours.” In response to this last technique, Haynes’s boss at the time, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in the memo’s margins, “I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours.”
• Haynes also wanted to keep death threats, waterboarding and exposure to extreme temperatures on the table as interrogation methods. He stated, “Fact: The detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.”
• These positions and actions have led to international condemnation and a stalemate in the prosecution of Guantánamo detainees. Only one case–that of Australian David Hicks–has been adjudicated in six years.
• Criticism of Haynes had sharpened in the wake of the protest resignation of the Chief Prosecutor of Guantánamo’s military commissions.
  • Col. Morris Davis, who charged that Haynes and other political appointees were interfering unlawfully in the process.
  • “I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis was quoted as saying about an August 2005 meeting the two men had. “At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We’ve got to have convictions.’”
  • Davis resigned when Haynes was inserted above him in the chain of command, saying, “Everyone has opinions, but when he was put above me, his opinions become orders.”
  • Davis said he resigned hours after he was put in a chain of command beneath Haynes, one of several officials who had encouraged the use of evidence even if it was gathered through waterboarding – an interrogation method that simulates drowning. “The guy who said waterboarding is A-okay I was not going to take orders from. I quit,” Davis said . In a Washington Post op-ed, Davis wrote that he had felt pressure to prosecute cases deemed “sexy” in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

Lester Mills Crawford- Commissioner, US Food and Drug Administration

As reported by The Washington Times and MSNBC:

• On October 16, 2006, the US Justice Department formally charged Crawford with lying and violating conflict-of-interest laws for falsely reporting his ownership of stock in companies regulated by the FDA.
• Dr. Crawford resigned from the FDA in September, 2005, two months after his approval by the United States Senate. On October 17, 2006, he pleaded guilty to conflict of interest and false reporting of information about stocks he owned in food, beverage and medical device companies he was in charge of regulating. He was sentenced to three years’ supervised probation and fines of roughly $90,000.
• Crawford admitted to falsely reporting that he had sold or did not own stock when he continued holding shares in the firms governed by rules of the Food and Drug Administration. Beginning in 2002, Crawford filed seven incorrect financial reports with a government ethics office and Congress, leading to the charges.

Sue Ralston- Special Assistant to the President & Assistant to Senior Advisor Karl Rove

As reported by Bloomberg and ABC News:

• Ralston’s name was mentioned 162 times in a 93-page congressional report on the influence wielded in the Bush White House by uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon. She resigned a week later.
• The bipartisan House Government Reform Committee studied documents from Greenberg Traurig LLP, Abramoff’s former lobbying firm — billing records and other documents — indicating that Abramoff and his team had made 485 lobbying contacts with White House officials over three years, 69 of which were with Ralston, who seemed to serve as a messenger between the Abramoff and White House camps.

Janet Rehnquist- Inspector General, Department of Health & Human Services
As reported by the New York Times, CBS News, & CNN:

• Ms. Rehnquist, whose responsibilities included rooting out fraud and waste in Medicaid and Medicare, came under lawmakers’ scrutiny shortly after President Bush appointed her in August 2001.
• Rehnquist was under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee and the General Accounting Office on allegations of official misconduct, including that she improperly delayed an audit of the Florida state pension system. Rehnquist has consistently denied any wrongdoing. She resigned in March 2003
• Her decision to dismiss or reassign 19 senior executives with broad experience in investigating fraud and waste was widely criticized by lawmakers.
• Her management was under investigation by the Integrity Committee of the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, a peer group of inspectors general, because she had an unloaded, service-issued 9 mm handgun in her office, even though she was not licensed to carry it.

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson- Chairman, Corporation For Public Broadcasting
As reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, & Source Watch:

• Mr. Tomlinson resigned from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a day after the agency’s inspector general delivered a report critical of his leadership.
• The CPB’s inspector general had been investigating Tomlinson’s practice of using agency money to hire consultants and lobbyists without notifying the agency’s board. Tomlinson last year hired a little-known Indiana consultant to study the political leanings of guests on such programs as “Now With Bill Moyers” and “The Diane Rehm Show” on National Public Radio. He also hired lobbyists to defeat legislation that would have changed how CPB’s board is structured.
• State Department investigators have found that Tomlinson. who also is head of the agency overseeing most government broadcasts to foreign countries has used his office to run a “horse racing operation” and that he improperly put a friend on the payroll.
• The report said that the Tomlinson had repeatedly used government employees to perform personal errands and that he billed the government for more days of work than the rules permit.

James Roche- Secretary of the Air Force
As reported by the Washington Post and Government Executive:

• Air Force secretary James G. Roche violated two military ethics rules when he urged a defense contractor to hire the brother of a senior Office of Management and Budget official while the Air Force was trying to win OMB endorsement of a new $30 billion aircraft leasing program, according to the Defense Department’s top auditor.
• Roche resigned in an effort to fend off continuing congressional criticism of the tanker leasing deal, according to the Air Force’s top acquisitions official, Marvin Sambur, who described his own January resignation as motivated by that aim. Mr Sambur was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
• Roche misused his public office for someone else’s private gain and violated Pentagon rules governing the personal use of e-mail systems in his dealings on the matter, Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz said in a letter to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
• Schmitz investigated e-mails that Roche exchanged with Office of Management and Budget National Security Chief Robin Cleveland. In the messages, which made reference to the tanker deal, Roche offered to help Cleveland’s brother seek employment with Northrop Grumman. Roche has said the e-mails consisted of lighthearted banter between two longtime friends, and that Roche’s brother never got a job.

Philip A. Cooney- Chief of Staff, White House Council on Environmental Quality
As reported by the New York Times here and here:

• Mr. Cooney was chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.
• Mr. Cooney’s resignation came two days after documents revealed that he had repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between building greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures.
• In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.
• The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.
• During a March 2007 congressional hearing, Cooney conceded his role in altering reports to downplay the adverse effects of man-made emissions on the planet’s climate. “My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his administration,” he told the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

John Korsmo- Chairman, Federal Housing Finance Board
Michelle Larson Korsmo- Deputy Chief of Staff, Department of Labor
As reported by the New York Times & the San Diego Tribune:

• John Korsmo submitted his resignation to the White House in the midst of a controversy over his fund-raising activities.
• The White House released a brief letter in which John Korsmo said he would resign from the board, which regulates the nation’s 12 regional Federal Home Loan Banks.
• Published reports have said that Korsmo and his wife, former Labor Department Deputy Chief of Staff official Michelle Larson Korsmo, are the targets of a Justice Department investigation into a possible cover-up of alleged campaign finance violations.
• Michelle quietly left her Labor plum job in February 2004, about two weeks before news broke that she and her husband were the targets of a criminal probe.

Claude Alexander Allen- Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Allen resigned February 9, 2006, stating he wanted to spend more time with his family. It was later reported that he had been detained by retail store security guards on January 2, 2006 and subsequently arrested by local authorities on March 9, 2006 on charges of “theft over $500″ and “felony theft scheme”, allegedly claiming retail store refunds to which he was not entitled.
• Appointed to his position in 2001, Allen was also appointed to the position of Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy in January 2005 where he was responsible for providing advice on all non-economic policy issues including education, health care, labor, housing, veterans, HIV/AIDS, and other domestic issues.

Carl J. Truscott- Director of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Carl Truscott resigned six months after the launch of an internal investigation into questionable spending on a new headquarters and other items during his tenure.
• Truscott was a 22-year veteran of the Secret Service who took over as ATF chief in 2004, was under fire for his spending and management practices at a time when the agency was considering sharp cuts in the number of new cars, bulletproof vests and other basics it provides agents.
• His office has been investigating allegations that Truscott put through or proposed hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary plan changes and upgrades to ATF’s new 438,000-square-foot headquarters. The building, under construction in Northeast Washington, was at least $19 million over budget.
• Sources familiar with the project told The Washington Post earlier this year that Truscott planned to buy, among other things, nearly $300,000 in extras for the new director’s suite, including a $65,000 conference table and more than $100,000 worth of hardwood floors, custom trim and other items.

David Smith- Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, Department of Interior
As reported by Citizens For Ethics:

• David Smith resigned after shooting a buffalo and accepting its skeletal remains and meat as an illegal gratuity.
• He was investigated by the Interior Department’s Inspector General on the charge that David Smith was awarded his own buffalo to hunt on a billionaire’s ranch a month before his office designated Houston as a port for exotic wildlife, a move that benefited the ranch owner.
• The Inspector General’s report concluded that appropriate administrative procedures were followed in the designation of the port of Houston; however, Smith’s involvement, given his personal relationships with individuals who benefited directly from the port’s designation, was inappropriate and violated the appearance standard.
• After the department’s internal watchdog began investigating, Smith reimbursed the ranch $3,170.54 for the buffalo’s shoulder mount, skull and tanned hide and for 20 pounds of meat. He also had the animal’s hooves made into bookends.

Bradley Schlozman- Department of Justice
As reported by McClatchy New Service and the Washington Post:

• Bradley Schlozman was a former acting civil rights chief for the Department of Justice and the first U.S. attorney appointed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez under a controversial clause in the Patriot Act allowing U.S. Attorney appointments without Senate confirmation under certain circumstances. He was later appointed by Gonzalez as acting assistant attorney general before being re-assigned to work at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in which position he resigned from the DOJ.
• Bradley Schlozman was a central figure in the controversy over alleged partisan decision-making in the Bush Justice Department where he and his office has came under review by US Congressional and Senate investigators looking at the Dismissal of U.S. Attorneys controversy, and the role that voter fraud may have played in the Administration’s decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. Attorneys.
• While acting chief of the department’s civil rights division in the latter half of 2005, Schlozman allegedly drove liberal-leaning employees from the unit and hired partisans to replace them.
• During his one-year stint as interim U.S. attorney for Kansas City, he allegedly brought politically motivated vote-fraud indictments days before the 2006 elections. Schlozman denied to a Senate panel that the cases were politically motivated and said he brought the indictments before the election at the direction of Justice Department officials, but he later revised his testimony and admitted he decided the timing.
• Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell some female attorneys that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to “make room for some good Americans” in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.
• Schlozman has acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that he had boasted of hiring Republicans and conservatives, but he denied taking improper actions against the division’s career officials. That account was challenged by six officials in the division who said in interviews that they either overhead him making brazen political remarks about career employees or witnessed him making personnel decisions with apparent political motivation.

Eric Andell- Deputy Undersecretary Department of Education
As reported by Citizens For Ethics:

• Eric Andell was appointed to head up the newly created Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools.
• As deputy undersecretary, Mr. Andell had the authority to approve his own travel for official purposes. Between November 2002 and September 2003, Mr. Andell used that authority to approve 14 such trips at a total cost of $8,659.85. All of these trips were motivated in part by his own personal financial interests.
• For example, on some of these trips Mr. Andell accrued service time toward a pension from the state of Texas. In addition, he sometimes conducted personal business and had the government reimburse some of his personal expenses.On some trips, Mr. Andell took paid sick leave while at the same time receiving compensation for serving as a visiting judge in Texas. Moreover, Mr. Andell failed to disclose the Texas payments on his public financial disclosure forms.
• On April 29, 2005, Mr. Andell pleaded guilty to one count of conflict of interest. He was sentenced to one year of probation, 100 hours of community service and was fined $5,000.

Brian Doyle- Deputy Press Secretary, Department of Homeland Security
As reported by CNN and WJZ-TV Baltimore:

• Doyle was arrested on April 4th, 2006 and pleaded no contest on September 19, 2006 to seven counts of use of a computer to seduce a child and sixteen counts of transmitting harmful material to a minor.
• Doyle is alleged to have had sexually explicit conversations with an undercover police officer posing as a 14-year-old girl online. He is also alleged to have sent pornographic movie clips to the “girl.
• On November 17th, 2006 Brian Doyle was sentenced to five years in state prison.

Felipe Sixto- Special Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs
As reported by the Washington Post and MSNBC:

• Felipe Sixto resigned from his job as special assistant to President Bush for intergovernmental affairs after learning that his former employer, the Center for a Free Cuba, was prepared to begin legal action against him.
• Felipe Sixto pled guilty to stealing nearly $600,000 from a government-funded center that promotes democracy in Cuba. His sentencing is scheduled for March 2009.

Timothy Goeglein- Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison
As reported by the Washington Post and CBS News:

• Timothy Goeglein resigned after admitting to plagiarism. Twenty columns he wrote for an Indiana newspaper were determined to have material copied from other sources without attribution.
• Goeglein was serving as the administration’s liaison with influential conservatives and was a right-hand man for former strategist Karl Rove when he oversaw the public liaison office.

Howard Krongard- Inspector General, State Department
As reported by the McClatchy News Service:

• Howard Krongard was forced to resign for allegedly impeding ongoing criminal investigations into the construction of a new, $740 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and security firm Blackwater Worldwide. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, through aides, asked him to leave.
• Krongard came under fire from his own investigators and from a congressional panel for allegedly blocking probes into serious claims of wrongdoing in Iraq. Those allegations include contract fraud and shoddy workmanship in the troubled Baghdad embassy and arms smuggling by North Carolina-based Blackwater.
• In July 2007, Krongard ordered aides to halt work on an investigation of Blackwater arms smuggling to Iraq and demanded a meeting with Justice Department prosecutors. At that meeting, he disparaged the probe and ordered a close personal aide to keep tabs on it.
• Krongard initially vowed to fight the accusations against him. But his position collapsed at a House of Representatives hearing last month when he was asked whether his brother, former top CIA official Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, had accepted a position on a Blackwater advisory board. Krongard first denounced what he said were “ugly rumors,” then, after telephoning his brother, reversed himself.

Lurita Doan-Administrator, General Services Agency
As reported by the Washington Post:

• Lurita Doan resigned as head of the government’s premier contracting agency at the request of the White House, ending a tumultuous tenure in which she was accused of trying to award work to a friend and misusing her authority for political ends.
• Doan had approved a $20,000, no-bid procurement order last July with a firm run by a friend who had served as Doan’s public relations consultant when she was in private business. Doan said she terminated the order after she became aware that it did not comply with contracting rules.
• An investigation also turned up evidence that Doan may have violated the Hatch Act, which generally prohibits employees of federal agencies from using their positions for political purposes.
• Doan allegedly asked political appointees how they could “help our candidates” at an agency briefing conducted by a White House official, according to several of the appointees present for the briefing.

His general election campaign is being run not on the premise of bringing out the best in America, but rather by playing on the worst. He has stopped being the conscience of the party and instead has become beholden to its lesser angels. It appears that John McCain learned exactly the wrong lessons from his defeat at the hands of George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary. He learned that winning at all costs is more important than how the game is played.

In that primary, the Bush campaign targeted John McCain with an underground thrust of push polls and personal smears to undercut the momentum the McCain campaign had built from beating the Bush campaign in New Hampshire by 19 percentage points. Rumors were distributed that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually the illegitimate offspring of an affair with a black woman. The New York Times reported:

Literature began to pepper the windshields of cars at political events suggesting that Mr. McCain had committed treason while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, that he was mentally unstable after years in a P.O.W. camp, that he was the homosexual candidate and that Mrs. McCain, who had admitted to abusing prescription drugs years earlier, was an addict.
“You had a sense of besiegement daily,” said Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Mr. McCain.

The McCain team had trouble nailing down the origin of the dirt.

“One time in Hilton Head, we chased these punks down the block who were handing them out,” said State Representative James H. Merrill, the Republican state majority leader, “and when we got to them and asked them where they got them, they said some guy in a red pickup truck said, ‘Hey do you wanna make $100?’”

The Bush campaign denied any involvement in the smears but the last eight years have since well demonstrated the credibility and integrity of President Bush and his staff. John McCain ended up losing South Carolina by 11 points. The McCain campaign never fully recovered personally or politically from the loss in South Carolina and is now generally regarded as the key turning point that led to the nomination of then Governor Bush. Since then, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have made a mockery of the law, the Constitution, and sullied the good standing and reputation of America around the globe.

My personal opinion is that 21st century American history would be dramatically different had John McCain won in South Carolina eight years ago.  And he knows it also.

Since the Republican convention, Senator McCain has applied the mislearned lessons of South Carolina and run one of the most negative and personally insulting (as a voter) campaigns I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness. John McCain likes to characterize himself as a maverick and at one time that description was apt, but now it rings hollow.

Choosing a vice-presidential nominee is effectively a candidate’s first presidential act. John McCain failed himself and the nation in this task multiple ways, the least of which was in selecting Governor Sarah Palin.  Palin is clearly not even close to having the level of general knowledge, professional acumen, and thoughtfulness I expect to see in a candidate- especially one that is next in line behind a 72 year old man with a history of cancer. Her ability to think on the fly and express herself coherently is abysmal. John McCain failed in his first presidential decision not by choosing Sarah Palin, and not by doing such a poor job in vetting his VP pick, but by bowing to pressure from the Christian conservative base and not choosing who he wanted as his VP nominee.

Senator McCain wanted to choose Senator Joe Lieberman or former Governor Tom Ridge as his nominee. According to the NY Times:

But both men favor abortion rights, anathema to the Christian conservatives who make up a crucial base of the Republican Party. As word leaked out that Mr. McCain was seriously considering the men, the campaign was bombarded by outrage from influential conservatives who predicted an explosive floor fight at the convention and vowed rejection of Mr. Ridge or Mr. Lieberman by the delegates.

Perhaps more important, several Republicans said, Mr. McCain was getting advice that if he did not do something to shake up the race, his campaign would be stuck on a potentially losing trajectory.

With time running out — and as Mr. McCain discarded two safer choices, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, as too predictable — he turned to Ms. Palin. He had his first face-to-face interview with her on Thursday and offered her the job moments later. Advisers to Mr. Pawlenty and another of the finalists on Mr. McCain’s list described an intensive vetting process for those candidates that lasted one to two months.

Maverick John McCain failed to stand up to his own party when it mattered most. Rather than choose a vice president, he chose a running mate. For someone who claims to not be in the pocket of special interest groups, he’s given in to pressure on his very first presidential decision. He’s placed politics over country and is willing to pass the fate of the country at this historic and critical juncture into the hands of someone who is clearly in way over her head.

Senator McCain, that isn’t “country first.” That’s winning at all costs. Being beat in 2000 by a Bush campaign the believed the ends do indeed justify the means doesn’t excuse your adopting the same strategy. Experience only matters when the correct lessons are learned from it. While I remain grateful for your past service, I will not vote for a person who willingly sacrifices their integrity and their best judgement for a chance to reside in the Oval Office. We, the nation, need and deserve better.

1. I don’t care whether Barack Obama is Muslim or not. Even though there has been overwhelming evidence provided by the Obama campaign and from his life story to verify that he is indeed Christian, let’s assume for the sake of argument that he is a follower of Islam. So what? Why is that anymore of an issue than if he was Catholic like JFK or Mormon like Mitt Romney? The whole “controversy” rests on the assumption that all Muslims support Al Qaeda and terrorism in general. It also assumes that Obama is some sort of Muslim Manchurian candidate. Each premise is ridiculous on its own merit, and exponentially more so when combined together. The average Muslim has as much connection to Al Qaeda as the average Christian has to the KKK. This is why even if I ignore all the evidence to the contrary and believe Obama is Muslim, I don’t care.
2. I don’t care whether Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig Palin or not. There seems to be a rabid amount of concern about whether Sarah actually gave birth to baby Trig or whether Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol did. Why does anybody care? Basic human biology eliminates the very possibility that Bristol is Trig’s mother. According to the McCain campaign, Bristol is due late December. That would put conception nine-months earlier around late March. Trig was born April 18, 2008. You do the math. For the sake of argument, let’s say Bristol was Trig’s mother. So what? Why would I even possibly care? It has absolutely no bearing on anything outside of the Palin family. Therefore, I don’t care.
3. I don’t care what any of the candidate’s preachers or their religious supporters had to say in their church. Preachers, especially evangelical preachers, have a penchant for bombast in their sermons. So don’t bother telling me what Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor), Rev. John Hagee (McCain supporter), or Rev. Ed Kalnins (Palin’s former pastor) said. To act as if everything they said is what the respective candidates believed also is to try to make them accountable by association. Do you agree with everything your preacher has said? Didn’t think so. Very, very few do. Therefore I don’t care.
4. I don’t care if any of the candidates wear a flag anywhere on their body. All the nonsense about lapel pins and symbolic displays of patriotism has hopefully passed like a pointless storm. As I previously wrote, patriotism isn’t about symbolism, but concrete actions. They can tattoo their chests with the flag; I don’t care. Presenting a detailed policy plan to address one of the many problems this nation faces is far more patriotic than any campaign flag display.

It is stunning to me the amount of time and effort that has been wasted on these subjects. There are far too many people who continue to fixate on pointless issues and conspiracy theories that are not only demonstrably wrong, but that would be completely irrelevant even if they were true. It’s comparable to twiddling with buttons on the car stereo to evaulate what kind of vehicle you should get.

America, snap out of it before we end up with a four year lease on another lemon.

Today, Sen McCain said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times.”

He said this the same day that investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch narrowly missed insolvency by selling itself to Bank of America. Saying that while two of the four remaining large investment banks on Wall Street give up the ghost is a rather clueless statement but he managed to top that later in the day by redefining what economic fundamentals are.

And my opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals — the American worker and their innovation, their entrepreneurship, the small business, those are the fundamentals of America, and I think they’re strong

It’s not just that his opponents disagree, the entire field of macroeconomic theory disagrees with him. American economic fundamentals are the inflation rate, gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment rate,  and other hard measurable factors.  According to Forbes magazine, core inflation “is up 3.6% over the past twelve months, the fastest unadjusted annual pace since May 1991.” Real GDP has been shrinking each year since 2004, and unemployment has gone up considerably since August 2007 from 4.7% to 6.1%. The sky may not be falling but these are not strong fundamentals.

This isn’t just a misstatement or an unusual errant assertion. Senator McCain has increasingly been making statements that are a blatant denial of reality.

Setting aside the normal political blather and partial truths both campaigns have engaged in, John McCain actually had the gall to publicly state that “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations” after Russia invaded Georgia last month. Upon hearing that, I was half-expecting his head to implode from cognitive dissonance or to see him struck by lightning for saying it.

I expected a much more honest and higher level of discourse from him. For a man who sells himself as a straight talker, he’s been anything but the past couple months. What happened to you, John McCain?

Photographer Jim Goldstein writes about recent political photo manipulation and also links back to Dartmouth University Professor Hany Farid’s impressive collection of Photo Tampering Throughout History. Make sure you click on the images there to see the original and the manipulated result side by side. It’s amazing how many iconic images there are that are fakes.

On the political language front, Author John Ridley writes an impressive post demonstrating how Republicans change characterization of similar circumstances facing their nominee and the Democratic nominee to fit their political perspective.

Voter beware!

I offer my sincere apologies to Governor Palin for not taking a more skeptical eye towards the photo and distributing an incorrect image of her.

Original Post follows:

The blogosphere and mainstream media is awash in a instant soup of rumor, speculation, and facts about Governor Sarah Palin that are currently being distilled for accuracy, relevance, and importance.  During my research, I came across this picture on author James Howard Kunstler’s blog. Thanks to him, I am now comfortable that we will not have another national round of insipid discussions about whether the latest vice-presidential candidate should be wearing a flag pin as a display of patriotism.

On Sunday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev defined bold and assertive guidelines that would define its new approach to international relations. This new policy most notably contains what is effectively the Russian version of the Roosevelt corollary of the United State’s well-known Monroe Doctrine. Re-asserting itself as having special “areas of privileged interests”, Russia is effectively trying to turn back the clock to the pre-Perestroika era when the Soviet Union still had the economic strength to impose its will on Warsaw-pact satellites and other disobedient nations in their global neighborhood.

Insisting that the future “world must be multi-polar,” Medvedev rejected the notion that the any nation, particularly the United States, should be the sole decision-maker on the world stage. Stunningly, very few news organizations have even bothered to report on this latest assertion of Russia’s resurgence on the global stage.

Russia has been retreating for years from its experiment with democracy and liberty after President Clinton initially prescribed economic shock therapy and then largely wrung his hands and shrugged his shoulders while Russia disintegrated into a kleptocracy that fed the oligarchs, impoverished the nation, and devolved Russia into a nuclear armed third-world country.

America needed President Bush & Secretary of State Rice to have a strong, coherent, and comprehensive policy towards Russia that would pull them back from their slow slide back towards an authoritarian regime and a cult of personality. Instead we got a long gaze into Putin’s eyes by which President Bush divined “a sense of his soul.” Since then the Bush administration, full of unilateral righteousness, either ignored or rudely dismissed Russia’s concerns.

President Bush concluded after his new age evaluation of Putin that he was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.” Given Russia’s recent actions, it appears that was one of the very few conclusions President Bush got right.

The problem I ran into in my effort to remove the spin is that I also largely removed my voice and perspective. In addition, investigating source material that verifies the facts in most posts takes a whole lot of time. I will continue to strive to keep my arguments factually grounded, but I’m going to begin writing opinion pieces that are based on facts and experience without necessarily doing the legwork to find the source material and hyperlinking to it in my piece. For this reason, these types of posts will be categorized as being “from the hip”.

Feel free to challenge me on a post and I will do my best to find the source material to back it up if necessary. If I’m wrong, I will certainly admit to it. I’m not as interested in being right as I am in being truthful.

The next euphemism to enter the complete glossary is below. Click on the phrase below for the political definition and description.

Energy Recovery

Feeling patriotic is not the same as being patriotic much like having feelings of love is not the same thing as being loving. Saying you support the troops is not the same as doing something to support the troops. Being patriotic is about what you do, not what you feel.

It is patriotic to:

• pay your taxes
• perform jury duty
• vote
• serve in the military
• serve in the Peace Corps
• serve in the government
• volunteer in civic organizations
• engage in peaceful dissent
• correct your country, when it’s wrong
• support and defend the Constitution
• exercise your constitutional rights
• prosecute those who break the law
• defend those accused of breaking the law
• seek justice in the courthouse instead of the street
• immigrate legally into the country

It is unpatriotic to:

• use positions of public trust for personal gain
• engage in rumor and gossip political campaigns, bereft of facts
• place party politics before country
• make political spectacles out of the minor offenses of the opposing party
• block or minimize investigations into the major offenses of your own party
• ignore the spirit of the law while abiding by the letter of it
• suppress voter turnout
• character assassinate those who don’t agree with you
• pardon the legal offenses of those who support you
• question other’s patriotism because they don’t have the same political beliefs
• undermine the Constitution
• deny other’s their constitutional rights
• place profit ahead of national interest
• lie under oath

Both of these lists could be much larger, but I’m sure you get the idea. Symbols of patriotism are important, but acts of patriotism are what really matter. It’s the difference between style and substance. Which one do you care most about?