How predictable.

You're kidding, of course.

It's impossible to embarrass this administration.

...that the White House even bothered to do anything about it at all. It's not as though any punishment is forthcoming.

To quote Dick Cheney: "So?"

It's apparently impossible to investigate them, too

But then, that might require Congressional leaders to actually grow spines.

will we start seeing the masthead read War Room by Steve Benen? Soon, I hope.

"a drafting error" that happened when policywriters merely cut and pasted a 20-year-old Defense Department regulation into the contracting crackdown.

Typical; this just shows how serious the Administration took the idea of writing new rules to "crack down" on fraud and waste: hand the job off to some low-level flunky who's too lazy to even put forth the miniscule effort it would take to cut-and-paste from current, more relevant documents.

Obviously.

From the post: "requiring U.S. contractors to report any and all waste, fraud or abuse they run into while doing taxpayer-financed work"

I mean, If some flunkie from Halliburton is driving down the road and happens to see some fraud lying by the side of the road...?

No. These guys are all complicit. They will not rat each other out, because they know they are all part of the same scheme. This proposal comes from the currently mis-named Justice Department. This proposal is just feel-good pablum.

Two words; Congressional oversight.

You know, you read a sharp little allegory like Animal Farm and you think it's filled with such great metaphors about the past.

Get a bit older and realize that it was thinly-veiled prediction.

Pigs write a set of rules to benefit all the animals of the farm, but awhile later, the rules have terms and exemptions that no one remembers from the original. Oddly, these new rules benefit the pigs.

I want bacon.

Seeing that that Bush Regime insiders have already siphoned more than $30 Billion dollars out of Iraq's economy and into their own pockets it no wonder why Bush & Cheney don't want any real oversight let alone investigations into how they're plundering that economy.

Corruption: Take for example that Cheney's Halliburton got $Billion$ in "no bid" Iraq contracts,based on Bush's contention that his "pre emptive" (Oil) War on Iraq necessitated an immediate deployment of civilain contractors like Halliburton to Iraq.

Why then were these "no bid" contractors allowed to stay in Iraq and keep on "gouging" the American taxpayers years after it was proven conclusively that there was no factual or legal basis for this war? Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction and was no threat to the USA.Also Saddam was not connected to al Qaeda (most probably because al Qaeda is a total fabrication of the Bush Regime and the CIA!)

Again since it has been proved there was no logical or legal basis for Bush's Iraq War,why then weren't all these "no bid" contractors forced to then submit "bids" to the supposedly "Democratic" US Govt if they wanted to stay in Iraq and keep earning all those easy $Billions??? I'm sure the Bush White House can come up with an answer to this enigma that will of course find in favour of their corporate pals like good ol'patriotic Halliburton!

Kellog Brown & Root, the company which does so much work for the DOD in Iraq and elsewhere, is no longer a Halliburton subsidiary. Halliburton has gone back to just doing oil and gas drilling & services. So if you need to slam a contractor, call them KBR.

Helm

I don't hate Koppelman, but Benen runs rings around him. War room is back, but for how long?

I liked a previous contributor's comment that it's impossible for the Boy King's administration to experience any sort of embarrassment. The President and his destructive band of zealots and true believers are ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG BUT NEVER IN DOUBT! The "drafting error" defense, like the Rosemary Woods fairy tale about the 18 1/2 minute gap, involves a MISTAKE that defies belief. Several SEPARATE AND DISTINCT actions are required to move a piece of text from one document to another. This administration is so pathetically riddled with patholigical liars (in Neo-Con-speak, they only tell "noble lies") that the shame here falls again, more to CONGRESS - as it has since the '06 election. I hope that this Congress, before this next election, comes to grips with the notion that CONTINUED shock and dismay at Bush's executive branch's inescapably predictable 7-year pattern of spin, misinformation, selective memory and outright, bold-faced lies says MORE about Congressional ineptitude and self-interest than this woeful administration's criminal and systemic blindness to America's past, present AND future.