Alphonso Jackson, the soon-to-depart Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, built a long and distinguished career on failure. He presided over a massive meltdown in the mortgage and lending markets by doing precisely nothing, even though the HUD oversees the Federal Housing Administration, which is supposed to ensure that poor people and first-time home buyers don’t end up impoverished and homeless when their loans go south. ANYHOW The Dumbocrats have been calling for his resignation, and now he is resigning. Not because he is terrible at his job, though! Because he needs to spend more time with his family, which does not yet hate him. That will change. MORE »

Remember nutty Jesus freak Rachel Paulose, who Gonzo appointed U.S. Attorney even though she’s like 19 years old? After a mass exodus at her offices in Minneapolis because she’s a bible-spewing Hitler, the littlest lifelong Republican talked to the Star-Tribune about her problems. Here’s how she defends herself: MORE »

Looking at the way the DC city government spends money is a lot like what it must be like to be a woman married to Tom Cruise: No one wants to address the main issue, the status quo is really bad for morale, and getting a straight (as it were) answer is like squeezing blood from a Thetan. Nevertheless, the WaPo is doing a heroic job of scrutinizing the district’s worst practices, in a series looking at the mischief that no-bid contracts do in a city government straining to recover from decades of shameless cronyism. Today’s entry is a close-up study of the strange career of Archie Prioleau, who since 1998, when he emerged out of personal bankruptcy proceedings, sopped up some $5.4 million in city money for ambitious sounding education projects–e.g., a business-minded retooling of the curriculum and facilities of McKinley High School, and a job placement program for would-be teen IT workers called Links to Learn. The latter concern was “training” a scant 3 pupils when an inspector looked in on it in 2004 (two of whom who left after “a break”). And even with city largess in the mid-7-figures at his fingertips Prioleau was unable to keep paying storage facility bills when he moved the operation from a rent-free site in the Southwest DC to a walkup in Adams Morgan. Some $195,000 in school equipment was auctioned off for less than $9,000 in delinquent storage fees. Our favorite detail, though: Prioleau appears to have siphoned a sweet $213,000 off in subsidiary fees to a second nonprofit he also founded. Read; weep: MORE »

• Page Six: “Judy Miller does not have speaking engagements booked through 2007. She has few, if any, on the calendar at this point,” says Times flack. . . Howard Wolfson to teach the “Art of Managing the Political Process” at the New School. . . Jim McGreevey busy dating. [NYP, NYP, NYP]
• Inside the Beltway: Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman introduce Anti-Cronyism and Public Safety Act. [WT]

• Bush nominates Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court; seen as “a woman who broke barriers in the male-dominated Texas legal world but brings no judicial experience or constitutional background to her new assignment.” Bush: “I know her heart. I know her character.” [WP, NYT, LAT, WSJ, WT]
• Miers likely to avoid partisan fight. Kristol: “It’s hard to explain why Harriet Miers is the right pick unless you’re trying to avoid a fight about someone who has expressed a conservative constitutional philosophy… it’s demoralizing for the president to pass over a host of publicly identified conservative constitutionalists.” [WP, NYT]
• DeLay is indicted for alleged money laundering; former majority leader says prosecutor “is trying to pull the legal equivalent of a ‘do-over’ since he knows very well that the charges he brought against me last week are totally manufactured and illegitimate.” Punishment for money laundering can be life in prison. [WP, NYT, LAT, WSJ, USAT]
• Many conservatives express skepticism, disappointment about Miers; responses range “from hostility to silence to praise.” [WP, LAT, NYT, WT, USAT, USAT]
• Nomination viewed as “more like a bunt than a bid for a home run,” writes Ron Brownstein. Bush “has no appetite, at a time when he and his party are besieged by problems, for an all-out ideological fight,” suspects Richard Stevenson. [LAT, NYT]
• Critics allege cronyism, the perception of which “is especially risky because it comes at a time when the White House has been accused of putting under-qualified political associates in top positions throughout the government.” [LAT, USAT]

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A forthcoming report from the CIA Inspector General puts forward a proposal to investigate former agency director for an official rebuke. Tenet is accused of not effectively sorting through disputes between the CIA and the National Security Agency concerning shared intelligence on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda activities. This recommendation is a very delicate matter of adminstrative etiquette, report Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball: MORE »