Dept. of Education latest to face charges of wrongdoing

Wow. When it rains, it pours. First the administration was hiring loyal but incompetent people for the reconstruction of Iraq. Then Housing and Urban Development officials were found to have encouraged the giving awards only to party loyalists. Now a report from the Department of Education has found that they, too, are running in true BushCo form. Of course, these are just the recent reports. Cronyism and mismanagement have also caused trouble for the FDA, the FCC, and most notoriously FEMA. Then there was that bungled attempt to turn public broadcasting into a propaganda arm of the neo-fascists. At least they have a perfect excuse: "See? The federal government can't do anything right!"

A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released Friday by the department's inspector general.

"They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags," the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.