June 25/22

June 25, 2008—The centerpiece of the Senate package is a resume-refinancing plan aimed at stemming the tide of more than 8, 000 new foreclosures a day that lenders are filing across the country. –NYT A1

— Justice Department officials illegally used “political or ideological” factors in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school graduates with Federalist Society membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberal-sounding résumés, an internal report found Tuesday. The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s own inspector general and its ethics office, portrays a clumsy effort by senior Justice Department screeners to weed out candidates for career positions whom they considered “leftists,” using Internet search engines to look for incriminating information or evidence of possible liberal bias. One rejected candidate from Harvard Law School worked for Planned Parenthood. Another wrote opinion pieces critical of the USA Patriot Act and the nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. A third applicant worked for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and posted an unflattering cartoon of President Bush on his MySpace page. Another applicant, a student at the top of his class at Harvard who was fluent in Arabic, was relegated to the “questionable” pile because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that advocates civil liberties. And another rejected candidate said in his essay that he was “personally conflicted” about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants. NYT A1

--“Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ‘70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime and decay.” Leinberger, cited at NYT A18

--June 22, 2008—If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-easting” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” the sweeten her image. It’s hard to imagine the decibel level of Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white.../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.” ... [Carla] charmed George and Laura Bush ... and then sitting next to the American president and keeping him entertained with a spirited conversation in English, one of her three languages and sort of his one language. Dowd, NYT WK 12