In the reflecting pool, the monument points directly at me.

I look back at Lincoln. For the moment, he has company enough—busloads of school kids and vanloads of families. A gaggle of middle-schoolers in red sweatshirts that say “Redwood City, California” race past me, the adults looking every bit as anxious to get up the stairs as the kids.

Instead of following them, I peel away toward the south, toward the Korean War Memorial, just a few hundred yards away.

I come up behind a slightly larger-than-life soldier cast in stainless steel. Draped in a poncho, he carries a hand-held radio and has a rifle slipped over his left shoulder. He looks a little surprised, a little worried, like I caught him off guard with my approach.

He’s one of eighteen such figures trudging through a narrowing triangle of juniper bushes and granite slabs. Spectral white light shines on each figure. They wear vague disquiet on their faces. Their eyes are hollow.

A smooth wall of black granite flanks the men on their right, and etched on that wall are faces, large and small, of men and women who served, who defended “ a country they never knew and a people they never met.” Maybe they’re the ones who went on before. Maybe they’re the ones who didn’t make it back. Now, they keep watch—and they remind me what the memorial means by its inscription “Freedom is not free.”

On the opposite side of the reflecting pool, along a different black wall, I find a watcher of a different kind. He describes himself as “one of the vets who walks The Wall.” I don’t catch his name, but he tells me he has held vigil at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost every evening for the past year and a half. “Even before that,” he tells me, “I’ve been coming here at least once a month since 2001.”

On this night, he’s the only veteran at the memorial, but a park ranger later tells me there are several “regulars” who walk The Wall and answer questions and tell their stories.

This vet, in his early sixties, doesn’t tell me about his service in Vietnam, though. Instead, his fight has been with the Veterans Administration. He’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and lung cancer from Agent Orange, he says, and the V.A. keeps denying him benefits. He’s hopeful that his latest appeal will get approved, he says, though it won’t be until May. Maybe then, he hopes, he can get the treatments he needs.

Until then, he spends his evenings at The Wall until eleven, when he can retreat to the homeless shelter he stays at. “They kick me out of there at six in the morning,” he says.

He doesn’t ask for money. He just asks to be heard. But then his pocket rings, and he pulls out a cellphone. “Hopefully it’s my buddy ready to pick me up,” he says.

We part ways, and I walk to The Wall’s far panels. In the dim light, I read names like David H. Whitchill and Jessie C. Alba and Nicholas S. Viankovich. There are so many of them. How often do they get read? How often do they get remembered?

The Wall is devoid of the memorabilia I’m used to seeing along the bases of the panels. At the bend in the wall stands a wreath of red, white, and blue flowers sent by an elementary school in Indian Valley, Virginia. Otherwise, there are no flowers, no photos, no teddy bears. The rangers must’ve picked everything up for the night.

On this night I also visit the largest of the mall’s war memorials. It’s the toughest for me to visit, too, because both of my grandfathers served in the war. As actor Tom Hanks once said, their generation did no less than help save the world. That was a pretty big thing for my grandfathers to be a part of.

The World War Two Memorial is comprised of fifty-six columns that form two semicircles—semi-ovals, really—around a rainbow pool alive with fountains. Each column represents a state or territory that sent men into action. A large pillared entryway on the north side of the plaza symbolizes the Atlantic theater of war while a similar entryway to the south, where I enter, symbolizes the Pacific theater.

And at the east end of the memorial, with Lincoln’s memorial as a backdrop, stretches a wall with 4,048 gold stars—each star symbolizing more than a thousand of the men who died during the war. “Here we mark the price of freedom,” it says.

My throat catches. I can’t help it. My father’s father wanted so badly to see the completed memorial, but like many of his comrades-in-arms, he died before it was finished. At the time, more than a thousand WWII vets were passing away every day—a rate, according to the Associated Press, that continues to this day. One study suggests that by 2020, all of the veterans of that war will be gone.

The memorial, as proud and sweeping as it is in its grandeur, with its wide granite plaza and magnificent fountain and inspiring words, hardly feels like it’s enough.

I walk back to the Lincoln Memorial to pay my last respects before heading to my hotel. I climb the steps, past the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., inscribed on one of the plateaus to commemorate one of America’s most powerful dreams. I usually stop and stand on that spot, but tonight, something else pulls me.

Near the top of the stairs, I see a sign that says, “No sliding down banisters.” I chuckle because that sign means someone, at some point, thought sliding down the banisters was a good idea and probably learned, the hard way, that it wasn’t.

I pass between two of the pillars and into Lincoln’s memorial chamber. The soft light reflecting off white marble makes Lincoln glow.

To his right, on the chamber’s south wall, the Gettysburg Address looms large, but it’s the north wall I always find myself drawn to—to the closing words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all…” Lincoln said. He hoped for reconciliation and hoped to move forward with healing, “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

That just and lasting peace has seemed elusive at times. But that’s what Lincoln and his army hoped for. That is, I think, what the veterans of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam hoped for, too.

I cannot think of a finer memorial.

I think this clip from a longer film demonstrates what war is in the most eloquent manner I’ve ever seen; and it’s done without words.  It’s about 10 minutes long, but worth viewing for many of us.  If you don’t want to watch that long, scrub ahead to around 6:08, and if you’re really pressed for time, go to 7:22, but I warn you; the impact will be greater if you don’t scrub ahead.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[P]erhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.

— from a report by the American Association of University Women, “whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity,” that debunks the notion of a “boys’ crisis,” saying, “Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense”; May 20.

I would say the president really has a choice here to show how much he values military service.

— Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who has led the Senate’s efforts to expand education benefits for veterans, on President Bush’s threat “to veto a bill that would pay tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for anyone who has served in the military for at least three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001″; May 22.

What’s this administration done? Nothing except to increase energy taxes.

— Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the assistant Republican leader, on March 12, 2000, as Senate Republicans blamed the Clinton-Gore administration for recent gasoline price increases; during the 2000 election season, reported The New York Times, “The average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline, which was about $1.25 at Christmas, is now more than $1.35. This week, the Energy Department warned that the price would rise to an average of $1.80 and as high as $2 a gallon in some places by the time people go on summer vacations.”

The fact that the U.S. gasoline demand can be down and that the U.S. gasoline consumer is no longer driving world oil prices is a monumental event.

— Arjun N. Murti, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, who met disdain in the summer of 2006 when he predicted a “super spike” of oil prices at $100 a barrel from $40; he now predicts oil will hit $200 a barrel and remain above $100 until 2011; May 21.

We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they’re beginning to fuse.

— Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group, in a Washington Post story reporting that “the grain required to fill a 25-gallon sport-utility vehicle tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year’”; about a quarter of the American corn harvest is diverted to ethanol; April 30.

We are seeing a flicker of light after long darkness. We never imagined coal would actually make a comeback.

— Michio Sakurai, the mayor of Bibai, on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, where coal mining has been revived as oil hit $135 a barrel; The New York Times reported that “fears of future energy shortages … have been an unanticipated boon to the coal producing regions of countries like Japan that had written off coal mining as a relic of the Industrial Revolution”; May 22.

They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this one is a foreigner and this one is not.’ It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.

— Charles Mannyike, 28, an immigrant from Mozambique to South Africa, describing what a news report called “a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting mayhem …”; May 21.

The campaign has put a very strict policy in place and every member of the campaign is expected to be compliant with it. There may be perfectly good people that have situations that are not reconcilable. They will not be compliant with the policy.

— Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for presidential candidate John McCain, on reports that Sen. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, lobbied on behalf of foreign governments over the past seven years and met several times with Sen. McCain to discuss his clients’ interests; May 21.

[I]n both parties, the very extreme elements control the nomination process. And a tiny number of people in a few states make these decisions, and we’re left with these options that are increasingly not attractive to the American people. If you had found the right candidate in 2000 or 2004, and you could have put that man or woman, given them ballot access in September of the election year, they could have won the election. There was broad dissatisfaction with the choices that the American people have.

— Hamilton Jordan, chief of staff for President Carter, in a May 31, 2006, PBS interview; Mr. Jordan died this week at age 63; May 20.

As I watch Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s continuing campaign for her party’s nomination, I see a self-focused politician who, despite the reality of the situation, continues to stubbornly pour money that the campaign doesn’t have into a battle that it can’t win. And over these last several years, I have learned that these are the specific qualities that I do not want in our nation’s next president.

— a letter to the editor of The New York Times by J. Maynard of New York City; May 22.

Although age is not a determining factor in whether or not we detain an individual under the law of armed conflict, we go to great lengths to attend to the special needs of juveniles while they are in detention.

— from a periodic report by the United States on its compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child that “as of April 2008, the United States held about 500 juveniles in Iraq”; May 21.

Administrator Johnson was presented with and reviewed a wide range of options and made his decisions based on the facts and the law. Distraction-oriented political tactics of the committee will not keep E.P.A. from moving forward, tackling tough issues and putting into place the most health-protective standards ever.

— Jonathan Shradar, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, on a congressional report that the administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, had “initially supported giving California full or partial permission to limit tailpipe emissions, but reversed himself after hearing from the White House”; May 21.

To those who attacked them we say, you will not find a safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail. America will not stop standing guard for peace or freedom or stability in the Middle East and around the world.

— President Bill Clinton, speaking at an Oct. 18, 2000, memorial ceremony at Virginia’s Norfolk Naval Base, home port of the USS Cole; The Washington Post reports that “[a]lmost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials”; May 4.

We’re already seeing a hurricane premium on gas of about five to 10 cents per gallon. Especially since Katrina, we’ve seen traders build that into prices.

— energy analyst Phil Flynn in a CNN story predicting that if “a Katrina-like hurricane were to hit in July, gas prices could go as high as $5 or even $6″; May 22.

Simply by chance, a pair of new cars fell into my hands last weekend that perfectly demonstrated the yin and yang of today’s auto industry. The Pontiac G8 was powerful, exciting, fun to drive — and as obsolete as the buggy whip. The Nissan Cube was homely, utilitarian and slow — and we all ought to get used to it, because that’s what most of us are going to be driving in the future.

— Alex Taylor III, senior editor of Fortune magazine, explaining that “an era of personal indulgence in automobiles — when prosperity and cheap gasoline made big and fast available to everyone — is rapidly being replaced by an age of limits“; May 20.

When the government attempts to intrude upon the personal and private lives of homosexuals, the government must advance an important governmental interest … and the intrusion must be necessary to further that interest.

— Judge Ronald M. Gould 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, writing for the majority in a decision that ruled the military cannot automatically discharge people because they’re gay; May 22.

There are few things that provide greater health benefits than quitting smoking. When considering the use of Chantix for their patients, health care providers should discuss the risks of smoking, the health benefits of quitting smoking, and the product’s efficacy and safety profile.

— from a statement issued by Francisco Gebauer, spokesman for Pfizer, maker of the anti-smoking drug Chantix (which had $883 million in sales last year), after the Federal Aviation Administration banned pilots and air traffic controllers from taking the drug — after the “Food and Drug Administration issued a public health advisory in February, saying that some Chantix users had developed a variety of serious psychiatric symptoms, and that some had committed suicide”; May 22.

I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network’s viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don’t hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

— from a letter to NBC president Steve Capus from presidential counselor Ed Gillespie complaining about the editing of an NBC interview with President Bush; May 19; here are the edited and full interviews.

It is routine for them to write memos and scream and yell, it’s all part of the game. But when it goes public, it reflects a broader strategy to get something else done. Maybe it’s to put everyone on notice that we’re still here, or to put everyone on notice that you’d better be careful, we’ll embarrass you publicly if you get the story wrong. Or maybe it’s a political strategy to help McCain and help gin up the base. Or it could be all three. But it wasn’t a random act.

— Joe Lockhart, President Clinton’s press secretary, on the White House’s publicized complaint by Ed Gillespie, counselor to the president, accusing NBC of “deceitful editing” of an interview with the president; May 23.

Patrick J. Durkin, of Connecticut, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation for a term expiring December 17, 2009 …

— from a May 22 nomination announcement by President Bush; Patrick J. Durkin, a managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston, was a two-time Bush Pioneer fundraising “bundler” of at least $100,000; Patrick Durkin is listed as a “Trailblazer” (bundlers of at least $100,000) for presidential candidate John McCain.

Q: Farm bill — where are we with the farm bill?
MS. PERINO: You tell me — or the Democrats tell me.
Q: What did he veto?
MS. PERINO: He vetoed — the President vetoed the bill that the Democrats sent us. And, look, I understand there’s a technical error and we’ll have to see what the Congress decides to do, but maybe it gives them one more chance to take a look and think about how much they’re asking the taxpayers to spend at a time of record farm income. The Congress had an opportunity to put forward — I’m sorry — to implement reforms, much needed reforms, and they decided not to. And I think with this move it shows that they can even up screw up spending the taxpayers’ money unwisely.
Q: What was that —
MS. PERINO: Said they can — they’ve proved that they can even screw up spending the taxpayers’ money unwisely. (Laughter.) Laughter by reporters. (Laughter.)

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; May 22.

This younger generation, it’s not that they’re more relaxed about grooming — they still spend time at the salon — but the grooming rules are different.

— Kerry Diamond, a vice president for public relations at Lancôme, on a trend described by New York Times style writer Melena Ryzik as “Over the last few years — since the era of the skull print scarf, let’s say, or the (metaphorical) rise of the Olsen twins — having streaked, chipped or just plain grotty nail polish no longer suggests drug addiction, manual labor or pure laziness. Like untied high-tops, thread-worn jeans and bedhead, it’s now part of a deliberate look“; May 22; emphasis added.

photo credits:
corn and tractor: Michael Williamson, The Washington Post
Hamilton Jordan: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
forecast graphic: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency
chipped nails: Robert Stolarik, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

“The Government Accountability Office has been warning about this problem for a decade. And it seems to me in this administration, there’s been pretty much a culture of disregard for privacy, and that’s part of the problem,” he said.

Wyden may have been referring to a 2006 report from the GAO documenting the lack of oversight in sharing Social Security Numbers with contractors working for various federal agencies, including the IRS and the FBI, as well as within the private sector. It is but one of many reports the investigative agency has issued documenting the serious vulnerabilities our government’s mad drive to outsource its functions to the private sector has wrought–but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Natasha Chart begins by asking the right questions:

Who did the passport data contractors work for? On top of that, my question, why the **** are contractors getting access to sensitive public data? Have we privatized the government so much that there aren’t any federal employees left to handle this stuff?

Brilliant at Breakfast’s Jill gets some answers by untangling the web of allegiances involved in the passport breach and discovers a number of disturbing conclusions, including the fact that new employees at State may have been trained using “live” personal data:

Is Mr. McCormack saying that when they’re training new employees, they’re giving them access to production data? Even if they’re taking a copy of the production database and putting it on a test server, this is still sensitive data about individuals, some of them high-profile, that they’re using for TRAINING NEW EMPLOYEES? And if a trainee immediately decides to look up information for Hillary Clinton, shouldn’t that have set off a red flag as to what this new employee was likely to do?

The question then becomes, why did low-level non-Federal employees have access to such sensitive data, and why weren’t better safeguards in place?

This excellent International Herald-Tribune article from February 2007 has the answer–the mad dash to turn government service into a pig’s trough of profitability has made contracting the virtual fourth arm of the government:

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion in 2006 from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does. Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government.

Outgoing GAO head David Walker added an emotional note to the phenomenon: “There’s something civil servants have that the private sector doesn’t,” he said in an interview. “And that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good — the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all.” He added, “Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country.

That’s absolutely right, and I can vet it from my personal experience. The government claims they need to outsource all of these functions to contractors in order to take advantage of younger, technologically-adept workers with specialized skillsets, rather than expanding the federal bureaucracy. If that were actually true, I’d understand it. But it’s not.

See, your average government contractor is very much a fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants operation. Unless you’re one of the established big boys like Lockheed Martin, SAIC, CACI, etc., in order to even get your foot in the door, you have to qualify for “8a/disadvantaged status,” which is gov-speak for “woman or minority-owned business.” I’ve lost count of the number of operations I’ve run across that were only getting contracts as the result of having a woman or black CEO, which adds a very ugly racist and sexist dimension to the business–it makes others resentful of them and less willing to trust that they can actually do the job. And, to be blunt, many times they cannot–the ease with which you can obtain these contracts often means many of these contractor and subcontractor agencies have virtually no experience as a business, no idea how to handle basic issues like payroll, accounting, getting benefits for employees, etc. When you have money literally being thrown at you because you’re the lowest (or ONLY) bidder in a contracting announcement, who needs to know how to run a business?

Now, once you’re in the mix as a government contractor, in order to make any kind of profit, you have to charge the agency you work for enormous markups, which can cost the government billions–and this doesn’t stop even if you’re a giant like Boeing:

The Army’s shady approach to its $200 billion makeover has been such a disaster, Congress has ordered the entire military to stop using the arrangement, forever…The outcome has been less than impressive. In 2003, when the LSI contract officially kicked off, Future Combat was meant to be a $92 billion effort; today, that figures stands at $200 billion, minimum — and maybe more than $230. An operating system that was supposed to require 33.7 million lines of code is now estimated to be 63.8 million lines big. “They’re getting to the point they should’ve been in 2003,” Francis noted.

But here’s the thing–many contractors and subcontractors who win bids for government service don’t have nearly enough employees available to do the jobs they claim they can do. So they put out a mad rush of job announcements on Craigslist, Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. and rush to get people in as soon as they can. Often this happens without any kind of background check or even vetting of the prospective’s qualifications or experience–and when the background check DOES happen, it’s often incredibly invasive and touches on every aspect of the prospective’s life. It’s an all-or-nothing approach in this culture.

The best part? Those obscene markups I mentioned earlier do not always trickle down to the employee in the form of higher wages. You often hear about longtime Feds leaving to make more money in the private sector, and that’s absolutely true–but it’s often true for those at the GS-13 level or higher, those with many years of institutionalized experience and knowledge that can be put to use for a company looking to get government gigs. At the lower levels, the salaries contracting agencies pay their prospectives are ridiculously low, many of which don’t even meet the standard of living in an expensive area like the Metropolitan D.C. region. (Trust me, I know.)

So you get people at low pay, which generally means either fresh-faced kids who need a serious boost on their resume, immigrants looking for a quick route to citizenship or on hold with their H-1B status, or people who just need any kind of job and are willing to say, and do, anything to keep it. They often don’t have the training or smarts necessary to handle all the pitfalls and complexities of working for a Federal agency, and once they see that there’s no promotional opportunities in it for them and nowhere to go, they start looking for better work–and they not only take their skills with them, they can cause all kinds of untold damage. To wit:

* A contractor who won a no-bid contract to design a Web site for the TSA to enable flyers to remove their names from terrorist watch lists created such a hole-riddled, poorly-designed piece of trash that it had to be shut down, leading to an investigation by Henry Waxman’s Government Reform Committee.

* 40 percent of Medicare/Medicaid agencies and health insurance contractors experienced breaches of sensitive medical and personal data between 2004 and 2006, driven by the vast interchange of data among contractors, subcontractors, and third parties across the world.

* A contractor upgrading the Department of Education’s online student loan service operations accidentally exposed the personal data of 21,000 students briefly in 2006.

* Unisys, a big-time government contractor hired by the Veterans’ Administration (yes, that Veterans’ Administration) to help process veterans’ health insurance claims had a desktop computer containing data on 38,000 veterans stolen from its home office in Reston,Virginia. (Note the quote from Larry “Wide Stance” Craig himself on privacy problems.)
All of these breaches could have been prevented by locking the data down, keeping it in-house, and most of all, by ensuring only federal employees had access to it. But the current contracting culture is determined to pare government down to the absolute brittle bones in order to build portals of profitability in the private sector. Contractors, as both Walker and a colleague of mine said, have no loyalty to the government–they know flat-out they may never get hired into the agency they work for. Nor do they have loyalty to their agency, really–they’re easily replaceable in ways that Federal employees are not. Their first loyalty is to themselves and their own survival. They are, in effect, outsourced mercenaries, paid to do the work of public service as a private commodity.

Hmm…mercenaries working for the government. I’ve heard of this somewhere before.

This morning yet another unfortunate story found its way to me. Soldier breaks back during training, needs surgery, system won’t approve it. The wife in this story, Sarah, turns out to be somebody I know through one of my online groups, and I’m trying to imagine her pain as well as his.

Clearly our troops need more support, so maybe today I’ll make time to go buy one of those Chinese-made yellow ribbon magnets for my car. Maybe if they hang a really big one on the side of Walter Reed….