An audit by the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration found that private security firm Blackwater “obtained dozens of small business contracts worth more than $110 million even though” the company “may have exceeded size limits for a small business”:

The Inspector General of the Small Business Administration said Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., obtained 39 contracts set aside for small businesses from 2005 through 2007. Of these, 32 contracts worth $2.1 million were set aside for companies with annual revenues of $6.5 million or less.

Blackwater’s revenues have exceeded $200 million each of those years, according to federal contracting data.

The report said that Blackwater “may have improperly classified Blackwater guards in Iraq and Afghanistan as independent contractors rather than employees.” It’s a tactic other private contractors have used to avoid paying taxes.

According today’s report by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), former Justice Department lawyer, Monica Goodling conducted detailed “Internet research on candidates for Department positions…designed to obtain their political and ideological affiliations.”

Apparently drawing on her experience conducting opposition research for the RNC, Goodling used a complex LexisNexis search string to screen candidates for affiliations or statements related to conservative flash points. The search string included such affiliations as homosexuality, abortion, and the 2000 Florida recount. This is the search that Goodling entered into the LexisNexis database to research job candidates:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

The OPR found that Goodling obtained this search string from a colleague who used it to screen political appointees. Goodling, however, used it in violation of federal law to screen candidates for career department positions. In addition, Goodling “instructed” a temporary assistant to “use the search string for all candidates she was asked to screen.”

According to the report, Goodling also used “www.tray.com and other web sites to get information about political contributions made by candidates.” She explained in her testimony to Congress, “Normally, if I found something that was negative about someone, we didn’t hire them.”

Interviewed on MSNBC’s Countdown last week, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Fox News pundits and commentators “were useful to the White House,” adding that they were given “talking points” to air. On his radio show today, Bill O’Reilly let loose on McClellan, calling him a “liar” and an “idiot”:

McClellan goes on NBC. Hehe, I guess he lives there now. I never got a talking point in my life from anybody. And McClellan’s lying. Okay, Scott? Got it? I’m calling you a liar. Lost all respect for you. I treated you courteously when you came on the program. No respect for you now. … He’s an idiot. He wants to sell his stupid book.

Listen here:

Earlier this month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that he was in “negotiations” for “a timetable” for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The Bush administration initially scoffed at Maliki’s statement, but a little over a week ago, the White House embraced a “general time horizon” for the reduction of U.S. troops. Gareth Porter reports today that this is not the first time Bush and Maliki have clashed over timelines. In fact, soon after Maliki took office in 2006, Bush quashed an Iraqi proposal for a withdrawal timetable:

Nevertheless, Bush signaled his rejection of the Iraqi initiative in his Jun. 14 press conference, deceitfully attributing his own rejection of a timetable to the Iraqi government. “And the willingness of some to say that if we’re in power we’ll withdraw on a set timetable concerns people in Iraq,” Bush declared.

When the final version of the plan was released to the public Jun. 25, the offending withdrawal timetable provision had disappeared. Bush was insisting that the al-Maliki government embrace the idea of a “conditions-based” U.S. troop withdrawal. Khalilzad gave an interview with Newsweek the week the final reconciliation plan was made public in which he referred to a “conditions-driven roadmap”.

In an interview with Der Spiegel recently, Maliki said that 16 months “would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal.”

Today’s Justice Department report — which faults department aide Monica Goodling for “violating federal law” through politicized hiring practices — reveals Goodling’s bizarre and thorough way of ensuring she hired only the most tried and true conservatives. Besides asking applicants, “Why are you a Republican?” or “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”, Goodling also judged applicants by asking them to name public officials they admired:

Several candidates interviewed by Goodling told us they believed that her question about identifying their favorite Supreme Court Justice, President, or legislator was an attempt to determine the candidates’ political beliefs. For example, one candidate reported that after he stated he admired Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Goodling “frowned” and commented, “but she’s pro-choice.”

The report noted that Goodling refused to hire one Assistant U.S. Attorney because she thought he was a “‘political infant’ who had not ‘proved himself’ to the Republican Party by being involved enough in political campaigns.”

Today, in a vote of 52 to 43, conservatives successfully obstructed the Advance America’s Priorities Act, a package of approximately “40 bills that have in many cases been single-handedly stalled by one of the Senate’s more conservative members,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). The act — dubbed the “Tomnibus” — included provisions for a centralized database to help doctors find a cure for Lou Gehrig ’s Disease and authorized more funds “to be added to the Department of Justice budget for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting outstanding Civil Rights era crimes.”

Phil Klinker at the Monkey Cage jokes:

Tom Edsall has a good overview of the election predictions offered by various political scientists. The consensus? A big win for Obama, unless he loses.

In truth, though, what’s striking about the roundup is how little real disagreement there is. First there’s Alan Abramowitz, Tom Mann, and Larry Sabato and their essay “The Myth of a Tossup Election” arguing that Obama will win easily. James Campbell, on the other hand, thinks it’ll be close. Then we learn that “Vanderbilt’s John Geer, in turn, is by no means convinced that McCain will lose as badly as Adlai Stevenson in 1952.” Robert Y. Shapiro says it’ll be close, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien argue that Obama will win but only narrowly because his race will turn off a segment of the electorate, Helmut Norpoth has a model that predicts a narrow Obama win, and then Sandy Maisel agrees with the Abramowitz/Mann/Sabato analysis.

Basically, predictions range from Obama winning narrowly to Obama winning easily with one guy calling it a toss-up. In other words nobody thinks McCain is likely to win.

My take on this is that the election is more unpredictable than the “Obama in a landslide” crowd thinks primarily because the fundamentals themselves are unpredictable. I don’t think it’s likely that there’ll be a marked turnaround in economic conditions over the next few months, but macroeconomic trends are famously hard to forecast. Similarly, none of us really know what’s going to happen in Iraq over the next few months. Elections are primarily determined by the fundamentals, and thus are in that sense more predictable than journalists usually imply, but it’s not as if the fundamentals are all that easy to predict.