What happens when the government gives no bid contracts with no oversight to a company closely associated with the Vice President? Yes, cronyism. Yes, corruption. But possibly worse than Republican cronyism and corruption are troops killed by the incompetance and callousness of a company that cares about nothing by profits.

As outlined in a Daily Kos diary, KBR, a branch of Halliburton, a company closely associated with Dick Cheney and favored heavily by the Republican Party for no-bid contracts with no oversight, has so bungled the maintenance of one of our Iraq bases that 12 of our troops have been electorcuted since 2004.

And this company has continued to get no bid contracts even though this problem was known. This is the worst kind of Republican corruption: sacrificing our troops for greed. That's goes even beyond the usual Republican war profiteering.

From a Houston Chronicle article:

FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), which did soooooo well in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, is up to their old tricks.

They held a press conference today about the fires in southern California. It was televised live, and complete with questions that deputy director Vice Admiral Harvey E. Johnson easily answered.

They may have been easy to answer because there were no reporters in the room. The questions were asked by FEMA employees.

Anyone wanna take bets on whether anyone at FEMA will lose his job over this one -- and if anyone does leave, how long it'll take before the W administration gives up on trying to protect these idiots?

Soon after The Albany Project and Daily Gotham revealed that Michael Caputo's smear campaign against Eliot Spitzer came directly from Roger Stone in Joe Bruno's office, revealing that Caputo and Stone were liars when they claimed they weren't working together, Roger Stone allegedly took his anger out on Eliot Spitzer's elderly father.

The threatening call made to Bernard Spitzer, Eliot's 83-year-old father, undeniably came from Roger Stone's own apartment. But Roger Stone has sworn that he wasn't there, blaming a one-armed man...[Correction...he blames Dale Hemmerdinger explicitly]...for making the phone call using a tape of Roger Stone's voice spliced together to say all those horrible things to Spitzer, Sr. Stone's proof that it couldn't have been him was that on the night in question he was at the theater watching, appropriately enough, Frost/Nixon.