Ye will be known

By the company you keep. Nobody is faster than Katie to honor the bromide. Usually.

Thursday (tomorrow; Spot's a little ahead of himself), we get a long tract on the virtues of Rachel Paulose, the sitting—or perhaps ducking—United States Attorney in Minnesota. Oh, she's so smart and so hardworking. But the fact remains that her appointment was based at least "partly" on political considerations:

Rachel Paulose was appointed interim U.S. attorney for Minnesota last year partly because she had more conservative Republican credentials than another candidate, former Justice Department official Monica Goodling testified Wednesday.

Asked by Rep. Keith Ellison if the other candidate was passed over because she was a Democrat, Goodling replied, "I heard she was a liberal. I think it was a factor in some ways, but it wasn't the overarching factor."

In the short but intense exchange with Ellison, D-Minn., at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Goodling also became the first Justice Department official to acknowledge hearing complaints about the performance of Paulose's predecessor, Thomas Heffelfinger. She said she had heard that Heffelfinger had spent an "extraordinary" amount of time on his work as chairman of the subcommittee of U.S. attorneys that deals with American Indian issues.

Goodling also said this, according to the Eric Black byline article:

She acknowledged that, in some instances, she "crossed the line" by allowing political considerations to play a role in filling civil service positions at the Justice Department in violation of regulations that require a non-political process. But she implied that such cases were few and that the violations were unintentional.

United States Attorney is not a civil service position, but if politics played a role in civil service appointments, how big do you suppose that role was for the USA jobs?

It is almost as if Katie knew what Goodling was going to say and wanted to offer her rebuttal. Katie says that Paulose comes in for criticism because:

She's young, female, a "person of color" and an immigrant. (Her grandfather came here from India with $7 in his pocket in the 1960s, she has said, and the rest of the family followed.) If she were a political liberal -- as such people are expected to be -- she would be the toast of the town. But she's not. In some folks' view, such renegades must be run out of the public arena quickly before other minority folks get similar uppity, independent ideas.

Second, she's an evangelical Christian. "This image of her as a kind of Jesus freak is just bizarre," says Kendall. "I've read things [about this] I find hard to believe. The descriptions of her aggressive religiosity just couldn't be farther from the person I knew."

The first of these two paragraphs could have been written by C.J. In fact, it was written by C.J. Katie championing the plight of young, female, minority immigrants. Hmmm, what's wrong with this picture?

The second paragraph is just Katie's Christian-persecution complex. That's more like it Katie.

Rachel Paulose has not gotten raves from the people who actually work in the office, nor the previous holder of that office. Getting the job through her pal Monica "I'll take the Fifth" Goodling is a blot on Paulose's escutcheon that she has done nothing since taking the office to remove.

Tags: Katherine Kersten, Rachel Paulose, Monica Goodling