Since I've been here, I've been going around talking to groups of career employees.
Recently, a group of career colleges signed on to Standards of Responsible Conduct and Transparency, which establish greater disclosure and transparency to support students' needs.
On Wednesday, Lanny Davis, a lobbyist for a group of career colleges, held a news call urging the department to delay final rules on approving new vocational programs.
But they are also a group of career prosecutors who understand the constraints that apply to prosecutors and the hardball techniques, like surreptitiously tape recording conversations with potential witnesses, that are the mainstay of investigations across the country.
Among the administration's preferred tactics to cow that last group of career employees into submission or, better yet, to push them out, has been to cancel, defund, or ignore their programs.
Operation Discover, one of the new programs Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced yesterday, is an expanded effort to track down fugitives, but it is built on the well-tested belief that a core group of career criminals commits most of the serious crimes in the city.
A group of career politicians is paying court to a clutch of local interest groups, largely ignoring the bigger issues facing the city; most potential voters are ignoring the whole business; there is a feeling that local government cannot really do anything, and a sense that politics lags demographics.
Almost all of the interviewees are perpetrators of horrific violent crimes, including a gay man who defiled his mother's dead body after having murdered her; a group of career criminals that mistakenly kidnapped a young girl from a poor family but raped and killed her anyway; and a woman who burned her husband to death after having been physically abused for many years".
What made this almost head-spinning turnaround occur?" In previous testimony, department officials said the rejection under the Bush administration had been made "without prejudice," meaning that the applicant could submit new information and reapply — and that the panel that rejected the application and later approved it was a group of career civil servants.
Competition has expanded beyond traditional candidates to a new group of career switchers who are vying (successfully!) for roles they don't have deep experience in.
