Digby: Brownie's Brotherhood

When the argument about civil service protections first surfaced during the intitial debates about the Department of Homeland Security, a lot of us knew that the danger was that the department would become a dumping ground for political patronage jobs. That's one of the ways a party builds a successful political machine. (You need to have a way to reward your loyal ground troops --- the government contracts and tax loopholes don't get out the vote.) Indeed, it was the creation of the civil service that succesfully reduced the dominance of the political machines at the beginning of the last century.