WTF Is It Now?!?

Partisan hack recuses self
The chief internal investigator at the Department of Homeland Security has decided that his ties to the Republican Party in Texas prevent him from conducting an inquiry into how the department became entangled in a bitter partisan dispute in the Texas Statehouse, the department announced today.

Democratic lawmakers in Texas and Washington have questioned whether prominent Republicans, including the party's leaders in Congress, tried to pressure the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to help find the Democratic legislators and force them home for a vote. The speaker of the Texas House, a Republican, ordered the state's law-enforcement agencies to try to find the Democrats, who had gone to Oklahoma.

In Washington, House Republican leaders were eager for passage of the Texas redistricting plan, which could have shifted several Democratic Congressional seats to Republican control, but denied bringing pressure on the department.

The withdrawal from the case by the department's acting inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, was another awkward turn in the controversy for the department, which has been forced to explain why its resources were diverted last week to a politically inspired hunt for the private plane of a Democratic state lawmaker.