From Mark Steyn, on Millicent Few, Beverly Hall, the Atlanta Public Schools

and Gunwalker:
..., it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers – whoops, pardon me, "educators," and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held "changing parties" at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students' test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for "No Child Left Behind" federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let's face it, it's easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few had an early report into test-tampering illegally destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children.

And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall's Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students to improve its employees' cozy sinecures.

The whole rotten stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?
...
Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn't bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you're wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We're not talking about hacking a schoolgirl's cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody's going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn't yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he's not planning on going anywhere soon.

So, at The News Of The World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of big government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability – legal, fiscal, electoral, popular.