FREDO'S RECESS APPOINTMENTS

I had heard of England before but I didn't know much about him. AFP has a good round-up of some of the appointees:

Bush defies Congress in filling defense, foreign policy posts
05/01/2006 07h31

However, England's appointed was expected to generate less controversy than that of Dorrance Smith, who was named assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, or the Pentagon's chief spokesman. In November, Smith penned an article for The Wall Street Journal blasting all major US television networks and the government of Qatar for cooperating with Al-Jazeera in showing gruesome battlefield footage obtained by the Arab television channel in Iraq. He decried what he called "the ongoing relationship between terrorists, Al-Jazeera and the networks" and asked if the US government should maintain normal relations with Qatar as long as its government continued to subsidize Al-Jazeera.

The recess appointment list also includes Ellen Sauerbrey, who has now become assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. A former unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate in Maryland, Sauerbrey has infuriated most women's groups by her staunch opposition to abortion rights in her current job as ambassador to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Her nomination was being fought by Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and Paul Sarbanes, with Boxer charging Sauerbrey had displayed "outright hostility" to women's rights at her UN job.

But if most of the latest recess appointees were opposed on ideological grounds, the naming of Julie Myers to the job of assistant secretary of homeland security in charge of immigration and customs was likely to revive charges of lax ethics. The 36-year-old lawyer from Kansas lacks significant management experience, her critics said, but has the distinction of being a niece of the former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Richard Myers, who retired from the Pentagon last year. Even The National Review, a leading conservative mouthpiece that rarely disagrees with Bush, editorialized last September that Myers' appointment "smacks of cronyism."