Just Kabul Something Together

Good news for fans of 18th-century Russian military leader Grigori Potemkin, who supposedly erected fake villages in Crimea to impress his lover, Catherine the Great. You, too, can construct fake villages, and the Marine Corps will pay you to do so.

The Marines are looking for someone to construct a "Mock Afghanistan Village" for training purposes, with "required salient characteristics" including "20 re-locatable house units (RHUs) of various sizes and some two-story structures." Some, but not too much, assembly and disassembly is okay, but it shouldn't require more than four people "using minimal hand tools."

These buildings "must resemble Afghanistan village structure" and "must have two doors and two windows." (Make the doors "breachable" and "replaceable at low cost." Apparently these will be no-knock situations.) They "must have a hidden compartment for a weapons cache."

Unlike Potemkin's phony-baloney "villages," which he allegedly built along the desolate Dneper River to fool Catherine into thinking his victories in Crimea were really valuable assets, these villages must look like the real thing, because, well, people are using real bullets over there.

So prospective contractors must provide 320 feet of "6 ft. high walls that will resemble an Afghan courtyard/compound in appearance" and should include seven pedestrian gates and two "vehicle gates."

Inside the walls, the contractor must include five "fruit stands with merchandise, five "vendor carts with merchandise" and five "miscellaneous vendor stands (CD, DVD, Rolex, etc.)." Not real Rolexes, we assume, as they're not exactly common in most parts of Central Asia. We know a guy -- used to sell really fine-quality knockoffs of high-end watches, DVDs, etc., in Silk Alley in Beijing, right near the embassy . . .

Get your bids in by the Aug. 3 deadline.

Judge Not

It's looking as though Judge Sonia Sotomayor, cruising to a seat on the high court week after next, could very well be the first Obama judge anywhere in the federal judiciary. The administration has moved with considerable dispatch to fill top jobs in the government -- though it's only halfway there by our count. (See The Post's online feature Head Count for details.)

But it's moving with extreme deliberate speed toward filling the 83 vacancies on federal district and appeals courts. So far the White House has sent eight nominations to the Senate -- less than 10 percent of the vacancy total.

For comparison's sake, President George W. Bush had 110 judicial vacancies to fill on July 2, 2001, and had nominated to fill 26 -- 24 percent -- of those seats. But most recent presidents were more akin to Obama than to Bush in this regard: By the August recess in their first terms, Jimmy Carter had sent eight judicial nominees to the Senate; Ronald Reagan, nine; George H.W. Bush, eight; and Bill Clinton, only five.

There are no nominees to fill three vacancies on the D.C. federal district court, two vacancies on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and one vacancy each on district courts in Maryland and Virginia.

Judgeship nominations are, by tradition, not a matter of presidential prerogative. Democratic senators are supposed to be sending the White House their picks for the seats in their states, and some may not have done so with alacrity.

Speaking of Vacancies

President Obama has been talking nonstop these days about health insurance and cost cutting and universal coverage and all that. But much of the cost-cutting focus has got to be on Medicare, which is also supposed to be the laboratory for all manner of experiments and innovations that might "bend the curve," as they say, of rising health-care costs. Medicare expenditures are more than $1 billion a day.

So you might have thought that the administration maybe would have picked someone to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and spearhead that effort ?

Well, no.

Names have floated up and names have floated down and . . . nothing.

We thought of making some calls to see who's the favorite-du-jour, but we figured, nah, there's sure to be a nominee any moment now. No?

Keeping Up

The White House moved to fill three important jobs this week. Obama tapped business executive Dennis F. Hightower to be deputy secretary of commerce. Hightower, a Vietnam War veteran and former senior executive at Walt Disney Co., has been most recently led a broadband interactive entertainment company based in Luxembourg. Jeffrey Goldstein, former managing director and chief financial officer of the World Bank and more recently management director of a private-equity investment firm, has been nominated to be undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department, and Jose F. Fernandez, an international banking lawyer, is the pick to be assistant secretary of state for economic, energy and business affairs.