In the Loop

Not so, says Undersecretary of State William Burns, the department's top career official. "This secretary is in touch every day with as many people across the department as possible, and Cheryl is a big part of making that happen."

Another senior State official said Clinton has been on the road a lot: Asia in July and Africa in August and Ireland and Moscow just the other day, and soon she'll be back on the road, pretty much until Thanksgiving. There have also been a bunch of meetings of late on AfPak matters.

Hey, just telling you what we're hearing.

In a timely fashion . . .

The Loop Better-Late-Than-Never award this year goes to the State Department's personnel bureau. The bureau, in an Oct. 13 notice, said it had awarded a $1.6 million contract to Campion Services Inc. in West Lafayette, Ind., to "assist the department in ensuring that all examinations for Foreign Service [jobs] have been professionally validated and constitute a reliable means of identifying those applicants with the greatest possibility of success in the foreign service."

Well, good thing the department's only been hiring for a couple of hundred years.

The rest of the résumé

The White House last week announced that President Obama had selected Jessie H. Roberson, a nuclear expert and senior vice president of environmental affairs for the Atlantic Sea Island Group, to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. The bio notes her previous jobs, even her undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering.

Name sounds familiar. Roberson, Roberson: Wasn't she Dubya's appointee as assistant secretary of the Energy Department for environmental management, the $6 billion-a-year weapons cleanup program? That's not mentioned in the White House release, but she was there from 2001 to 2004.

Waterboarding for kids?

WGDB, Part II: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) must be feeling stressed these days over the travails of his pal, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.). For those who missed it, Coburn took to the Senate floor last week to decry federal deficits, which are not, for him, an abstraction.

"It is deeply personal with me," Coburn explained. "I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all of these other children who are out there. You know what? We are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt. We are going to shackle their opportunities. We are going to limit their possibilities because we don't have the courage to make the difference for their future."

Wait a minute! It's just a dunk in the water.