White House

This is legislation we really need passed, and Waxman is considering it:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has primary jurisdiction over the executive branch, is considering legislation to eliminate Karl Rove-type advisers in future administrations.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hints broadly that such a bill could ban the use of federal funds to finance such a politically partisan office.

“Why should we be using taxpayer dollars to have a person solely in charge of politics in the White House?” Waxman said in an interview. “Can you imagine the reaction if each member of Congress had a campaign person paid for with taxpayer dollars?”

But other governments have done this in the past? I know of one government that had paid political officers in every part of government, and the military. That government was the Soviet Union. Isn't that the goal of the GOP - to make us more like the commies? Look at the legislation and way they govern. It sure seems like it.

That's what the excuses the White House keeps giving on the email scandal sounds like:

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed.

"When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired ... the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction," the White House said in a sworn declaration filed with U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola.

So they replaced a working archive system with a failed system and then tossed out the harddrives? This sure sounds like a deliberate cover up to me.

This should make all the people suffering feel better:

The White House said on Friday that it was disappointed in the biggest monthly decline in nearly five years in U.S. job payrolls and that the current quarter would be difficult for the U.S. economy.

"This quarter's going to be a difficult quarter for the U.S. economy. We are in a low growth period in the economy," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

The Labor Department said U.S. employers cut payrolls for the second straight month in February by slashing 63,000 jobs. February's data showed biggest monthly job decline in nearly five years.

So when little Bobby or Suzy are hungry, just feed them a big, warm plate of the bullshit that comes from our nation's leader. That should fill them up!

In their defense, if you don't have oversight then you can't say you did any wrong:

On Friday, the White House issued a new executive order effectively gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), "created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies." Under the order, many of the IOB's investigative powers will now be transfered to DNI Mike McConnell. "Rather than intelligence agencies reporting their activities to the board for review, they will now report them to McConnell," the AP notes.

It's nice that Bush is doing things like this for President Obama or President Clinton. I am sure the wingers will agree it is a great idea also. (insert snark here)

Looks like plagiarism is something Republicans do well (h/t Duncan).

That is what the RNC is telling Congress now. Previously they said they would try to recover the missing emails and now, well no they won't. Marcy has more.

Well it turns out that happened because the Bush White House decided to scrap a working archive system President Clinton put in to install their own:

For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.

President Bush's White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.

So now we have more proof that the Bush White House is defying statues and court orders. I think we have reached "high crimes and misdemeanors". Will Congress act now?

When it looks like these missing emails may have altered other investigations then it is time for a criminal probe into it:

Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

Here is where the Plame case may come into play in this:

Among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney's office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney's chief of staff.

Pretty convenient that emails would happen to be missing from those four days, and Melanie Sloan seems to concur:

Factual statement by Henry Waxman, but also one that comes as no surprise:

e chairman of a House committee said a White House spokesman's statements Thursday in the controversy over missing e-mail conflict with what congressional staffers were told four months ago.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., scheduled a hearing and challenged the White House to explain spokesman Tony Fratto's remark that "we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing."

When has this administration been straight with Congress or the American people? Every week we hear about new lies they tell in order to promote their own agenda. Perhaps instead of saying they are lying it is time to take action for their lies. This country deserves transparency by the White House and Congress must insure that it is there.

Just another problem our next President gets to fix:

The arrest of a man named Steven Howards in June 2006 after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney at a Colorado ski resort and denounced the war in Iraq might have seemed, at the time, no more than a blip on the vice president’s schedule.

But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.

The revelations arise from a lawsuit Mr. Howards filed against five Secret Service agents, accusing them of civil rights and free-speech violations. They offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Secret Service, which usually wears the standoffish, plainclothes cool of its mission like a cloak of invisibility.

Yup the President's own secret police make up their own laws, which go against the very laws the President swears to defend. How is that for irony?

Of course the White House thinks their study is not credible:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

This goes hand in hand with the White House saying that they don't believe any emails are missing. So then they are just ignoring the law and rulings from the court? That sounds like either a misdemeanor or a high crime to me.

Here we go again!

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.

Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

Hey Bush - you can look at my emails when I can look at yours. Oh wait you destroy yours.So to quote your VP "go fuck yourself!"

It's amazing that there is an apparent leak from the White House that may have just closed a very important back end to al Qaeda. If you have been in a cocoon for the past 24 hours, here is the run down:

A small, privately run intelligence analysis company says that a Bush administration leak has ruined years of clandestine work to find and exploit al Qaeda secrets on the Internet, the Washington Post reports.

SITE Institute, one of many private companies that troll extremist Web content and use secret methods to find unreleased material and release it early, against the wishes of the militants creating it, was the first to obtain an Osama bin Laden video last month.

According to the report, Rita Katz, who runs SITE, told The Post she turned the video over to the White House on the condition that it not be made public until the material was released on line by al Qaeda's own media wing.

Katz told The Post that by the afternoon of Sept. 7, the day she turned the video over to White House officials, it had been leaked and was appearing on myriad news Web sites and television networks around the world.

Of course the White House is denying any involvement in this. Didn't they deny any involvement in the Valerie Plame leak also? Ask Scooter Libby how that went.

To me the biggest outrage of this should come from the silence on the right. When the New York Times reported how the administration was possibly violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans, the wingnuts immediately called for investigations and called the Times traitors. Now we got a leak that has done evident harm (unlike the NY Times article), and not a peep from these people. So where is the outrage over this?

Oh I get it. The wingers only care about national security when it comes into play with their political beliefs. Their inactions on this proves that point.

We have yet another example of George Bush's disregard for the laws of this country:

Opening a new front in the Bush administration's battle to keep its records confidential, the Justice Department is contending that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The department's argument is in response to a lawsuit trying to force the office to reveal what it knows about the disappearance of White House e-mails.

The Office of Administration provides administrative services, including information technology support, to the Executive Office of the President. Most of the White House is not subject to the FOIA, but certain components within it handle FOIA requests. Last year the Office of Administration processed 65 FOIA requests.

I have given up on the Democrats doing anything about the total disregard this administration has for the law. The Democratic leadership has turned into a copy of the Republican leadership. Maybe its time to push the Republicans to take action. Perhaps we should remind them that they are allowing precedent to be set here and do they really want this expanded power to be granted to a President Hillary Clinton? Maybe they need to start thinking about that and will take action against George Bush.

She will be missed by all. She was a proactive first lady, in a time when that wasn't the norm. She was also one of the most environmentally friendly first ladies this country has ever had.

The AP has a quote from Lady Bird that really applies today. This was her quoting her husband:

"I can't get out. And I can't finish it with what I have got. And I don't know what the hell to do."

Of course Johnson was talking about Vietnam. That reminds of what it is like to have a president who can face reality. Today we have a President who lives in an altered universe, believing the war he started is the greatest thing ever done. Along with that, he has a spokesman who stands before the American people and flat out lies.