Yell, damn it!

[lagilman]

I really, really hate our goverment, and feel the need to put on my kickin' boots and give the Fearless Chimp and his cronies a solid rectal howdy...


Yesterday’s midnight filing by the White House in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, a lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails, raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer.

The White House has now admitted that it does not have an effective system for storing and preserving emails. This is no mere technicality; it is this failure that led to the likely destruction of over 10 million email. What the White House has not explained is why it abandoned the electronic record-keeping system used by the prior administration -- a system that properly preserved White House email -- but did not replace it with another effective and appropriate system. ...

Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes -- instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President -- at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.


Why, I and many others wonder, is the media not all over this? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I remember when even the slightest hint of, oh a blow job in the Oval Office got prime time coverage, and yet the current administration gets to give rim jobs to John Q in that self-same office? People, this is YOUR country, not his. Yell!

Comments

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

I was put in mind, too, of those 18 minutes of dead air in the Oval Office tapes, 'way back along when the President had this thing called "accountability."

[lagilman]

oh hell yah.

(the thing is, there ARE people in the guvmint who are trying to put a stop to this sort of abuse. We just need to be there for them, voices loud and hands strong... and brains alert)

[zzinnia.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Consider me informed. I'm reposting this in my journal (among other things). thanks for the heads-up.

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

Color me shocked but entirely unsurprised.

Though, at this point, I really wouldn't be surprised to learn Dick Cheney eats babies.

[skaldic.livejournal.com]

He does. And with ketchup, which is just plain tacky.

Oh, and it's wrong, too.

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

There comes (let me rephrase, there CAME, about three years ago) a point where they stopped even pretending to care, methinks. GAHRRGHSG.

http://americablog.com and http://crooksandliars.com are where I go for my daily dose of "WTF", but half the time, I'm just... dazzled by their audacity more than anything else.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

The best explanation I've heard for Bush's not being impeached is that his government does so many things incompetently, illegally or both, and so frequently, that he's become a moving target - it's difficult to focus on just one atrocity before he commits another.

Clinton's enemies, OTOH, were able to concentrate on the one offence - being evasive about an extramarital blowjob. I'm not saying that was the only thing Clinton did wrong, but it was easy for people to become outraged about. Or at least fake it.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

The apparatchiks the junta placed at all levels of appointments in the US Government are mostly loyal to the regime that placed them there, and extremely protective of their perks and cronies--the cronyism makes Teapot Dome look like a meritocracy.

The Senate stayed in session to prevent "recess appointments." It didn't work, the Schmuck appointed someone the Senate was refusing to confirm, via a different filthy slimeball trick. Congress hasn't got the votes and discipline on the Opposition side, to pull the control freak stuff the Repukes did when Newt-the-hypocrite was leading the archaeological-find-any-dirt-and-expose-at-any-expense-to-US-taxpayers dig and impeached Clinton.

The fanatics are fanatics, and will go to any and all lengths in their fanaticism, and their actions are far wider in scope than their numbers in Congress--but they are blocking any effective investigation and action against the junta. (I call it the junta because there was clear and unambiguous fraud in the two most recent Presidential elections, sufficient and necessary to have put the junta in. I want the junta's administering declared null and void, and every appointment permanent or temporary made by them of judges, agency heads, agency apparatchiks, ambassadors, etc., reviewed, and most of them -excised-, as being appointed illegally by an illegally "elected" administration.... the whole situation of Department of Justice prosecutors, who were Republicans, even, being dismissed because they were investigating Republicans such as Abramoff and others's roles in the effectively slave labor factories in the Marianas (the replacement for the sacked prosecutor, a Republican who had been appointed by the George Herbert Walker Bush and not his son, is a relative of the Governor of Guam....) and not engaged in witchhunts against Democrats running for office instead and not engaged in crusades purging the voting registration rolls of people with demographics indicated their likeliness to vote for Democrats (how many people were disenfranchised in Florida without effective recourse in 2000 whose demographics indicated they would vote for Democrats, and how many people were disenfranchised in 2004? It was quite simply conspiracy, and at least two Republican operatives actually got charaged and CONVICTED of election interference, but it was only months AFTER their actions prevented people from voting.... and of course the trails which apparently led back into Cheney's office, got SQUELCHED by the so-called Department of Justics of the United States of America as regards following the trails to those responsible for developing and masterminding the strategy/activities/operations... the people charged and convicted, seem to have had direction and support from highers up in Washington DC at the top of the junta.

So long as junta appointees runs the so-called Department of Justices, there ISN'T "justice" in this country. So long as Anton Scalia and John Roberts and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are on the Supreme Court ajd with Anthony Kennedy constitute a majority there will be little to so self-determination for women without megabucks, no sympathy and justice for the economically deprived, no woman without independent wealth will have ownership of and control of her own body.... if one is a wealthy white Christian male or close facsimile thereof, there is primacy. All others get disenfranchised as regards Rights, and forget about the Bill of Rights....

[fakefrenchie.livejournal.com]

Hear hear! I totally agree.

[marinarusalka.livejournal.com]

Note also that while the government doesn't want you to see their e-mails, they sure would like to see yours

[rwglaub.livejournal.com]

Then you've got Huckabee saying that the Constitution has to be changed to conform with "God's Law," whatever that is.

Having spent a portion of my boyhood in Arkansas listening to people of that ilk, their interpretation of God's Law would be highly hostile to anybody who isn't a White Anglo-Saxon male...

[fakefrenchie.livejournal.com]

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I'm beginning to think that the President has become a King. With divine right. And the scary thing is it's spreading. Sarkosy is taking a page from the Bush/Cheny playbook. At least Chirac, for whatever reasons, refused to fall in line. Didn't Washington refuse to be King?

[lagilman]

Didn't Washington refuse to be King?

That's the legend, anyway. Amid cries for him to be crowned, he declined, saying American'd had enough of kings...

I am deeply suspicious of such founding legends, but it's enough in character with Washington that it's probably got a kernel of (much less gracefully-spoken) truth.