White House E-mail Scandal Widens 839
Spamicles alerts us to a report just issued (PDF) by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At least 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for government business. The RNC has destroyed at least some of the emails from 51 of those officials. Law requires emails sent by officials to be stored or recorded. There is evidence that White House lawyers and the (current) Attorney General knew of this but did not act to stop it. From the article: "These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies... Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
We still, by and large, have food, clothes, heat (or AC), cars, and sex with no short-term end in sight. Thus, there will be no revolution here. Even a tiny burp of one. Well fed well fscked people do not change their circumstances, if they can help it, even if there is a nagging feeling of wrongness about the whole enterprise of continuing onward.
Corruption is a specially cruel joke in a two-party government, because we all know they are both in it up to their necks, they have all the money they will ever need (mostly donated by 'people' made primarily of stock portfolios and imaginary assets) and they get it from literally the same sources.
You know, the other day in the shower I was thinking about the legitimacy of a corporation giving money to both candidates in an election. It occurred to me that the 'money is speech' argument usually trotted out for justifying scant regulation in the area that allows people to donate out of both sides of their ass is self-defeating. After all, since elections are zero-sum games between the candidates, the only way a speech argument could be legitimated is by arguing that the gift of money is intended to encourage the victory of a preferred candidate; giving money is a political act of approval and that political expression is thus a form of speech. Problem is, if someone gives money to both candidates, they are saying exactly the same thing as if they had given no money at all, which is essentially they don't care who wins. Thus the introduction of money does not substantially lend to any political speech in such cases. And if the money doesn't contribute to a speech act, it shouldn't be protected.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think a tiny first step might be not allowing a given individual or corporation to buy *both* candidates in an election; maybe people should have to make real the speech argument and actually say something with their money that is actually relevant to the political contest, namely by wanting one to win over the other.
Rant over. Back to your original question; if Dick Cheney sat on the average American's face, they (sorry, we) would complain loudly, and yet there would Cheney be, still sitting on their (our!) face. I sometimes wonder whether free speech has not become the most brilliant pacification tool ever devised; as long as people are shouting, they feel accomplished and they don't move forward to....doing anything.
Mod parent as TROLL (Score:2, Interesting)
You, sir, are a nitwit.
While I see both parties as uniformly spineless, the GOP was incredibly supine to corporate and other special interests at the expense of the individual. (And in the case of deficit spending, literally at the expense of future individuals.)
The Dems aren't that great (and there are a LOT of things they could have done differently the past 6 months IMO), but they're a damn sight better than the crowd they replaced.
Now if only Nancy would grow a pair..
Re:Keep sucking up your Democratic Propaganda Fanb (Score:5, Interesting)
That is largely what is happening here. If the President and his staff are unhappy because their personal correspondence is now the fodder for investigations, perhaps they should have behaved in an appropriate manner when it wasn't about them. Kind of ironic, that all of a sudden an absence of evidence really means innocence, right, I mean that is what you were getting at right? In this case a lack of evidence is clearly a powerful indication of innocence.
The Republican party has really no basis for complaining, they have themselves conducted these sorts of witch hunts over far less, and in this case their own secrecy is largely what is keeping the investigators from making a fair assessment of the bounds of the investigation. If they would have just provided the emails, then the investigators would look through them determine the innocent, and move on. I mean why would an individual who hadn't committed a crime ever wish to have information remain confidential?
Huh? The alternative is Nancy Pelosi (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
11 or 88? (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note, I'm guessing that federal marshals will be sent to Texas to ensure Harriet Miers keeps the appointment made for her with the House Judiciary committee. Does anyone think that issues that arose when they were called on to hunt down the Texas legislature will come up in this case?
too much email to actually govern (Score:3, Interesting)
What is surprising is the quote:
"The RNC has preserved e-mails from some of the heaviest users, including 140,216 messages sent or received by Bush's top political adviser in the White House, Karl Rove."
140K emails? Even over six years, that's over 20k messages per year, or about 400/week. Say 80 emails/day. Assuming a 16 hour work day, that's 5 emails/hour, every hour, forever. Basically an email every 12 minutes. I don't see where Mr Rove has any time to do anything other than receive and answer emails. Maybe these guys are so busy sending emails to each other that they have no time left over to actually try their hand at competent governance. An email every 12 minutes implies that there is absolutely no thinking time here. It sounds like it's all reaction, presumably just giving orders. Amazing.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
So it's easy enough to ignore it. Why not? The president is just the guy you'd like to have a beer with at a barbecue.
Re:no malice needed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Such a One-sided Conversation (Score:1, Interesting)
For ONCE, I'd like to see somebody delve deeper into this subject other than just repeating that age-old withered bullshit about "the illegal war". There IS no law in international affairs. The war was authorized by the US Congress. There is NOTHING illegal about it. If this war is so illegal, why do we have the support of numerous nations who want to see the job in Iraq done, and done right?
You aren't getting off that easy. Your own disagreement does not make your statement any more credible than mine. What say you?
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, to be fair to Paul and, for that matter, any other candidate that participates in those shams we now seem to call debates, ninety seconds isn't enough time to articulate any sort of monetary policy more complicated than "we print too much money". Knowing that encapsulated in that obviously broad-brush oversimplified soundbyte way are his actual concerns about controlling the money supply via interest rate adjustments, and his concerns about foreign assets (particularly oil assets) being heavily traded upon the dollar. Both of these things he has talked about before, just not in the context of the ninety second answer.
OTOH, he was the only Republican who was willing to say that nasty things happen to America sometimes because of blowback. Everyone else was too busy wrapping themselves in the Flag and Reagan's corpse to say anything meaningful on foreign policy.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
A call which, incidentally, probably wasn't illegal, especially since he paid for it, which is what is always left out of the story. He made the call using a calling card, billing it to the DNC, which incidentally how it was discovered. He just physically used his official phone, but that's not actually that damning, because the president and VP themselves have always had a bit more freedom in using the White House for political work than, say, the Senate or other government buildings. It's the president's residence and political work get done out of said residence, despite it being a government building and having government offices in it. As long as the president is okay with the VP's behavior in the white house, it's presumably okay.
Anyway, it have have been allowed, or might have been prohibited, although as Al Gore pointed out, there didn't actually seem to be anyone to regulate it. That isn't as inane as it sounds, because there actually are lawyers that are supposed to figure out things like that working for the white house, but 'use of the white house property by the president and VP' has, in general, been unregulated, and there literally don't seem to be any laws about it. The big one that stops that sort of behavior, the Hatch Act, specifically doesn't apply to them.
But it's interesting how a call that no one disputes would have been legal and have exactly the same effect for all involved had he walked out into the hall and used a visitor payphone got all the press coverage, yet Bush's politizing of the Department of Justice went unnoticed. And I'm not even talking about the USA scandal, which are, at least, supposed to be political positions. (Although you still can't kick people out because they aren't making up bogus cases against Democrats and investigating Republicans.) I'm talking about partisan hiring of positions protected by civil serivce rules, like AUSAs and district judges.
If we're taking bets, that's what they're tying to hide, BTW. Firing USAs for random reasons looks really bad, and there are a few of them that open them up to charges of obstructing justice if it was to screw up an active investigation, but barring that is at least legal. But some of the irregular hirings at the DoJ, and other places, the ones where they hired partisan operatives for by-law-non-partisan positions, were flatly, undisputably, illegal.
Get a rope (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Impeach Cheney.
2) Impeach the sock puppet.
3) Try Karl Rove for treason.
4) Ferret out every GOP minion, operative, flunkie, and vote-rigger who had a hand in Bush's election(s) and investigate the life out of them.
5) Get a free press and use it.
Good luck, US. You're gonna need it.
Re:Barack Obama and Ron Paul? (Score:4, Interesting)
That would be *interesting* to say the least; I'd switch it around though. In the era of the imperial presidency, I think Paul would have a better respect for what the person in that job shouldn't do, while Obama has the more interesting positive policy agenda, which should of course proceed from Congress instead of the executive.
I have to say, I am naturally extremely suspicious of government power, which tends to stick me somewhere between Libertarianism and armed rebellion by default; but on the other hand I don't worship free markets either, and do believe that the zones in which governments can and should be involved in some capacity are wider than preventing fraud and maintaining infrastructure. As an Atheist trying to pick amongst a field absolutely lousy with Christians, I found Obama's comments on the subject of faith in politics by far the most well thought out as well as the gutsiest.
My GF harasses me all the time; she's a hard-core democrat, like a *Dean* democrat, and so my conservative tendencies are an evil aberration to her. Ah well. Here's for the parties self-destructing spectacularly. The best news I've heard all year was the party affiliation rates absolutely crashing and people registering as independents en masse.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
He turned out to be...a slightly less mediocre president. Look, he was charismatic enough to convince a sedimentary rock to sleep with him ("Oooh, your layers, are reallll nice!"), and he at least pretended to be a multilateralist non-psychopath on the foreign policy front (except when bombing factories in African countries). But his domestic agenda was somewhere to the right of Nixon, and not in a good way. He was lucky enough to preside over a technology driven economic boom that he was smart enough not to fool with. On the other hand, his fairly uncritical support of everything free-trade and globalization-related while ignoring the real world human effects of such moves and policies was, I think, over the long term quite destructive. He was undoubtedly the person with the greatest raw inteligence to occupy the oval in recent times. He did sell out gays in the military...
My basic point is that he was basically competent and basically boring. He made some low key decisions that were a break even, and did not change our course overall for better or worse. He gave Americans very little to believe in, while I suppose also denying us anything to really hate (except for investigator's reports about BJs). Ah well. At least he didn't start any wars of conquest. These days, presidents who restrain themselves to horrific bombing campaigns and "UN" occupation forces are angels compared to what has followed.
You're all missing the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that the Dems have lost their focus on occasion. They have never been able to keep a sharp focus like the Republicans. I also agree that some Dems in office now are bums and crooks who should be kicked out of office. They are, however, the least evil of the choices right now by far. The corruption and incompetence, and rank stupidity of republicans right now is far past comical.
As to what you've all missed.. The Dems don't REALLY have power in congress right now. They have a decent majority in the House which is good but they don't have the 60% required quash a Republican fillibuster. Remember when Republicans were going to re-write 200+ years of proceedure to stop minority filibusters before they started regularly doing them again?
In the Senate it's more bleak. The Democrats do not have a majority at all. Lieberman bailed from the Democratic party when he lost the the primary nomination for being in bed with the Democrats and Bush in particular. Lieberman has had a man-crush on Bush for years now. Lieberman SAYS he's working with the Dems now (because he's from a blue state and he'll lose next time if he doesn't convince just enough Dems that he's one of them. Lieberman just campaigned for a REPUBLICAN from his state. It's gotten so bad that the head of his new party, Independent Democratic Party, has asked him to resign so that the Governor can assign a replacement. He left the Democrats because the majority didn't want him, now his new party is kicking him out for being a closet Republican. The senate can go either way with independents but it's basically 50-50. It's certainly not 60% or super-majority in favor of Democrats.
The reality is, politics is dirty. There's an old saying that you know you've got something in Politics when everyone leaves the table unhappy.
The thing that really has the left wing of the Democratic party up in arms is the folding on the Iraq funding. Unfortunately, the reality is, Dems didn't have enough votes to shoot down a Presidential veto and they had to add ear-marks to get enough people to sign on to even get it to pass. The Dems are TERRIBLE at 'reading the crowd' even when 70% of Americans want us out of Iraq.
In their defense, however, they were in an untenable situation. They had zero chance of getting that bill through and there was a good chance that the decades of Republican media buildup would have been successful in portraying it as the Dems fault.
IMHO, If I were the Democratic leadership I would have sent that bill back over and over and over, every week if possible. I'd have made Bush veto funding the troops over and over. I'd have put out the party members to simply say "why does President Bush refuse to fund the troops? First it was the body armor and the Humvee armor, now he won't sign the funding bill.". That's it, nothing more.. over and over. In fact, they could have stripped appropriations one by one and threatened their own members that they were in it now appropriations or not.. or they'd be flip-floppers at their next election cycle.
Bottom line, the Dems are anything but all powerful in Congress right now. They have enough power to assign committee seats and put up legislation but they don't have enough juice to push anything all the way through if the Republicans and Bush say no.
The plan now isn't to bring Republicans down. The plan now is to maneuver, politically, so that they stand to gain more power in 2008. Unfortunately, I suspect that Dems will control both Congress and the WH in 2008. I think it's dangerous to vest too much power in one party (as we've seen). The good thing is, we've seen a lot of new (young) Democratic blood come in. We've seen a lot of war vets who seem to be in for the right reasons. I hope they can hold the corruption back for a while.
I would suggest that I'd like to see some of the old Democratic blood (particularly the corrupt) taken out in 2008 by young un-tainted Republicans but Rove and his Ilk h
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Could someone explain why no many people hate Hillary Clinton, is it just personality or is there something else?
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Note that I'm not even commenting on the relative quality of information made available to people by corporate owned media. That's another rotten layer of the onion that must be dealt with as well.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because that particular chart doesn't show it, doesn't mean it can't be argued. The problem with tracking statistics like income disparity is that there's not one way to calculate it. When you posted that chart I decided to look around to see what other similar graphs I could find and guess what, looking at other charts I really have no idea because every one told a completely different story. This is why things like this get debated so often; because there really are a lot of different ways you can calculate it and a lot of different results you can find. Then, on top of that, there's the normal weirdness of statistics like where the data comes from, how it's aggregated, etc.
Hanlon's Razor (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe Hanlon's Razor might be appropriate here. For those that don't know it, or more likely just don't know what it's called, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
I run the internet presence for a society I belong to, people in administrative positions all have society e-mail accounts, essentially giving them an "official" e-mail address. Trying to get them to actually use them is nigh on impossible, they all just use their personal or work addresses. The number of times I get e-mails from people with .gov.uk addresses is slightly worrying, mind you.
The simple fact is it doesn't occur to most people that they can have more than one e-mail account and they should be selective about which account they use for what tasks.
It's easy to assume malice. Especially when you're dealing with politicians.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Bush administration has been involved in so many scandals that it's virtually impossible to keep track of them all. One site that tries to keep up lists 193 separate scandals [netrootsmass.net]. Many of them are relatively minor (political favors to candidates up for reelection, for example), but some are clear violations of the constitution that should have them all in prison (Knowingly conducting illegal wiretaps without a court order while publicly stating that no such thing was happening-- a clear violation of the fourth ammendment. Firing US Attorneys who fail to actively prosecute democrats or who refuse to -not- prosecute republicans-- the law is non-partisan, and prosecution, by law, should not consider political affiliation. Illegally outing a covert CIA agent for purely political purposes, seriously undermining the nations efforts to fight nuclear proliferation and possibly exposing other agents and their assets in the process. There are plenty more at this level). The problem is simply that with 193 seperate scandals, they all seem to blend together, which makes it easy for Bill O'Really & Rush Lumbaugh to brush them all of as democratic political dirty tricks. If you actually read that list & think about the implications of some of these scandals, you might start to question you party loyalty a bit.
The problem, I think, is lack of community (Score:5, Interesting)
1. US College System & Culture encourages people to move and "get away" from their families, friends, and the "village" of people they grew up with and around. While I'm not that old, at 28, even with this short amount of time, very few people I've kept in touch with from highschool live "back home". You develop friends who are in your income bracket, who have similar interests, and usually similar thoughts politically. It's much easier not to care about the minimum wage if you're not affected by it.
2. Mass Media: TV is the "Bread and circus" of the day. I'll admit it - most of the time I come home after work, flop down on the couch and watch TV. I'm not sitting on my porch and seeing my neighbors when they walk by. It's in the entertainment industry's intrest to try and keep us there by making us numb to everything else by constantly bombarding us with sex, violence and danger. And, lets face it, it's interesting. There's a lot of good entertainment there. Judgment on the medium aside, it keeps us inside with little community interation.
3. Cars: The US is a car society. People do not walk, with an exception of a few cities. If you drive 30 minutes to work instead of working near where you live, you don't meet people in your neighborhood. There are some exceptions: church and school for example. But look at those two communities and how active they are pollitically. They're brought together by a common purpose, but I bet if you did a survey of people who attend church or have children in school they'd be more politically active than the average.
There are a lot of other things that contribute, and I'm not even suggesting that this is the primary factor, but I don't see it discussed and thought I would put it out there.
-nb
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll vote for Hillary in 2008 if that is what it takes to keep the theocrats from pushing their agenda, but I have no illusions about what she'll do to this country in the long run if unchecked.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
No joke, I think it's pure mysogyny that causes so many people to hate her. "Traditional" men feel threatened by her, "traditional" women feel ashamed of/for her.
Re:The big Constitutional FUBAR (Score:3, Interesting)
That view is not obvious to all observers.
The President is commander in chief, but the Congress is empowered to make laws governing the operation of the Executive Branch, and also the military. Congress has a major role to play in governing the military, up to and including whether it will be used at all in cases where hostilities have not already commenced.
They just can't command the strategy of the war, nor can they negotiate terms for its ending. But they can start it, and they can certainly end it, and they regulate the means by which it is carried out.
The founders were born and bred English gentlemen. The powers of the Congress versus the President were precisely the late eighteenth century Whig view of the powers of Parliament against the King. This in turn was shaped by centuries of English monarchs using the wealthy of Britain as a springboard to gaining a European empire.
It's amazing how fans of "strict construction" have such a mania for theories of "inherent executive powers". These are not only unwritten in the Constitution, they have no real historical basis. What they are really talking about is the powers they'd like to have, and we have a system based on nobody having the powers they'd like to have.
Re:I'll bite. (Score:3, Interesting)
You may be an anarchist [infoshop.org]. Or at least, you may find that an anarchist analysis is pretty close in line with your own concerns about large centralized government, and the corrupting influence of money and greed on government.
I think the biggest reason government (and business) is so fucked up right now is because as their supporters we allow them to be. We allow them to be fucked up not by voting for them, but by depending on them. We can't take care of ourselves or each other without the government. We can't have functional communities where people look out for each other and make sure we're all safe without the government's heavy hand over us, forcing us to behave. Hell, people won't even share their bounty when others are in need, so we get the government to take it from them, and "share" it how the government sees fit.
So in my mind, the biggest thing you can do now to be part of the solution is stop depending on the government. Many, many people in our society put up with the government's abuses of power because they believe that if we took that power away, we'd have mass chaos and "the law of the jungle" would reign. Prove them wrong. Get involved in non-governmental organizations. Help out the needy in your community voluntarily. Speak up for people who are being treated unfairly, and stand up against those who try to boss everyone else around. Support organizations that do things that the government won't, or do them better than the government can. Basically, stop thinking only about yourself, and start thinking about how to build a society that will be less and less dependent on the government as time goes on. Be a reasoning ethical person, and demand the same from others.
Re:That's a peculiar definition of democracy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unions are different because they are (theoretically!) accountable to their members through elections. Political organizations such as you mention have no where near the power of corporations. No one is calling for excluding anyone, I don't even know where you got that. Are you paying attention to the conversation, or the voices in your head? Read and attempt to understand what people here are really saying, not what that the little parody of a liberal that sits in your head is saying.
Two interesting statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
During Q&A my wife asked if the "easy" press coverage during the Bush years reflected some sort of conspiracy - that perhaps the media wanted a Republican administration so they could keep consolidating, for instance.
Dean said that at one point he went looking, expecting to find such a conspiracy - and didn't. What he found instead was such attention to money that there was no time left for true investigative journalism. Watergate wouldn't have happened today, because Woodward & Bernstein would never have had the time to chase down the blind alleys until they found the real story. No doubt they'd be taken off of that and put on something important, like Paris Hilton's driving record and religious background.
Quibble (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way to remove the president is to put him on trial.
Imprecise. That is merely the only practical way for an external agency to remove the president while maintaining the rule of law. A president may also be pressured into resigning (Nixon), assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), or removed during an overthrow of the constitutional government by coup d'état (military or otherwise, without US precedent thus far; Amendment to the Constitution such as to remove the office might fall in this category while remaining lawful, but as you note is impractical due to greater political obstacles than impeachment).
Impeachment was considered a really bad option by many of the founding fathers, but left in (partly from Benjamin Franklin's advocacy) as preferable to these alternatives. The Republicans in the US Senate are betting that two more years of the Bush presidency will continue to seem less dangerous than the alternatives to impeachment, and that they, their party, and/or the country will be less damaged than by encouraging impeachment and removal of President Bush and Vice President Cheney from office. I consider the stakes high enough that I would fold rather than take that bet... but then, I'm far too liberal in my secular, sexual, and anti-corporate attitudes to be a Republican.
Re:As a VERY left leaning voter, let me just say.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
Get yourselves a parliamentary democracy. You typically get more than 2 choices of candidate. Plus, when parties screw up, they are fairly regularly completely obliterated.
Re:Question for any Americans reading Slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as the war goes, the Republican approach does not help us, and probably hurts us considerably. In 2003 I was for invasion, with the thought that we would be wrapped up within a few weeks and be able to move on into Iran or Syria. (I think going into either of these countries first would have been a better idea, but if it was Iraq or nothing, Iraq it was, for the simple value a show of force would have had at the time). 4 years later, our troops are still in the area dying for the altruistic goal of letting the Iraqis vote themselves into theocracy, Iran's becoming more and more belligerent (and we're NEGOTIATING with them, just showing that compromise is the fine art of cutting your own throat to save your enemies the expense), and Syria's apparently gearing up for a blockbuster summer war with Israel. Long story short, the Republicans lack the moral courage to stand down the mullahs and do what is needed to ensure our security, and are therefore no better than the Democrats in this particular regard.
The second difference breaks down into underlying philosophy. The Democrats really have none at this point. The Marxist underpinnings of the party have been disproven in the real world, and few besides Gore are committed to going fully Green (not to mention that the Greens will probably be high and dry when "doomsday fatigue" sets in again). There's just a sort of freewheeling pragmatism occasionally wrapped up in "class struggle" overtones. (Notice how all the bad things the Republicans predicted would happen during the Clinton regime didn't).
The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to be becoming more and more theocratic. Christianity cannot be proven or disproven in the real world, and the pressure to integrate politics into Christian philosophy is becoming stronger and stronger (Some Dems, like Obama, pay lip service to religion, but they have a *long* way to go in that particular regard). Even the "fiscally conservative" wing of the party has by and large fallen to the Christianists.
So I guess it boils down to: both parties are a threat, but the Democrats are the less imminent one.