22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found 326
ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.
Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we to understand that it was the people in Bush's white house that failed, and not "the gubbermint"? Nonsense and tosh! If people are the root cause of government's failures then the party of "government sucks" has some mirror-gazing to do.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh I wouldn't be so quick to defend the democrats either. Most of congress was right there with Bush on a number of controversial issues up to and including when the democrats had control. Both parties are guilty as frak and you'd have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that that kind of corruption and failure will be limited to Bush and friends.
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Who's defending the Democrats? I'm challenging the notion that "government" is more prone to corruption and incompetence than "people" in general..
Re: (Score:2)
The government is made up of people in a very high position of power. There's no reason to believe that they're any less corruptible than anyone else. The abuses of power continue despite Bush's administration being replaced. The government as a whole did fail. It wasn't something that was solely Bush's doing; it was and continues to be systemic.
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Right, so are you describing a feature of government, or of people?
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Both.
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I'm challenging the notion that "government" is more prone to corruption and incompetence than "people" in general..
The difference between government and ordinary people? Opportunity. Back to you.
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Sure, but that applies just as well to rapists, murderers, and investment bankers.
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Sure, but that applies just as well to rapists, murderers, and investment bankers.
So what? In case you haven't noticed, the government bashers have a ready solution for this problem. Cut the size of government and its power and you cut the opportunity for mischief and mayhem. It doesn't matter if government is made of ordinary people or people who have a magic susceptibility to corruption. The solution works in both cases.
Rather than debate some dubious position not held by most people and irrelevant even in the cases where it is believed, in other words a strawman argument, how about
Re:Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Cut the size of government and its power and you cut the opportunity for mischief and mayhem.
If only it were that simple. If the functions that a particular government organization is performing are cut and then are merely transferred to private enterprise, then the opportunity for mischief and mayhem remain, at best, the same. In addition, private enterprise is by many metrics less transparent, less accountable, and more profit driven than government. If that function was for the public good, then going private enterprise means less accountability and more mischief and mayhem... but at least with less transparency, you and I might know less about it.
I am not advocating bigger government or smaller government. In the end, there are no easy solutions which makes public policy and the business of government very boring and unsuited to 30 second soundbites. Our system is still very flawed and the way our politicians play the game these days just makes it worse. But of course, it is the people that lets this happen and the people in the end have to decide as collective to fix it.
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Are we to understand that it was the people in Bush's white house that failed, and not "the gubbermint"? Nonsense and tosh!
Clinton's Administration didn't seem to have a problem with archiving e-mails.
I imagine that if Obama's Administration was having problems, we'd know about it by now.
So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and say that yes, it was the people in Bush's white house that failed.
Gonna be a blame bonanza (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot wait for the leaks, figure we can have yet another year of "see, it was Bush's fault and here is the email to prove it, not that we leaked it"
Considering that every administration has problem with records perhaps it needs to be outsourced.
Mystery solved (Score:2, Funny)
At least they know what that lump in the carpet was.
The Ones I'm looking for: (Score:3, Funny)
We need to destroy freedom to save it. I want to track everything. I want to track every keystroke on every computer ever. We will all feel safer when ther eis no safety from our snooping.
From: George W. Bush
I think my mind is a terrible fool thing again, hey what was that song by the Who?
From: ATT
Dear Mr President - it is all set up. Just pick up your phone reciever and press STAR 6 6 6. This will allow you to instantly listen to conversations by REAL LIVE TERRORISTS. It might SOUND like someone ordering pizza, but really, THEY ARE ORDERING OUR DESTRUCTION! Ask Cheney - he'll tell ya.
Standard IT issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
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Yeah, those stupid liberal groups are just out to hodgepodge the truth again. All we did was violate 2 federal laws by not keeping records of our communications, and had insanely incompetent I.T. staff at this, the richest and most powerful country in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Just an honest mistake. Tens of millions of e-mails, big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
If this wasn't purely about politics, where were their fucking lawsuits when the Clinton-Gore administration lost emails [judicialwatch.org]?
LK
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At least according to their Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], they were founded in 2003.
I certainly hope they don't just fold because another party is in charge now. It seems like they've done good work so far, hopefully they'll watch the Obama administration as they did the Bush administration.
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20 million? Hard to believe! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to believe that the former Bush Administration edited 22 million emails.
That would mean at least 7,500 emails per day including weekends and holidays; and at least 5 emails per minute.
Now, just tell me who in Bush's administration was spewing such an amount of email.
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Do you assume it's one person? What if it was 10 people? What if it was 100? What if it was 1000?
If you work a 40-hour work week, there are 2080 hours per year when you work. Over 8 years, one person working a full-time job with no overtime works 16,640 hours. If you've got 100 people working full-time for 8 years, that equates to 13 emails per hour per person. Now imagine if they work 60 hour weeks, or 80 hour weeks. 5-10 emails per hour doesn't seem all that outlandish when you're helping run a cou
Re:20 million? Hard to believe! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just think of how many people would be considered to be part of the Bush administration and multiply that by the number of emails per day and any duplicates and it becomes fairly easy to see how this many emails could be sent.
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There are approx. 1,700 White House staff. This is not counting OEOB staff that works across the street or other Executive branch personnel that most likely would have there email grouped with the White House archives.
If y
Re:20 million? Hard to believe! (Score:5, Interesting)
That happens when you change from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange.
It is amazing that this many were recoverable at all.
Perhaps someone in IT considered the possibility that the
migration to Exchange would fail, and kept feeding all of the
e-mails to another set of servers for, you know, safekeeping.
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I remember reading something about a Bush official talking about how terrible and obsolete the old Lotus system was and how they had modernized the system by going Outlook and Exchange. (ouch)
On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine that these particular "mislabeled" emails were lost for other reasons, inadvertant or otherwise.
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I find it hard to believe you spent more time typing out that post than the amount of time it would have taken to think up the answer on your own. And yet, here we are.
"Found" (Score:2)
Options :-
1 - They were down the back of the Oval Office sofa the whole time.
2 - They were hidden in some storage area, possibly the fifty-first area, which of course, doesn't exist in our universe for large percentages of the time.
3 - They were stored under the water-boarding rig at Gitmo, and they had to wait for them all to dry out.
I mean, really, is it any wonder that conspiracy theories are born, when a simple archive of data can mysteriously "disappear" and then even more mysteriously "reappear" after
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Makes me curious what happened to those tapes in the meantime...
Maybe there is a gap or two a la the watergate tapes.
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No, no. They were uploaded to AT&T's 3G network (sort of an online backup, y'know), and it took all year to download them again via an iPhone!
Fundraiser? (Score:2)
Never really missing... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never really missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Conspiracy theorists are NEVER disappointed. If they find the evidence, that is proof of the conspiracy. If they find NO evidence, that is proof that the conspiracy runs even deeper than suspected.
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A conspiracy is when two o
It's not all of them (Score:2)
Re:It's not all of them (Score:4, Insightful)
Any really damning stuff would not be in emails to begin with. Cheney learned a lot during his time in the Nixon White House.
Strangely enough (Score:5, Funny)
An all-time lawsuit low... (Score:2, Insightful)
"...two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system.
what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.
Regardless of how you may feel about Bush and the job that Administration did, this is an utterly pointless lawsuit that reeks of bashing one(of many) "rough" Administrations. N
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what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.
Your post, sir/ma'am, is full of fail.
If we were talking about e-mails on a classified network, then the data would be gone. The process for cleaning a hard drive of classified information is to randomly overwrite the HDD with random bits no fewer than five times ... and then degauss the son of a bitch.
Now, if we were talking about classified information on an unclassified system, that's practically a cyber-oil spill, and I imagine the press would have been all over it.
So, no. We're talking about informatio
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what exactly is the fucking point over a lawsuit to prove that one of the most secretive components of our Government actually saved data that is very well likely to be CLASSIFIED to begin with? Did these groups or the lawyers actually think they were going to be allowed to see the "hard evidence" of this? Give me a fucking break.
Your post, sir/ma'am, is full of fail.
If we were talking about e-mails on a classified network, then the data would be gone. The process for cleaning a hard drive of classified information is to randomly overwrite the HDD with random bits no fewer than five times ... and then degauss the son of a bitch.
Now, if we were talking about classified information on an unclassified system, that's practically a cyber-oil spill, and I imagine the press would have been all over it.
So, no. We're talking about information that's maybe For Official Use Only or Law Enforcement Sensitive. And the more of it the American public gets to see, the better.
Actually, the latest procedures do not allow for formatting and degaussing anymore, it must be destroyed. Furthermore, I was also referring to FOUO classified levels as well, which it is very well likely that we will not be privy to for another couple of decades, which by then, another 2 or 3 Administrations from now will make the Bush era look golden by comparison...IF our economy and the dollar last that long.
I knew this was coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I knew this was coming when I first heard about the White House scrapping their previous GroupWise based email archiving system, as they were switching to Exchange, and deciding to roll their own archiving system.
Thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, email archiving is big business now and you can buy enterprise ready solution from the likes of EMC.
Instead they decided to have a private contractor roll a custom system, spent a couple hundred million and 2 years, and then scrapped it for not working right (scrapped by the White House CIO).
In the end they implemented an EMC solution, right before Bush left office.
They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.
Supporting facts: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20080417/chron.htm [gwu.edu]
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They can pull the wool over non technical peoples eyes, but I have no doubt they purposely FUBAR'ed this, there was no reason not to go with an industry standard solution from the get go unless they were up to no good.
You ever worked with a government contractor, or even a huge corporation?
I'm sure the OTS solution was unacceptable because it wasn't using legacy 3.5" single sided floppies formatted for 937.73K each running on a CP/M terminal accessible by thirteen different departments in nine different ways each by thirty-five untrained secretaries with a five second response time that of course would never be used by any of them. And also the servers had to be the proper shade of green.
The government has zero in
How many are for Viagra? (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, with some of the data retention rules caused by SOX, etc. I have often wondered how much storing the volume of spam that must be received by a corporate mailserver is costing the economy. Unless there is some loophole that allows "spam" that is presumedly filterend and never delivered to not be archived.
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Including them does allow inflating the numbers though, 22 million missing emails sounds ominous.
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With the amount of people Bush screwed I would have to say all of 'em!
Badda Boom Ding... I will be here all week, try the veal!
Don't forget the use of private email (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.
If I can reformat a drive to DoD 5225-22 M and find someone to destructively dispose of a disk, you don't think the USAF folks in charge of White House communications can if they were ordered too? Same goes for civilians working at the White House. If the Bush administration really wanted emails to "get lost", they would have.
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.
And for the next X years, anything that goes wrong with foreign diplomacy, military conflicts, or the US economy is Bush's fault that Obama (or whoever else) is "cleaning up" with "tried and proven methods" of some sort (that apparently we have known about since the 30s but I guess nobody wants to try them; that or they've been tried and failed but we don't want to admit it).
-1 Flamebait, but oh well.
-1 Fire Insurance Line Was Included ;)
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Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
> No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at
> pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while
> being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker.
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history. Cheney was however one of the most stunningly successful senior executives in US history, getting more of his agenda accomplished than any other President except FDR and possibly more than him as well (so much is still classified so we don't and may never know). To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this: besides Libby, Addington, and Yoo, who were the other 37 members of Cheney's staff from 2001-2009? Oh wait, their names, salaries, titles, and duties were kept secret for 8 years, Cheney used his self-granted power to classify the information secret, and it never leaked. Nor did the members or agenda of Cheney's 2001 oil conference ever leak. Again, after the events of 2002-2006 to say it is not possible to manage a secret concerted effort in DC is foolish.
sPh
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually will have to wait for the verdict of history.
Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)
To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is, well, foolish.
I agree.
And if it is impossible for a large group to keep a secret in Washington DC, answer me this:
It's certainly not impossible; and while investigating is fine and I don't have a problem with that, many seem to run rampant with conspiracy theories based on nothing more than the fact that they don't know (even though with some of them, we probably do know, but it doesn't suit their particular political bent - whether R. or D.).
I was primarily venting because I get tired of - and not you, apparently - various people attacking Bush (or Obama, for that matter) as being both exceedingly cunning/educated/knowledgeable-about-everything-going-on and stupid/ignorant/high-school-dropout. Slightly exaggerated, depending on who you talk to. "My" side - since conservatives tend to be Republicans - do it with Obama, too. Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country, to completely ruin the country economically and to ruin health care, all the while being ignorant, inept, and completely inexperienced.
I actually disagree very strongly with Obama on many issues... unfortunately, when many people disagree, they get angry; and when angry, they apparently don't think rationally and start accusing of even contradictory things....
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>> Bush may or may not have been inept; on that we will actually
>> will have to wait for the verdict of history.
> Then you aren't the type of person/attitude I was sarcastically aiming at :)
I suspect I will have to disappoint you then: personally I think the verdict on the outcomes of W Bush's /policies and actions/ is already in, and those outcomes were, are, and will be for the (now shortened) lifespan of the United States colossally bad. However, whether Bush was inept or was actually v
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Funny)
You are mistaking the objective.
The Bush II Administration was the most successful in living memory. It accomplished every one of it's objectives. Stage one dismantlement of the constitutional republic was completed.
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Everyone does the best he can. Why do we consider politicians to be some sort of know-it-all superheroes? They don't have the easy answers to the complicated problems either. If they did, a lot more people would because, guess what, they're not the smartest, best informed people on the planet.
A politician, at least a successful one, is usually good at one thing: Being a politician. Getting elected. That does not necessarily entail being a cunning businessman, an experienced expert for social problems, a per
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We don't expect super0human qualities. We expect them to do their jobs without being corrupted or serving their own interests or those of their associates. We expect them to represent our interests as they promised to do in their campaigns. We expect them to uphold the constitution as they swore in their oath of office.
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Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Funny)
We don't expect super0human qualities. We expect them to do their jobs without being corrupted or serving their own interests or those of their associates. We expect them to represent our interests as they promised to do in their campaigns. We expect them to uphold the constitution as they swore in their oath of office.
You expect too much.
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How Muslim? (Score:2)
Obama is well on his way, apparently, to turn the US into a Muslim country
How? Which planks of his platform are directly aligned with the Qur'an, especially with the differences between the Qur'an and the Christian Bible?
very Muslim indeed! (Score:5, Funny)
This quotation from his platform is directly taken from the Qur'an:
"Whooosh shall be the sound entered into record when obvious attempts at sarcasm, humor, or hyperbole are completely missed or obtusely ignored by any child of Allah."
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WTF?
Was done before he got there.
Was done before Nixon got there, and the reforms Nixon was trying to push were a lot more involved than what Obama is trying to get through. It really should be a bipartisan issue instead of being blocked by wreckers that don't want to see Obama succeed at anything even if it is in the national interest.
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Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.
Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.
Something, at least, seems fishy there.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re-reading, though, I still think there's a problem; if Cheney was so good at keeping these things a secret, you'd think his secret-keeping IT staff would have deleted the e-mails from backups, too, as WyattEarp said.
Even I would have done that if I were trying to cover up something that badly.
Something, at least, seems fishy there.
I'll contribute to the conspiracy theories!
Perhaps 18 months was how long they needed to sort through 22 million emails and remove any traces of illegal activity. Now that the emails have been sanitized, they have been miraculously "found".
Or, perhaps the provided reason for discovery points to why these email were not deleted... they were mislabeled as backups for a different system and thus never destroyed by the Cheney-ites. We may be days away from announcements of indictments against the Bush Ad
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To call Cheney "stupid" or "inept" is,well,foolish (Score:2)
yes
the word is "evil"
oh come on guys there's a logical explanation (Score:2)
Cheney left the emails in his other pants.
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You're right, it wasn't dumb. It was psychopathic.
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No, because the Bush/Cheney administration are incredibly talented at pulling one of the biggest conspiracies in the history of the US while being inept, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, and a horrible public speaker. In other words, one of the smartest stupid educated ignorant uneducated charismatic foot-in-mouther guys in the world was just POTUS and deceived the entire world while completely ruining - in secret, mind you - the US economy.
Uh, yeah. Bush and Cheney were secretly planning to ruin the economy because.... well just because they are evil.
As for who ruined the economy, and whose holding it down, if you will take the time to read the Constitution, you will learn that it is not the executive branch at all that controls the economy, but the legislative branch. So blaming Bush/Cheney or Obama/Biden really just shows ignorance. Congress controls the purse strings. I don't know if you old enough to remember, but just a few years ago
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
"'Bush's tax cuts to the rich' (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)"
I think you're being disingenuous. The point being made is that although the Bush tax cuts affected every bracket, the brackets they favored most were the highest ones.
"Then the economy tanked. What changed? Here's another hint, it rhymes with congress."
I'm sorry, but if you think that the Democrats in Congress did anything to affect the economy this badly in the space of only one year in office, I don't think you paid the slightest bit of attention to the legislation passed in 2007. You could cite legislation they passed in 2008 for making it WORSE, or reform they blocked while in the minority before 2007, but there's nothing to even correlate with the downfall of the economy for that year except for raising the minimum wage.
Secondly, in the year 2001, Republicans had a majority until June 6 when Jim Jeffords switched in June, and a 10 to 12 member majority in the House of Representatives. Using your own logic, then, the same party as the President must have been responsible.
In truth, what you describe is the official description of the president's role, but if you took a political science class, you would know the president has considerable influence over Congress. The President has used Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden effectively to mediate disputes between members of Congress and make sure that the interests of members in favor of a bill are aligned, such that less disputes arise between one faction fighting for something in a bill another faction wants out.
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the problems today began back in the 80's when the first wave of banking deregulation happened under Reagan. That eventually lead to the S&L scandal. However, that didn't keep deregulation from happening. The late 90's was the next big flub. After World War Web happened, interest rates were dropped through the floor. The deregulation removed leverage limits and all those other pesky regulations that prevented banks from acting like drunken sailors. Then the whole thing fell apart when everyone realized they were holding steaming piles instead of pipe dreams.
There is no one party to fault here. This was helped along by both sides of the aisle, at the insistence of big banking. Enough green and you can make anything happen in congress. It also helps if your elected congress creature can't tell the the difference between a CD and a CDS.
In any event, the greed fueled money orgy was pushed for by the banks and granted by congress with BOTH parties. The measures were signed by presidents of BOTH parties.
WE, the people, were screwed by just about everyone. At least they bought us a drink ("stimulus" checks).
~X~
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Insightful)
Bush and Cheney were secretly planning to ruin the economy
No, they didn't want to ruin the economy; they just wanted to concentrate greater wealth into the hands of fewer people. They don't see that as the ruination of the economy, since those with wealth continue to live in comfort as long as things don't get quite bad enough for a revolution.
Bush's"tax cuts to the rich" (I got a tax cut. I had no idea that 50k/yr made you rich!)
Depends on where you are and who you're comparing yourself to. But in most places outside the SF Bay Area and NYC, 50k/yr makes you pretty comfortably middle class unless you've got a mess of kids and you've bought more house than you can afford.
But the 3% or so that you saved translates to no more than $1500/year of tax reduction for you. It's something, but not a lot. Now, give that same 3% tax break to someone who's pulling down 100 million dollars per year, and suddenly you've left up to $3M in the pockets of one household. And that's not even considering all the other tax breaks that wealthier people have access to.
And the thing to think about here is the tipping point, the point where, for most Americans, an extra $100 a month is the difference between falling behind and getting ahead. Or the difference between saving for your kid's education or hoping for a scholarship. Or buying those new brake pads or waiting a month or two. $1500 a year in savings for a middle class person might make a more substantive difference in their daily lives than the $3M would for the person brining in $100M per year. Except for the principle of the matter, the richer person wouldn't even notice it.
And that's the core of why people complain about Reagan and Bush's "tax cuts for the wealthy". It's not that they didn't benefit a substantial number of average people in some way--they did. But they provided a windfall for the sector of society that simply did not need it, and with all the lost tax revenue, services for those who are the most in need of them have been repeatedly cut. Public schools, mental health institutions, scientific research, even our national parks have had to scale back services, privatize and focus on profits instead of their core goals, to what has been--I feel--the detriment of society.
I don't think that everything is the fault of any individual executive, but the POTUS does indeed set the agenda; tax cuts were one of Bush's mantra through the whole of his eight years. Combine that with a completely unbalanced budget, two major wars and the continuation of 30 years of removing checks on the banking industry, and the current economic situation was completely predictable.
I think the process of concentration of wealth within a society is not a bad thing overall, but when it gets to a certain point, it becomes difficult for that society to continue to grow and prosper, as there are so many people struggling to get by, surviving at the effective whims of the wealthiest classes. I say treat it like a game: Look! These people won. Now start over and redistribute everything and you get to play again. Think about it. How much fun would a game of Monopoly be if the winner from the last round got to start the next game with all of his or her holdings?
I don't believe in revolutions; they're too bloody. But bloodless redistribution of wealth is possible. It can be done through taxes, or the wealthy can just man up an let go of 90% of their holdings. Rich people don't need money; they'll get rich again. Look at Don Trump: it wasn't that long ago that he was over $100M under water, but that didn't stop him.
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Interesting - a couple of Cheney fans with mod points apparently just hit the thread. Hi guys!
sPh
Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Insightful)
As any mob boss will tell you, just because you tell the 'lackeys' to 'disappear' the evidence, doesn't mean they actually will. It just means it'll go away for a while.
Especially if they have a good idea that you are on the way out and a new boss is on the way in.
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
It may just be that the "lackeys" knew that it was wrong to destroy the emails and so they got rid of them only to the extent that an average executive (or below average president) would understand.
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.
Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions. Violating the archiving laws is a serious crime, and letting the special prosecutor get them with an Al Capone gambit would have been foolish. No, much better that the data be "lost", as in present but unavailable for current use. After all, the e-mails would only have to stay missing until the investigation was concluded. Then the emails show up again, and voila -- as far as the official record goes, the Bush administration violated neither intelligence nor data archival laws.
Of course there's a simpler explanation. As TFA states: "Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems". So odds are that it was simply that their archival system sucked and it really did lose the emails accidentally. Sure one could argue that having a system that accidentally loses emails is convenient if you want to "accidentally" lose some emails without it being obvious, but again according to TFA they did try to get Microsoft's help to fix it before the issue even became public. And evidently failed.
Which is somewhat related to the topic my sibling post pointed out, the always droll "How can Bush be both an evil genius and a complete moron at the same time?" Well the obvious answer is that most people are some combination of smart and stupid at the same time. The Bush Admin being a perfect example. They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity, yet they were terrible at prosecuting said war. They were great at political manipulations and neutering opponents, yet terrible at leveraging that advantage to achieve results. They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.
Anyway, getting back to the topic of these emails and how hiding them for only a short time is sufficient, the National Security Archive who the former White House spokesmen slams as "liberal" and "distorting the facts" demonstrates this clearly. They might be liberal, though they uncover dirt on liberal Presidents like Kennedy, and regardless I don't see how their liberal bias can modify the contents of documents received via FOIA. If you didn't know whether to believe that the U.S. government, and specifically Oliver North, were aware the Contras were smuggling drugs into the U.S. and approved of this [gwu.edu], well, here's the U.S. government telling you in black and white. But it doesn't matter anymore, at least as far as North et. al. are concerned, now does it?
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Brilliant analysis. I would also add that you have to factor in Karl Rove retaining his e-mail account and Blackberry on the Republican National Committee server, which was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, for use in his role managing the Republican Party, and then conveniently "forgetting" to switch back to his White House userid when he handled e-mail related to official government business in his government-salaried job. Potentially including the routing of classified information through the non-secure RNC system.
sPh
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They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.
That's what they get for recruiting from slashdot.
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Wait... Bush being smart and stupid at the same time is perfectly normal. And you support this claim with an example... which is Bush being smart and stupid at the same time.
It's like a perfect storm of bad reasoning.
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"Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions."
So, you created a nice straw man hypothetical. The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. We don't have evidence (reported) that there was any deletion attempt (or success). That 22mio emails were found suggests something other than a cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _ha
Re:Love the spin (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you created a nice straw man hypothetical.
Indeed I did posit a hypothetical*, but like I said I think there's a simpler explanation in an unintentionally shitty archiving system.
The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _had not deleted_ emails. Therefore, your point is moot.
Except my actual point is that implication isn't true -- not deleting emails does not mean there was no coverup. They could have also "lost" them, and this would actually be the smart thing to do since evidence of deletion would be evidence of a cover up. That's what I meant by "Al Capone" gambit: when you can't get them for the crime, get them for the cover-up. So, if you're the conspirator, don't let them get you for the cover up by not actually deleting the emails. By the time they're found, released, and read the emails to find anything relevant, the prosecutor and you are both long gone. NSArchive is full of examples of things past their political statute of limitations, released years later.
That their archive system seems to have legitimately sucked makes that sure seem a lot less likely, though. Al Capone had a hard time arguing he didn't have good accountants. If this was actually a conspiracy, then well played, Bush Administration.
But really in however many years before NSArchive has put up their Bush Jr. documentation, I doubt any of this will be the among the most interesting reading.
* But not a straw man, because at no point did I represent this hypothetical as being someone else's argument. :P
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and if it really was unintentional, then they would've taken less than "new administration plus year+" to find them.
Maybe it was an accident, and they found them on some unlabeled backup tape. Maybe it was an accident, and this is the first time they thought of using low-level disk tools to undelete. Or maybe it was intentional, and someone doing the grunt work "forgot" to "accidently delete" the backup tapes (in a whistle-blower
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now, we'll never really know.
I'm waiting for the entire archive to be posted to WikiLeaks. That ought to be fun; and the right wing has acknowledged the legitimacy of posting huge archives of other peoples' private email, as long as you can pull out a few nice quotes that look incriminating, so they won't mind if someone leaks it.
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Unless this computer was retired and moved out of the Whitehouse before the emails were deleted.
The emails accumulated over *years*, and then they all disappeared. Well, I am sure they ended up on several, if not dozens of computers. Even if they were deleted on purpose, there may be computer eye-witnesses that weren't "eliminated". Maybe a hope PC that was used for work - connecting to a VPN, downloading your email, but not really understanding there is a local copy. Then you donate your PC to some charity
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You can have both malice and incompetence, one doesn't rule out the other.
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Sure, let me just casually reformat this 22 million emails worth of backup tape...
See, this is why you'd never make it as a Sooper Seeekrit Government Squirrel. Everyone knows that backup tapes should be burned, not reformatted.
Anyway, 22 million e-mails is what ... 1 terabyte? What's the big deal?
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Re:Love the spin (Score:4, Interesting)
I love the spin that is being put on this: "found", "technical problems", etc. - esp in the Washington Post. These e-mails just happened to have technical problems and get "lost" when 10 of the senior members of the Bush/Cheney Administration where under investigation concerning a conspiracy to violate foreign intelligence secrecy laws. Just happened to get "lost", yessirree.
sPh
If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name. Remember Dick Armitage [cnn.com]?
However, I will say that the administration didn't want an investigation into that leading to something else. I remember another president was being investigated for something he was cleared of (Whitewater) and ended up getting into trouble from something completely unrelated (Lewinski).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> If you talking about the Valerie Plame thing, it turns out that there was
> no cover up because it wasn't the administration that leaked the name.
> Remember Dick Armitage
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person wh
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that Patrick Fitzgerald said he could not complete his investigation because of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that there was "a cloud over the Office of the Vice-President"? Remember that Novak testified that Armitage leaked the information to him, but that in no way proved that Armitage was the only person who leaked information, or even that Armitage was the first to leak? Remember the notes in Libby's handwriting on the typed minutes of his meetings with Cheney?
I am so happy that I don't know the level of raw hatred and paranoia to continue to blame someone for a crime AFTER someone else has confessed (Armitage), that confession has been confirmed (by Novak) and the case has been closed.
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Oh how I miss the days of being able to compare Presidents to monkeys and chimps.
Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has never really been the place to come for the latest news. It is however, the best place to discuss news.
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Re:TWO DAY OLD NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
If Slashdot's primary function was to simply present a news story without regard to comments, there'd be little need for a moderation system or comments for that matter. The only reason Slashdot got as far as it did was the moderation system that allows fruitful discussion of articles. Without it, Slashdot would be long dead.
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Back then it didn't have the same number of users and the same quantity of good discussion. It's not dying, it's changing.