Slashdot Mirror
White House E-mail Scandal Widens
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."
Just how obvious does the corruption in the White House have to be before you demand a change of government?
Judging by the number of people still defending this administration on slashdot, it would seem the parade scandals, lies, coverups & half-truths aren't enough. What will it take to convince you people? Does Cheney have to visit each house in the US personally, pry open the door with his shotgun, be caught shitting in your pillowcase while installing a keylogger on your PC?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
"In other words, given that all the evidence has been deleted, good luck proving it... even if the other side did have enough votes to bring the charges, and we didn't own the court that would adjudicate any case."
- Your Overlords.
Catch-22. It's the best catch there is.
Fish hunting? Isn't that fishing?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
If those servers belonged to anyone but the RNC, they would have been impounded immediately. Why are they allowed to destroy evidence?
Would you prefer we elected Republicans instead? Yes, the Democrats betrayed the left, but would the Republicans have been any better? Remember that liberals are now hammering the Democrats to grow that most rare of all Washington institutions, a spine.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Praise Jesus!
Thank God Bush restored Dignity and Honor to the White House!
All these Liberals demanding our President stand for American values just simply hate America.
and they hate Jesus, of course!
This wasn't a betrayal of the public trust by government officials using public resources feed their political games, subverting democracy and intentionally betraying oversight and justice...
It was just a simple case of pro-active privatization of communication channels. It's liberty from the chains of evidence! It's saving the public from expensive prosecutions at no cost to the tax payers!
We're at war people - and dog gambit - it's just plain not patriotic to be demanding accountability of our heroic politicians during a war they went through such pain to start and keep going!
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..
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
[ObDisclosure -- I'm independent -- I prefer to think before I vote.]
Before this becomes a big GOP-bashing party, let's not be so tunnel-visioned to believe that this could never happen on the blue side of the aisle.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The issue is that the emails were presumably written while the officials were acting in an official capacity or could have been. The accounts were from a political party, and it is a wee bit suspicious that now that there are probes going on that the information was not being saved. Being by public officials normally subject to the act they should have retained enough of the records to demonstrate that they weren't a subject to the act. That way if there were any sort of investigation they could be looked at examined and then considered to be unrelated to matters. This is the same if you were to be investigated for a computer crime, you would be required to hand over any and all information relevant as well as decrypt any encrypted files. Failure to do so would result in sanctions as well as your guilt being presumed.
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?
If we impeach the top two power-mad kleptomaniacs we have in the executive branch, we have president Nancy Pelosi. An election of Hillary is LESS likely once that happens.
The owners of the system claim deleted files can't be recovered. Well, like I said, unless it's a secure wipe, that's patently bogus, even if the original tracks have now been filled with other data. Up to nine times over, if you're lucky. I'm not sure I would trust a technologically-ignorant group to run a critical service.
The Democrats, on the other hand, no matter how justified their cause, are either unwilling to get competent technical advice or are unwilling to take the gamble of being wrong if they have that advice or knowledge. This may well be rocket science, but it still doesn't take a rocket scientist to do a search on Google to find out what can be done and who can do it.
In short, for me this has ceased to be a matter of rights and wrongs, of whether the law was broken, or of whether civil servants lost their jobs due to degenerate politics. Nobody will ever know the full facts of the matter, because those who could perfectly well obtain them have - for their own reasons - declined to do so. I trust the Democrats on many issues, but after this, I cannot trust them on the issue of cleaning up politics. How can I? Either they want to but can't, or they don't and won't. What does it matter which it is?
I'd also LOVE to know where all the technologists are, who are fully aware of these sorts of capabilities. Why the silence? It's not a conspiracy, that's obvious enough, so why is nobody asking questions? Why are the Republicans not asking why the Democrats aren't making the effort? Why are the blogs not discussing the effects of layering text over text on the magnetic fields? Even if the reliability of the technique is too poor, someone could at least have asked and gotten that reply.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
remember how bush came in and was going to "bring integrity back to the whitehouse" and how psyched we all were as republicans? Remember how he had 90% approval after 911 and was totally leading the world and everything? remember how he controlled both houses of congress and put 2 (maybe more) judges on the supreme court and was starting to push back roe and bring in religion and morality in government and the dems had to eat shit and got kicked out of their nicer hill offices and got the shittier old used blackberries? And we republicans were going to reign high in an unbreakable majority for generations and we would eventually put all the athiest, lesbian, liberal, aclu, anti american, intellectual rat bastard scum in their place and turn the culture of america back to god fearing conservative decent people for the next hundreds of years? George W. Bush really really really fucked it all up didn't he?
Idiots. Keep reading your MoveOn.org "press releases"
It's no worse than you watching Fox News. Our country is being gutted, everything we stand for as a nation undermined and you're still supporting them?
With your user number, you'd think you'd be old enough to have learned something. What an embarrassment that you continue to support such a lying, corrupt administration. We are all the poorer as a nation because of you.
Does anyone besides me wonder if there's a peaceable solution to our differences? Sometimes I wonder if we're going to have to have it out with you and your kind to get our country back. How can we move forward when a third of the nation is okay treating the Constitution like it's just a piece of paper?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
let's not be so tunnel-visioned to believe that this could never happen on the blue side of the aisle.
It is fairly well-known that the repubs had a sense of "ends justify means" for quite a while. They practically felt that since they were doing "God's work", they had a right to skirt the rules. Perhaps in the 1970's the Demo's had this kind of belief due to civil rights and Vietnam. However, the prez was a Repub at the time, putting that in check. This time there were no checks on power: Pubs controled 2, and perhaps 3 branches of gov't.
It is this sense that the ends are important enough to justify the shady means when these kinds of things happen. They felt that when their grand plans succeeded (Iraq victory, Gaza democracy, Prayer, etc.), then voters would be so happy that they could stay in power and stop any investigations. But, reality caught up with them.
Yes, it could happen to the Demo's, but it takes almost a perfect storm. Voters have historically kept mixed parties in the different branches, and this kind of "alignment" is rare.
Table-ized A.I.
the parents score shows that it is not safe to criticize the Democrats on slashdot.
Oh well. Been a week or so since I had a -1. Might as well join you.
So I have this boss... in fact, I have several bosses. And none of them know their email account and client from a hole in the ground. Maybe there's some law that says their email has to be configured some way or another, but you know what? They're old dudes who yell at me if I take more than thirty seconds setting up or fiddling with their machine. If it doesn't work in a way that's convenient for them, in the office/on the road/at home/at the mistress', my ass is grass.
:(
They're not the smartest bunch, but I guess no one who gets into this business is. They're certainly not smart enough to come up with any kind of cool movie-plot conspiracy to run the world.
Presidential Records Act? Give me a break. I'm a freaking intern, who's just trying to make the stipend cover until the end of the month and save up enough scratch to take out that hot page from Texas.
Uh oh. Sen. Pelosi's giving me the eye. Might have to flash her BIOS again later.
I'm not sure I follow this. The committee is saying 88 officials had political cover email accounts while the RNC says there were only 11. Is this a catagory problem? Are 77 not White House officials so that the RNC is correct, or are they minimizing in a way that is not truthful?
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?
Honestly, I believe that this administration has fucked up so bad that there is no shock element any more. Compared to Bush, Nixon was a saint, and Carter was as accomplished as FDR.
I agree with some points earlier about how we'd be even worse if we impeached Bush, though. Who would we be left with? Cheney. The only solution would be to impeach both Bush and Cheney at the same time, but by the time that proceeding gets through we'd already have finished the next election.
basically, Mr. Carl Rove ended up only having 130 emails actually recorded throughout bush's presidency when there should of been all of his emails and all of the other peoples emails recorded. This is why we will never know anything come 25 years from now when things get declassified. This seriously amazes me why the general public is not outraged by this. Compared to the insane ridiculousness of this administration. This trumps it all. I could bet my life that most of those emails were about foreign affairs in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, oil, military, war funding, contracts and contractors for Iraq, occupying the middle east, nsa wiretaps, spying on Americans, the whole damn thing were in those emails. I seriously would be my life on it. Now we have no records of any wrong doing. How screwed up is this place. We should be marching in DC with pitchforks (well guns) and over take the city. Un-fucking-believable
without two?
Help Fight SPAM today!
I'm shocked but not surprised.
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.
People like to use one email account for everything.
People hate to change their email account.
That's it. No malice needed, or even incompetence. It's just being lazy/efficient. Perhaps we should be thankful they aren't all using hotmail accounts.
scandal my ass. these people are untouchable. there's no one willing to stand up to them, so they will just keep on doing whatever the hell they want.
there is no scandal here.
You do realize that this House Oversight committee report was written solely by Democratic staffers under Chairman Henry Waxman (D), right? If there was anything to this issue, Waxman would be the first to call for the resurrection of the independent counsel statute. Instead, it's just more typical he-said/she-said Washington politics. I wish all of them (R's and D's) would just get back to work and quit wasting our money.
There is one reason why this ludicrous and destructive charade continues, and that is from a serious flaw in the Constitution. The executive branch controls 99%+ of the "no questions asked" order followers who carry guns.
And that's it. Supposed to be some vague oath for constitution and then commander in chief. That's the theory. In practice, it is completely loyal to commander in chief. Full stop.
The legislative branch has nothing. Zero. Toothless. Even when they allegedly "pass" this or that legislation, it invariably gets "decided" to be something else, by "signing statements", and the orders from the deciders keep being followed. Combine that with that little cute warning to Congress and the mass media with that *mysteriously unsolved* anthrax attack, which let them know in no uncertain terms who was calling the shots now, and you get what you see.
This has been a coup d'état, with hacked elections and some really dodgy and quite *odd* "terror" attacks, and until that is recognized universally and identified as such, by the population en masse and especially by the toady media and by folks inside the government "system", nothing much will change, it will just keep getting worse.
Above is my opinion. I do not like having that opinion, it just sucks.
This is my anecdotal. Going by what I was taught in gradeschool, we are already way past the point where this can be called a police state. That it is not as bad for people right now as worse police states like north korea or wherever is a moot point. The important thing is, it crossed the threshold and is continuing relentlessly in that direction. It's been slow speed but really increased the past few years. I think they really saw they could pull it off cleanly if they took their time and did it piecemeal, instead of an all at once overnight deal like most coups. I also think it has been going on in a loose form since at least when they offed JFK and got away with it. Eisenhower warned the nation. I don't think he was joking.
Let's see... which is worse?
Sacks of cash in the freezer or thousands dead in an illegal war of aggression?
Mull it over again....
Sacks of cash in the freezer or suspending habeus corpus, a cornerstone of the rule of law?
Let's try it again....
Sacks of cash in the freezer or torturing people?
Yes, Jefferson is a cheezie corrupt punk, but your scaling the war crimes, the violations of the constitution, and the offences to common reason and decency perpetrated by the Bush Junta is ludicrous and pathetic, as well as ignorant and just plain stupid.
So, before you post more of that kind of idiotic horsecrap, please think twice. In your case, once would be a grand improvement.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Being by public officials normally subject to the act they should have retained enough of the records to demonstrate that they weren't a subject to the act.
DING DING DING.
So, who wants to pick the winning excuse that will let the "left wing media" ignore this scandal?
-Because the RNC can't afford enough disk to save all of Karl Rove's e-mails.
-Republicans are conservatives, and they were just trying to be conservative with computing resources. Especially what with all the sacrifice the country made during the leadup and first years of the war.
-Computers are complicated.
-Democrats are corrupt too!
-Clinton got a blowjob!!!!!!!!! And LIED about it!
Charles Ray Polk
Sons of Gestapo
Willie Ray Lampley, Cecilia Lampley, and John Dare Baird
Joseph Martin Bailie
Peter Kevin Langan
Ray Hamblin
Larry Wayne Shoemake
Robert Edward Starr III, William James McCranie Jr, and Troy Allen Kayser
Gary Curds Baer and the Viper Team
Eric Robert Rudolph
John Pitner
Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrell
Floyd "Ray" Looker and the Mountaineer Militia
Eric Robert Rudolph again
Marine Ricky Salyers
Brendon Blasz
Carl Jay Waskom Jr., Shawn and Catherine Adams, and Edward Taylor Jr
Todd Vanbiber
William Robert Goehler
James Cleaver, Jack Dowell, Ronald Sherman, and Thomas Shafer
Playford Glover
Chevie Kehoe, Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace
Eric Robert Rudolph yet again
Dennis McGiffen and The New Order
Ken Carter and the North American Militia of Southwestern Michigan
Alan Monty Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean
Jack Abbot Grebe, Jr., and Johnnie Wise
Paul T. Chastain
James Charles Kopp
Chris Scott Gilliam
Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams
Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
Buford Furrow
James Kenneth Gluck
Donald Rudolph, Kevin Ray Patterson, and Charles Dennis Kiles
Donald Beauregard and James Troy Diver
Mark Wayne McCool
Richard Baumhammers
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Steve Anderson
Clayton Lee Wagner
Irving David Rubin
Michael Edward Smith
David Burgert
Charles Robert Barefoot Jr.
Robert J. Goldstein
Larry Raugust
Matt Hale
James D. Brailey
David Wayne Hull
David Roland Hinkson
William Krar
John Noster
Norman Somerville
Sean Gillespie
Ivan Duane Braden
Demetrius "Van" Crocker
Craig Orler
That's the right-wing American terrorists between 1995 and 2005. Of course, they weren't planning on keying cars or yelling at elected officials, they planned to murder people in cold blood, and in a few cases managed to get away with it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The following steps are indicated. Order is significant:
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.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Bush has certainly done worse than publicly bite the heads off kittens. He has killed more than 650,000 Iraqis in a very public scheme to restrict the flow of oil from Iraq, and thus cause oil prices to rise. (Saddam Hussein was selling oil by trucking it through Turkey. Iraq has 20% of the known reserves of oil.)
The truth is much, much worse than any one person can document. But I tried to write a summary: George W. Bush comedy and tragedy.
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.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Why is anyone a "card-carrying" anything? Why don't they assess each issue and position as it arises regardless of which party is presenting it?
Maybe that's just too much of an ideal scenario?
I usually don't chime in on political topics, because frankly I just don't care. I know I'm going to get it in the "end". Any politician is going to screw you, it's part of the job.
But this question begs to be answered, and I think I can give it a little bit of justice.
I think it's because everyone knows that politicians are corrupt. But they want to be on the the "winning team" In the late 80's Bush the Senior was ruining things... opps Running things. and after 12 years of Republican rule the country wanted something a little different. So the majority of people found some flaw in the republican platform. Anything at all they could disagree with. They would build on this one thing(or 2 small things you get the idea) and eventually talk themselves into being a Democrat. (i'm too young to cite any specific examples... poor schools I guess)
Clinton had his fair share of scandal, whether deserved or not (not up to debate in this post) is irrelevant. Many people claimed to "think of the children" or Family Values or whatever judeo-christian BS the Moral Majority is shoving down our throats.
These people now identified with the Republicans more because they would never (get caught) cheat(ing) on their wives. Or Lieing under oath. Or even would never be confused as to the legal definition of "is".
These people were slowly but surely shown the benevolent side of the Republican agenda. As their following got stronger they branched out into more legally/morally obscure areas.
The people are already going to vote republican because they agree you should (get caught) cheat(ing) on your wife, you shouldn't (get caught) stealing from children etc...
wow that turned into a rant.
I am an American. At one point I thought this country was great, we had freedoms many other places didn't enjoy. We had a great document that limited the power of any one individual, we even had a system of checks and balances so that in the off chance that one individual or group became too powerful it could never truly take away our inherent rights.
This system probably worked rather well for quite some time. Maybe even 50 years.
With the current system, there is no possible way to get back to what this country is about. We are too far gone.
But I cannot think of any alternative. Power breeds corruption. I cannot honestly say that I have never used my job to further my own personal goals. I drove cab for 4 years, I used that job to meet loose women, and score drugs. I'm now in the IT field. I use this job to keep with current trends in the industry and meet contacts that will further my personal agenda.
I'm not saying that if I was a politician I would burn schools down to create parking lots for my fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, but some people do not have high moral standards I do.
If there is a way to use a position of authority, any authority at all it will be abused, more often than not. This is the new American dream.
Lie, Steal, Cheat, Blame your predecessor.
The Constitution is a great piece of work, sad to think of it more as a work of fiction these days.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, America has to go through some kind of radical change. IMHO nothing short of revolution will bring this country even close to the splendor that it once was.
I'm not talking about riches and wealth splendor, I'm talking about freedom.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
That article's headline is "WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a major victory for the White House, the Senate early Friday voted 77-23 to authorize President Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refuses to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions." Bush's actions were limited by that qualifier. Hussein was complying and had given up the WMD as required by the UN resolutions (primarily resolution 687 see:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news /iraq/un/index.html). So far 500 munitions of degraded sarin has been found (http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Natio n/archive/200606/NAT20060621e.html)(Personal, this doesn't seem like a stock pile). So technically, the war is illegal as it fails the qualifier that congress stipulated.
Most people feel that Congress wouldn't even have passed that resolution had Bush et al not been fabricating the intelegence (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3 87374.ece)
I voted for W in 2000 because I thought Gore was an empty suit being handled by a slick campaign. I knew better by 2004 but it was too late. I'll never vote for the son of a president again. W will spend his life trying to prove he stands on his own two feet, without daddy, even if it means leading my children onto a battlefield. Screw you W.
Clinton's staff DELETED ALL of their e-mail, and not a peep was made out of it.
OK. Put up or shut up. Cite a source that isn't connected with the Arkansas project.
This is probably what you're thinking of. Unlike the Bush white House, the Clinton White House case hinged on an incompetent third-party contractor - not the Republican National Committee's grant of free e-mail accounts to be used for political business only.
Whether Karl Rove used the RNC e-mail account exclusively for political ends is up to anyone in a large company to decide. Anyone who has responded to a work query from personal e-mail account, for instance.
You all seem to be missing the obvious.
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
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Is the American system isn't one where you just change it whenever you want. Elections happen at regular intervals. The people, congress, even the president, can't simply call for an election, the law has to be changed. At a federal level, the level you are talking with the president, the law that needs changing is the Constitution. That's not an easy document to change (on purpose). 66% of both houses of congress have to vote in an amendment, and then 75% of the states have to ratify it. As you might guess, this isn't a short or easy process.
That isn't to say nothing can be done, if the president has broken a law he can be impeached by congress, but for now congress doesn't seem to be very interested in trying that, even though the Democrats now have majority control of both houses.
That being the case, there's little a person can do to bring about any sort of immediate change. Basically the best you can do is to do as much as possible to make sure people get out and vote for someone better next time.
The US system is very much designed on a rule-of-law concept, where things can't just be changed because a majority gets pissed off. This has good and bad consequences, but one of them is that the people cannot simply call for a new presidential election and get one. It happens only once per four years, 2008 being the next, and will continue to be that way until the Constitution is changed.
"There can be no crime committed when it's God's will and work that is being done." That is the way such people have deluded themselves to reason. Machiavelli would be proud.
You don't need to prove malice or incompetence when the acts were illegal. Motive is always speculative, but if it makes sense to think they were probably covering things up, they probably were.
The choices are not as you would like us to believe.
What we currently have is a corporate environment filled with anti-American sentiment. They avoid paying taxes at all cost, sidestep environmental regulation, avoid paying fair wages or proper benefits (if they decide to give Americans jobs at all), and do it all without a trace of thought as to the state of the country.
And that is NORMAL. Corporations are sharks, they only exist to make money, and to ask them to fight on behalf of the people is preposterous, because it is simply not feasible or logical.
Government, on the other hand, is responsible for its citizens. They are responsible for the common welfare. And when they start making decisions that are not in the best interest of the people who elected them, they have made themselves obsolete.
Pick one. Either corporations are responsible for helping citizens take care of themselves, or the government is. And I, for one, don't think this is a burden that business should have to bear.
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.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
If a felon is one who commits a felony, you sir are an iron.
This:
[Y]ou know insulting the speaker always invalidates the facts he speaks.
coming right after this:
Clinton was an immoral slime ball with the frat boy charm that got him through.
would blow out the irony meter on anybody but a Neo-conservative fascist who is goose stepping over his fellow countrymen while saluting Fox News.
This isn't really in response to any one comment, but more or less the general "Americans Don't Give a Shit" genre of comments that appear on this story. I've been thinking about the general sense of apathy and while I think a lot of them have been discussed inside and out (corruption, money in politics, biased media, lack of political options) one I've been thinking about lately is the lack of communities:
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
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Something about how The Complex's actions are in the process of cutting America down at the knees. Even though much of the populace seems to be doing okay right now, the entirety of the U.S. population will eventually suffer consequences of the Neo-Con-victs' tyranny:
I wish I could say I've done more to change the system... I've donated a couple bucks to various resistance organizations, but that hardly seems like much. I'm working on a plan to enlist veterans to collect signatures to recall my state's worthless Senators & Congressmen, but this plan is on hold until I figure out 'how to read' (which is, of course, a euphemism for all the things I should've learned in skool but didn't. Soon, very soon indeed, certainly.).
Chomsky has some good stuff out. I found a torrent of his Class War CD, and was quite impressed with the argument (he's been ahead of the curve for quite a while, I think)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Nice deflection from my original request.
I don't think your post matches the challenge of "putting up or shutting up" that I set. I'll grant that absolute contests like that are no fun, but I couldn't let your counterfactual statement stand.
Like so many manufactured scandals, the "trashing" of the White House by Clinton staffers never actually happened - it was ginned up by a Republican machine ready to deliver locker-room dick sizes to a press breathless for scandal - and a year after the story "broke", the truth came out, thanks to the non-partisan GAO.
Hell, read it. I'm tired of trying to make Republicans believe that white is, in fact, white.
From the article:
The White House made 78 staffers available for interviews with the GAO, and clearly spent an enormous amount of energy just to try to stick another scandal to the Clintons. (Gonzales' time alone, billed by the hour, might cost more than the $9,000-plus the GAO blamed on the Clintons.)
Some conservatives. They've been doing the same trick for six years now and spending a shitload of money just to keep the lights on while 68% of people don't even want to get in the front door.
Good grief! Can it get any more "gray area" than this? So there is a law against using government email for political purposes and a law requiring all official, non-political email to be stored. I would imagine there are many emails (regarding appointments, for example) that could go either way. "Hey, how do you think it will make us look if we appoint this guy for this position?" Is that "official" or "political"? And were the emails "destroyed", or were they just not archived? (c'mon slashdot, this is our subject area - we know you don't shred emails). I'd like all the Bush opponents out there to take a minute and imagine hearing these same allegations against Clinton (or whatever administration you would support). I'll admit, if I'd heard the same news about Clinton, I'd be a lot more suspicious, but so far, this is just an allegation of not preserving emails. The implication is that this is part of some big cover-up or scandal, but nothing specific is mentioned. It's just more "Bush Dynasty = Big Oil = Big Conspiracy".
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I'm an anarcho-syndicalist and I feel the same way about Clinton, and his wife. They aren't real democrats. They are both centrist populists. Dennis Kucinich is the only democrat worth his salt these days. You know how most intelligent republicans are jumping ship these days? That was me vis a vis the democrats years ago.
I admit, listening to most repubs talk about Clinton is exactly as you describe, but elemenope is not a republican, and he isn't just badmouthing Clinton (except for the sedimentary rock bit, which is actually funny and kinda true.) He's offering legitimate criticism of his presidency. If we can't respond to criticism with something more than grade school insults, we're no better than the republicans.
You know who I liked? Carter. Go ahead and laugh. I think he was a better president than Clinton.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Having a majority isn't the only thing that counts. In fact it doesn't count at all, it's meaningless.
What matters is the power you can wield.
Political power is mathematically the number of winning coalitions you can join. By that measure, the most powerful man in the Senate is Joe Lieberman, who is, in effect, a Republican caucusing with the Democrats. He is roughly speaking as powerful as all the Democrats put together when it comes to a vote on an issue like timetables in the supplemental.
As the GP points out, the majority's power is further restrained by procedural and constitutional rules. Without the power to invoke cloture on a party line vote, the majority party's power is not really all that greater than the minority party, which is why the Senate has been less extreme than the House during the years of Republican hegemony. The only way for the majority to exploit its power is by abusing the rules (e.g. slipping provisions into bills at the last minute).
The same goes for impeachment. The Democrats can certainly impeach the President, but they can't get a conviction in the Sentate without a supermajority. Since this would work to the President's advantage, the Democrats cannot "win" any impeachment effort until the President is abandoned by his Republican allies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, it's you and people who do what you do. Don't get ruffled, but it's true?
What do I mean?
This
"Bush has certainly done worse than publicly bite the heads off kittens. He has killed more than 650,000 Iraqis [npr.org]"
Now, I'm making no judgment about this statement, but I do know linking to a blurb on NPR that itself says the study may be flawed is not what I'd consider a great way to start. I am certain there are better sources available.
But that's not really the point. The point is, this kind of irresponsible "fact" spewing is epidemic on both sides, and I simply am far too tired of watching them scream "lies" "murder" "impeach" etc. at the expense of being solution oriented. Posts like yours feed that.
Worse still, the number will continue to inflate, so that not long from now it will be "nearly a million" or some such manipulation of reality.
So now, as a responsible consumer of information, I have to wade through a mile of garbage to track down the truth, because it's far more important to "win" than to tell the truth. Some fact "massaging" seems to be accepted, and when the "massaging" itself gets "massaged" suddenly you have a serious information problem.
It's simply too tiring.
Backlash from oppressive communities. Communities work because they have alot in common, usually social rules.
The monolithic 'good ol' days' society of the 50s and before is long past. Our 'melting pot' isn't melting together because people have realized that they don't need to conform to one vision of the nation. And why should they? It's the land of the free, we are free to believe what we want. It just so happens that people are starting to believe much more diverse things, some of these concepts are antagonists.
With internet and easy personal travel, people have less incentive to give up their principles and to conform to the local community. They don't like being gay in their religious home-town where people look down on them, so they move. They don't like being made fun of as the 'college boy' in a dying blue-collar industrial town, so they move.
When people don't buy into the 'one vision', social shaming fails. It used to be that if you didn't behave according to the rules you'd be ignored or exiled. Now people voluntarily exile themselves from communities that don't represent their views.
Blar.
I favor a government with no central point of failure, but then trying to get a crowd to agree on anything important is near impossible. (see congress) And you would still have the probability that some of those people vote with their wallets and not with their hearts or heads.
You may be an anarchist. 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.
Corporations are "evil" because of their structure. No one person is accountable for the evils a corporation does. CEOs don't go to jail for poisoning millions, but they will get the boot if they don't protect the bottom line at all costs. Stockholders aren't fined if their company rapes the environment. That is the problem, that is why corporations behave in an anti-social fashion. There is nothing wrong with commerce, and the free market works wonders under many conditions, but corporatism is evil.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The median and the mean are two simple statistics to look at. Since Bush took office, the median income has dropped (meaning the "typical" American makes less money) while the mean income has risen (meaning that the upper half gained more than the lower half lost). Ideally, both the median and mean income would increase, of course. Here's a interesting chart of historical median income, which I believe has been adjusted for inflation. Here's another version with additional percentiles. Interestingly enough, in that version it's hard to make the argument that the rich are getting richer (although these are medians of each percentile, so if the top 1% got ridiculously richer that would explain how the mean could still go up). I was unable to find a comparable curve to back up my claim that mean income has risen during the Bush years (while median income has dropped) so do take it with a grain of salt.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You know, here is the thing: I think at one time she was liberal. Certainly in college, also while Bill was president. It feels to me like something happened to her. She changed. She's not the Hillary of universal health care from Bill's first term. I have nothing against the idea of a female president, or ambitious women in general. It just seems like she has sold out her values and now would do or say anything to get elected. Maybe I'm wrong, and I would certainly vote for her over any republican in a heartbeat, but she isn't my first choice. Now a Pelosi presidency, that I could get behind.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton