Slashdot Mirror
White House Refused To Open Unwelcome EPA E-Mail
epfreed writes "The White House lost a case in the Supreme Court about the need for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. So the EPA made new rule. And now the NYTimes reports that the White House did not want to get these new rules from the EPA about greenhouse gases. So they did not open the email."
Frankly I'm pretty sure my boss would give me the sack for that sort of BS.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
How did they know about the rules if they never opened the e-mail?
Also after 7 years, is anyone surprised?
The only thing sadder and more despicable at this point than the Bush administration are the Democrats in Congress who have been on their knees for the last two years after promising to hold this imperial administration accountable.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Given the government's poor record with computer security, I wouldn't open ANY documents emailed me. I would imagine there are policies in place that would forbid the acceptance of such messages. This story could well be somebody at the EPA insisting on total asshattery.
And if its something official and important, why is it being emailed anyway? Shouldn't it be, like, printed out and physically handed to somebody? Maybe signed, stamped, notarized, and whatever else?
Based on the experience of the last seven years, non-reality-based decision making is a powerful tool for gathering and holding power. We should celebrate the Bush administration's success in contesting or ignoring every bit of evidence that contests their highly profitable worldview. After all, didn't a lot of people vote for Bush because they wanted a president who says what he means and means what he says?
Anyway, listening to scientists just encourages to make up stuff that upsets people. Evolution, the germ theory of disease, the greenhouse effect . . . we'd all be happier and more content if we all behaved like Ben Stein would like us to: God-fearing authority-worshipping dumbfucks.
If you think "If I ignore it, it'll go away", then you're probably ignorant. If you're the President of the United States and you think to yourself, "If I ignore this official message sent here by the EPA, maybe it'll go away", then you're criminally ignorant.
Other possible subject lines: "Get Viagra / Cialis without a prescription"
"VP Cheney shot another friend in the face"
"Bum Fights Vol 3 now available on DVD"
"American Idol canceled"
"Mobilize the Navy! North Dakota invades South Dakota"
"Senator Byrd called you a pussy!"
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
For the past sixty years or more, judicial despotism has increased until now, you have governors and legislators of states waiting to see what some court will rule on an issue before they can proceed. This is NOT what the Framers intended, and unless we get things back to the balance of powers between the branches of government things are going to become more despotic.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
There's too many problems with it. If you're sending something official, there's no reliable record that it was even delivered.
What's next? The EPA sending an IM about new regulations?
Using email in this matter is completely inappropriate, and the ./ community shouldn't get so slackjawed because of it.
Um, no, that's not how it works. The legislature (that's the House and Senate) writes laws. The President either vetos or enforces those laws. After enforcement, the judiciary judges whether or not said law has been broken.
The primary law that all other laws must conform to is the Constitution. If the Constitutions doesn't say Congress has the power to pass a certain law, than said law doesn't have to be obeyed (in theory, of course).
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The President is the Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Branch.
All power of the Executive Branch comes as proxy for the Chief Executive.
The Executive Branch does not have the authority to create obligations which the Chief Executive officer does not want.
The EPA is part of the Executive Branch.
The SCOTUS ruling endorsed the authority of the EPA to create such regulations, it did not empower the EPA to create them exclusive of the Executive Officer. The SCOTUS did not somehow turn the EPA into a fourth branch of the Federal Government.
There's no "there" there.
It really is that simple.
John McCain says he's completely computer illiterate, and has to rely on other people to do anything on the computer for him. Now, given that George W. Bush has said that "doesn't read newspapers" - what're the odds *he's* computer literate? Or that either of them would hire (or keep) people who felt that skill was far more important than they did?
Whether you think this is genuine incompetence or just plausible deniability - the fact remains that we collectively "hired" someone who said he lacked a vital skill for the job, and a fair portion of Americans are seriously considering hiring another one.
If you were willfully ignorant, and had to rely exclusively on the caliber of people a willfully ignorant person would hire as advisers - you too would end up having to:
-Say things like "$4.00 a gallon gas? I hadn't heard about that".
-Wait until your staff put together a DVD for you to illustrate what a "heckuva" job that ex-Head of an Equestrian club manager you hired to run FEMA was doing responding to a Category 5 hurricane that hit a below sea level city.
-Claim that "Everyone thought he had Weapons of Mass Destruction".
-Respond that "No one could have predicted" terrorists would fly highjacked jumbo jets into the building they previously tried to blow up with a truck bomb.
-Assume that promising to "Protect and Uphold the Constitution" consisted primarily of keeping your hands of the interns, and doing a lot of bicycling.
So let's not complain about this too much folks. We hired an incurious idiot to run the company. Just be thankful the company didn't go completely bankrupt before we started paying more attention to applicant's resumes.
I'm actually far more surprised than thankful. If we make it to 2009 without China foreclosing on us, it's going to feel the way it does to wake up safe in bed when you have no memory of how you got home from the previous night's party: thankful you got home alive but still worried about kind of damage you've done to your car, credit line, or reputation in the process.
I said it before, I say it again, I prefer having someone in the Oval Office that gets a blowjob to someone who really needs one badly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's strange, making me suspicious of your thesis, that with all the hyperlinks in that Washington Post article, not one points to the full text of the report it discusses, nor even to complete paragraphs or even complete sentences that specify, for example, on [sic] nuclear or biological weapons, just which of the "president's statements 'were substantiated by intelligence information.'" And it's strange that, among so many excerpts, all the excerpts from that article are sentence fragments, necessitating the improper grammar repeated ad nauseam, "On [fallacy]?. The president's statements 'were substantiated [by
And, no, most of Congress did not know at that time anything but the cherry-picked version manufactured by Douglas Feith & co.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p