How really very odd....

John Yoo's emails are missing. Who could have predicted....?

Too little too late

Too weird....

• Al Qaeda offers 'condolences' for innocent victims.

• NELSON: A LOST CAUSE?

• High fructose corn syrup responsible for rise in childhood diabetes.

• White House Emails Case Nearing Settlement Between 10 and 20 MILLION of them have been recovered and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)have been prevailing to get them out.

• Obama’s Delusion

Climate change email scandal!!1!

Leaked emails expose the fact that scientists were complaining about bad scientific processes and how much work they had to do and stuff:

Climate change is real and man-made. Period, end of story. But recently, some emails have leaked that conclusively prove that climate scientists... are really pissed off that a well-funded industry exists that subverts and denies their work.

A "hacker" obtained a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and posted them to some website, and for some reason Matt Drudge and the right-wing media have decided that these emails are proof of a massive conspiracy to make up global warming, for fun. The emails are mostly scientists complaining about political pressures and people they dislike and things that make their job—and their job is attempting to reconstruct climates of hundreds or millions of years ago based on fucking ice floes and tree rings—harder.

Maybe if people actually READ the emails before commenting on them..... um... be right back....

Update: Scientific American and Mother Jones have replies.

Update 12/1: Via Mahakal in comments, Will Bunch of Attytood has a good overview.

Just imagine if a Clinton or Obama administration did this

And imagine the outcry, the baying of hounds, the frothing of mouths as the Right Wing Smear Machine ground into full throttle:

WASHINGTON -- The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page outline of the White House's e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors' proposals, which was dated June 20.

Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document.

[snip]

"We will continue to work with members of Congress and the National Archives and will communicate the results of our accounting effort at an appropriate time," White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has said the White House's failure to properly archive e-mails violated the Presidential Records Act. The top lawyer for the National Archives has expressed disappointment the White House did not have a formal records management system in place.

On Wednesday, House Democratic Caucus chairman Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois criticized how the problem has been handled, saying, "The White House that wants to keep track of all your e-mail and phone records can't even keep track of their own."

Right. Everyone stands back while Cheney hires a TRUCK SHREDDING SERVICE to come to his office, has two man-sized safes to keep his paperwork in, silences everyone who's ever worked for, near, in the vicinity of him while he clearly took notes on how not to get caught from the Watergate scandal. There's even a question on exactly how many people staff his office. And Cheney has even cast doubt which branch of government the vice-president works for and answers to?

It's called covering your tracks, wiping your fingerprints, giving yourself plausible deniability. And yet people cannot call the White House on this blatant of all lies?

Being a teenager not covered by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield

And everything you say or do will be held against you. Via Ripley of Zen Cabin, The Consumerist:

How's this for twisted: An insurance company, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, have demanded that the parents of minor children who suffer from anorexia turn over their children's writings on MySpace and Facebook, as well as any emails where they discuss their problems.

The insurer says that eating problems are not "biologically based" and are therefore not covered.

Lovely. Way to show you want to heal people rather than screw them for their money and not help them when in need, besides invading their privacy and doing more untold damage to the teenager in question.

Tell me again, why we are paying insurance premiums?

Imagine that!

How utterly bizarre! We couldn't have imagined this happening... oh good grief, you guys! How can this possibly be a surprise?

The Washington Post:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.

The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said.

The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records -- including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions -- for history and in case of any future legal demands.

Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue.

Another official in that office on Tuesday challenged the study's credibility in a court affidavit, contending that current White House employees have been unable to confirm the veracity of the analysis or to recreate its findings. Waxman's disclosure provides the first details about the study's findings.

We saw this one a mile off. Why are people so amazed? I mean, in 2006 the Democrats take Congress and the next thing we see is a TRUCK filled with shredding machines driving up to Cheney's offices. This is the group that studied Watergate to see how NOT to make mistakes. Not to avoid breaking laws, mind you, but how NOT TO GET CAUGHT.

Cheney has wiped his fingerprints off of every thing he's ever touched. I'm sure he's behind this oh-so-mysterious email erasure thing....

Update 1/19: Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat cites an AP article and says:

Read the entire article for a sample list of some dates for which emails are known to be absent. Remember as you read that the government is legally required to archive all its emails. There's a system in place to do so. There is simply no way this quantity of emails can have gone missing accidentally.

Why is there any American anywhere who does not see that the current White House is one massive criminal enterprise?

The dog ate my homework

And the hard drives of every computer and server in the administration, the little scamp!

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat notes:

A federal magistrate has ordered the White House to answer a simple question: does it, or does it not, have backups of White House emails between 2003 and 2005. The judge, John Facciola, ordered a lower court judge, Henry Kennedy, to issue a court order requiring an answer..

The White House's response to CREW's requests:

"CREW has yet to provide any basis for their assertions -- be it their original assertion, or their new claim. We are aware that some e-mails may not have been automatically archived in the past, but they may be available on backup tapes. Unlike what the liberal group CREW has asserted, we've never been without a backup system. The Office of Administration at the White House has been maintaining and preserving backup tapes for the official email system."

-Scott Stanzel
White House Spokesman

Has anyone checked those mysterious man-sized safes said to be in Dick Cheney's office?

Here's Jack Cafferty's take:

Should I open this email?

"Turn your trouser mouse into a one-eyed giant bmpqic!"

It's so... tantalizingly weird.

Now if they had mentioned something about squirrels....

Like sneezing into a Hallmark card

Then sending it to Grandma:

If you've been taken in by an e-mail that says you have an electronic greeting card from a friend or relative, your computer might be infected.

A new multipronged virus e-mail has been making its way around the Internet in recent days, containing a virus nicknamed Storm Trojan.

If, believing there is a genuine card, you click on the link, the destination launches three exploits. If your computer is not vulnerable to the first, it tries the second, and so on.

"Since the Storm Trojan relies on a person to click on a link rather than open an attachment, it makes tracking it more difficult," said Hoala Greevy, CEO of Pau Spam.

The link destination may itself be a compromised computer.

"The trend for assaults like these is a heavy payload of e-mail based attacks during the first four to five days, after which it then subsides," Greevy said. "The goal of attacks like these is to compromise a vast number of computers as quickly as possible, at which point they can be used collectively as a zombie army to spend spam and phishing schemes."

(Via PSoTD)

The 140,216 emails gap

Worser than Watergate, Georgie:

House investigators have learned that the Bush administration’s use of Republican National Committee email accounts is far greater than previously disclosed — 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone — and that the RNC has overseen “extensive destruction” of many of the emails, including all email records for 51 White House officials.

For the last several months, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been “investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act” by using email accounts maintained by the RNC and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign for official White House communications. Today’s findings confirm that the accounts were used “for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies.” The report adds:

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.

So. What are we going to do about this? Anyone?

Update: TAH DAH!! Waxman's on the job:

Of the 88 officials using RNC accounts, the RNC has deleted records for 51 users. Still, the committee found heavy use of the account by some high-ranking officials. For instance, the RNC tracked down 140,000 messages sent to or received by Karl Rove. Half of those were addressed to or from an official ".gov" address. The White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor sent 66,018 emails and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings sent 35,198 emails, according to RNC records.

Waxman's committee is investigating whether RNC email addresses were used for official work to avoid a record required by official email addresses and to what extent those acts violate the Presidential Records Act. Democrats were tipped off to the use of the off the record email system from emails revealed during the Jack Abramoff and U.S. Attorney firings investigations. Waxman has asked 25 federal agencies to scour their records for email that has been lost by the White House and the RNC.

Investigators now plan to pursue Alberto Gonzales' actions while White House counsel. The early report shows Gonzales likely knew Rove was using RNC accounts for official work, but that Gonzales did not intervene to keep records of those messages.

I'm going to predict the future....

We will be doing splendidly in Iraq in just a few .... (/yanks out a few more Cat5 cables) .... more minutes....



Jeraylyn Merritt of Firedoglake:

Iraq’s interior ministry has decided to bar news photographers and camera operators from the scenes of bomb attacks, operations director Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said on Sunday (local time).

His announcement was the latest in a series of attempts to curtail press coverage of the ongoing conflict, which has already attracted criticism from international human rights bodies.

That got me thinking, how real is the War in Iraq to Americans who don’t have a loved one fighting in the conflict? Where has the news coverage been of the gory daily details?

For those of you old enough to remember the media coverage of the Vietnam War, you’ll remember how vividly it was brought to us every evening on our television screens by the nightly news programs.

Without the internet or e-mail, a massive anti-war movement grew. I don’t think anyone doubts that it contributed to the war’s end.

By contrast, we hardly ever see the damage inflicted in Iraq up close and personal on television news. The war has become something we hear about in headlines, like “5 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq” and “37 Civilians Killed by Roadside Bomb,” but we don’t actually see it.

Maybe we should. Maybe the visceral effect of watching people die and be maimed, which is a daily occurrence in Iraq, would spark greater outrage here at home and force Congress to act to end this war once and for all.

So, what do you think? Is the media doing its part to expose the atrocities in Iraq? Has self-restraint dictated media coverage to date or is the Administration controlling what the media shows?

This new embargo on showing bombings in Iraq is very troubling. I think Americans need to see the blood and gore to absorb the reality of war and the lives lost.

And Bryan of Why Now?:

[05/11/07] Laura Smith-Spark, BBC News, Washington: US military takes Iraq war to YouTube

The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.

[05/14/07] Rob Watson, BBC defence and security correspondent: US blocks soldiers from websites

The US military is to block troops from using YouTube and MySpace and 11 other popular websites for sharing photos, video clips and messages.

[05/02/07] Army Regulation 530–1: Operations Security (OPSEC) - commanders must approve blog posts and e-mails.

So, who wants to bet that Commander Guy, the Big Manly Surge, and his Plan to Win will suddenly be doing super-de-duper well?

Update 5/15: Think Progress:

As of yesterday, U.S. soldiers are blocked from accessing YouTube, MySpace, and 11 other websites on official Defense Department computers nationwide, “severing some of the most popular ties linking U.S. troops in combat areas to their far-flung relatives and friends, and depriving soldiers of a favorite diversion from the boredom of overseas duty.”

The military has justified the new policy by stating it will “increase network security and protect the use of the bandwidth.” But soldiers are already barred from posting classified material and scholars point out that “the Pentagon could have rationed Web access rather than cut it off entirely.” While troops will still be allowed to visit the sites from non-military computers, “few soldiers in combat areas carry private computers.”

If it wasn't for those pesky emails

They'd've gotten away with it, too! Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker:

Murray Waas has a new story on the U.S. attorney firings, this one leading to the inescapable conclusion that the administration was complicit in attempts to cover up White House involvement in the firings.

The revelations come from emails that the Justice Department is withholding from Congress.

A "senior executive branch offiical" tells Waas that it's no accident that Congress hasn't gotten their hands on these documents:

Damn those internetal tubes!