Breaking: White House “Lost” 5 Million Emails

Ken AshfordWhite House Secrecy1 Comment

In just a two-and-a-half year period – March 2003 to October 2005.

That’s astounding.  This from a report just issued by CREW.

Crewpra

Of course, "lost" doesn’t necessarily mean what people think it means.  Just because an email is deleted, and even deleted from the "deleted trash" folder, doesn’t mean it’s gone. 

From Justin over at ABC:

…But “deleted” doesn’t mean what it used to, according to computer forensic experts. Indeed, deleted emails and files, even years-old ones, are recovered all the time.

“We do it every day of the week,” said Beryl Howell of Stroz Freidburg LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that specializes in recovering lost data for businesses complying with court orders, criminal investigators and others….

“They look at their backup systems and backup tapes,” Howell said, adding that “with any electronic storage media, you can do forensic recovery and find deleted data.”

Sanjaya Lives; Vonnegut Dies. There Is No God.

Ken AshfordIn PassingLeave a Comment

Kurt_vonnegut_jr_associated_pressIn memory of Kurt’s passing:

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

_________________

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

_____________________

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

Finally, here’s some things you didn’t know about Kurt Vonnegut — from Mental Floss:

  • The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor
  • Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986’s Back To School, in which he is hired by Rodney Dangerfield’s Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon’s own, Professor Turner tells him, “Whoever did write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.”
  • In fashioning “instructions” for writing short stories, Vonnegut said “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
  • In 1945, Vonnegut was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a “ludicrously negligible wound.”
  • After leaving the army, he reported for Chicago’s City News bureau, then joined the public relations department of General Electric – a job he loathed.
  • On May 14, 1944, Mothers’ Day, his mother, Edith Lieber Vonnegut, committed suicide.
  • In the novel Timequake, Vonnegut writes that his alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, (also) dies at the age of eighty-four.

    • I’m not sure if Slaughterhouse Five is one of those books that I keep saying I’ve read, and actually haven’t.  I think I’ve read it.  Anyway, maybe I should read it again, or for the first time, depending.

    The Dog Ate My Homework

    Ken AshfordAttorney FiringsLeave a Comment

    As an attorney who deals with subpoenas and requests for electronic documents on a regular basis, I can tell you that if a private company — especially one that is required by law or court order to retain documents, emails, and other information — told the government that it had "mishandled" its email retention system such that business-related emails were now "lost", that company would be in a world of shit.  It would be fined; judges would go apeshit; the proverbial "book" would be thrown at them.  Juries would be instructed by the judge that inferences can be made about the non-preservation of the emails — i.e., they can (if they want) infer that the emails were intentionally destroyed because they reflected wrongdoing.

    So what, then, shall we make of this?

    Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday.

    Of the 1,000 White House officials with political duties, 22 — including Karl Rove, the chief political strategist — have Republican National Committee accounts that are supposed to be used only for campaign-related work. But recent revelations that some officials have used those accounts for Bush administration business, including discussions of a plan to dismiss United States attorneys, has prompted a Congressional investigation.

    On Wednesday, Scott Stanzel, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration had recently begun its own inquiry, and had concluded that its policy governing political e-mail accounts was unclear, that the White House was not aggressive enough in monitoring political e-mail and that some people who had the accounts did not follow the policy closely enough.

    As a result, Mr. Stanzel said, “some official e-mails have potentially been lost.” He said Mr. Bush had told the White House counsel’s office “to do everything practical to retrieve potentially lost messages.”

    There is, and should be, a strong presumption of wrongdoing here.

    UPDATE:  The email scandal is being compared to the 18-minute gap.

    And a Kos diarist thinks he has a good name for this scandal: dogAte.

    The Wider Conversation

    Ken AshfordPopular CultureLeave a Comment

    Don Imus’ reference to the Rutgers’ womens’ basketball team as "nappy-headed ho’s" has opened up a wider conversation (see here and here and here) about the liyrics of many rappers, and they’re frequent allusions to ho’s, and so on.  Why, for example, aren’t we condemning them?  Is this one of those situations where blacks can use racial epithets on blacks, but whites get fired/suspended for using the same words?

    My feelings?  Yeah, I don’t like the misogyny in rap songs either.  (Truth be told, I’m generally no big fan of rap music, regardless of the lyrics).  But it is an different animal.  Imus was direct a racial slur (and an untrue slur) at specific named and identifiable human beings — real women with names, histories, families, and feelings.  Rappers refer generically to women as "hos" and "bitches".  The rapper’s language is ugly, but what Imus did was ugly and mean-spirited, because he didn’t merely use the offending no-no words; he directed them specifically at someone.

    Should rappers who use such language be condemned?  I certainly think so.  And hopefully — in time — the free market will.  Imus, however, is — and God only knows why — a media power broker.  He’s a man who politicians and newsmakers seek out.  By virtue of that position, he’s necessarily more accountable.

    So it ain’t the same thing.

    The Job Nobody Wants

    Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

    So, according to the Washington Post, Bush wants somebody to act as "war czar", overseeing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    And nobody wants the job.  (Surprise, surprise):

    At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration’s difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.

    "The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going," said retired Marine Gen. John J. "Jack" Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. "So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ " he said.

    ….Besides Sheehan, sources said, the White House or intermediaries have sounded out retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, who also said they are not interested. Ralston declined to comment; Keane confirmed he declined the offer, adding: "It was discussed weeks ago."

    I think Kevin Drum has the right take on this:

    The fact that the White House is incapable of coordinating the war effort is indeed a real problem, but aside from the wee issues [WP reporter] Sheehan mentioned — Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing and Cheney still has too much influence — ask yourself: is one more matrix manager really going to do any good? We already have Secretaries of State and Defense, we already have a military chain of command, and we already have an NSC that’s supposed to coordinate all this stuff. Does anyone truly think that a shiny new White House staffer with no budgetary authority, no bureaucratic support, and little in the way of institutional levers of control is going to be able to magically get everyone on the same page sometime in the next few months? It’s a suicide mission, and the fact that Bush apparently thinks that a bit of org chart shuffling will make a significant difference in Iraq is just one more sign of how deeply out of touch with reality he is.

    Not Your Granny’s Sewing Machine

    Ken AshfordScience & TechnologyLeave a Comment

    Arista 730E from Barista.  Pretty cool:

    Artista_730e_2The 730E has a big bright color touchscreen on it that provides on-screen help and graphic tutorials, all powered by Windows. The system does even more than just sewing – it also can quilt and do embroidery. It’s packed with a stitch library with over 850 stitches, over 100 embroidery designs and an assortment of other features I most likely wouldn’t even be able to make sense of because in the end I’d probably be hopeless, despite all the on-screen help.

    It also can link to your Windows-operated computer through a USB connection, and has a proprietary memory card.

    Downside: It costs $8,199.

    Those Ford Bastards Recall My Car

    Ken AshfordScience & TechnologyLeave a Comment

    Well, not yet.  But if this goes the same way that the whole dog food-wheat gluten thing went, they just might recall my car soon:

    NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Ford is recalling 527,000 Escape sport-utility vehicles because of a problem in the antilock braking system that could cause fires, the company said Tuesday.

    Missing or incorrectly installed wiring harness seals on the Escape’s antilock brake connector could allow water and other contaminates such as brake fluid or road salt to enter the ABS connector causing corrosion.

    The corrosion, in turn, could "lead to an illuminated ABS warning indicator, an open fuse, and in some rare instances smoking, melting or burning of the electrical ABS connector," the company said in a statement.

    The recall affects 444,880 Escapes from the 2001-2004 model years in the U.S., as well as 82,000 Escapes in Canada, Mexico and Europe, Ford said.

    The hybrid version of the Escape is not included in the recall, although the Mazda Tribute, which is essentially a twin of the Ford Escape, is being included, according to spokesperson Kristen Kinley.

    I have a 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid.

    Post Of The Day

    Ken AshfordPopular CultureLeave a Comment

    Written at Suburban Guerilla:

    It used to be that sometimes I would wake up in the morning and Imus would be on the TV and then I’d change the channel and everything would be right again. Now when Imus is on the TV and I change the channel, he’s still on the TV and no matter how often or enthusiastically I pursue non-Imus related program activities, he’s still right there on my TV. If anybody has found a way around this, please let me know.

    Step It Up!

    Ken AshfordEnvironment & Global Warming & Energy1 Comment

    My days of citizen activism (I’m ashamed to say) are largely behind me, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t plug it.

    Saturday, April 14, is a National Day of Climate Action, with thousands of events and demonstrations taking place all over the country.  Check it out.

    P.S.  For local folks here in Winston-Salem

    April 14, 2007 10:00AM to 12:00PM

    Event Description:
    Join your friends and Sierra Club members at Hanes Park near downtown Winston-Salem from 10-noon. We will be across the street from Mock Orange Bikes at the corner of West End Boulevard and Reynolda Road. Kids, come get your face painted, everyone else, step up and sign petitions for local and national action to stop global warming! And for bikers- 2 ride options! 10:00 Join the Mock Orange Road bike ride for a faster pace, 50 mile ride. 10:30 A more casual pace ride of 12-15 miles. Look for us at the Step It Up banner in the park. We may even have live music!! And of course, wear GREEN to show your love for Mother Earth. Also learn about other local events in this run-up to Earth Day — films, fairs, green building designs, all in Winston-Salem, all in April, all to help us be more informed citizens regarding the important topic of Climate Change. See you there!

    Crazy Diaper-Wearing Cross-Country-Driving Kidnap-Planning Astronaut Woman Also A Little Kinky, Too

    Ken AshfordCrimeLeave a Comment

    USA Today:

    Explicit photos of bound women were among the evidence that police recovered when they arrested ex-astronaut Lisa Nowak after she allegedly attacked a romantic rival at an airport in Orlando.

    "Fifteen of them were depictions of a woman in various states of dress and undress," the police reports said, according to Florida Today. "Most of the images depicted scenes of bondage. Some of these images were photographs and some were drawings."

    Hey, I’m only promoting this story because I’m sick of hearing about Don Imus.

    And Anna Nicole’s baby.

    Attack Of The Cicadas

    Ken AshfordDisastersLeave a Comment

    A breed of insects — cicadas — spend 17 years living underground.  Then they emerge en masse, breed a new generation, and those babies live underground for 17 years.

    It’s the emerging part that’s interesting, because once every seventeen years, certain parts of the midwest get covered with millions of these bugs (often mistakenly referred to as locusts) who eat every bit of vegetation in sight.  We’re talking millions per acre.

    And this year — 2007 — marks the beginning/end of a 17 year cycle.  Read more.

    Glad I live in the South.

    I’m No Socialist, But….

    Ken AshfordCorporate GreedLeave a Comment

    This doesn’t seem right:

    Wages_2

    Let’s break this down.  (All figures, by the way, are adjusted for inflation)

    From 1990 to 2005, the average CEO pay went up almost 300 percent, whereas the average worker pay went up 4.3 percent.  And minimum wage, in real dollars, went down 9.3 percent.

    Look, I get capitalism.  The heads of corporations get more money.  I get that.  And I’m quite content — barely — for them to earn 107 times as much as the average worker (which was the case in 1990). 

    But now there are earning 411 times as much as the average worker.

    Does this strike anyone else as, well, wrong?

    Data and more graphs here.

    UPDATE:  And five minutes after I wrote that, I read this:

    Citigroup plans to eliminate one of every 20 positions as part of what Reuters describes as a "a broad restructuring designed to cut costs and bolster its long underperforming stock."

    The company says 17,000 of 327,000 positions are targeted for elimination, with 9,500 jobs moving to off-shore locations with lower-cost workers.

    "This is the beginning of a change in how we manage expenses," CEO Charles Prince said on a conference call. "You will see a more efficient, more tightly managed, and a more tough-minded Citigroup than you’ve seen in the past."

    Very nice. 

    Oh, by the way, according to this, Citicorp CEO Charles Prince’s total compensation for 2006 was over $25,000,000, an increase of 20% from the previous year.