Henry Waxman still wants the private White House emails staffers used to circumvent the Presidential Records Act. Yesterday, Justin Rood reported that the Bush gang isn’t exactly anxious to cooperate with the investigation.
The White House will not identify a private company which appears to be involved in the disappearance of millions of White House e-mails.
The company was responsible for reviewing and archiving White House e-mails, a White House official told congressional staff in May, according to a letter yesterday from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Congressional investigators asked then for the name of the company and “have repeatedly requested” the information since then, according to Waxman.
They are still waiting for an answer, the chairman wrote to White House counsel Fred Fielding. […]
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel declined to tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com the company’s name or explain why the White House would not provide it to Congress.
Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing at all.
Waxman asked the White House to come up with the company’s name by Sept. 10. We’ll see how that goes.
Apparently, on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina ravaging the Gulf Coast, conservatives have decided they’ve grown tired of the topic.
GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) said Friday it is “time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station” and urged an end to the federal aid to the region that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago. […]
“The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end,” said Tancredo.
That would be the same federal government, of course, that neglected the victims before the storm hit, as the storm hit, after the storm hit, and for the two subsequent years that followed. Indeed, for all the rhetoric we’ve heard, as of this week, “none of the 115 ‘critical priority projects’ identified by city officials” for publicly funded rebuilding efforts “has been completed.” Of the $34 billion “earmarked for long-term rebuilding,” less than half “has made its way through federal checks and balances to reach municipal projects.”
What’s more, it’s not just Tancredo. Over at Townhall, John Hawkins offered this jaw-dropper.
Two years after Katrina, everywhere you turn, there are people carping, whining, and kvetching. Just why hasn’t the pity party for the citizens of New Orleans run out of booze and chips yet? […]
Let me tell all the citizens of New Orleans something that should have been told to them 18 months ago: it’s time to stop playing the sympathy card and get over it.
Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent “Get Out of Work Free” card?
If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it.
Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), as expected, announced his resignation just minutes ago, citing his ongoing scandal as an “unfair distraction” to his constituents. He added, “I apologize for what I have caused,” though that’s just vague enough to leave ambiguities.
Craig did not respond to reporters’ questions after reading his brief statement, though his office said it would issue a written Q&A this afternoon with more details.
I’ve let my subscription lapse on Republican Talking Points Weekly, but it’s pretty obvious that the Powers That Be have a clear message in the wake of the Larry Craig scandal: this shows that the GOP means business.
On Thursday’s edition of “Hardball,” for example, Tom DeLay, who inexplicably has been assigned to defend the Republican Party on issues relating to scandals and corruption, told Chris Matthews, “I’m not defending Larry Craig, if he’s guilty. What I do know is the Republicans, as they have in the past, when you have members that have problems or scandals and they are found guilty, the Republican Party does the right thing and kicks them out.”
The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes emphasized the same point in his latest column, arguing that the party is “intent on pushing scandal-plagued members of Congress out of office and far from the media spotlight.”
Republicans are desperate not to have another corruption-driven defeat in 2008. So when House Republican leader John Boehner, whip Roy Blunt, and others in the hierarchy met in a private retreat outside Washington last December, the corruption issue headed their agenda. They adopted a zero tolerance policy. They want no House candidates with corruption problems on the ballot. In 2006, four House members resigned (two later went to jail).
Boehner came up with a vague phrase for the sort of scandal they had in mind. It’s one with “a clear indication of serious transgressions.” In Boehner’s mind, an FBI raid on your home or your wife’s office is such an indication.
It all sounds very nice, but there’s ample reason for skepticism. In fact, this “zero tolerance” talk might make for pleasant-sounding p.r., but I don’t think the party leadership means a word of it.
Consider the scandal sheet Paul Kiel put together the other day, which helped prove that this year is poised to be as shameful for the GOP as last year.
Of the 11 lawmakers on the list, Craig has resigned and Renzi has said he won’t seek re-election. Everyone else — including those whose homes have been raided by FBI agents — remains in good standing. Indeed, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), one of the more notorious members on the list, announced this week that he will seek a 16th term next year. “I never seriously contemplated not running again,” he said in an interview. If there was an outcry in GOP circles based on their “zero tolerance” policy, it was awfully hard to find.
It gets back to the same point we’ve emphasized again and again this week — Republicans will act swiftly to purge the party’s scandalous members when they won’t suffer political consequences for it. All the other arguments are hot air.
Fred Thompson isn’t skipping the Republican debate this Wednesday, after all â he’s buying a 30-second ad to run right before it. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.
A couple of days ago, the NYT reported that the White House “is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq.” It’s not because conditions in Iraq have improved, and it’s not because the president’s policy is producing results, but because the administration has “a sense the dynamic has changed.”
It’s all about some amorphous “sense” that’s entirely independent of reality. Consider what we’ve learned this week. The GAO prepared a “strikingly negative” assessment of conditions on the ground, with no political progress (the intended point of the “surge”) and little evidence of reduced violence. Of the 18 Iraqi benchmarks, Bush’s policy has come up short on 15. An independent federal commission believes Iraq’s 26,000-member national police force is beyond repair and might need to be disbanded altogether. A working draft of a secret document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad shows that the Maliki government is rotten to the core. Iraqi civilian deaths are getting worse, not better. The latest data shows U.S. troop fatalities worse every month this year compared to the same months last year. A smidgeon of evidence pointing to at least marginal political progress late last week turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
It’s against this backdrop that the White House and its conservative allies boast, “See? This is the progress we’ve been waiting for.” More importantly, the conventional wisdom in DC is suddenly in agreement that they’re right.
How on earth is this happening? Kevin Drum explains that Gen. David Petraeus has run a methodical political campaign that has produced exactly the desired effect.
[Petraeus is] keenly aware of the value of both the media and public opinion, and he did what any counterinsurgency expert would have counseled in his circumstances: he unleashed a hearts-and-minds campaign aimed at opinion makers and politicians. For months the military transports to Baghdad have been stuffed with analysts and congress members, and every one of them has gotten a full court press of carefully planned and scripted presentations, tightly controlled visits to favored units, and assorted dollops of “classified” information designed to flatter his guests and substantiate his rosy assessments without the inconvenience of having to defend them in public.
And it’s worked…. Five months ago Petraeus was guaranteeing to wavering Republicans that they’d see progress in August, precisely the month when the PR campaign was scheduled to go into high gear. Today he’s issuing dire warnings about al-Qaeda hegemony and nine-dollar gas if we leave, circulating bio pages that let his staff know whether they’re dealing with friend or foe among visiting congress members, and insisting repeatedly that violence is down in classified briefings where he doesn’t have to publicly defend his figures.
If these don’t sound like the actions of an honest broker to you, they don’t to me either. They sound like elements of a campaign with one overriding purpose: to convince politicians and opinion makers that we’re making progress in Iraq regardless of whether we are or not.
As con jobs go, this is a masterful one.
The fact that the sex scandals involving Republican Sens. Larry Craig (gay) and David Vitter (not gay) are being treated very differently has not gone unnoticed by the GOP establishment. The NYT’s Carl Hulse quoted some anonymous Republican insiders who offered an explanation.
Despite such unusual steps against [Craig], Republicans took no punitive action against Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, after his acknowledgment this summer of involvement with an escort service that the police described as a prostitution front.
Party officials said Mr. Vitter’s case was different in that he faced no criminal charges and was not in the Senate but was serving in the House at the time.
It’s a pretty weak case, which Greg Sargent took apart this morning.
Of course, Craig’s resignation will probably shift the conversation in a new direction, but in a sense, the point is even more salient now: Vitter hasn’t faced any adverse consequences at all, and the GOP establishment is content to pretend he didn’t talk to the DC Madam while casting votes on the Hill. Even some conservatives, such as Ed Morrissey, are waiting for a coherent explanation:
[Vitter] didn’t plead guilty in court, but unlike Craig, he openly admits he broke the law and solicited prostitutes. Others serving in Congress at the moment have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors of more import than disorderly conduct without being forced to resign. If morality and credibility are at issue, why isn’t Vitter being held to that standard?
We know the answer, but it’s apparently not a response the Republican establishment is anxious to acknowledge.
When it comes to aides, staffers, and high-ranking officials, the Bush White House has had a reverse Midas touch. People who have reasonably good reputations before working for Bush, tend to leave humiliated. It’s as if the president’s inner circle is some kind of credibility-sapping black hole.
Condoleezza Rice, for example, left Stanford with at least some stature in professional circles, only to become what David Kay described as “probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created.” Seven years ago, Rice was considered a fairly credible foreign policy expert, particularly on Russian policy. Today, Rice is best known for helping sell a disastrous war and losing turf wars to Donald Rumsfeld.
As Secretary of State, she has had little success improving U.S. relations with much of anyone. Rice’s biggest diplomatic victory was a breakthrough deal with North Korea, in which she triumphantly accepted the same deal the Clinton administration struck years earlier.
But, never fear, Rice has a comeback plan.
… Ms. Rice is working hard to reshape her legacy in her remaining 16 months in office. She is cooperating with a range of authors who have lined up to write books about her…. Although both the Kessler and the Bumiller books are expected to be critical of Ms. Rice on many points, State Department officials say that it is unusual for a sitting secretary of state to cooperate with so many biographies. But then again, few of her predecessors had multiple authors jostling to write books about them.
Beyond trying to influence the historical record, Ms. Rice is trying hard to rewrite her legacy to include something more than Iraq. Her colleagues and friends say that she has accepted that Iraq is a stain that she probably cannot remove before she leaves office.
At the risk of sounding uncharitable, that’s probably a good conclusion to accept. Rice, like her boss, has a legacy that is based entirely on the war she helped sell.
For that matter, Rice tied her fate to the president, with whom she has chosen to be inextricably linked.
By the time Rice met Bush, he had become a Christian teetotaler and a devoted family man. The two shared a strong religious faith, a belief in American power, similar senses of humor, and a conviction that sports was a metaphor for life. He admired her brains. She valued his instincts. […]
“There was this connective stuff — that was really fully under way by the summer of 1999,” said Rice’s friend Coit “Chip” Blacker. “There’s a funny kind of transfer of energy and ideas that’s almost — not random, but unstructured. It’s as though they’re Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe.”
The president reportedly refers to Rice as his “sister,” while Rice’s stepmother said she “just can’t say no to that man.”
I’m afraid it’s a little late for Rice to start wondering how history will perceive her.
The good news is the Bush White House has unveiled a plan to assist homeowners who are poised to lose their homes in the midst of the nation’s crunch and housing slump. The bad news, as McClatchy’s Kevin Hall reports, is that the president’s plan is very thin, leaves most affected homeowners behind, and duplicates efforts that are already underway. (via TP)
The plan was announced days before Congress returns from its August recess with housing issues high on its agenda. The proposals, however, duplicate efforts already under way by Congress and other federal agencies, would help at most 21 percent of the homeowners facing foreclosures and would do little to help areas in which inflated real estate prices are a problem.
Bush called on Democrats to approve a modernization of the Federal Housing Administration, which passed the House of Representatives last year with bipartisan support but was quashed by Senate Republicans.
He promised to require greater disclosure from lenders, a move on which federal bank regulators already have provided guidance. He promised to get tough with unscrupulous mortgage brokers, but they’re largely regulated on the state level. And during a briefing Friday, a senior administration official acknowledged that the plan would do little to help states with high real estate prices, such as California.
At least 2 million foreclosures tied to the sub-prime meltdown are now expected; the administration’s plan should provide refinancing options to, at the most, less than a fourth of them by the end of next year.
Meanwhile, in the other war…
Over the past six weeks, the Taliban have driven government forces out of roughly half of a strategic area in southern Afghanistan that American and NATO officials declared a success story last fall in their campaign to clear out insurgents and make way for development programs, Afghan officials say.
A year after Canadian and American forces drove hundreds of Taliban fighters from the area, the Panjwai and Zhare districts southwest of Kandahar, the rebels are back and have adopted new tactics. Carrying out guerrilla attacks after NATO troops partly withdrew in July, they overran isolated police posts and are now operating in areas where they can mount attacks on Kandahar, the southâs largest city.
The setback is part of a bloody stalemate that has occurred between NATO troops and Taliban fighters across southern Afghanistan this summer. NATO and Afghan Army soldiers can push the Taliban out of rural areas, but the Afghan police are too weak to hold the territory after they withdraw.