Remembering history the way they wished it had been
Brace Yourself for Disappointment, Lad 
Canadian pol Bob “He Too Has Known Disappointment”Rae takes us back to our Nation’s Capitol in the fifties. Dick Cheney’s Fortress of Solitude at the Naval Observatory was decades away, and Vice Presidents walked amongst us.
Or at least resided. Rae says he served as Nixon’s paperboy, and his Christmas tip amounted to ten shiny pennies.
The Missing Millions 
The Bush White House’s signature style has been to dodge responsibility for it’s actions and havoc wrought by claiming to be “looking ahead” while not engaging in a “blame game.” Another trick is to package the unpalatable and unexplained as being part of a “program,” torture euphemism being the most prominent example.
Their latest exercise is less ghastly, but still one of the greats.
In a Good Friday court filing, the Bush Administration says many of it’s missing millions of emails are dead, and there will be no resurrection. The White House is placing it’s faith in the howling news chasm of the holiday weekend to disappear the story, and it appears it’s faith will be rewarded.
The White House filing says that, besides disabling an existing system to archive email, they now admit they destroyed computer hard drives without saving all the emails on them. They told the court that recovering emails from where the Bush Administration’s inattention or deceit put them would be hard or impossible because of this “refresh program,” so the judge should give them a pass.
The Associated Press is reporting the story off the White House filing, apparently alone in all the world. It’s story is worth reading in full, if only to appreciate the baldness of the Administration’s contempt, actual if not legal. Over and above the details of this case, every Administration is obligated to preserve all it’s records. The endless quibbling over access come later.
The National Security Archive and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have been fighting the White House on this, and their web sites have nothing on the latest White House whimsy. 
Media worthies who soiled themselves this week crosschecking the Hillary Clinton schedules with Presidential blow-jobs have been silent so far.
But nothing slows down White House preparation for Monday’s Easter Egg Roll.
Hope you had a great Sunshine Week! 
ABC Digs Deep 
Team Coverage!
The Hilary Clinton papers are loosed upon an expectant world, and Brian Ross and the ABC Investigative Team have done democracy’s work, cross checking the First Lady’s schedules with the Ken Starr oral sex tick-tock ,with explosive results.
Jeepers, Peeper 
Meanwhile, a desperate plea for the silent legions of citizen journalists to paw through the papers for the august New York Times [“Like many others, we are poring over the pages today to see what’s in there. We invite you to take a look, too, and let us know what you find”].
The Times did come up with some of what we don’t learn from the document dump:
“The documents offer no support for her claims, made during the presidential campaign, that she helped to negotiate the Irish peace accords or facilitated the flow of refugees in the Balkans. Neither is there evidence in them to back up her claim that she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, the first legislation Mr. Clinton signed as president. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, sailed through Congress and landed on Mr. Clinton’s desk 10 days after he was inaugurated. Indeed, on the day Mr. Clinton signed the bill into law, Feb. 5, 1993, there is no indication on that day’s calendar that she attended…The documents offer no insight into her role in appointments to key administration posts or in courting donors for her or her husband’s political campaigns…And they do not add to an understanding of how she coped with revelations in 1998 of her husband’s sexual betrayal with a young White House worker, or provide a paper trail of the discussions that led to her declaring her candidacy for the Senate in 1999.”
The Dallas Morning News‘ answer: Go Local!
“Cutting to the chase, the quest for interesting, Texas-related nuggets would be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. So, maybe there are some readers with a lot of patience for squinting who would care to take a peak and share their findings.”
Make of It What You Will! 
The long awaited, eagerly anticipated, epic event of our time has arrived.
Some of the endlessly gassed about Hillary Clinton papers will be unveiled at last before the eyes of an eager and expectant world, yielding up such secrets as they contain.
I have no idea whats there, and neither do most of us, but i predict two lines of easy blather:
– angry huffing that this is not enough [I’m looking at you, Judicial Watch]
– content free “analysis” seizing upon the odd fact to demonstrate ready-made theories [see above]
Party Time Out 
The Republican National Committee has long joined in the fun beating up the Clintons over access to Clinton Administration papers. But you don’t need to hide what you don’t have, and they’re doing their part to bury Bush Administration emails generated by White House staff.
A subset of the wider lost email issue, some 80 White House staff used RNC email accounts for both political and government business. The RNC did nothing to preserve the government records, purging files after 30 days.
And now they say they won’t bother to find the lost records.
“The process of recovering missing e-mails from RNC servers and \ilhite House
back-up tapes has not begun. Beginning in April 2007, the Archives urged the White
House to start recovering missing White House e-mails stored on back-up tapes
maintained by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the White House. In his
May 1, 2007,letter, the Archivist advised Mr. Fielding that such ‘oa ‘restoration’ project
can easily take more than one year to complete.” Despite repeated requests from the
Archives, these efforts have not yet begun. Moreover, the RNC has informed the
Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore missing White House e-mails.”
