Game Face 
Yet another holiday is wholly incorporated into the universal White House calendar.
The Clinton Library glommed onto the White House Easter Egg Roll, but holding it’s event a week earlier.
Giving us the disturbing image of Presidential Heads on Sticks.
But Clinton is merely following the proud tradition of other past Presidents who can’t let go of that
South Lawn feeling. 
In Crawford a “Western White House Easter Egg Roll” 
appropriating the event name appears to be a Bush fan effort, gathering tough Texans indoors this year and last.
Today’s actual event at the White House featured, as always in recent years. the most pointless of a pointless category:
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.
Ready [Or Not] 
Excited panting about missile defense, Star Wars, or for true believers “President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” will likely climax today, the 25th anniversary of Reagan’s speech unveiling the concept. 
The breathing is already labored in the wake of the February US shoot-down of a falling spy satellite over the Pacific.
Investors Business Daily whipped itself into a frenzy over the recent Dick Cheney speech teeing off Hillary Clinton’s 3AM-Your-Children-May-Die commercial. 
The King of Mirthless Laughter charmed us all with his Darth Vader self depreciation, and said wistfully:
” the best tool we can leave to a future commander in chief is a weapon of defense to blow that missile out of the sky.”
In the Reagan manner, IBD took that dream, sprinkled it with pixie dust, and pronounced deal done!
“We don’t know who might pick up that 3 a.m. phone call, but 25 years ago Ronald Reagan made sure that if it’s about an incoming ballistic missile, the order will be: “Shoot it down.”..Today we can…Last month, the Aegis missile cruiser USS Lake Erie succeeded in shooting down a dying U.S. spy satellite, the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-21 Radarsat, before it could strike the earth with its deadly hydrazine fuel tank nearly full. It could just as easily shoot down an incoming nuclear warhead… thanks to Reagan, the next president will be able to give the order, in Cheney’s words, to “blow that missile out of the sky.” Happy anniversary, Ronnie.”
In the February shoot-down the actual “risk” posed by the falling satellite was overstated, leading many to conclude something else was going on. Critics pointed to “…the near impossibility that the hydrazine tank would survive the 50 g-forces acting on it during reentry, putting the probability of killing someone on Earth below 0.01 percent–NASA’s baseline standard. In the absence of a credible rationale, suspicions of ulterior motives abound. Mainly, many believe that the shoot-down was a disguised demonstration of the U.S. missile defense system’s ASAT capability.”
The shoot-down didn’t tell us much about hitting missiles, but may show how we can take war to space.
“…taking out a crippled satellite and destroying an attacking ballistic missile are not the same thing. Most importantly, the satellite’s trajectory was known in great detail and it could not maneuver under its own power. That’s not the case for enemy ballistic missiles, which have unknown trajectories for large portions of their flights …[and] are likely to be able to maneuver themselves midcourse and release decoys to confuse the missile-defense interceptors. … Navy personnel were able to choose the location and timing of the intercept.. The satellite was also several times larger than a ballistic missile would have been and was therefore easier to see”
Let’s have Reagan Legacy Casper Weinberger Jr. bring us back to magic time:
“It took that great visionary, the true man with the white horse, that symbol of Twentieth Century strength and goodness, the ultimate cowboy of the Lord, Ronald Reagan, to bring it down from the heavens for us and fight right up to his death to make it a reality.”
Hi-Yo, Silver! 
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! 
Hugo Your Way & I’ll Go Mine 
Along with a Trotsky quoting fan of a 19th century slave holder, one of the joys of Venezuelan politics is the freakishly heterogeneous alliance of groups opposed to Hugo Chavez.
The broad span is demonstrated in a recent article where Venezuelan student leader Stalin González laments the alleged persecution of fellow campus caudillio Richard Nixon Moreno.
Stalin & Nixon, Together At Last! 
