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.”
Philadelphia Freedom 
Philadelphia is recognising a George Washington slave who escaped while he lived in the city. Oney Judge was one of nine slaves the Father of Our country brought with him to the nation’s first capitol, and one of two who escaped. Their experiences have been in the news with the excavation of The President’s House site in Independence Square.
Judge lived the remainder of her life a fugitive in New Hampshire.
Book Buddies 
From Palestine comes a first: a Presidential Library honoring the dead leader of a barely functional fragment of an occupied territory. The Presidential Library contagion has now spread to the Israeli occupied West Bank, where an institute devoted to the late Yasser Arafat will now join the proud line of American inspired memorialist buildings.
Perhaps they can do exchanges with the new Rabin institute.
Everything Must Go! 
Whatever will they fill the SMU Bush Library with?
The White House has said it may have “lost” as many as five million emails, than said it didn’t know and resented the question.
Henry Waxman hosted the White House’s email trackers and the Archivist of the United States, exploring whether the Bush Library at SMU will have anything to put in the place.
Whatever they did to preserve email, Waxman says they did it intentionally.
“[The White House] dismantled an effective system and replaced it with a primitive alternative that just didn’t work…It initiated its own study of missing e-mails in 2005 and now derisively attacks its own work as incompetent and grossly inaccurate.”
Archivist Alan Weinstein is supposed to be watching how the White House keeps it’s papers, but appears to have been incurious to say the least. Bush named him to the post in murky circumstances, and he’s had trouble with papers before.
Turn That Frown Upside Down!
Amidst planning parking, demolition and President Bush’s Image Lab, Bush Library Host & SMU President Gerald Turner told the Dallas Morning News he’s found a special benefit for all of Dallas: easing what he thoughtfully calls the “Kennedy Issue.”
“But underneath all the details, he said, the library will provide global visibility for the school and for a city where the assassination of John. F. Kennedy remains entrenched in the memories of many…”A positive element … will be Dallas’ relationship with the presidency of the United States on the other side of the Kennedy issue,” he said”
In other happy image rehab news, George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation President Mark Langdale says Karl Rove has emerged from his subpeona dodging long enough to render still more service to the nation.
“Karl’s pretty busy doing a lot of things in his private life right now, but he’s a critical resource about what happened in the administration, and he has a lot of good ideas about programming and positioning,” said Mr. Langdale”
And former White House counsel, CIA tape destruction bystander and Contempt of Congress scofflaw Harriet Miers is helping out with the Library’s lawyering.
Dallas Do-Over? 
