In the latest round of “How dare you think we’d do this on purpose!” the White House has revealed that as many as 10 million e-mails from March to October 2003 may be permanently lost.

All White House e-mails are required to be preserved for official archiving by the Federal Records Act. However, the current administration abandoned the electronic record-keeping system of the Clinton administration, replacing it with, well, nothing substantive. As a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) lawsuit revealed, the only safeguard in place for preserving deleted e-mails were backup tapes containing snapshots of the White House servers at given moments in time.

In response to a court order, the White House has now admitted that those tapes were routinely recycled. But that’s ok, right? It’s not like anything important happened during time period.

Continue reading Above the Law →

As Think Progress reports, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee announced at a recent campaign event:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

(Emphasis theirs. They also have a link to a video.)

Ironically, “Jesus!” is the best response I can muster to this one.

Add this quote next to the sordid Wayne Dumond affair when trying to convince your Republican friends not to vote for him.

While Bush may claim that this week was the the first time he was informed about the National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran hasn’t had a functional nuclear weapons programs since 2003, Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post points out that a clear shift in the President’s rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program took place in early August.

Continue reading What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It? →

If we accept the pithy definition of insanity as doing the same thing twice and expecting a completely different result, then the U.S. “War on Drugs” has been insane for nearly two decades. Even worse, everyone associated with the effort knows it’s insane. American drug policy is hugely expensive and unfairly punitive, but we keep returning to the same failed practices again and again, long after we should have known better.

Continue reading The War On Us →