Political Jackass

From ThinkProgress:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan will publish a memoir in April titled “What Happened.” In an excerpt posted by his publisher, McClellan implicates “the President himself” in the Valerie Plame scandal:

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”

McClellan, who orchestrated the White House’s stonewalling of the investigation into the leak, later said he was lied to by those directly involved.

I doubt these e-mails will ever see the light of day. They will claim they’ve been destroyed and have no record of any of these e-mails. The American public will probably just let them get away with lies once again. It’s sad really. The Republicans know they can get away with anything so they do what they want.

A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against.

U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law.

In response, the White House said it has been taking steps to preserve copies of all e-mails and will continue to do so. The administration is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive.

The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White House e-mails. The court order issued by Kennedy, an appointee of President Clinton, is directed at maintaining backup tapes which contain copies of White House e-mails.

The Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States.

Justice Department lawyers had urged the courts to accept a proposed White House declaration promising to preserve all backup tapes.

“The judge decided that wasn’t enough,” said Anne Weismann, an attorney for CREW, which has gone to court over secrecy issues involving the Bush administration and has pursued ethical issues involving Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The judge’s order “should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don’t know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It’s a mystery,” said Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive.

CREW and the National Security Archive are seeking to force the White House to immediately explain in court what happened to its e-mail, an issue that first surfaced nearly two years ago in the leak probe of administration officials who disclosed Valerie Plame’s CIA identity to reporters.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed early in 2006 that relevant e-mails could be missing because of an archiving problem at the White House.

The White House has provided little public information about the matter, saying that some e-mails may not have been automatically archived on a computer server for the Executive Office of the President and that the e-mails may have been preserved on backup tapes.

The White House has said that its Office of Administration is looking into whether there are e-mails that were not automatically archived and that if there is a problem, the necessary steps will be taken to address it.

Kennedy issued the order following recommendations to do so by a federal magistrate who held a hearing on the matter.

“We will study the court’s order and the magistrate’s recommendations,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel. “However, the Office of Administration has been taking steps to maintain and preserve backup tapes for the official e-mail system. We have provided assurances to the plaintiffs and to the court that these steps were being taken. We will continue preserving the tapes in compliance with the court’s order.” Source: CNN

CNN reports that a Blackwater Worldwide spokeswoman says the company supports “stringent accountability” for any wrongdoing in the wake of a New York Times report that federal investors have found that the shooting deaths of at least 14 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater guards in Baghdad in nearly two months ago violated rules of deadly force.

The Times cited unidentified civilian and military officials in reporting for Wednesday’s editions that the killings of at least 14 of the 17 Iraqi civilians shot by Blackwater personnel guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy were unjustified and violated standards in place governing the use of deadly force.

State Department officials have said it has offered limited immunity to private security contractors involved in shootings in Iraq. They disagreed with law enforcement officials that such actions could jeopardize prosecutions in the September incident.

Rep. David E. Price, D-North Carolina has sponsored legislation to apply U.S. criminal law to contractors serving overseas and called for the Justice Department to hold someone accountable for the shootings. Continue reading at CNN.

Another gay sex scandal for Republicans. This comes from The Daytona Beach News-Journal:

A former Daytona Beach city commissioner and a local high school teacher arrested Thursday during a sex sting at a Volusia mall bathroom were released from the Volusia County Brach Jail today, authorities said.

Former commissioner and mayoral candidate Mike Shallow and David Behringer, an athletic trainer and teacher at Seabreeze High School, posted $1,000 bail today after midnight, a jail spokesman said.

Behringer resigned today, according to officials with the Volusia County School District. Read more…

For the party that hates gays, doesn’t think they should get married, and calls them immoral, the GOP sure has a lot of closet homosexuals. Yet another government official and member of the GOP caught in a homosexual sex scandal.

A Republican state legislator who repeatedly voted against gay rights measures resigned his seat Wednesday amid revelations he had sex with a man he met at an erotic video store while in Spokane on a GOP retreat.

In a written statement, Rep. Richard Curtis, of La Center, said that while he believes he’s done a lot of good during his time in the Legislature, “events that have recently come to light have hurt a lot of people.”

“I sincerely apologize for any pain my actions may have caused,” he wrote. “This has been damaging to my family, and I don’t want to subject them to any additional pain that might result from carrying out this matter under the scrutiny that comes with holding public office.”

Three days earlier, Curtis had insisted to his local newspaper that he was not gay and that sex was not involved in what he said was an extortion attempt by a man last week……

He went to the Hollywood Erotic Boutique in Spokane early on Oct. 26 and met Castagna, who accompanied him to the hotel, police documents released Tuesday said. The two arrived at the hotel around 3:34 a.m. and had sex, after which Curtis fell asleep, according to the documents.

Police interviewed several witnesses at the Hollywood Erotic Boutique, and according to the report, Curtis walked into a bathroom at the store early on the morning of Oct. 26 and a few minutes later left the bathroom wearing long red women’s stockings and a black sequined lingerie top. A witness told police that shortly after that he saw a man with a cane performing a sexual act on Curtis in an upstairs room.

Police also interviewed Jalene Henneman, a Hollywood Exotic Boutique employee, who told them Curtis had been in the store three separate times in the past month, and called him “the cross dresser.” Henneman said Curtis told her his wife knew he was gay, but that he only pursued sex with men when he was out of town, according to the report.

In 2005 and 2006, Curtis voted against a bill that granted civil rights protections to gays and lesbians.

In 2007, Curtis voted against a bill that created domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. Source

Ron Paul has gotten a huge following on the internet. Websites, such as the ever-popular Digg, are flooded with Ron Paul articles. Why is a radical so popular around web communities? Some researches might have an answer: Spambots.

Presidential hopeful Ron Paul hasn’t been doing very well with the print media, and offline, his name recognition isn’t that high. But online, the libertarian candidate seems to have an almost cult-like following. But how much of that is real? Much of Ron Paul’s online support may be at least partially manufactured by overenthusiastic supporters, as some researchers say that spammers have recently stepped up their efforts to gain support for their favorite candidate.

The University of Alabama-Birmingham’s computer forensics research department, which collects spam messages as part of its Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, analyzes hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages per month. When it began getting bombarded with e-mails about Ron Paul immediately following a Republican debate on TV, the lab began to examine their origin and saw consistent patterns that it described as “disturbing.”

The e-mails originated from IPs all over the world, but researchers’ suspicions were aroused when they found that the e-mails purported to come from different countries than their IPs indicated. Messages claiming to come from the US were actually coming from Korea, for example, and messages claiming to come from Italy were actually coming from the US. The pattern showed that the messages were clearly not coming from Ron Paul’s official campaign, but rather illegitimate spam operations and botnets.

“We’ve seen many previous e-mails reported as spam from other campaigns or parties, but when we’ve investigated them, they all were sent from the legitimate parties,” department director Gary Warner said in a statement. In contrast, the Ron Paul messages clearly came from a number of other parties attempting to spoof where they came from. Paul’s campaign may run afoul of the authorities as a result of these e-mails. Warner believes that the messages may violate the CAN-SPAM Act due to their deceptive sending practices.

The Ron Paul camp, however, wants to make sure the world knows it’s not involved in the spam. “This is the first I’ve heard about this situation,” Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton told Wired. “If it is true, it could be done by a well-intentioned yet misguided supporter or someone with bad intentions trying to embarrass the campaign. Either way, this is independent work, and we have no connection.” via ars technica

According to CNN, The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert will be running for President in his home state of South Caroline as a Democrat. The reason? The GOP is too costly. The Democratic Party requires just $2,500 or 3,000 signatures whereas to get on the GOP ballot you need to raise $35,000.

Funnyman Stephen Colbert’s presidential campaign is apparently no joke.

The host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” will file papers late Wednesday or early Thursday to put his name on South Carolina’s Democratic primary ballot, a source familiar with the comedian’s strategy said.

The South Carolina native will not file papers as a Republican because the $35,000 required to get on the GOP ballot is apparently too high a threshold.

“They priced us out of range,” the source told CNN.

The South Carolina Democratic Party demands a candidate pay $2,500 or garner 3,000 signatures to get on the ballot. Surrogates of “The Colbert Report” star will file the hand-signed papers at state party headquarters before the November 1 filing deadline.

The mock conservative pundit whose show regularly features real politicians and political commentators announced that he was running as both a Democrat and Republican on October 16.

But whether Colbert’s name will show up on the ballot remains unclear.

The state party’s 26-member executive council — with representatives from each of South Carolina’s six congressional districts as well as state members of the Democratic National Committee — will meet Thursday afternoon to decide which candidates meet the criteria to appear on the ballot. Read more…