Bush must face reality...

[MaguMan]

Originally Posted by Beneath the Shadows

A few months back? She assumed office as a Senator in 2001.

By a few months, he means 80. Commence the backpedaling!

[Wormboy]

if 80 months is a few, im an infant =(

[MaguMan]

Yeah, I know what you mean. My grandma was only a few years old when she died.

[CptSternn]

White House sued again over e-mail

http://news.**********/s/ap/white_ho...lBfpSSgO2s0NUE

WASHINGTON - The White House abandoned an automatic archiving system for its e-mail in 2002 and did not replace it, says a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Executive Office of the President.

The suit by the National Security Archive, a private group, is the latest effort to find out whether the Bush administration lost millions of electronic messages.

White House e-mail problems first came to light during a special prosecutor's investigation into the leaking of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity and again during congressional inquiries into the role of presidential aides in firings of U.S. attorneys.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democratic House committee chairman, has set a deadline of Monday for White House counsel Fred Fielding to turn over a White House-prepared analysis of the issue. A second private organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued last May in a so-far unsuccessful effort to force the administration to release records that provide an explanation.

Waxman said last week that two White House lawyers told congressional staff three months ago that a review apparently found some days with a very small number of preserved e-mails and some days with no e-mails preserved at all.

Both the lawsuit by the National Security Archive and the earlier one filed by CREW say there were hundreds of days in which there were missing White House e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005.

"The period covers the period beginning with the Iraq war until the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; it doesn't get more historically valuable than that," said Tom Blanton, director of the private organization, which advocates public disclosure of government secrets.

The group's lawsuit filed under the Administrative Procedure Act seeks a federal court order directing the White House to recover any e-mails that were deleted from servers and that now exist only on backup tapes.

Unless the electronic messages are retrieved from the backup tapes, the records "may be lost forever," the suit says. The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act require that e-mail be preserved.



This is yet another first for the bush administration. They now claim to have 'lost' years worth of presidential records, and claim no backup system was in place, and no one noticed for years.

Yeah, right.

It's a first, because unlike every presidency to date, there will now be a large gap in the records which show what was happening behind the scenes. Previously, only the small bit of time on the nixon tapes that 'disappeared' was the only time this has happened. Now, we have years missing, and the president once again claiming he had nothing to do with it.

We all know how well this tactic worked for nixon.

[CptSternn]

You have to love these articles...

"Childrens do learn," Bush tells school kids

http://news.**********/s/nm/20070926...c9UluR3Pis0NUE

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: "Childrens do learn."

Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centrepiece of his education policy, as he touted a new national report card on improved test scores.

The event drew New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plus teachers and about 20 fourth and fifth graders from P.S. 76.

During his first presidential campaign, Bush -- who promised to be the "education president" -- once asked: "Is our children learning?"

On Wednesday, Bush seemed to answer his own question with the same kind of grammatical twist.

"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured," he said.

The White House opted to clean up Bush's diction in the official transcript.

Bush is no stranger to verbal gaffes. He often acknowledges he was no more than an average student in school and jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.

Just a day earlier, the White House inadvertently showed how it tries to prevent Bush from making even more slips of the tongue than he already does.

As Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, a marked-up draft of his speech briefly popped up on the U.N. Web site, complete with a phonetic pronunciation guide to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

When words get in the way, Bush goes phonetic

http://news.**********/s/nm/20070925...F8pw0zFrGs0NUE

NEW YORK (Reuters) - How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?

When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

The White House was left scrambling to explain after a marked-up draft of Bush's speech popped up briefly on the U.N. Web site as he delivered his remarks, giving a rare glimpse of the special guidance he gets for major addresses.

It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.

Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the draft, labelled the 20th version and complete with typos and speechwriters' cellphone numbers, had been turned over in advance to help U.N. interpreters who must simultaneously translate leaders' speeches into several languages.

Bush's text also had to be loaded onto a teleprompter to appear on screens in front of the podium as he spoke.

"There was an error made," Perino told reporters. "I don't know how the draft of the speech that was not final was posted but it was and it was taken back."

"Anyone giving a major speech or delivering a broadcast, like on the morning and nightly network news, has phonetics for cues just for the possibility they're needed," she later explained.

Bush is no stranger to the occasional faux pas, and often jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.

One of his highest-profile gaffes came in May when, at a welcoming ceremony for Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, he nearly placed her in the 18th century.

At a speech during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Sydney earlier this month, Bush seemed to confuse the organization with OPEC and spoke of Austrian troops in Iraq when he meant to say Australian.


Is your children learnin? Childrens do learn! And this guy is a Yale graduate? And people argue that his daddy didn't pull strings to get him through college.

I mean, he can't say words without PHO-nétic spellings on-screen for him to read - what does this say about the man? He doesn't know the difference between Austrian and Australian, yet some people still trust his judgment on Iraq.

[crucifix]

I do not like president bush. He is, seriously, one of our least intelligent presidents ever.

[CptSternn]

It's official, bush's approval rating is now the lowest in recorded history. That mean he now ranks as the president whose job approval rating has sunk beneath even that of nixons.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news..._low_in_r.html

One comment that was posted there brings up a good point - they recalled the governor of California when his approval rating dropped to 37%, it's a pity they can't recall a president when their approval rating does the same or bush would have been out years ago.