[CTRL] NRO: Trash Talk

[MIKE SPITZER]

-Caveat Lector-

'For example, much like O. J. Simpson in his pursuit of the "real
killers," Hillary Clinton is still trying to figure out how those old
billing records showed up in the White House residence.'


National Review Online

Trash Talk

Even if Clintonites didn't trash the place, that doesn't change much in
my book.

By Jonah Goldberg
June 4, 2001 5:05 p.m.

At this point I can't keep it straight. The former residents of the
White House may or may not have trashed their offices to stick it to the
incoming Bush administration. The White House communications types may
or may not have fed a true or false story for either good or bad
motives. They may or may not have backed off that story, also for good
or bad motives. And they may now be coming up with "evidence" to clear
their good names or to cover their dershowitzes.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, good for you. If you want to
know what I'm talking about you can either wait thirty seconds until the
feeling passes or you can click here for the Washington Post story. And
if you still don't care, my Star Trek opus is still on the site.

Now, because this threatens to become the metaphysically trivial
equivalent of the Hiss-Chambers dispute, forever dividing liberals and
conservatives, I for one would like to apologize on behalf of everybody
on my side of the argument, whether they'd like me to or not.

While the rest of this column will be drenched with sarcasm, I do want
to offer my sincere apologies here and now to the totally innocent
Clinton and Gore staffers who were painted with an overly broad brush. I
am sure there are some decent, honest, and, again, completely blameless
individuals who had nothing to do with any White House trashing, even if
there was a lot of vandalism.

That said, I'd like to offer something of an explanation - sort of like
pleading guilty with extenuating circumstances.

It was totally believable.

You see, the Clinton White House was not known to be above such things.
It was not known to be a real button-down operation. A lot of very smart
kids chewing gum and eating pizza at their desks was the image served up
to America in 1992. And while quite a few grownups traipsed through the
White House over the years - John Podesta, Leon Panetta, and Lloyd
Bentsen come to mind - even when the Clinton staff was at its most
impressive, no one ever thought of it as a by-the-numbers enterprise.
Big boxes of really important files kept appearing and disappearing. For
example, much like O. J. Simpson in his pursuit of the "real killers,"
Hillary Clinton is still trying to figure out how those old billing
records showed up in the White House residence.

Now, of course, I know everyone was in the dark about the fact that
President Clinton was playing President and the Intern with Monica
Lewinksy. But beyond that it was still the kind of office where it would
seem reasonable for an intern to be shuffling in and out of the leader
of the Free World's office with a pizza box.

And as for the pettiness and vindictiveness, well, I guess we were wrong
that an administration that could press false criminal charges against a
lifetime White House employee could also be capable of pulling the "W"
keys off the keyboards. An administration where Sidney Blumenthal is a
moral North Star is incapable of something like that.

But, I should stop myself. I promised to do my level best to stop
writing about the Clinton administration - and have more or less kept my
word for these last few months - because there's no point to it. So,
let's just say that if they ever make a movie of the White House
operation they won't be looking for John Gielgud-types to play staff
members.

But I would like to add one small point. I think the level of outrage by
some liberal pundits says a lot. Joshua Marshall, the Washington editor
of the American Prospect has made the vandalism story the My Lai
Massacre to his Seymour Hersch. He's been denouncing the "slandering"
and "smearing" of White House employees by the Bush administration with
great zeal for quite a while now.

He's not alone. Marie Cocco, a writer for Newsday (my fellow guest last
weekend on CNN's Reliable Sources), wrote a column dripping with outrage
toward the Bush White House. "In this administration of dignity, the
dignified thing to do might be to apologize to those whose reputations
were smeared," Cocco sneers. "But real men have no regrets."

Now, if I cared more I could investigate. But I don't, so I will simply
guess that Ms. Cocco and Mr. Marshall - as well as the other usual
suspects on the chat shows - have dedicated far more space and emotion
to the allegedly false accusation that a few staffers got out-of-hand
with their pranks than they ever did to Billy Dale, whose life was
destroyed by the Clinton White House and who never got an apology.

I'd also bet they never saw much wrong with the institutionalized
search-and-destroy operation the Clinton White House had up and going
since th

Re: [CTRL] rWhite House property destruction by departing Clintonstaffers

[Steve Wingate]

-Caveat Lector-

Yes, BB I read the article the first time. Like I said before, why no
photographs? All we have is a few anonymous sources reported on by right
wing pro-Republican media.

Steve

On 6 Jun 01, at 1:23, BB wrote:

> -Caveat Lector-
>
> Steve Wingate wrote:
>
> > -Caveat Lector-
> >
> > There has not been a single shred of factual evidence to support these
> > allegations. Not a single photograph, nothing but claims by certain Bush
> > officials of questionable integrity and motivation.
> >
> > Why no evidence? It did not happen anywhere close to the extent claimed.
> >
> > Steve
> >
>
> CHANGING OF THE GUARD
> Post confirms earlier
> WND vandalism account
> White House property destruction by departing Clinton staffers
>
>
> © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com


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[CTRL] Fla. Vote Rife With Disparities, Study Says

[radman]

-Caveat Lector-

Fla. Vote Rife With Disparities, Study Says



Rights Panel Finds Blacks Penalized

By Robert E. Pierre and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 5, 2001; Page A01

Florida's conduct of the 2000 presidential election was marked by
"injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" that unfairly penalized minority
voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded in a report that
criticizes top state officials -- particularly Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary
of State Katherine Harris -- for allowing disparate treatment of
voters.Unequal access to modern voting equipment and "overzealous efforts"
to purge state voter lists most harshly affected African Americans in the
state that decided the November election for President Bush, the commission
declared in a 167-page final draft report obtained by The Washington Post.
The inquiry found no "conclusive evidence" that officials "conspired" to
disenfranchise minority and disabled voters. Fifty-four percent of votes
rejected during the Florida election were cast by black voters, according
to the report, scheduled for a commission vote Friday. African Americans
accounted for 11 percent of voters statewide. "The disenfranchisement was
not isolated or episodic. State officials failed to fulfill their duties in
a manner that would prevent this disenfranchisement," said the report, the
product of a six-month investigation. "Despite the closeness of the
election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement and not the dead-heat
contest that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election."."The
commission -- composed of four Democrats, three independents and one
Republican -- is poised to ask the U.S. Department of Justice and the
Florida attorney general's office to investigate whether federal or state
civil rights laws were violated. The commission is charged with
investigating possible violations -- intentional or unintentional -- of the
federal Voting Rights Act and other civil rights protections. Advisers to
Gov. Bush and Harris were angered yesterday by the report's early release.
Harris's spokesman, David Host, called the leak "both fraudulent and
shameful" because Harris's response is not due until later this week. "The
commission had issued a preliminary report several months ago and was
unable to find any evidence of intentional discrimination in the conduct of
the November election," said Katie Baur, the governor's communications
director. "Since that report, the governor has signed into law one of the
most progressive election reform bills in the nation. We will have no
further comment until our office receives a copy of the final report."."The
Florida attorney general's office is investigating "possible civil rights
violations stemming from the election," spokesman Joe Bizzaro said
yesterday. "We're going to give due consideration to whatever is requested
by the commission."."Florida's election problems have been scrutinized
since Election Day. A bipartisan task force appointed by Gov. Bush
concluded that the November election was marred by systemic
inconsistencies. That report cited unreliable voting machines, improper
counting of absentee ballots and inaccurate databases that allowed
unregistered voters to vote while preventing legal voters from casting
ballots. A computer analysis by The Post showed that the more black and
Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of
invalidated votes. No inquiry so far has been as broad as that conducted by
the commission -- or as specifically focused on the rights of minorities.
The commission held three days of hearings, interviewed 100 witnesses and
reviewed 118,000 documents. Some of the key findings:
--African Americans were nearly 10 times as likely as whites to have their
ballots rejected. Poor counties populated by minorities were more likely to
use voting systems that rejected larger percentages of ballots than more
affluent counties.
--Some Hispanic and Haitian voters were not provided ballots in their
native languages, and physical barriers sometimes kept disabled voters from
entering polling sites.
--There were no clear guidelines to protect eligible voters from being
wrongly removed as part of a statewide purge of felons, people with dual
registrations and the deceased.
--Elections supervisors in the counties with the worst problems failed to
"prepare adequately" for the election or demand adequate resources.
--The Florida Division of Elections failed to educate Florida's residents
on the mechanics of voting.
The report, and its executive summary, were particularly critical of the
roles played by Gov. Bush and Harris. Bush was chided for a failure of
leadership -- for example, rejecting a $100,000 budget request for voter
education. Harris was criticized for claiming that she had only a
"ministerial" responsibility for elections. "While she described her role
in the policies and de

Re: [CTRL] rWhite House property destruction by departing Clintonstaffers

[BB]

-Caveat Lector-

Steve Wingate wrote:

> -Caveat Lector-
>
> There has not been a single shred of factual evidence to support these
> allegations. Not a single photograph, nothing but claims by certain Bush
> officials of questionable integrity and motivation.
>
> Why no evidence? It did not happen anywhere close to the extent claimed.
>
> Steve
>

CHANGING OF THE GUARD
Post confirms earlier
WND vandalism account
White House property destruction by departing Clinton staffers


© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com


The Washington Post's current stories detailing destruction of
White House property by outgoing Clinton staffers confirms the
detailed, exclusive reporting done by WorldNetDaily.com last
January.

When vandalism reports surfaced upon George W. Bush's move
into the White House, initial official outrage was quickly
doused by the newly inaugurated president's stated desire to
"change the tone in Washington."

However, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a leader in the move to impeach
Clinton, asked the General Accounting Office to check into the
matter. In an April 27 letter, the GAO told Barr that there
was "no record of damage that may have been deliberately
caused by the Clinton administration." That is, the White
House had not maintained a written accounting of any damage.

The matter seemed dead and buried.

However, apparently unable to leave well enough alone,
Democrats like Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., seized upon the
GAO report as vindication of Clinton and evidence that the
Bush people had been fabricating their initial vandalism
reports - and even demanded an apology from Bush.

Pushed against the wall, the Bush White House responded by
doing what it refrained from doing last January - and issued
late last week an extensive list of damage done by outgoing
Clinton staffers. The list includes obscene graffiti in six
offices, a 20-inch-wide presidential seal ripped off a wall,
10 sliced telephone lines and 100 inoperable computer
keyboards, according to the Washington Post.

Jake Siewert, Clinton's last presidential press secretary,
called the White House's actions "incredibly infuriating,"
reports the Post.

'We tried to be gracious'

"Most of the incidents described yesterday by White House
press secretary Ari Fleischer," said the Post, "were said to
have occurred in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,
adjacent to the White House. Pornographic or obscene greetings
were left on 15 telephone lines in the offices of the vice
president and White House counsel and in the scheduling and
advance offices, Fleischer said. As a precaution, all phones
were disabled and reprogrammed, he said."

"The details were provided to The Washington Post after
several days of inquiries about the degree of White House
cooperation with the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress,"
reported the Post.

White House officials added that they did not release the
information sooner because of Bush's desire to "move forward
and not live in the past," said the Post.

But in the face of accusations the White House fabricated the
tales of vandalism, Fleischer says the Bush team was forced to
respond.

"The White House will defend itself and the career employees,"
Fleischer said, according to the Post account. "We tried to be
gracious, but the last administration would not take
graciousness. By getting the information out, we hope to put
an end to this, so everyone can go on with the policy and
business of the government."

Sunday's Washington Post story confirms -- five months
later -- WND's earlier investigative reporting, based on
knowledgeable sources such as career White House computer
technicians, on exactly what was damaged in the White House by
departing Clinton staffers.

Here are a few comparisons:

Post (June 3, 2001): "Fleischer said that workers were able to
affix new 'W' caps to many computers but that 100 keyboards
had to be replaced."

WND (Jan. 26, 2001): "Based on a preliminary survey, an
estimated 50 to 60 computer keyboards were actually destroyed,
and not just temporarily disabled as originally believed,
after outgoing aides removed the plastic key with the letter
'W' -- President Bush's new famous middle initial.

"'We'll actually have to replace the whole keyboards, because
they also gouged out the contacts underneath (the plastic
keys),' said a White House computer technician in an exclusive
interview with WorldNetDaily."

Post: "Fleischer also said five brass nameplates bearing the
presidential seal were missing in the Eisenhower building [the
Old Executive Office Building]."

WND: "Outgoing staffers pried several official U.S. emblems,
about the size of 50-cent coins, from doors in the Old
Executive Office Building, according to a General Services
Administration worker involved in the maintenance of White
House offices."

Post: "White House officials yesterday released a list of
damage ... including ... 10 sliced telephone lines ... ."

WND: "Former White House aides also cut telephone lines
throughout the White Hous