Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
In an op-ed in the New York Times a couple of days ago, Kurt Eichenwald claims to have seen excerpts from presidential daily briefs from throughout 2001, and says that the lone declassified one (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) is nothing compared to those in the months beforehand. He says that the White …
Continue reading “Bush White House actively ignored September 11 warnings.”
This should be a wake-up call to the grown-ups in the Republican Party. Fetishizing ignorance and demonizing education has led to two-thirds of the party’s members being morons. I can understand why some people are confused about global climate change and evolution—there’s been a well organized attempt to spread misinformation on these scientifici topics. But …
Washington Post: Poll Finds Public Wary on Tax CutThe A1 headline in the Washington Post on the morning of September 11, 2001 was for this prescient story: "A majority of Americans say they are prepared to roll back President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut to help deal with the shrinking federal budget surplus and say …
CBS News: Like Every Administration, White House Defends Obama "Vacation"President Obama has taken 38 days of vacation so far in his presidency. At this point in Bush's presidency, he'd taken 102 days of vacation. Rick Perry’s Texas A&M TranscriptRepublican presidential candidate Rick Perry's academic record is on par with President Bush's—which is to say, very …
New York Times: Policy Changes Under Two PresidentsThis chart of new costs versus savings under Presidents Bush and Obama is really striking. The total cost of Obama's new policies comes to $1.44T. Bush's? $5.07T. Just his tax cuts alone cost more than Obama's policies, at $1.8T. Once you figure in two wars, TARP, and the …
WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it …
New York Times: A Tipping Point for Gay Marriage?With the government unable to muster a legally defensible argument against gay marriage, it's amazing that the House of Representatives went ahead and hired their own private law firm to carry on the right. But it's more amazing still that the law firm dropped the case, finding …
You’ll remember the name Abu Zubaida. That’s the guy President Bush bragged about capturing back in 2002, describing him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations.” Zubaida denied it, saying that he had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. So we held him at a CIA black operations site and tortured him in order to get him to …
In yesterday’s New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti reveal how top White House and congressional officials all came to agree that torture was legal in 2002: This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were …
Continue reading “Torture OK was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm.””
Yesterday whitehouse.gov prohibited search engines from indexing 2,400 pages on their site. Today 0 pages are prohibited. That really says it all about this transition, doesn’t it?