Temporarily at My Life as a Spam Blog
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Each of you works for an agency that has a designated records official. You should contact that official to determine what the record policies are for your agency.
Congress made a deliberate choice that not every document created by you in connection to your duties should be released to the public. You should check with your records official to determine which of the documents should in fact be released and which of the documents should be preserved.
For example, certain types of documents related to litigation, documents that may implicate the privacy act, deliberative documents are all types of documents that Congress has determined can be preserved by the agency in order to ensure that the agency functions the way that it should on behalf of the American people.
A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.
Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.
Now is the Time to Speak for Alaska’s Wild Future
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is currently evaluating its long-term land use plan for over 7.1 million acres of public lands and valuable wildlife and recreation resources in eastern Alaska. This plan will establish the direction for federal land management decisions on these rivers, lands, and resources for the next 20 years or more!
Now is the time to make your voice heard! The 90 day public comment period will end July 28, 2005!
Alaska public lands affected by the plan include a range of scenic landscapes, stretching from the southern slopes of the Alaska Range to the Chugach Mountains, and the Talkeetna Mountains to the Wrangell Mountains, including portions accessible from the Glenn and Richardson Highways and the Denali Highway.
The BLM’s preferred plan would open 3.9 million acres to oil and gas leasing (55
percent of the entire planning area) and 6 million acres to hard rock mining (85 percent of the planning area). This radical plan would significantly and permanently change the landscape and would result in deterioration of wildlife habitat, traditional recreation opportunities and the area’s natural beauty.
Due in part to a lack of support from Alaska State officials, wilderness inventories were not conducted as part of this planning process. Although there are areas that possess remarkable wilderness characteristics, designation of wilderness areas is not considered in any of the BLM’s proposals.
BLM needs to know what YOU think about these 7.1 million acres of public lands and valuable resources in eastern Alaska. Join us in submitting comments to BLM to share our vision of how these public lands should be managed for the enjoyment of future generations.
But even beyond that, recognize that working on this administration means that you should have the courage to follow the rules, obviously, and stay within the law, obviously. But it's actually to do more than that. Recognize that you do have a moral compass that tells you what to do and to do the right thing, and we'd like to see everyone do the right thing.
Many people ask what kind of job they should be doing for this administration, and the truth is they should be doing a job for the American people. After all, we're here to serve them all. The money that the federal government spends really belongs to the American taxpayers. So we’re the stewards of the American taxpayer’s money, and we have to remember that every dime that we spend on their behalf should be spent wisely.
SEATTLE (AP) — With a record number of dead seabirds washing up on West Coast beaches from Central California to British Columbia, marine biologists are raising the alarm about rising ocean temperatures and dwindling plankton populations.
"Something big is going on out there," said Julia Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries and Sciences at the University of Washington. "I'm left with no obvious smoking gun, but birds are a good signal because they feed high up on the food chain."
Coastal ocean temperatures are 2 to 5 degrees above normal, which may be related to a lack of updwelling, in which cold, nutrient-rich water is brought to the surface.
Updwelling is fueled by northerly winds that sweep out near-shore waters and bring cold water to the surface. The process starts the marine food chain, fueling algae and shrimplike krill populations that feed small fish, which then provide a source of food for a variety of sea life from salmon to sea birds and marine mammals.
On Washington beaches, bird surveyors in May typically find an average of one dead Brandt's cormorant every 34 miles of beach. This year, cormorant deaths averaged one every eight-tenths of a mile, according to data gathered by volunteers with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, which Parrish has directed since 2000.
"This is somewhere between five and 10 times the highest number of bird deaths we've seen before," she said, adding that she expected June figures to show a similar trend.
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Asked about the White House's previous statements that Rove was not involved, Blunt told CBS' "Face the Nation" that spokesmen for the White House "need to be very thoughtful about what they say and be sure that their credibility is sustained.
One reason investigators are looking back is that even before Novak's column appeared, government officials had been trying for more than a month to convince journalists that Wilson's mission was not as important as it was being portrayed. Wilson concluded during the 2002 mission that there was no solid evidence for the administration's assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Niger to develop nuclear weapons, and he angered the White House when he became an outspoken critic of the war.
The FBI is trying to determine when White House officials and members of the vice president's staff first focused on Wilson and learned about his wife's employment at the agency. One group that may have known of the connection before that time is the handful of CIA officers detailed to the White House, where they work primarily on the National Security Council staff. A former NSC staff member said one or more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson relationship.
"We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two.
Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.
