Frustrated Russian Officials Struggling To Get Any Policies Through Dysfunctional Trump Administration
Posted: February 23, 2017 Filed under: Foreign Policy, Global, Humor, Politics, Russia, White House | Tags: Donald Trump, Michael T. Flynn, Mike Pence, National Security Advisor (United States), Parody, President of the United States, satire, The Onion, Vice President of the United States Leave a commentMOSCOW—Lamenting that internal disorganization was making it extremely difficult to get anything done, Russian officials voiced their frustration Thursday about continuing struggles to get policies through the dysfunctional Trump administration. “You’d think that after being in the White House for a month, they’d have at least some rudimentary process for rolling out our new proposals, but it’s just been a mess so far,” said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, adding that the recent dismissal of Michael Flynn as national security advisor was “just the tip of the iceberg” in a chaotic White House where internal conflicts and numerous leaks made it hard for the Russians to implement any workable ideas at all. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Campaign 2016: Governor Larry Hogan Makes Important Announcement
Posted: April 1, 2015 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Politics | Tags: Annapolis, Annapolis Junction, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Martin O'Malley, Maryland, Maryland State House, President of the United States, Vice President of the United States Leave a commentToday, Governor Larry Hogan made a shocking announcement at the Board of Public Works Meeting in Annapolis: He will seek the nomination for President of the United States.
[VIDEO] Mrs Amina Namadi, Wife of the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Seen Buying Votes with Cash on Live TV
Posted: March 26, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Global, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Bayero University Kano, Birnin Kebbi, Boko Haram, Goodluck Jonathan, Independent National Electoral Commission, Namadi Sambo, Nigeria, Peoples Democratic Party, Peruvian Democratic Party, Vice President of the United States Leave a commentWife of the vice president of Nigeria, Hajiya Amina Namadi Sambo, was seen sharing money on live television to sway voters during the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) women presidential campaign rally on Tuesday in Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi state.
THE PANTSUIT REPORT: Michael Wolraich’s Confession: ‘I Sorted Hillary Clinton’s Email’
Posted: March 19, 2015 Filed under: Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Associated Press, Email, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Mayo Clinic, Michael Wolraich, New York, Nobel Peace Prize, Rochester, Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, The Pantsuit Report, Vice President of the United States, Walter Mondale Leave a commentNatural language — the way people ordinarily speak and write — is notoriously difficult to parse
Michael Wolraich writes: When Hillary Clinton released emails from her personal account last week, many assumed that her attorneys had personally reviewed the messages before sending them to the State Department, but that’s not what
happened. As detailed in her press statement, the review team used keyword searches to automatically filter over 60,000 messages, flagging about half as work related.
“I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department,” Clinton declared.
I’m afraid that I don’t share her confidence, and I speak from experience. Twenty years ago, I used the same method to sort the Clinton administration’s email communications, including those of First Lady Hillary Clinton. It failed miserably.
Email did not exist when Congress established the Freedom of Information Act in 1967, and government officials did not originally consider electronic communications to be public records that they had to preserve and disseminate. On the last day of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a group of organizations representing archivists and libraries sued the White House to prevent the administration from deleting email relating to the Iran-Contra scandal. A temporary injunction was issued, and the case wound its way through the courts until 1993, when a federal judge ordered President Bill Clinton to preserve all electronic communication under the Freedom of Information Act.
“Even after significant tweaking, I don’t recall achieving more than a 70 percent success rate, which is particularly poor when you consider that random sorting would yield 50 percent if the distribution were even.”
In 1994, I was 22 years old, fresh out of college and working as a computer programmer for a company called Information Management Consultants. IMC was one of many three-letter-acronym corporations that ring Washington’s famous beltway and feed off government contracts. I dressed in a gray J.C. Penney suit and programmed three-letter-acronym computer languages (SQL, 4GL) for three-letter-acronym federal agencies (IRS, OPM, DOI, OMB, DOD). It was dull work, made duller by my company’s decision to block employee access to the “World Wide Web” so that we would not be distracted from our work.
“Those were heady days for a young government IT contractor. We had a special office in Arlington, Virginia, where we were could dress casually while pursuing important, groundbreaking work for the President of the United States!”
One day a colleague invited me to join a mysterious new project for the Executive Office of the President (EOP). The White House had hired IMC to archive its email after the court ordered it to preserve electronic records. Few people had multiple email accounts back then and many federal employees used their work accounts for personal communication, so we had to figure out some way to distinguish work email from personal correspondence.
[Check out Michael‘s book “Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics” at Amazon.com]
Those were heady days for a young government IT contractor. We had a special office in Arlington, Virginia, where we were could dress casually while pursuing important, groundbreaking work for the President of the United States! We lounged around the conference table in our khakis and scrawled deep thoughts on the big whiteboard. Mostly, we wrote words: president, federal, treasury, treaty, China, Serbia, ambassador, military, classified, and so on. These were the keywords with which we hoped to flag all the work-related messages, or at least the vast majority. We included the names of federal officials, common misspellings, and, of course, numerous three-letter acronyms. Since I had a philosophy degree, the team leader asked me to design logic to make the search smarter, e.g., “white AND house.”
“To make sense of natural language, it’s not sufficient to recognize the words; you also need to understand grammar, appreciate nuance, interpret metaphors, grasp allusions…”
To test our algorithm, the administration gave us a batch of sample messages. They included official business, such as a debate about a public scandal in which an official traveled by federal helicopter to play golf, and less official business, such as a private love note between two staff members. We ran our algorithm and crossed our fingers. Read the rest of this entry »
This Day in History, October 10th 1973: Vice President Spiro Agnew Resigns
Posted: October 10, 2014 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Gerald Ford, John C. Calhoun, Nixon, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Tax evasion, Vice President of the United States, Watergate 1 Comment“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.”
“I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won’t deceive you except in matters of this sort.”
todayinhistory:
October 10th 1973: Agnew resigns
On this day in 1973 the Vice President of the United States Spiro Agnew resigned. Agnew served under President Richard Nixon until he was formally charged with bribery and income tax evasion. Agnew was the second Vice President in history to resign from office after John C. Calhoun in 1832. He was replaced by Gerald Ford, who later became President upon Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal. Thus Ford is the only American President to have not been elected either Vice-President or President.
Pundit From Another Planet (via blondesforreagan)
[VIDEO] New White House Video Looks Oddly Like a Campaign Ad For Joe Biden
Posted: May 14, 2014 Filed under: Politics, White House | Tags: Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Ukraine, Vice President of the United States, White House, White House Tuesday 3 CommentsFrom Breitbart‘s Debra Heine:
…A video released by the White House Tuesday to promote investing in ports infrastructure, seems to be equally promoting the Vice President.
White House Dossier’s Keith Koffler wonders, “WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON HERE??”
Take a look. You paid for this.

Malcolm X’s Heirs Headed To Court To Block Publication Of Activist’s Diary
Posted: November 9, 2013 Filed under: History, Mediasphere | Tags: Associated Press, Chicago, Malcolm X, Manhattan, New York City, New York Public Library, Third World Press, Vice President of the United States 1 Comment
Black Nationalist leader and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X in Oxford with Eric Abrahams, right, the Student Union president, before addressing university students on the subject of extremism and liberty, 3rd December 1964. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
NEW YORK (AP) — Heirs of Malcolm X have gone to court to stop a Chicago company from publishing a diary of the activist leader’s last year.
X Legacy says in papers filed in Manhattan federal court that Third World Press does not have the right to publish “The Diary of Malcolm X.”
Hugo Chavez’s legacy: How his economically disastrous, politically effective ideology will haunt the country he ruined.
Posted: March 6, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Caracas, Havana, Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, OPEC, South America, Venezuela, Vice President of the United States Leave a commentEven before Hugo Chávez died, he had become a ghost. A strange, unfamiliar quiet had fallen on Venezuela for weeks as people waited to hear the voice of the president who had been part of their daily lives for nearly 14 years. That’s because Chávez spoke to Venezuelans constantly. In his first 11 years in office, he addressed the nation, on average, every two days. His remarks, usually improvised, typically ran more than four hours. If you add up these talks, which all radio and television stations were required to broadcast, they would amount to 54 full days.
And then there was silence. Venezuelans last heard their president on Dec. 8 when he announced that he was returning to Havana for his fourth operation to treat a recurring bout of cancer. He wouldn’t return to Venezuela until Feb. 18, slipping into a military hospital in Caracas in the middle of the night. (His advisers later admitted that his ability to speak had been impaired by a tracheal tube that had been inserted to assist his breathing.) Chávez had made the trip home, but he never truly returned. He was present but could not be seen. The eerie quiet was only broken with the announcement, delivered by Vice President Nicolás Maduro late Tuesday, that the 58-year-old president was dead.
What has Chávez bequeathed his fellow Venezuelans? The hard facts are unmistakable: The oil-rich South American country is in shambles. It has one of the world’s highest rates of inflation, largest fiscal deficits, and fastest growing debts. Despite a boom in oil prices, the country’s infrastructure is in disrepair—power outages and rolling blackouts are common—and it is more dependent on crude exports than when Chávez arrived. Venezuela is the only member of OPEC that suffers from shortages of staples such as flour, milk, and sugar. Crime and violence skyrocketed during Chávez’s years. On an average weekend, more people are killed in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. (In 2009, there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, more than four times the number of a decade earlier.) When the grisly statistics failed to improve, the Venezuelan government simply stopped publishing the figures…
More — from Slate Magazine
(via Instapundit)