Bush: Clueless and Happy

"Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, also a Democrat, said his state has 50 or more infrastructure projects the state could begin working on in 30 to 90 days, if only the federal government would provide matching funds. . . .

"'The president ... had an open mind when he listened to them, but he did say he was very concerned about any proposal that would raise taxes,' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters after the meeting."

On another front, Zachary Coile writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told Bush administration officials Monday that he is tired of the Pentagon treating the California National Guard like a stepchild by using its equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan without returning or replacing it."

White House E-Mail Watch

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing today about missing White House e-mails -- both the ones apparently deleted from White House servers and the ones that were never on those servers in the first place, because they were sent from Republican National Committee accounts.

Here's the opening statement from committee chairman Henry Waxman: "The result is a potentially enormous gap in the historical record. Karl Rove, the President's closest political advisor, was a prolific user of his RNC e-mail account. Yet the RNC preserved virtually none of his e-mails from before 2004. The result is that we may never know what he wrote about the build-up to the Iraq war.

"In recent weeks, the White House has launched an all-out attack on its own analysis of the missing e-mails. One White House spokesman tried to claim there were no missing e-mails after all. Another senior White House official said she had 'serious reservations' about the accuracy of the White House's previous work and that she had 'so far been unable to replicate its results or to affirm the correctness of the assumptions underlying it.'

"Many of us have grown used to the White House attacking any congressional or independent study that conflicts with President Bush's policies. This is the first time I can remember the White House using those same tactics on itself. It is remarkable.

"But that's not all. The White House is also refusing to cooperate with the National Archives. For almost a year the nonpartisan National Archives has been urging the Bush White House to assess the problem of missing e-mails and to take "whatever action may be necessary to restore any missing emails. . . .

"The Archives also asked the White House to start recovering official e-mails that the Republican National Committee deleted pursuant to its policy of regularly purging e-mails from its servers. These repeated requests have also been rebuffed. In fact, the RNC has informed our Committee that it has no intention of trying to restore the missing White House e-mails from backup tapes containing past RNC e-mail records."

Waxman also published a report from the Democratic Committee staff on the story so far. More on that tomorrow after I have a chance to go through it. But I gather that the information in the report provided by Steven McDevitt, a senior official in the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer from September 2002 through October 2006, is quite incendiary. He apparently suggests the White House adopted a new e-mail archiving system with full knowledge that users could delete e-mails without leaving a trace, and that there was a high risk of data loss.

Meanwhile, Pete Yost writes for the Associated Press: "The White House still has not finished work on a new records management and e-mail archiving system, a project that began nearly five years ago."

Addington's Man in the Pentagon Steps Down

Jess Bravin writes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "A principal architect of the Bush administration's detainee policies is stepping down, just as military officials gear up for the Guantanamo Bay trial of alleged planners of the Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracy.