MemeMachineGo!

Sometimes I feel like I can’t keep up. The Pentagon accidentally destroyed Bush’s service records. Whoops.

Military records that could help establish President Bush’s whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of “numerous service members,” including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush’s claims of service in Alabama are in question.

Strangely enough, there was no word of this when the White House released what they said were all of Bush’s military records earlier this year.

It’s enough to make someone believe the former Texas National Guard officer who said he once overheard a conversation in which there was a request to sanitize President Bush’s Guard records during Bush’s tenure as Texas governor. (Links from a Metafilter thread initiated by August Pollak.)

Updated 2004/7/10: Michelle Malkin notes that the Times has posted this correction:

An article yesterday about the destruction of some payroll records of National Guard members, including President Bush, misstated the record of White House acknowledgment of the loss. The White House indeed took note of the missing information last February when it released hundreds of pages of Mr. Bush’s military files. In a briefing paper for reporters on Feb. 10, summarizing those files, it noted that payroll records for the third quarter of 1972 had been lost when they were transferred to microfiche.

(Regular ol’ un-updated entry resumes…)

Meanwhile, the USDA is preventing a small slaughterhouse from testing all its cows for mad cow disease.

The only thing it needed was testing kits. That’s where the company ran into trouble. By law, the Department of Agriculture controls the sale of the kits, and it refused to sell Creekstone enough to test all of its cows. The USDA said that allowing even a small meatpacking company like Creekstone to test every cow it slaughtered would undermine the agency’s official position that random testing was scientifically adequate to assure safety.

What it didn’t say was that the rest of the meatpacking industry was adamantly opposed to such testing, which is expensive, and had no desire to compete with Creekstone’s fully certified beef. “If testing is allowed at Creekstone … ,” the president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. told the Post, “we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too.”

The Agriculture Department’s Creekstone decision reveals the best thinking of Soviet central planning: The government shoots the innovator to preserve market stability. Though President Bush invokes free-market principles when it comes to industry downsizing, “outsourcing” jobs, media mergers and energy deregulation, those principles apparently have their limits when a company seeks to become an industry leader in consumer protection.

(Via Ethel the Blog)

Meanwhile, Orcinus compares and contrasts two Supreme Court decisions. Regarding having Dick Cheney reveal his secret energy task force documents:

Why do the president and his advisers need to be shielded from document searches by groups such as the Sierra Club? The justices answered that question by stressing “the paramount necessity of protecting the Executive Branch from vexatious litigation that might distract it from the energetic performance of its constitutional duties.”

It added that “all courts should be mindful of the burdens imposed on the Executive Branch in any future proceedings.”

And regarding Jones v. Clinton a few years ago:

Petitioner’s predictive judgment finds little support in either history or the relatively narrow compass of the issues raised in this particular case. As we have already noted, in the more than 200 year history of the Republic, only three sitting Presidents have been subjected to suits for their private actions. See supra, at 9-10. If the past is any indicator, it seems unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the Presidency. As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner’s time.

Of greater significance, petitioner errs by presuming that interactions between the Judicial Branch and theExecutive, even quite burdensome interactions, necessarily rise to the level of constitutionally forbidden impairment of the Executive’s ability to perform its constitutionally mandated functions. “[O]ur … system imposes upon the Branches a degree of overlapping responsibility, a duty of interdependence as well as independence the absence of which `would preclude the establishment of a Nation capable of governing itself effectively.’ ” Mistretta, 488 U. S., at 381 (quoting Buckley, 424 U. S., at 121). As Madison explained, separation of powers does not mean that the branches “ought to have no partial agency in, or no controul over the acts of each other.” The fact that a federal court’s exercise of its traditional Article III jurisdiction may significantly burden the time and attention of the Chief Executive is not sufficient to establish a violation of the Constitution. [emphasis added]

There’s more, but, like I said, it’s hard to keep up.