Fast and Furious on Dialup

View 729 Thursday, June 21, 2012

I am down at the Beach House. Sable is home with the house sitters, and gets two walks a day so while she misses us she has mixed emotions about the whole situation. Anyway all is well here and there.

Except that I am on dialup. I have the AT&T wireless gadget and my ThinkPad knows how to use it. It takes me to a place where I can prepay for some high speed time. My ThinkPad remembers my user name and password. AT&T doesn’t. It’s still The Phone Company. Tomorrow I will go over to the AT&T store and buy some high speed time, or maybe I won’t. Dialup works, and it probably won’t hurt me to see what those still stuck with dialup have to go through. My site uploads in under two minutes, which isn’t all that awful.

Windows LiveWriter doesn’t know about my site. Well, it does, and presumably it is going to post this, but what it knows about is the last thing I used this machine to post something with. That was months ago. I am offered no chance to go out to the site and bring in the last thing I put up there. This is annoying.

I am now going to post this to see if it works. If it does, and I have no reason to suppose it won’t, then I’ll do some work on Executive Privilege. I’ll also look at speculations on just what they are so afraid of with Fast and Furious. For some reason the President is willing to take ownership of a fouled up operation that he asserted, and everyone believed him, that he had no knowledge of until it hit the newspapers. Something happened in their coverup attempts; something in one of those documents that is so horrible that the President can’t have it come out. What that could be is hard to discern. It is interesting to speculate. Anyway, I am off to test this.

I’m still on dialup, although I suspect I could fathom the AT&T thing if I had to. But actually dialup isn’t all that awful, oddly enough. I am not going to download any video, of course.

The trickiest part of this operation was figuring out how to get Livewriter to update the list of “recent posts”. That requires going to the open recent post item, ignoring the popup stuff that appears when you hold the mouse on it, and clicking on the open recent posts thing, then when that opens a dialog selecting the site name. It’s obvious from there. Thanks to Rick Hellewell for having the patience to explain it to me. Three times.

The news is full of the President’s invocation of Executive Privilege to protect someone in his Justice Department from being found out by Congress. For the President to invoke that privilege the President has to say that something in this involves him; Executive Privilege does not work to protect malfeasance or incompetence form being exposed. It has to say that the Office of the Presidency would somehow be at risk if the documents became public. If for example there were a document naming a specific person to be assassinated as part of the operation, or something embarrassing a foreign head of state, or a CIA contact in Mexico – we can speculate endlessly. But there is no evidence that any such thing happened. It’s more likely that one of the Chicago White House staff got involved in covering up Fast and Furious – which is itself embarrassing – and wrote things he/she should never have written, and —  well, that’s speculation too. But whatever happened, the President doesn’t want to throw the staffer under the bus, and has been willing to own Fast and Furious as if it were his operation; which, I would have thought, would be more embarrassing than anything else could be.

Eventually it will all come out. It always does in these high technology days. The Three Musketeers can’t bring the Queen’s Necklace just in time to save things…  It will come out, and I for one will be curious as to just what was so important that it required Executive Privilege to protect.  And also exposing the President’s lack of knowledge about the constitutional issue here.