What a week for Pres. Obama

Health care passed (well, kind of, to be continued...) and an arms treaty with Russia.... I guess that over an year of work is paying off.

Found: Missing Presidential Emails

Not surprisingly, looks like some IT guys were able to dig up the Bush administration's missing emails. Odd isn't it it that it took almost an year... Perhaps someone went to great lengths to try to destroy them? In any case, here are some choice quotes from the article:

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

"They never made an effort to restore them," she said.

But Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary in the Bush White House, said the group "has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."

"We always indicated that there is an e-mail archiving system and a disaster recovery system," Stanzel said. "We also indicated that e-mails not properly archived could be found on disaster recovery tapes. There is a big, big difference between something not being properly archived and it being 'lost' or 'missing,' as CREW would say."

He Who Can Sell Ice To Eskimos

Ex-Pres. Clinton shows up to North Korea, chit-chats with Kim Jong Il, and goes home with two detained U.S. citizens. Amazing.

Keep on truckin' Bill.

The Return of Reason

Three cheers for President Obama's lifting of the embryonic stem cell ban! Finally, an administration that is following reason. Here's an example from Time magazine of a promising scientist's lead cut short by the policies of Luddites in the previous administration:

After a storm hammered San Francisco that winter, the university campus lost power; if not for the backup generators that pumped emergency electricity to its labs, countless cell cultures might have been lost. Fisher's embryonic stem cell lab, however, was off the campus grid, housed in a temporary facility built with private funds, which did not have a backup system. It would take several days for power to be restored to that site, during which time Fisher had no other place to bring her cells — she couldn't use the university incubators without jeopardizing the school's access to federal funding. Her cells were no ordinary stem cells, either. They were the first to be cultured on a bed of entirely human cells, an important advance in bringing usable stem-cell therapies to patients. With no other option, Fisher watched her cells die.

What a meeting of the minds

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for this meeting. Getting all of the living U.S. Presidents together... apparently it hadn't happened since 1981.

I think it's going to take a lot of strong creative and analytic thinking to solve the issues we face. I think it's a sign of strength for the new administration to be open to other ideas, but still have the grit to go ahead and do what it thinks is best.