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Steve Benen informs me that Rep. Darrell Issa (R–Lemmingstan) has suddenly become concerned over the proper retention of White House emails:

Issa, easily a #2 seed on my bracket for Most Ridiculous Member of Congress competition, also asked the White House to respond to a series of additional questions about the administration’s email archiving. He said the answers are due in two weeks.

The irony, of course, is that Issa couldn’t care less about an actual scandal regarding White House emailing archiving. Bushies lost untold thousands of emails, with no archive or backups. Indeed, the former president’s team deliberately created a “primitive” email system that created a high risk that data would be lost — there was “no automatic system to ensure that e-mails were archived and preserved.”

Hmmm.  Only a #2 seed?  I guess the competition is pretty tough in this category.  Here in California, though, I think we’d bump him up to #1.  After all, he was the bright boy who decided it would be cute to use his car alarm fortune to fund a recall of Gray Davis less than a year after he was elected, thereby making Arnold Schwarzenegger governor and turning a dismal economic mess into a complete catastrophe.  No Darrell, no Arnold.  That’s his legacy to the Golden State.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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