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The World Wide Web Consortium, which purports to be an “open forum” for standards discussion, doesn’t exactly live up to its own claims.

Earlier on Monday, the W3C barred one of my colleagues, News.com reporter Anne Broache, from attending a “Toward More Transparent Government” conference held, ironically, in a government building in Washington, D.C.

The conference Web site clearly says: “Conversations and results are public.”

But Danny Weitzner, one of the W3C’s policy directors and event co-chair, repeatedly claimed in a followup telephone conversation that, by “public,” the W3C actually means “closed to the public.” Weitzner was the person who personally barred my colleague from entering the conference.

If they ever need a replacement for Tony Snow, here he is..

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For months, the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales have taken political heat for the purge of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Now the fallout is starting to hit the department in federal courtrooms around the country.

Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.

Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors.

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In other words, thanks to the Bush gang’s shameless attempts to politicize every aspect of the federal government, the president, the attorney general, and their cohorts have made it more difficult to prosecute corruption. Way to go, guys.

Call center agent: “Meneer, gebruikt u Microsoft Outlook Express?”
Klant: “Nee, nee, per ongeluk denk ik…”

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E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday.

The Bush administration may have committed “extensive” violations of a law requiring that certain records be preserved, said the committee’s Democratic chairman, adding that the panel will deepen its probe into the use of political e-mail accounts.

The committee’s interim report said the number of White House officials who had RNC e-mail accounts, and the number of messages they sent and received, were more extensive than previously realized.

Surely this…