<http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/Story?id=3105288&page=3>
Newsday's Craig Gordon has the back story of why former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, R-N.Y., left the Iraq Study Group last May: He missed a pair of two-day meetings that conflicted with paid appearances and was told he would have to either start showing up or quit. "By giving up his seat on the panel, Giuliani has opened himself up to charges that he chose private-sector paydays and politics over unpaid service on a critical issue facing the nation," Gordon writes.
It turns out all those presidential "signing statements" have meant something very real: Federal officials have disregarded at least six laws that President Bush challenged via signing statements, a Government Accountability Office study found. "The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers," reports The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage.
This would crash our servers: Karl Rove sent or received 140,000 e- mails over five years from his Republican National Committee e-mail address -- more than half to or from an official ".gov" address -- despite rules requiring him and other White House aides to communicate via official channels, a House-led investigation found. Some 88 White House officials were supplied with RNC e-mail accounts, and "potentially hundreds of thousands" of those e-mails have been destroyed, according to Michael Abramowitz's Washington Post write-up.