Tuesday Roundup: Netroots Oversight

The big news on the blogosphere is that the Congressional judiciary committees received over 3000 pages of emails in a document dump from the Justice Department. Why is this big news on the blogosphere? Because the House Judiciary Committee put PDF scans of all those emails online, and TPM Muckraker asked their online community to go through the documents and comment on anything of interest they find. Now, that's some clever leveraging of the netroots.

TPM Muckraker also has the first reports from the print media on the contents of those emails.

It seems that the House of Representatives was getting a bit jealous at all the fun the Senate Judiciary Committee was having in setting up subpoenas for White House Officials. They have now decided to get in on the fun: House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers has announced that the House Judiciary Committee will vote tomorrow on subpoenas for Rove, Miers, and Kelley as well, along with Kyle Sampson and Scott Jennings. For those of you keeping score, that's two more subpoenas than the Senate Judiciary Committee, being voted on a day earlier. The House seems to really enjoy its ability to move on issues faster than the Senate, but really, isn't this rubbing it in a bit much? Yesterday's All Things Considered on NPR discusses the balance between the Judiciary Committees' subpoena powers and the shelter of executive privilege.

The fallout still isn't over at the Texas Youth Commission. Two more high-level officials have informed Executive Director Ed Owens that they are resigning today. This comes on the heels of news of a $5 million lawsuit against the TYC for alleged abuse of a youth once held in a facility. I imagine this will be the first of many lawsuits like this. One wonders how the total cost of these lawsuits to the state will compare to the money they "saved" by grossly underfunding the TYC in the first place.

Finally today, BOR has the scoop on the Lege dropping a little rain on Attorney General Greg Abbott's parade (though they put it far more poetically themselves) by passing HB 2061, which effectively reverts just about anything Greg Abbott has said on the confidentiality of social security numbers this year. I'm actually not sure if we should be calling this as an inarguably good thing. Call me kooky, but I'm a big fan of personal privacy, and it sort of seems that Lege Republicans took advantage of a badly managed situation — Abbott's decision and the subsequent forced closing of a number of county clerk's offices throughout the state — to ensure that the state would not be required to protect any of my personal information it may have. The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.