As we mentioned earlier this week, the WHCA has invited Salon, Politico the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo into the White House pool rotation—the system whereby the White House press corps joins together and appoints one outlet to follow the president during his waking hours and file reports that everyone can use. According to the most recent rotation schedule, there are 34 outlets in the "print" pool. (Click the image at left to see a bigger version of this month's schedule.) The order of the shifts are assigned alphabetically, though if you are, for example, the poor sap at the New York Daily News who drew Christmas, you can try to talk someone else into swapping shifts with you. Partly this is done so that every news organization doesn't have to dedicate a full-time reporter to gathering the most basic of facts about the President's activities. But it also helps the White House to not have to herd 34 reporters onto a bus whenever Obama leaves 1600 Pennsylvania.

It's a time-honored and mostly harmonious tradition. Now Politico's Michael Calderone reports that the old guard doesn't like the idea of ideological upstarts being let into the club:

"This is really troubling," said New York Times reporter Peter Baker in an email to POLITICO. "We're blurring the line between news and punditry even further and opening ourselves to legitimate questions among readers about where the White House press corps gets its information."

Baker said he has no problem with outlets like Huffington Post, which he described "an important part of the marketplace of ideas." But the site, he said, has a mission "to produce pieces with strongly argued points of view" and that puts the Times-or other non-partisan news organizations-"in a position of relying on overtly ideological or opinionated organizations as our surrogate news gatherers."

Though we wouldn't quite call it "troubling," we actually understand where Baker's coming from. But there's a rather glaring irony here: The main reason for putting the new kids into the pool is there's fewer people in the print world left to do it. When newspapers close or consolidate their Washington bureaus to save what little money they have left, the pool loses bodies. If Baker doesn't want to rely on pool reports from some leftist blogger, the Times will have to either a) exit the pool and assign someone to cover Obama's comings and goings full-time with the paper's own resources, which it doesn't have, because blogs are slowly killing it, or b) offer to pick up the shifts that Salon, Huffington Post, and TPM reporters are taking over.

It's a rather concise little vignette about the plight of newspapers: Online outlets that the old newspapers regard as insufficiently reverent to the ideals of journalism are able to attract readers by not being stodgy and hidebound; newspapers are laying off so many reporters that they don't have the manpower to do the boring work they consider as their core mission; when the online (i.e. reckless) outlets step up to fill the gap, they sniff at them for being insufficiently stodgy and hidebound.

Not to mention that, as Matthew Yglesias puts it, the pool is little more than a "mutually agreed upon plagiarism pact"—members of the pool simply fold the reporting into their stories as though they were actually there. So Baker isn't being forced to rely on "overtly ideological" outlets for his reporting. He is free to quote from the reports and cite their authors, thereby insulating his paper from any partisan influence. But that would require abandoning the fiction of the pool reports altogether and alert the Times readers to the fact that its reporters are not everywhere, all the time.

In defending the idea of letting folks like TPM participate in the pool, WHCA president Ed Chen claimed that ideological leanings don't matter, because the pool reports themselves are "transparent" and available for everybody to inspect:

"So whether it's [the Huffington Post's] Sam Stein or [TPM's] Christina Bellantoni or Peter Baker, all of our work is out in the public," Chen said. "It's transparent, can be judged, and when there are violations, we'll come down on them."

We think that's a magnificent idea, so we've decided to make Chen's claim a reality. Gawker was recently added to the White House Press Office's email list, which along with official press releases, speech transcripts and advisories, includes the presidential pool reports. The fact that the White House is in charge of distributing the raw reporting of people covering the White House is, as we've noted before, deeply strange. Since the pool reports are by their very definition "on the record," and are distributed by the White House to the entire press list (not just the pool participants), it seems to us they should be considered public records. In fact, it's never made sense to us why the White House Correspondents' Association doesn't just post them to a web site of their own.

So, we're stepping up to fill the gap. We have posted all the reports we've gotten in the past week to the tag page #publicpool, and will post each new report to that page as we receive them. We recommend having a look. You can find some interesting things, like the time when Politico reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, in covering the Obama state dinner as a pooler, threw a plug for Politico into her report—"shameless promotion for POLITICO...see this link for more details on the bookstore arrivals..."—and actually appeared live on CNN while she was on pool duty, which kind of defeats the purpose of pool duty. There's all kinds of great stuff in there. Enjoy. We'll update it early and often.

Oh, and before you accuse us of just freeloading off the work of real journalists, Gawker is volunteering for pool duty if the WHCA will have us. Gabriel says the travel budget can cover a once-a-month Amtrak ticket to DC.

As Politico noted last month, the White House Correspondents' Association, which runs the White House pool—a resource-sharing arrangement whereby all the news organizations that are supposed to bodily cover the president during all his waking hours rotate their reporters in shifts and share their notes with everybody else—has started letting Talking Points Memo, Salon, and the Huffington Post share in the pool duty. That's a major shift considering the fact that the pool report has historically been a just-the-facts-ma'am recounting of detail (with the occasional insider joke thrown in) that can be served up to all sorts of newspapers. Throwing avowedly partisan web sites into the mix is, well, interesting.

Christina Bellatoni, a senior reporter for Talking Points Memo's Washington, D.C., bureau, is today's designated pooler, marking TPM's first time in the regular rotation (she hasn't filed any reports yet). She also filled in for Salon's Mike Madden as the travel pooler on Friday, offering this accounting of Obama's day:

Travel photo lid called. We're thankful.

First Lady's Christmas tree event is open press.

(I'm filling in for Salon, who has the day off).

Predictable liberal cant.

Salon has been in the pool rotation since January (Mike Madden has drawn the coveted Dec. 31 shift), and the Huffington Post (next up on Dec. 20) and TPM were both added in the last month. Whatever issues may surround letting outspoken Obama supporters serve as purportedly objective chroniclers of his daily routine, the main motivation for the White House Correspondents' Association in opening the door to them appears to be manpower: As newspapers close or consolidate their Washington operations, Politico's Michael Calderone noted, web upstarts are there to take over shifts from overworked ink-and-paper types.

It's a good thing that non-institutional web-based outlets have continued to infiltrate the heart of the D.C. journalistic establishment, but there's something strange about the idea of the Obama Administration becoming a playground for people who support his policies. Not that we want Michelle Malkin writing pool reports to balance things out, but—actually, we really would like to see Michelle Malkin writing pool reports. That would be fantastic.

When we asked Salon's editor in chief Joan Walsh how long Salon had been pulling pool duty, she replied, "Certainly we were not in the pool during the Bush administration."

Gosh, why not?

1. They represent American ingenuity, and the possibility it manifests. Just when you thought you'd never get into a State Dinner: there's hope yet! All you need is to know a few people and fake it till you make it. And ambition! These people actually went through with the mischievous shit you only daydream and giggle about to yourself when you're bored. You want moxie? These creatures bleed it.

2. They've demonstrated and unleashed previously understated powers of Facebook. Remember when your parents first started smokin' the 'Book? It was embarrassing. Humiliating, even. Now, adults might feel slightly more free to put up crazy shit on their Facebook account, which, you know, evens the playing field a little bit. Also, why put out a press release when you can just use the viral autogenius of Facebook? We always kind of knew it to be a press outlet for our overshares, but this just steps the game up to an entirely new level.

3. Diplomats are assholes. Power-corrupt assholes. And this proves it! Diplomats are gonna have to check themselves before they wreck themselves a little more often now, as America's Favorite Party Crashers probably had help on the inside from an Indian ambassador. Did you know! Having diplomatic status basically allows you to get away with everything. Everything! These guys put the "dick" in "dignitary." [Ed. ?!] Forget a fire lane; these guys could park their motorcade on your face and they'd barely be ticketed. It's time we throw down on diplomatic immunity. Somehow, this is all evil John Bolton's fault. It's time to fix it.

4. Reality TV needed some highbrow classing-up. It's here. Seriously: the kind of people who want to get on reality TV, lately? Sociopathic, egomaniacal parents (Richard Heene) and emotionally unstable killers (Ryan Jenkins). The pool of reality television stars comes exclusively from the lowbrow-despicable quadrant. If we don't move up, at least we can move right: towards the brilliant. And aspirations of crashing the state dinner via diplomats is—out of context, Beavis and Butthead-level stupidity—in the context of reality televisions' current state, mindblowingly brilliant. A solid season of these pranksters and desperate social-climbers in The Real Housewives of DC (which the couple was aiming for stardom in at one point) could be a refreshing antidote to the philosophical nuances of NeNe and Danielle Staub.

5. They're keeping us honest. The Secret Service failed. Miserably. And those are your tax-dollars at work, America! It should go without saying—but often doesn't—that, to their credit, a more docile quality control check on the abilities of the Secret Service has never taken place with such tremendous results. Let's say one of these two charmers were psychotic, and went after Somebody Important with a presidential spork: I'm pretty sure, despite letting them in, the Secret Service still would've bent this guy's face up his own ass faster than you can say "colonoscopy." White House Party Crashers: Low Risk, High Yield. America needs more problems like this.

6. They're crazypants freaky! Just like the rest of us. Come on. Hello, huddled masses yearning to breathe free! We all have some kind of freaky weird shit inside, and these people let loose. This country is a melting pot of crazy. We need different spices in it, and occasionally, someone needs to spike the punch with something a little psychedelic (thankfully, they didn't actually do that). But really, first: just look at them. Second: Who crashes a White House State Dinner and puts the pictures on FACEBOOK? Crazy people! Freaky people! People without discretion! And these people aren't just freaky, but are functionally freaky.

7. The White House Party Crashers are American Greatness, incarnate. In the grand tradition of people getting places they don't necessarily belong, they've set the bar, there's not much else higher than this. Maybe karaoke with Kim Jong-Il. Maybe. But nobody got hurt, and these guys crashed a state dinner! Again, sure: they exposed a massive hole in our national security, will cause diplomatic stresses, are going to cost taxpayers a shitload of money, maybe put some Americans in an unnecessary state of fear, dominated a news cycle when there're surely more important issues to be discussed, and stripped even further bare the terrifying ethos of people who desperately want to be famous in America by clearly blacking out any and all rational thought, but come on. This was epic. As President Jimmy Carter once noted, "If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement." These Party Crashers deserve our highest regards. They are freaky, weird, awe-inspiring hot messes. In whatever era we live in, there are far worse things to aspire to than meeting our country's leaders....asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for their story, and then dissing them on Facebook.

Yeah, they're assholes. People are ridiculous. Shine on, you crazy diamonds. Shine on.

In the photo album Michaele Salahi posted on her Facebook page after the event, one photo stands out among all those of the crashers smiling next to famous media personalities, politicians and Joe Bidens: A picture with one "Ambassador Singh":

This is Arun K. Singh, Deputy Chief of Mission for the Indian Embassy, and he has chilled with the Salahis before. Here they are drinking wine at a September 9th event hosted by the Indian Embassy to announce America's Polo Cup, a 2010 India Vs. USA polo match organized by Tareq Salahi and co-sponsored by Indian Ambassador Meera Shankar:

A (terribly reproduced) picture of the three even made October edition of the Indian Embassy's newsletter. Ambassador Singh is quoted in the Indian Express as saying "the polo match between India and the US next year to be played at the National Mall reflects another dimension of the growing relationship between the two countries." In that same article, Michaele Salahi is quoted as saying the match "aspires to bring the love of the game to a wider audience and bring international cultures together..." So, Singh and the Salahis are polo buddies. They go way back.

Furthermore, Tareq Salahi's only statement to the Washington Post's Reliable Source blog after crashing the state dinner was "India is the challenger in the America's Polo Cup World Championships June 11/12 2010, and they are very excited in this first ever cultural connection being hosted on the DC National Mall since Polo is one of the primary sports in India." This suggests a polo-motivated party crashing.

Based on this knowledge, here are a couple theories of how Singh helped the Salahis crash the White House.

1) Singh invited the Salahis to the dinner as a reward for their work on the India Vs. USA polo match, but for some reason their names didn't make it on the official guest list. When they showed up and were turned away (Brian Williams told the Times the couple's car was turned away by the first ring of Secret Service, after which they "hopped out") they called up Arun K. Singh: "Dude, you said we were on the list!" Singh spoke to the Secret Service and got them in.

2) The Salahis showed up uninvited, confident that they could use their Singh connection to get in the party. After being turned away, they either name-dropped Singh or got him to vouch for them to the Secret Service.

Either way, the Salahis weren't just some randos who showed up at the White House and schmoozed their way past the Secret Service with their fancy clothes. The Salahis knew somebody; they likely leveraged their connection to Arun K. Singh—the Indian Embassy's polo liaison—to crash the state dinner and successfully roll their way to immortal fameball-dom.

The Salahis will be appearing on Larry King Live Monday, where they will maybe prove our theory correct. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo has a statement from the Indian Embassy: "Neither the embassy nor anyone from the embassy was involved in any way in their getting into the White House. Nor did we request any invitation for them."

The Washington Post's Reliable Source blog reported earlier today that the two notorious DC socialites had not been on the official white house guest for last night's state dinner honoring the Indian Prime Minister—but were there anyway! This evening, Reliable Source received official word from the White House: The Salahi's had slipped through a Secret Service checkpoint "which did not follow proper procedure to ensure these two individuals were on the invited guest list." AKA: THEY CRASHED THE FUCK OUT OF THAT PARTY.

But the Secret Service told Reliable Source that the couple did not pose any risk aside from embarrassing everyone by dancing sexy to "Bad Romance":

"Everyone who enters the White House grounds goes through magnetometers and several other levels of screenings," said Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service. "That was the case with the state dinner last night. No one was under any risk or threat."

Like most good party crashers, the Salahis flitted around like they owned the place, mugging for the camera with celebs and politicians for pictures Michaele would later upload to her Facebook profile (status update: "Honored to have attended the state dinner at the White House in honor of India with President Obama and our First Lady.")—basically stopping just short of pushing Obama aside to deliver the opening toast themselves, blisteringly drunk, complimenting the Indian prime minister on his "funny hat" before trying to goad the Obamas into a quad-kiss. Here they are with Joe Biden, who you will remember is the vice-president of our nation:

The Salahi's biography is predictable in a sad way: She is a rumored contender for the upcoming DC edition of Bravo's hope-squelching "Real Housewives" series, and defines her style as "classic and feminine with a slim rocker edge. I'm addicted to white clothes, and I love stilettos." He has been embroiled in a complex lawsuit over a family winery and is a polo enthusiast who founded "America's Polo Cup"—which is also being sued for not paying a caterer, according to Reliable Source. Of course these are the people who crash state dinners.

It is pretty ridiculous (and scary) that on this night—Obama's special night!—these two fameballs showed up and successfully used an important geopolitical event as a launching pad for their now inevitable reality show/string of late-night television interviews. But also kind of awesome. Go (to Hell) Salahis!

UPDATE: Commenter Claire Buoyant points us to the Salahis wedding video, which adds about 10,000 pounds to the "sad" side of the Sad/Awesome Scale of Justice.

[via NYT]

The dinner welcomes India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and all of the guests have arrived which meant the sad end of Politico's unintentionally hilarious live coverage of the parade of celebrities and politicians walking past the media scrum. ("There we have Katie Couric... I wonder if she got that purple shawl today to go with the purple colors of the state dinner?")

However: serving a main course of Indian food ("Roasted Potato Dumplings with Tomato Chutney", "Green Curry Prawns with Coconut Aged Basmati" This is not Indian food, actually. We're not racist, we promise!) to the Indian prime minister? Doesn't he get enough Indian food in, um, India? What's wrong with a huge burger and a Caesar salad?

[Between Clinton, Jill Biden, and her shifty husband Joe, no one is looking in the same direction, but still there are no flaws in sight. Image via Getty]

They found a "high-ranking official" from "a previous Democratic administration" who thinks Bob is a bad choice, which allowed them to write that "even some Democrats" have "privately questioned" the appointment.

This is a photo caption: "Questions arise whether incoming White House counsel Bob Bauer's experience as a partisan warrior is appropriate for the position." The questions did not "arise" from the earth, unbidden. Nor were they torn from the thigh of Zeus. Politico reporters asked these questions, themselves.

But what's even better is who these questions arose to: the anonymous "high-ranking official" and Peter Wallison, the lawyer who most famously instructed Ronald Reagan to claim ignorance while testifying on Iran-Contra.*

Everyone else is like "well maybe he has done some stuff on campaign finance that I find personally distasteful but yes he is qualified." That's not gonna win the afternoon, guys.

The real tragedy here is that Politico went with "Bob Bauer Unqualified" instead of what will be the real scandal: he is an agent of ACORN!

*And then this happened:

The question, of course, came up...After a preliminary question about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and Regan's on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around the desk and said to Wallison, "Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?" Then he picked up the paper and began to read, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

HAH. A highly qualified quote-giver, this one.

Previously in "Politico Inventing And Then Reporting On Invented News" News:

Politico Reports on Story Politico Invented
Politico Begins Posting Fox News Slashfic
Scandal: Bill Before Congress Is Long, Complicated

[Photo: AP]

Next headline: Selfish Obama Wants Your Kids to Die! Why, God, Why?!

[Story: White House Blog
Pic: Dance With Shadows]

Earlier this year, Dunn spoke to a class of graduating high school students and asked them to go fight a war in Calcutta as per the recommendations of her "two favorite political philosophers" Mao Tse Tung and Mother Theresa. While it is not known what became of these newly militant American schoolchildren armed with maps, Fox News' resident Crazed Crybot discovered this footage in his continuing quest to expose the violent red heart of the Obama White House.

What a fright for Glenn Beck!

Would you be a little alarmed if somebody in the White House had cited Adolf Hitler in a speech to high school students as the person they turn to the most? What is the difference? Mao was worse. Plus, he took away the freedom of hundreds of millions of Chinese, and now he's being revered? How did we get here?

Now Andrew Sullivan thinks all this talk of a Red House is just silly. But he does have an answer for Beck:

Dunn would never have used Hitler as a source for perseverance and setting the right objectives. Why Because Hitler's evil is self-evident. So why is Mao's rancid evil not self-evident for a person like Dunn? Because she retains a double standard for far left totalitarianism over far right totalitarianism. It's that insulting and morally disgusting double standard that gets my goat. Mao was responsible for the deaths of up to 70 million people - and Dunn sees him as a useful strategist.

Oh, that's right. Lefties only ever truly despise righties. That explains the overwhelming love for Stalin... no?

Asked to comment, Dunn says she got the quote from noted Communist Lee Atwater, which leaves us back at square one: why doesn't the world feel about Chairman Mao the way it does about Hitler and Stalin? He definitely felt he deserved to share space with Stalin at least - even had a little tiff with Khruschev when he thought his heir apparent status was being infringed upon.

Perhaps it's because he never bombed our grandparents nor made our parents hide under schooldesks. Or maybe it's because the strongest proponent of the Cult of Mao is still the very country where he once had those millions of people tortured and killed.

[Pic: IntelligentLife]

Leibovitz's commercial day rate is $250,000, according to New York magazine. We certainly hope taxpayers didn't pay her that much to document for posterity the fundamental adorableness of the First Family. Perhaps the Obamas, or Obama's campaign arm, footed the bill. Or maybe Leibovitz performed her duties gratis. That would have been especially admirable, however, seeing as how this picture was taken on September 1, one week before Leibovitz's deadline to repay the $24 million loan she owed to high-end artsharks Art Capital Group or lose possession of her photographic legacy. That deadline was eventually extended, but there must have been a lot on Annie's mind when this photo was taken.

Fox News has bored us all week with the proclamation that the White House is having a war with them, and it wasn't until tonight that I started listening. I knew Glenn Beck was reenacting Network, Bill O'Reilly frightened us before we saw that Inside Edition clip where suddenly his strong language made us laugh more than cringe, but now it's time to start worrying.

Van Susteren has ventured into the performance hall of the enemy, and probably gotten more love and respect than she's gotten since she used to hang around the Connecticut dive bars armed only with her fake ID back in the late nineteen-seventies. Be warned America, you heard it here first: Our freedom may now truly be at risk.

Image via APimages

Aside from Ruscha, they selected Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, sculptures by Degas, and still-life canvases by Giorgio Morandi, according to the New York Times, which has a gallery of some of the works.

In as sad an indication we've seen yet of how low the politico-media complex has fallen, it took the fucking White House of the United States of America to point out, on its blog, that you can't lose money on the 2010 Olympics if it's still 2009:

RHETORIC: BECK SAID VANCOUVER LOST $1 BILLION WHEN IT "HAD THE OLYMPICS."
Glenn Beck said, "Vancouver lost, how much was it? they lost a billion dollars when they had the Olympics." [Transcript, Glenn Beck Show, 9/29/09]

REALITY: VANCOUVER'S OLYMPICS WILL NOT TAKE PLACE UNTIL 2010. Vancouver will host the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games from February 12 – 28, 2010 and March 12-21, 2010, respectively. [Vancouver2010.com, accessed 9/29/09]

That's why the White House has a blog: To periodically remind us of transparently true and immutable facts about our inescapably temporal existence.

What happened? The White House was weakened and brought to their knees by a media campaign they—with all of their supposed love, affection, and adoration from the mainstream media—couldn't fight to win on a bloodied mainstream media's battleground. And the mainstream media played right along with a narrative they couldn't drive, so instead, piggybacked on: check it out: the White House employs a guy with extreme beliefs. Easy enough.

Not that Van Jones, an environmental czar, was the biggest bounty in the world, but this can't be seen as anything other than a huge setback in their war to move forward against the insane lies, conspiracies, and successful media guerrilla tactics pushed forward by neoconservative (for lack of a better word) crazies: Birthers, Death Panel Pushers, and their ilk.

The question is: why? Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina lies about his whereabouts, getting his colleagues to appropriate his story, and admits to having an Argentinean lovebird, going against a basic republican talking point of family values. Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada: an affair, exposed, sans resignation. All Van Jones did was say some incendiary things—without any cover-up, or illicit activity, things that were more or less in his past and distanced from his current political agenda—and he became the Obama administration's biggest casualty to date.

Politico points out the other casualties of the Obama administration: Military Office Director Louis Caldera, White House Communications Director Ellen Moran's supposedly lateral promotion, Gen. David McKiernan, and Steve Rattner. Caldera and Moran were victims of media battles, McKiernan and Rattner to lesser degrees.

If you went through any administration's subscription cards of yore, you'd probably find a few anarchists amongst their ranks going by what they read. Maybe shuffling through every comment they've ever tossed out on the internet, or in private conversation, or in a paper could turn over a few pretty interesting rocks. And if this is all it takes for an administration official to resign, damn. But it isn't. It requires the intricate, smart campaign waged on Van Jones. One way said campaign wasn't fought: hard.

Is Obama gonna keep bowing to the will of political extremists every time something "gets in the way" of his agenda? At the rate they're going, they're not going to have any foot soldiers left to fight it.

Next up: his school speech. Despite picking up a Republican ally here and there—who, as traditionalists, think Obama should be able to address schools, like any other president—they've already started to lose ground on it. Schools are offering students whose parents don't approve of their kids hearing out the president on education "alternative programming" as an opt-out of the speech. Refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance for religious beliefs: one thing. Making a teacher's curriculum a political sacrificial lamb is another one, entirely. Obama's not just losing the media war for his White House, but for his constituency, now, as well.

Jones' resignation letter:

"I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today.

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.

I have been inundated with calls - from across the political spectrum - urging me to "stay and fight."

But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

It has been a great honor to serve my country and my President in this capacity. I thank everyone who has offered support and encouragement. I am proud to have been able to make a contribution to the clean energy future. I will continue to do so, in the months and years ahead."

The change is a deal with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government Washington, which agreed to drop two FOIA lawsuits in exchange for a promise that the White House would start releasing the names. The new White House policy [pdf], which is voluntary, will be to release visitor logs on a monthly basis, with the exception of visits that were private in nature, related to national security, or related to other "sensitive" issues, like potential Supreme Court nominees.

That's all well and good, but it's voluntary. The White House will make the determination about which names to release—including which one's are "sensitive"—without recourse to any oversight or appeal, and without the force of law to keep them in line. Do you trust them?

The main issue in CREW's FOIA suits was whether the visitor logs, which are maintained by the Secret Service, are subject to FOIA. The White House is exempt from that law, but the Secret Service, which is an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, isn't. The Obama White House took the Bush view that the logs are somehow really White House records, even thought the White House doesn't maintain them. CREW's view, which has been upheld by two federal courts so far, was that if the Secret Service created and maintained them, then they're Secret Service records, and have to be turned over if someone asks for them under the FOIA.

The Obama White House still insists that the logs are not covered by FOIA, but has decided to generously release those portions of the logs that it chooses to just in order to get CREW off its back. What's the difference? Well, the FOIA has strict protocols for what can and can't be redacted from documents, and an appeals process for requesters to make sure the government isn't holding back. And if they are holding back, it's illegal. The White House's new policy has none of that. They will give out what they want to give out, and you will take it on faith that it's the whole story. And the FOIA has no provision for redacting names or documents because they're "sensitive." What's more, under the FOIA, the decisions about what names would be redacted would be made by the Secret Service. Now they're being made by the White House itself.

"Yes, it's voluntary," CREW's chief counsel Anne Weismann told us. "But I think it would be political suicide for them to retreat from it. We'll see what gets released. I think we'll be able to tell if they're holding back." Weismann points out that the White House has promised to publish the number of names it has redacted because of "sensitive" meetings, so we will get a sense of how much is being held back. And anyone is free, if they think the redactions are overbroad, to launch another lawsuit under the FOIA and finally litigate the issue of whether visitor logs are covered.

But this deal lets the White House promise to comply with the law without actually making it comply with the law. It's like a prosecutor dropping charges against someone who, in exchange, promises to go live in a jail for a year. The FOIA says what it says, and those records—at least according to two federal judges thus far—must be released. To let the Obama Administration get away with claiming that it will do so, without any system for checking that they're not lying—as all White Houses do, all the time—is a sham. It's better than nothing, but it's still a sham.