Replies

Whew, had to go sit on the side of the bed for a minute and regain my composure. I got a headache I was laughing so hard. I reviewed the documents. IMHO, Poor Butter has lost her bearings in a sea of government red tape, state employee inexactitude, and bureaucratic confusion.

In my last few jobs, I had to deal with this on a fairly regular basis, and nothing I saw in her documents convinces me there is any cover up, or that there is an amended document.

She is latching onto the details of the language (trees) and missing the forest. This happens a lot.Over the years, I developed a very good approach to dealing with state employees, and I good as I was, there were still times I ended up in red tape hell.

Recently, on one matter, I sat before a state employee with a clear copy of the law and several opinions from the attorney general. I did not get my way, and had to use the system to get thru the system.

FOIA requests often turn into turf battles. It isn’t just the state. One can run into the same thing with agencies, and big businesses.

What Poor Butter did, was confuse the language “a denial is a confirmation” with actual confirmation.

Let me give you a very practical example. I want to serve legal papers on Bob Smith, who is dodging me. I am not sure where he works. So I call Flump Trucking. “Hey is Bob Smith gonna be in town this weekend? I got to bring his bar b q grill back.”

If I get either a yes he is or a no he isn’t——I know that Bob Smith works there. The denial is a confirmation of what I am trying to discover. That is because what I am trying to discover isn’t whether Bob will be in or not-—it’s whether he works there.

Now smart people, or state agencies, can be aware of this kind of snooping. Hence, the glomar response. But a state agency, if there ain’t a glomar form in the slot, are just as likely to print out a denial. The language will indicate the denial is a confirmation, but it ain’t. Someone was just too busy to grab the right form. Or, they don’t understand it in the first place.

Trust me here. I have done enough of this kind of snooping, that I know the layout. Here I get no confirming “vibes” that this was a cover-up.

parsy, who has played a few games in his time