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Did you miss the White House memo on transparency?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in your personal data. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in the wars on terror, copyright violation and whistleblowing.

Your personal data should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for Government about what their subjects are doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to obtain your information rapidly in forms that the NSA and similar agencies can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about your operations and decisions online and readily available to the NSA. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback from ex White House staffers and former CIA leadership to identify information of greatest use to the Government.

Government should be participatory, but isn't. Public engagement damages the Government's effectiveness and impairs the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and my friends benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer my friends and ex-agency people to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government surveillance should be collaborative, as it was in the former German Democratic Republic. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, secret courts, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit feedback the NSA to assess and improve your level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for incarceration.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to obtain for me naked pictures of your mother and the last 30 days of emails you've sent and received, not because it serves any useful purpose, but because I can and will know your every secret.

This memorandum is not intended to be honest or in any way representative of my administration's views on seeing your holiday photos and the drunken SMS conversation you had last Tuesday with your ex-wife.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register. Sleep well, loyal subject, for I stand guard against all the terrible things that could befall you. All I ask is that you trust me.

BARACK OBAMA

This must be part of the Open Government Initiative that the US administration has been promising: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open

The problem is the funding cuts are in a decidedly partisan matter.

If they're that concerned about meeting the budget then they are free to set a budget goal and work together (you know - bi-partisan like) to cut funding in a more even way. None of this:

Hey you know the law that passed years ago and we fought you tooth and nail on and tried to excise every little tidbit from? Yeah.... 41 votes and no success. Guess it's there for good eh? Well, we decided there's money for everything else *except* that. Weird huh? Like the cash ran out the instant we made it down to the Afordable Care Act. Whoopsie!

Of course that's also ignoring the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and OMB (Office of Management and Budget) show that the ACA will actually work to reduce the defecit .

You know what the latest "compromise" was? To delay the individual mandate. So, for an extra year health insurance companies would be required to take people with pre-existing conditions, however, healthy persons could still opt out of coverage for an extra year. It's like they're trying to either bankrupt the insurance industry or present unworkable "compromises" to the Senate. Either way, they're negotiating in bad faith.
 

For some reason, it's not considered an epidemic when a doctor being paid by insurance companies prescribes methamphetamine manufactured by a pharmaceutical corporation under the brand name "Desoxyn"

Yes it is.

NIH: "The original amphetamine epidemic was generated by the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession as a byproduct of routine commercial drug development and competition" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/

White House: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified prescription drug abuse as an epidemic". http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/prescription-drug-abuse

There's is a part of me that wants the FCC to treat Obama's petition the way he responds to all those citizen petitions on WhiteHouse.gov... which is to say, the FCC ignores him completely or else responds with a watered down statement that says nothing.

Except I sort of like the idea of the FCC enforcing an unlocked-phone/BYOD policy for the carriers...

Hmmm, petty and pointless dreams of third-party revenge vs. naive hopes of an unlikely outcome brought to pass. Choices, choices!

Notice how now that Obama is president the climate change is not a big deal anymore?

“This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work.”

Hardly sounds as if Obama considers "climate change" to be a sideline. You just have to look at Obama's Climate Action Plan to see for yourself. In his speech on climate change in June, he declared that he would be invoking his executive authority to invoke a number of measures aimed at curbing climate change and 'preparing' America for its costly impacts. In that speech, with the quip "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society", he summarily dismissed any possibility of considering that the holy doctrine of anthropogenic climate change might be wrong, despite the repeated failure of climate models to reproduce the global cooling of the last fifteen years.

--
"You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about anthropogenic global warming."

FISA Court Will Release More Opinions Because of Snowden?

Nope. Any releases will be made as part of the administration's drive to increase transparency while retaining the tools needed to protect against the terrorists. It's not coming because of public pressure or legal challenges. No siree, not like last time:

https://www.eff.org/mention/obama-administration-dishonestly-wants-public-believe-it-voluntarily-declassified-secret-nsa

This time they'll be truthy. We can be certain of course that this information would have been released even if Snowden hadn't kicked-off this shit-storm. After all, isn't this the most transparent administration, with unprecedented levels of openness? Must be true - it says it on the White House site:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment

try We The People website.

They DID divulge the details!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/30/government-assessment-syrian-government-s-use-chemical-weapons-august-21

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Education

The Department's budget increased by $14B between 2002 and 2004, from $46B to $60B.[16]

was quicker to find then writing a post.

For the second point, start here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historicals

get back to me in 6 months after you have done a comparative between budget, presidential parties and control in congress.
Since the parties stance on things have reversed, you should note those.

Please sign the petition over at Whitehouse.gov to get the US to act in getting the Japanese government to allow US/UN assistance in cleaning up the spent fuel pools. This is an urgent need.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-united-states-petition-un-and-japan-seek-assistance-removing-spent-fuel-fukushima/LHSB04r0

~ X

So much for greater transparency.

How long before you hear impeachment?

How about right now?

(By the way, you do realize the Republican pundit shows are just going to continue whining about Obamacare and other partisan but unimportant bullshit, right? Dealing with an issue like this is really up to us, the Actual Citizens, not the idiots on the radio.)

Petitioning the oppressers has never worked will never work. What a useless suggestion.

My guess is a similar number as those who signed this petition.

Well if you don't want to sign that petition then there is always this other one asking the president to remove the director of the NSA in light of the current revelations on their activities.

Someone should be brought up on charges.

If that's what you want, then sign the petition!

SIGNATURES NEEDED BY SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 TO REACH GOAL OF 100,000: 99,957
TOTAL SIGNATURES ON THIS PETITION: 43

Have to wonder just how many people are afraid to sign?

Someone should be brought up on charges.

If that's what you want, then sign the petition!

signed. I can only hope more people sign this one than mine last week (5).

Obama is responsible.... Impeachment is the strongest signal we can peacefully send, and that vote is a clear dividing line on who in Congress is for us and who is against us.

If you want Congress to impeach Obama over this, you should sign this.

How long before you hear impeachment?

How about right now?

(By the way, you do realize the Republican pundit shows are just going to continue whining about Obamacare and other partisan but unimportant bullshit, right? Dealing with an issue like this is really up to us, the Actual Citizens, not the idiots on the radio.)

Someone should be brought up on charges.

If that's what you want, then sign the petition!

Here's a petition asking for exactly that!

I've created a petition demanding that the administration to hold itself accountable (or that Congress should do so if the administration won't).

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/restore-united-states%E2%80%99-human-rights-record-and-grant-clemency-pvt-bradley-manning/L7zHZv4r

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/restore-united-states%E2%80%99-human-rights-record-and-grant-clemency-pvt-bradley-manning/L7zHZv4r

If you care, sign the petition:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-united-states-petition-un-and-japan-seek-assistance-removing-spent-fuel-fukushima/LHSB04r0

Just like in the recent Obama said in his speech about NSA operations, the government is really concerned about public opinion and very much wants to know the best way to make you comfortable getting screwed. After all, people being uncomfortable with getting screwed is the biggest impediment in a democracy for advancing to the next level of screwing them over. So your feedback is important to them.

Nothing new. Nothing to indicate the results will be different either.

Or was he a whistle blower. Go put in your vote if you think so.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/recognize-edward-snowden-whistle-blower-and-guarantee-he-will-not-face-charges-his-acts-courage/m4pCqtjR

In addition, the USA White House petition site received a petition to pardon Snowden, and ignored it. There is now a new petition for them to respond to the previous one. Hilarious, in a very sad way. The government answers to the people, sure, but only when they feel like it.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/respond-petition-pardon-edward-snowden/c7cTD9Lh

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/create

Regarding the edit: I don't really think removing the change.gov content was a move to avoid disclosing policy on whistleblowers. You can find discussion about whistleblower protections in even greater detail on whitehouse.gov. Example: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/image/ppd-19.pdf . Came up after a simple search for "whistleblowers".

I didn't read every last word of the PDF, so I can't certify whether it follows the spirit of the original paragraph on change.gov. It seems to limit protected whistleblowing to information shared up the chain of command instead of with the public. Makes me wonder if they know what the word "whistleblower" means. Still, it's certainly more official than a campaign promise, and it's readily available.

Exactly! How about government being

a) accountable
b) honest
c) transparent

So this bullshit about government over stepping its Constitutional Authority doesn't happen in the first place.

/sarcasm Nah, that would involve work. Better to keep lying to the people like ... censored by bullshit National Security Theater...

Thank the press.

They're letting Obama get away with this crap.

Crap like sending the IRS after his opponents. The IRS activities have been traced back to the IRS General Counsel's office. And it all started two days after that very same IRS General Counsel met with Obama. (Just looke for one William Wilkins...)

From the article:

The FISA court should be a public court, and documents should be sealed for a set period of time, [to] let people audit the actions later.

It is a public court where the documents are sealed for a set period of time. It just happens that they refer to that seal as classified, but all classified documents are classified for a set period of time. See the Executive Order governing classified information for all the details (especially Section 1.5: Duration of Classification).

So you're ambivalent about the sacrifice of a man who has done us Americans a great service because of what he might do at some point in the future? That is ridiculous.

Our government has it out for this guy in a major way right now, and your ambivalence isn't helping.
I find it extremely embarrassing for our country that the "Pardon Edward Snowden" petition only has 130k signatures. That petition should have been blown out of the water. The very least people could do to thank him for his service is to allow him to come back home.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD and the ones like it

I get the feeling that you just don't like our (making an assumption here) government. That's cool man, you can do whatever you want as long as you don't infringe on anyone else's freedoms. The government is filled with all kinds of people, good and bad. There are checks and balances to keep shit from going too crazy. But as Americans we are also responsible for raising our voices so that the people that we elected know which direction to go. If those elected officials are marching to their own beat then fuck them and let's all vote for someone else.

Emergency powers are very important, imo. I understand what you are saying. That there is a kind of slippery slope there. But i think you can agree that Emergency denotes a temporary situation. Changes to our society that are permanent fall far outside emergency powers. Like the TSA. That is just a huge waste of time and money. I'm probably a bit biased though because i always get the *S* on the plane ticket : /

Honestly i feel that most of the problems we have are with private companies manipulating our officials. When SOPA went off it was fun to watch everyone scramble. Just as they are right now over PRISM. I've signed a couple of the petitions on whitehouse.gov. Check it out, there's a ton of good petitions there (and some crazy crazy ones too). I'm pretty excited to see the answer to this gem: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD : )

So Restore the Fourth and Fight for the Future. Attend rallies like this one last week, support privacy advocates, sign the petition to shut down the NSA Utah data center, or hell the petition to pardon Snowden.

So Restore the Fourth and Fight for the Future. Attend rallies like this one last week, support privacy advocates, sign the petition to shut down the NSA Utah data center, or hell the petition to pardon Snowden.

Which demonstrates the importance of online activism. While spending Sunday afternoon in my armchair commenting on a Slashdot thread is not going win a lot of admiration (why did you do during the war? why son, I worked my keyboard, that is how I got blogger butt), it does make a difference. Everyone who throws their support for Snowden on these threads, everyone who signed the petition to pardon Snowden, everyone whoever linked to Restore the Fourth is making a difference. It is easy to make fun of online activism, but clearly we are making a difference or our opposition would not spend so much money trying to manipulate us.

Here is the link:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/prosecute-director-national-intelligence-james-clapper-lying-congress/HNfsgGlm

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/prosecute-director-national-intelligence-james-clapper-lying-congress/HNfsgGlm

Then help end it. Sign the petition. They only have 4 days left. https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/allow-tesla-motors-sell-directly-consumers-all-50-states/bFN7NHQR

Here you have another worthy petition with too few signatures. Because Nixon.

"Transparency and Open Government" said Barack Obama.

He also explains what that means here.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD sign the petition if you haven't already. help speak out against this bullshit.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD PETITION SIGNATURES ALREADY OVER 100K. SIGN THE PETITION IF YOU BELIEVE SNOWDEN IS A HERO WHO DIDN'T BREAK ANY LAWS.

FYI, the petition to pardon Snowden is just a few thousand short of the 100,000 mark as of midday on Friday. There is still time to sign. Probably a waste of time, but
it might be worth it.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

And what do you want to bet the response will be, "We cannot comment on an ongoing criminal matter."

Just in case you weren't aware, there is a White House petition to pardon Snowden that is almost at the 100K signature threshold:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD