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Obama Administration Withholds FoIA Requests More Often Than Bush's
bonch writes "Agencies under the Obama administration cite security provisions to withhold information more often than they did under the Bush administration. For example, the 'deliberative process' exemption of the Freedom of Information Act was used 70,779 times in 2009, up from the 47,395 of 2008. Amusingly, the Associated Press has been waiting three months for the government to deliver records on its own Open Government Directive."
Breitbart.com? Really? Has Slashdot become Free Republic?
That's change I can believe in.
I'd like to be surprised - but it seems like all the presidents are mostly interchangeable these days.
Is this really surprising?
The AP's review of annual Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the administration's use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public increased during fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
1) This is an AP story, Breitbart didn't write it.
2) If you don't think 2,000 pages that nobody has read which rebuilds 17% of the US economy according to the whims of a couple hundred Democrats doesn't represent an oppressive regime, then I don't know what to tell you.
I know you are trolling but one of Pres. Obama's big campaign points was that he was going to "change" Washington. He was going to run this wide open and "transparent" government. So far he has been anything but transparent. It's disappointing, I had some hopes about Pres. Obama (and I did not vote for him).
It's amazing how much hoopla goes into picking and voting for a particular party, when government is so much bigger than just one man (or woman). It makes you wonder if anything will ever, or can ever, change.
... and he doesn't need to answer to the ignorant masses or explain himself to them.
If the media really cared about open government and barring corruption, they would be publishing daily headlines about denials to FOIA requests, how long they have been waiting, and what the alleged reason is. If the press did their job and informed the people rather than preach propaganda, people could be better armed with information to put pressure on elected officials and force them to move on come election day if the officials don't mend their ways.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The first reaction, especially given the headline is, Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
But, as pointed out in the article: "Obama's directive, memorialized in written instructions from the Justice Department, appears to have been widely ignored."
Then we look into the details. The fiscal year that this article is covering started in October 2008 and ended in October 2009. So for the first quarter of the time period covered by this article, we weren't even in the Obama Administration.
Also, if we assume that the decision to exempt information from FOIA requests is made by senior officers in the respective agencies, and we know that Bush had 8 years to appoint people who shared his views, and that the Senate Republicans have been doing an impressive job of blocking and delaying Obama's appointments, let alone the "cleaning" that occurs once the new bosses are in place.
Should it come as a surprise to anyone that this last year was no better, and perhaps even worse than the previous year? Absolutely not. I would expect that this coming year should show improvement, provided the white house is willing to back up Obama's directive now that they have had time to get more of their appointments into positions of authority.
That said, I sure hope this article makes it to the President's desk and that he thinks long and hard about it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Have you seen what he's up against? The Democrats were never as obstructive to President Bush.
The problem is that Obama's main idea of change - bipartisanship - is the least productive way of making change
in America.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Agreed. It's the same as when MS says that Linux/BSD is less secure because it had more fixes in a certain time period than Windows did in the same time period. It tells you nothing about (1) Severity, (2) Potential for exploit, (3) Timeliness of fix, etc.
All that is mentioned is that the Obama administration turned down more requests in the first full year than the Bush administration did in it's last full year. So what if the Obama administration is just cleaning out what the Bush administration left behind. I can see that in the last year of an administration, things might not be done in a timely manner.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Bullshit. Bipartisanship works both ways... The Democrats are asking the Republicans to "work with us", yet the Democrats are refusing to do the same! If you disagree, please explain the purpose of the closed door meetings between Dems and the Pres on healthcare. In what way can a closed meeting promote "working together" when half of the decision makers are not even invited...
What he's up against? He made his bed (By touting "change" and "openness"), and now he needs to lie in it... The truth has come out in the past year. He's a politician... Plain and simple. Sure, his campaign made it look like he was something different, but the reality of the matter is in the end of the day, they are all politicians...
Have you seen what he's up against? The Democrats were never as obstructive to President Bush.
The only people stopping Obama are angry voters, and the Dems he can't get on board with his agenda. Note...the Dems control BOTH Houses of Congress by a wide margin. He's not "obstructed" by the R's, as they can't do squat to stop him. They can't even filibuster now that they have Scott Brown since the D's are happy to use Reconciliation.
Watch a little Rachel Maddow, read a little of the HuffPo, you'll be surprised just how many times liberal sources DO report on stuff like this. The liberal blogosphere is kinda pissed that Obama isn't the far-left bleeding-hear socialist that conservatives make him out to be, and they call him out on it quite a bit.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Do you realize that line means the numbers quoted are not comparable. If more than one "exemption" can be cited per request, then the number of exemptions, which they are quoting, does not actually tell you how many FOIA requests were withheld. It could easily be that the Obama administration is being more clear about what is being withheld and why for any given request, and that leads to a larger "exemptions" count. The problem is, without more info the numbers obviously do not mean what they are being represented to mean.
Every time I read a story about how Obama is continuing a Bush administration policy, or extending and exceding it, I post it to http://obamaisthenewbush.tumblr.com/
Having kept this up, on and off, for the last 6 months some patterns definitely appear. The Justice Department is seriously entrenched in covering its ass, cracking down hard on individual freedoms and privacy, and almost always falling on the side of big business.
I'm not disappointed because I believed all the pablum about "Change" and "Hope," but because Obama was a frickin' law professor. He should know better!
I don't trust him for the simple fact that he's a politician.
Technoli
No that's Bullshit. Democrats have presented a bill that's far to the right of a bill that Republicans would have even proposed, and Republicans are refusing to be a part of it at all. If there was not bi-partisanship than they would have rammed this through Congress and I'd be sitting pretty with socialized medicine right now. The problem is there have been far too many overtures to bi-partisanship.
Republicans don't want bi-partisanship. They want Obama to fail.
Closed door meetings? Stop bringing up bullshit Limbaugh talking points. There are always closed door meetings on capital hill. Are Republicans having public meetings on crafting there competing health care bill? That's a bullshit point.
1) Sort of a fair point. What I'm saying is though, Breitbart and Drudge will run things from any source, with no confirmation and are slanted in their selection. But yeah, I respect AP, so I'll give that to you. 2) If its rebuilding it in a way I like. And yeah, I haven't read it all, but I've gotten some good synopses from sources I trust. If you're going to make an extraordinary claim like "The Dems are as oppressive as the last Republican administration," you're going to need a lot of evidence. We're talking about a party who's core value is conformity. And who presided over a mood of the time of pervasive bullying, anti-intellectualism, and fear mongering. This whole "they're all the same line," got tired after Bush beat Gore in 2000. Because Bush and Gore were the same. Yeah right. What a load.
Drudge and Breitbart are Fox News on the Web.
What do you expect to happen in 5 years when people catch on? Those will become the top two sites on the Web, like Fox News is on cable?
You seem to hate them because they actually hire people who aren't liberals. Apparently "non-biased" means "100% liberal".
2) If you don't think 2,000 pages that nobody has read which rebuilds 17% of the US economy according to the whims of a couple hundred Democrats doesn't represent an oppressive regime, then I don't know what to tell yo
As opposed to not doing something because a couple of hundred Republicans oppose it? Every time Republicans mention that the majority of Americans oppose the Health bill, I want to ask them if they ever polled anybody other than their constituents. Because, you know, those of us who actually like the bill think we ought to be counted as Americans as well.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Bipartisan ship means that the right-wing folks need to accept some of the left wing folks' ideas.
Bull. That's not bipartisanship. That's horse trading.
Bipartisanship would be the Dems not liking the way insurance companies ride roughshod over subscribers, and the Reps not liking the idea of the government taking over 1/6th of the economy, so they reach an agreement that answers both concerns. A law that would require insurance policies to match one of a few DHHS outline policies, or state clearly how they differ.
Dems are concerned about the huge cost of the tax liability and portability between jobs, and Reps are concerned about the lack of accountability. A viable compromise would be that all policies are taxed like normal income, raising necessary funds and removing the chain between insurance and a job.
In no way is bipartisanship a "you get one, I get one" game. That leads to the ridiculous robbing of the public purse and our grandchildren's inheritance that we see now.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Why do you hate atheists, pudge?
Why are you lying about me?
p>2) If you don't think 2,000 pages that nobody has read which rebuilds 17% of the US economy according to the whims of a couple hundred Democrats doesn't represent an oppressive regime, then I don't know what to tell you.
So a government is an "oppressive regime" any time it passes a long bill on an important topic that an unpopular political party doesn't like?
Not sure why your post was marked troll, even if it's a little paranoid. It's quite likely that teabaggers and other anti-obama people have affected these nnumbers, even if unintentionally.
So this is all just a giant conspiracy? A vast, right-wing secret attack on Obama? A backhand way to make him look bad? "Hey boys, lets fill out another hundred or so of those FOIA requests today! We're almost at our goal".
Wow. There's paranoia, and then there's you guys.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Those are your precise words. So are these:
I'm not misrepresenting you in the slightest. You're an archetypal, callous, right-wing blowhard who sees failure as weakness, and life as being about strife, not cooperation and happiness. Your ideas are definitely, clearly, and verifiable wrong, and the medieval policies you advocate will lead to unfathomable human misery if enacted. You're the kind of man who gives America a bad name in the civilized world.
As I said, since we don't have all the facts, it's also possible that "Obama's record" is worse than Bush's. Even if we had enough data to get to that comparison, it's still not worth all that much.
When you get to such a levels of "horrible" with politicians, any varying level of "worse" seems so inconsequential.
I see you didn't bother to read my post before replying... you know, the part of my post that actually explains what I think may be a contributing factor, that has *nothing* to do with any kind of conspiracy.
Although, FWIW, there *are* groups that coordinate to send FOIA requests on topics. I don't think the purpose is to discredit Obama via bad FOIA numbers -- but the purpose is generally to discredit *someone* via the information gathered.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
When I judge a site for bias, I like to look at the comments sections.
Then Slashdot should never again link to the New York Times.
Are you really claiming that the NYT is as biased as Breitbart? Odd.
Well, *I* would never in a million claim that the NYT is as biased as Breitbart.
The NYT exceeds the level of bias at Breitbart by orders of magnitude.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.