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Liberal Watchdog Questions White House Gmail Use
MexiCali59 writes "Liberal watchdog CREW has joined Republican Congressman Darrell Issa in calling for an investigation into whether White House staffers regularly use private email accounts to communicate with lobbyists. The allegations, first reported last week by the New York Times, would likely constitute a violation of federal law as well as an ethics pledge created by Obama upon taking office last year."
I think the point is that Obama pledged to stop this from happening and it hasn't.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
I thought this was how every politician operated? Palin, The previous white house, etc, all used non-government assigned email addresses to avoid archiving and disclosure laws.
--jeffk++
Wasn't Palin's email full of personal stuff and not full of emails from lobbyists and the like offering bribes?
There's nothing forbidding politicians and their staffers from having personal email accounts. However, it is illegal to use them for official, government business as is being alleged here.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Well, the other way to look at it is that they used private e-mail to avoid violating the law prohibiting use of public e-mail accounts for conducting political business. Most folks who work for the White House have, for example, 2 cell phones. One is paid for by the taxpayer and is used when conducting official government business. The other is paid for by the party or by a campaign committee and is used when conducting political business which the government employee, by law, must do in their "private" time and using private, not government, resources.
Since the law expressly allows federal employees at that level to remain involved with the political process, so long as they don't use public resources to do so, I don't see how they can function without having a separate e-mail account just as they have a separate cell phone. The only legal issue is whether they are using that separate e-mail account properly for political business, or whether they are improperly using it to conduct official government business, which would be a violation of the law for circumventing the archiving and disclosure laws.
And yes, I took the same position with the last President as I do with this one, even though I really don't care for the current President.
Good for CREW. Most of these partisan advocacy groups play team red / team blue and have to check the roster to decide where they stand on an issue. It is great to see one of them finally standing on principal and holding their own team to the same standard. It would be nice if every "issue advocacy" group would stick to its guns without regard to party affiliation.
No wharrgarbl like political wharrgarbl, amirite? Read this. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Yes. PolitiFact has what they call an Obamameter, which tracks promises Obama made while campaigning. I realize it's fun to point to specific things you don't like and say that Obama has kept no promises, but that's dishonest.
You can argue that on some large issues, Obama has backtracked (such as his apparent desire to continue the ridiculous power grab of the executive during the Bush administration), but don't lie and say Obama has kept no promises. You look better (at least to those who don't already agree with you) if you're willing to be reasonable.
Disclaimers should not be necessary for posts like this, but since irrationality always pops up on political threads:
I voted for Obama in 2008, but only because I wanted McCain to be crushed after his ridiculous choice of VP candidate.
I will vote for Obama in 2012 only if the Republicans put a Palin-like character on the ticket. I've been unhappy with some of Obama's decisions.
I am not a Democratic/Obama apologist. To the people who believe that if you approve of anything a politician does, you approve of everything he does, you need to do a better job of understanding how the world works.
If this is a legal requirement, than you're not in a war. The US congress declared war for the last time (so far) in June 5, 1942 and this is what it takes for you to be formally in a war. So the president probably can't use anything that can be done only in times of war.
You've got to be kidding me. To quote Jon Stewart, "Democrats... have an 18 vote majority in the Senate. Which is more than George W Bush ever had in the Senate when he did whatever the f*ck he wanted to do. In fact the Democrats have a greater majority than Republicans have had since 1923. But for Democrats apparently a majority of 100 is 60?"
The Republican party does not vote in lock-step. They have moderate members who will vote against their party. In fact, of Senators in the current term who vote against their party more than 20% of the time, 5 are Republicans (out of 43) and 4 are Democrats (out of 62). In the 2007-2008 Senate when Republicans held a 51:49 majority, the 9 Senators who voted against their party more than 20% of the time were all Republicans.
The problems the Democrats are having passing anything is because when they effectively got 60 Senate seats, their leadership went into the throes of a collective orgasm and dreamt up every far-left bill they could think of and tried to pass them. Not only did Republicans vote against them, they had to beg and bribe moderate Democrats to support those bills. If a bill you propose is opposed by all Republicans and a significant number of moderate Democrats, most intelligent people would logically conclude that the bill is far too liberal and needs to come back to center to have a chance at passing. Not that there's some right-wing conspiracy to thwart you.