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US Open Government Sites To Close
SEWilco writes "US government sites which promote open government are going to shut down soon due to not enough funding being directed at them."
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Can we donate? I'm serious.
Is SEWilco one of kdawson's aliases?
We need at least another $4 million just to keep USASpending.gov operating this year.
$4mil to keep a website going for one year? Think if I called them up and offered to do it for 3 they'd take it?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Ironic. Shut down the websites that watchdog government spending due to lack of funding. I'm shocked.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
I am disappoint, America.
Oh yeah? Well... at least our birds aren't so lazy that they don't fly! Chalk up another crushing comeback for me.
Working...
You should be modded +5 bitches do be crazy.
for social media propaganda and sockpuppet accounts... Eh.. whatever. The whole thing is such bullshit
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
When sites like WikiLeaks do that for you for free?
Had she run you over I wouldn't have had to waste a few seconds skimming your post. I would have been OK with that.
This is too funny.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
That's 2 * 10^-6. I wonder how that stacks up to government standards for parts per million of various toxins, numbers of rodent hairs in canned foods, etc.
$4 million is pocket change for the Federal Government. It'll be pocket change for all of us if we keep collecting wars like they were action figures.
She was probably trying to get laid. Now, who's the dumb cunt?
Let's have more shouting about tax dollars going to illegal immigrants, abortion clinics, and aircraft carriers accompanying the President's trips to foreign countries.
So what you're saying is that you're too stupid or ungainly to avoid women on a collision course with you, and the knowledge of this lack makes you violent. That's a sad story, bro.
I'm saddened by the fact that this post employs better grammar and spelling than most constructive posts on this site.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Fortunately, we have a president in the whitehouse who IS the open government president. He would never allow for this kind of thing. He just received a transparency award for crying out loud! So what if it was behind closed doors?
Just part of a larger republican led effort to shrink the government and make it less accountable as the larger, unelected corporate shadow government emerges that will put the little people in their place.
The specific people who are responsible for funding the Open Government sites are the members of teh majority of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Those are the people who have "given up". They haven't given up on protecting their friends from being taxed, though. "Open Government" is for dirty hippies, anyway, so why should they care, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Title X dollars do not go to abortion clinics. They fund STD testing, contraceptives, lab work, etc. The funding of abortions is expressly prohibited by the act. In a time when roughly half of our annual pregnancies are unplanned, cutting Title X dollars will actually INCREASE abortions due to reducing the availability of contraceptives. Duh.
Special interest groups own Washington. Consistent, open data and an informed public are usually at odds with these special interest groups. It was a milestone to get these initiatives started in the first place, but in this climate? I mean, NPR got cut, and while that might not sound like much, decent radio as we know it just DIED across most of rural America; and its the radio that often tied whole communities together.
There's a reason America has the best government money can buy.
No one should be immune to cuts. But should such information programs be killed off with nothing to replace them with? If nothing else, such websites help dispute so much of the opinionated pundit talk that Fox 'News' airs for hours and hours during Prime Time. There's those medical Death Squad panels you hear about, looking to save money by cutting medical support for old people, and then there's the facts.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
At this point, there are only 12 comments visible. Why?
Guess they don't want to be open any more...
He's determined to be remembered as the first black(ish) president, and nothing else.
So sad. Did he fight to preserve anything he believed in?
One of the differences between government and the private sector is that the private sector tends to make decisions on ROI models. You'd think they could trim the budgets to keep these sites alive, and that the ROI on less corruption and duplicity in a government spending a trillion dollars a year could easily achieve a viable ROI. Except that there's no model for the quality of a decision made by government and it's value to the country. Bad government is such a minor concern that even Enron and BP aren't enough to sway half the population from the position that government is best completely abolished.
Unfortunately, a positive ROI for Obama and America is a negative ROI for senator Bedfellow and his bailiwick of regulatory capture by the virtuous private sector.
There is a simple solution. Fund OpenGovernment with the funding each department uses for their own public websites and merge them all under OG.
I'd hate to see NASA, NIST, CDC, CIA, State Dept and IRS sites disappear, but having access to the numbers is much more important to me.
WikiLeaks does this for free.
Probably chickens outnumber all other bird species in the US (I think about a gazillion a day are killed just so Ma and Pa Fattie can get their fix), so that statement may be false.
Caveat Utilitor
You do realize that chickens can fly, right? Unless you clip their wings or lock them in a small cage they are able to fly, if not elegantly over long distances.
The Libya investment costed so far at least 186 millons, but having a friendly government there willing to share their oil with US corporations will return that investment several times in the next years.
Also investing in something like that, after all the money they invested in discrediting Wikileaks and anything they published, looks like a waste.
Taking an award for a program that is about to die in public is bad form.
“It’s almost a theater of the absurd to have an award on transparency that isn’t transparent,” Gary Bass, founder of OMB Watch, and one of five groups that met with the president, told The Washington Post. “The irony is that everything the president said was spot-on. I wish people had heard what he had to say.”
http://www.allgov.com/Unusual_News/ViewNews/Obama_Receives_Transparency_Award__in_Private_110402
I don't even know why there would be a need for official government tennis sites in the first place. It's about time.
More like from the "We don't really want you watching and we're not really open and want to make it more difficult for you to monitor unecessary government spending department."
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Golf or tennis
Same as old.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Watching a chicken attempt to fly is like watching a retard attempt to run at full tilt.
WOMEN BE SHOPPIN'.
They're open. Duh.
Grew up on a farm. Chickens can get airborne for very short distances, but not really fly.
Caveat Utilitor
That's because people like you hate reason, are driven by emotion...
Rage is an emotion. It's that feeling you have when someone has offended you beyond your ability to understand. It often manifests as an intense desire to cause physical harm to the offending person(s), with little to no concern for any mitigating circumstances.
Perhaps the woman in question has a vision or coordination problem. Perhaps she's distracted thinking about other things. Perhaps you should have been a proper gentleman and made sure you were well out of her path, that she may go any way she likes. Perhaps, for a few fleeting moments, you could let a trivial inconvenience pass by you, and not demonize someone you know remarkably little about.
What moral principle says that someone should be so privileged that they can risk injuring others without even trying to be responsible and should never ever suffer any consequence of that?
That's a very good question. Why should anyone be given the ability to risk injuring anyone else, especially around the face, which is of high social importance?
Given that you've shown you know nothing about the other side of the story, and appear unable to empathize, why should you be the sole judge of who should be injured and who shouldn't?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
If you feel so strongly about it then next time take 1 minute out of your day to explain to her how important it is for her to watch where she's going. You can include some of the reasons you've listed here, children, old people, etc. The reason we don't allow people to slap each other people is that it crosses a line that society has learned from experience should not be crossed for everyday problems. If you were to slap/assault her, I assure you many men would find your reasons insufficient and would then feel that assaulting you would teach you a lesson. Then you have a situation where somebody is going to end up with injuries similar or worse to the ones you were originally so worried about.
try drinking some ovaltine
rewriting history since 2109
The government has no right to illegally display this information. Displaying the information is socialist.
Every fucking politician is a lying duplicitous scumbag, and we should be able to sue their asses when they break their promises.
Verbal contracts are binding in my state, I think campaign promises should fall under those rules.
When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar giftâ"through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price â" it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
you want to balance the budget, get rid of crap like this, and this http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=4
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
bold added for emphasis
Which proves that chicken aren't LAZY but rather incapable. NZ birds are BOTH lazy and incapable, thus keeping my sick burn intact.
Working...
this is precisely what republicanism and "shrinking the government" is all about. Of course, they are even more clever by slipping in all their favorite kickback schemes into the defense budget that no one dares touch for fear of being labeled anti-American. Its the perfect scam. No or a shrinking government lets them get away with anything they want and you and I get to pay for it in further reductions in regulations and services that may potentially save the lives of millions. Republicans are good at recognizing that millions can starve or die as long as they get their millions.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$4 million is what. 20 minutes in Iraq/Afghanistan? A day in the "War on Drugs"?
And Drupal was a rousing success for that one site. Well except it took 20 minutes to display data. IT Dashboard for sure.
just re-enforces the "correct spelling / grammar != intelligence" argument. how could anyone over the age of 2 consider this an appropriate response to an "almost" accidental "bump". someone has issues and its not the girl.
need i say more?
Knowledge is power... I wouldn't trust and government to aid openness in any way... except traling the names and faces or people who share the 'secrets' that help them keep their power.
Wouldn't supise me if all the Government leaders get together for an afternoon tea (I think Muslims can drink tea and it's Kosha), plan their next move to control the people .. The get the Absenth, Crack pipes and hookers out an party it up all night, with the Journalists and Bankers.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You're equating an improper response to an "almost" accidental "bump" to intelligence (or lack thereof)? Wow, you're stupid.
And yet somehow there's always funding to rain $600,000 missles down on some 3rd world nation. Oh, well. I guess they fund what matters to them.
Wikileaks has gone quiet because there has been a lot of real news lately. E.g. The Arab Spring, nuclear meltdown, et cetera.
You can safely assume that once the news gets back to 'What color underwear did Brittany Spears flash to Charlie Sheen', Wikileaks will be back in the news. As they have already told us, the next target is a major US bank. If Wikileaks were to release incriminating documents about, say, Bank of America, while a nuclear power plant is melting down, this would not get maximum exposure. Wikileaks knows that their maximum exposure will come when the 'news' is 'quiet'. After all, they can control the timing of their releases. Think about it.
One other note: most readers probably missed it, but just two weeks ago Wikileaks released another State Department cable that is causing a huge political kerfuffle in India - something to do with which Indian politicians bribed which other politicians, and how much it cost: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18india.html
I'd say that's hardly 'really quiet'.
Your mistake is thinking that these multi-million dollar websites have anything to do with "Open Government".
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Somebody confused the words deficit and debt.
I wasn't an Obama supporter; however, I have seen him do much more good than harm while having to take the blame for things beyond his control. I'm not just talking about the economic mess (which was years in the making and more in the fixing) but the OVERWHELMING CORRUPTION. Obama will probably sell the farm rather than let the republicans shut down government -- which is too bad because they are more nutty now than they were last time.... Now days we actually have some congressmen who believe the PR lies as truth (for example: Bachmann, MN -- and most the right has an open hatred for the other side and its hard to ignore so one expects some return hate...) You can't be a republican today without being apeshit or stupid.
The reason Bush was closer to a dictator was because he went with the flow. Obama is tacking against the flow and getting a little progress while moving mostly sideways and in some areas completely losing ground. One simply can not move in all directions at once. Especially if he is all alone-- his staff is not so hot either - I won't go into where he is just flat out wrong if not bought off. Healthcare was almost entirely him, his staff gave up and that says something good about him. He wouldn't have been allowed to get in if he was going to be a real threat... ANYBODY post-bush was going to be a fall guy, its just how it works (you think Rove and the smart guys really wanted/cared if McSame won? ever hear of a sacrifice?)
REAL Politics is about how to look like you enjoy eating shit while covertly tossing as much of it as you can onto your predecessor's pile.
You can be powerful if you have the powerful behind you; otherwise you are lucky to survive when they plow over you. A Taoist approach of using their power against them only works to an extent - even in martial arts, a powerful enough foe is going to fuck you up no matter how much you try to redirect and deflect their power. In these corporatist times that approach seems (to me) like just a stalling tactic at best. A serious fight is coming and absent a political forum it will become violent.... Unless they can continue to sucker people forever... like 1984; except we're always at multiple "wars", including between the 2 parties.
All we have now is the GOP completely playing politics to the point where they are purposely trying to ruin everything even their own ideas - just to harm Obama; they hate him more than Clinton (must be the skin color.) Its a false political war distracting from the real problems and Obama has openly been trying to stop it and failing to do so; he doesn't seem to realize no president that allows this propaganda warfare to continue can get us back on track. The corporations are raping us while this ship sinks and any disaster or infighting is to their benefit.
In my state, the idiot GOP is fighting to cut all the walnut trees down in the state parks to raise money! (naturally sold at a cheap price to donor who also is "over-regulated" as if this would do any real good.) They are also fighting on nearly every front to make us mirror 3rd world states like Georgia (US state; however, I wouldn't be surprised if that nation was in better shape.) - in many cases repeating the same policies that worked so well down south in all those welfare states. It has little to do with ideology and much more to do with the corps buying them off. The dems just play weak while the other side openly fights for some of the most blatant corruption in generations. Sometimes I wonder if democrats would be as stupid if their party was hijacked... I won't need to wonder for long, its been gradually happening for some time.
If you wanted an honest guy with no-compromise for corruption you are just asking for another martyr.
There is no hope for people who read/watch mainstream "press" in the USA. Turn off your telescreen.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Maybe she likes you and is nervous around you?
Ironic. Shut down the websites that watchdog government spending due to lack of funding. I'm shocked.
Irony would imply that it's in contrast to expectations. It's not irony; it's exactly the usual display of corruption that comes from those in power being confident that their actions will have no bad consequences for themselves. I can't even come up with a way that irony could happen in this situation, since it's not that they're destroying the information that could save them; they're just keeping it for themselves, so they can trot it out if they need it, just not when you need it.
Sue their asses? How about tie 'em up & light 'em?
If every politician is a opportunistic scumbag, why do we keep trusting politicians, instead of ourselves?
Pretty soon we're gonna have to stop blaming them for doing what they've always done, and start blaming ourselves for continuing to fall for it. After all, who's more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows?
they fucked you pretty good...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRqeJcuK-A&feature=related
One third of one day of lobbing missiles into Libya, that is how much money we are talking about to keep these sites operational for one more year.
On the first day we shot a wad of some 120 Tomahawk missiles at roughly $750k each. You do the math.
THINK AMERICA! The Military Industrial Complex is destroying our nation. (I would have said democracy but we have a clear or near plutocracy/oligarchy in play here folks).
"Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said recently that the IT Dashboard has helped save the government $3 billion on IT projects. " Why are they balking at a few million to support the site(s)? I don't get it.
they'd find another "reason" to shut it down. I'd try to blame the Republicans, but Obama probably supports closing down such sites just as much. He's been following in Bush's shoes when it comes to accumulating power and using the cloak of "security" for justifying all sorts of b.s.
"To stop the terrorists."
The irony!
Getting airborne by their own power is flying. I grew up around chickens as well, and yes they do fly, not for long distances, but they can fly. Which makes them neither lazy nor incapable of flight. I'd love to be able to fly, even if it was only as well as a chicken.
It proves no such thing. It proves that they can't migrate, but for the purposes of reaching a tree or flying over a fence. The record being a bit over 300 feet. Chickens are incapable of long distance flight, but things which cannot fly would love to be able to do even that.
Chickens
Domestic chickens are not capable of long distance flight, although lighter birds are generally capable of flying for short distances, such as over fences or into trees (where they would naturally roost). Chickens may occasionally fly briefly to explore their surroundings, but generally do so only to flee perceived danger.
Shut down Congress.
Shut down the Federal Courts.
Shut down the State and Local Courts.
Nationalize the State's National Guards (for his private security force against American Citizens).
Suspend the Constitution of the U.S.A.
Hell, he has made himself the 4th Court by Ex-Order in the U.S. and suspended Miranda and Habitués Corpus.
Barak-O-Vision for President, yea right.
With some simple equipment I'm sure you can fly better than a chicken, since we seem to be defining "fly" to mean "how far I can jump through the air before I fall back down".
No, I'm just equating correct grammar doesn't mean intelligence. and people like him "who over react to a non event" re-enforce that idea. This implies that he doesn't have intelligence based on the example demonstrated through his actions. but it certainly doesn't equate to it. In conclusion, No, you're stupid. Nice try though, you almost had me.