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White House Office of Administration Not Subject to FOIA, Says White House
An anonymous reader writes with this story at USA Today: The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office. The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law.
This is not the kind of "hope and change" I voted for, Mr. President.
Because were living in the Roman Empire.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Oh well....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And I will harshly persecute anyone who dares to break that secrecy.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
What ugly things are you trying to hide Mr. President?
The fact that you are no longer represent people of this country?
The fact that your actions are exact opposite of your rhetoric claims?
Is it an attempt to remove any possibility for people to learn and act,
provided they will wake up one day?
Makes me wonder ....
To the casual (and admittedly distant) observer of Obama's Presidency it looks as if he has finally had to admit that he will be unable to change things as he initially wished and that ultimately he did not fully comprehend the 'complexities' of the office.
Cynics would say that he was naive in believing that he could effect any fundamental change in areas such as government transparency but we need more people that believe they can or we might as well all pack up and head for that island (away from potential cyclones of course...)
Do as I say, not as I do.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Radar and laser don't apply to me if I'm speeding. Right? Oh.
FCC rules don't apply to me using interesting hardware to intercept cellphone traffic. Right? Oh.
Regulations don't apply to me if I want to sell firearms to people in Mexico. Right? Oh.
Yep, this seems par for the course. We peasants can go fuck ourselves while the ruling class does what they please. I mean we can't expect them to reveal the horrific things that are going on to protect corporate trade secrets. Sheesh.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
RTFA jackass. Nothing heinous is going on. Offices within the White House are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. However, the Office of Administration was the odd man out. In 2009, a Federal Court ruling confirmed that the Office of Administration is exempt from FOIA like other Offices within the White House.
The White House is required to archive e-mails and release them under the Presidential Records Act; not until at least five years after the end of the administration.
So the sky is not falling.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment
Transparency and Open Government
Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies
SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. 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 Government.
Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.
Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities 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 should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperateamong themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.
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 coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.
This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.
BARACK OBAMA
This is not the kind of "hope and change" I voted for, Mr. President.
Apparently he forgot the words of Abraham Lincoln: "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
LMOL scary when people don't read. The White House was always except from FIOA. Try again Zippy.
Subject says it all!
am I right guys?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Well yeah, look at all the pretty graphs and visual aids. That's all the over-sharing you need. It's interpreted for you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Considering Republicans fought him at every turn - what did you expect.
Parties fight - it's what they do. If they didn't, their "constituents" might go from slightly upset to mildly upset. Good/great Presidents find a way to compromise through all of the fighting. Do you think Reagan didn't fight with Tip? Clinton didn't fight with Newt? You may not agree with what they got passed, but they got shit done.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
The question is, did you learn your lesson? Will you stop supporting the one party Republocrat system next election?
Never supported it in the first place but for better or worse that does not matter. There is nothing I am going to be able to do that will make it go away. Furthermore it's not as if the (theoretical) alternatives are somehow more compelling. Libertarian? Green? There's nothing out there that I think is likely to be meaningfully better even if I could somehow be convinced that a third party somehow had a realistic chance at attaining power.
The ONLY thing that will make our current "two" party system go away is to change the voting system to something other than first past the post. Until that goes away we are stuck with the two party system and I don't think it is likely to go away any time soon.
Aren't regulations great? When they're no longer convenient they can just *Poof!* make them disappear. When it is convenient to have a new regulation, *Poof!* it appears just as easily.
We need less regulatory fiat in our government. This is the kind of stuff that should be codified into law.
Clear, concise law at that. Not 2,000+ pages of crap nobody has read.
Love sees no species.
Obama, is that you? Or your PR team?
Because if there was, you'd already know all about this matter if you were paying any attention at all to The Fair & Balanced Network(tm) Fox News, instead of these here slashdots. Just trust me on this, okay? Here, let me help you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Afo...
Unless somehow, amazingly, Slashdot managed to scoop the very motivated Fox News, of course. I doubt it.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Transparency my ass.
That settles it. I made a mistake.
"Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing," Obama declared when he first took office. Except the White house? Fuck Obama, and of course, fuck the government!
Stress is a medical condition that was explicitly mentioned in Prop 215.
So what? That doesn't make weed a medically appropriate treatment for stress that requires a prescription. People drink alcohol to relieve stress too so are you claiming we should start asking doctors to write prescriptions for Jack Daniels?
If you want to smoke weed I have no issue with that but the number of people who smoke weed for any valid medical reason is close to zero. The claim that it is medicinal is a fig leaf people use to circumvent the (stupid) laws regarding marijuana. I think the fact that it is illegal is a huge waste of money, brains and time but please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that it is a medically necessary treatment for stress or glaucoma or any of the other hundreds of "ailments" that people claim so they can get high.
This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, mean anything at all.
This memorandum shall be published to give people warm fuzzy feelings.
FTFY.
During the McCarthy hearings, this was a primary bone of contention between McCarthy and Eisenhower (who, despite both being Republicans, personally despised one another). Ike insisted that the president's records, and those of the executive branch, could NOT be subpoena'd for McCarthy's hearings.
When the courts tended toward finding that the PRESIDENT's correspondence and files were sacrosanct by the separation of powers rules*, this didn't apply to the State Dept records, so Ike had the State Dept file cabinets physically moved to the Oval Office.
McCarthy, hinting that the President was doing this because he might have something embarrassing in the files, had finally crossed the line by maligning a figure of such public reverence that the public couldn't tolerate it. Logically, he was perfectly correct; it seems unreasonable that Ike would have gone to such lengths to simply defend a presidential prerogative on principle alone, but then again his personal enmity for McCarthy likely played a role as well.
*final curious appendix to this story: one of the Junior Congressmen working for McCarthy, who saw how the courts went to the mat to defend the IRONCLAD sanctity of Ike's files from Congressional snooping would later find that such precedents were little defense in protecting his own files, Mr Richard Nixon.
-Styopa
White House not subject to election laws. Do away with that pesky "voting" once and for all. Hey this executive order thing is pretty good isn't it?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just think how much money will save by not having all those pesky congressman and senators!
This can be argued many ways. I'm not saying I completely agree with this, but consider the 2000 election: Ralph Nader ran, and we can speculate that if he hadn't done so, most of those votes would have gone to Gore instead, but because he did run, he "spoiled" the vote for Gore, and we ended up with Bush and the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. Thus, the (much) greater evil won, if you assume that Gore would not have done that (which is probably a safe assumption I think). This is the problem with this line of thinking. But then again, if we always just stick to the two "approved" parties, we'll never have any change, will we? But then again, we've tried having other candidates running (Perot, Nader) and it didn't seem to help any, and in fact seemed to make things worse. Hmmm...
Anyway, my whole point was that even if you are the pragmatic type who doesn't want to "spoil" the vote, you don't have to worry about that in most states, at least in the Presidential election (but also in many other elections too, depending on state and district). If your state/district is certain to vote a certain way, and you prefer the opposing party as the "lesser of two evils" but want to see more power for 3rd parties, you can safely vote third party. As I said before, there is zero chance that Mississippi is going to vote for the Democrat candidate in 2016, so if you live there and don't like Republicans, you might as well vote for the Greens or anyone else besides the Dem candidate, because it will not make any difference in the actual election results (the Republican candidate *is* going to get MS's electoral votes), but at least the 3rd parties will show better results. It's a small change, but it is a change.
This was a bad move. They can just deny FOIA requests anyway, or otherwise redact the everloving out of them. Why go through the big public thing of saying no and getting all the bad "nice transparency" fluff.
Start a website where voters can come register and log their votes to be reconciled with the government #'s. I'm certainly not alone in being highly skeptical of the process where I hand in a vote sheet that a worker feeds into a hopped up paper shredder looking contraption and tells me I'm done. No receipt for even showing up. Nothing.
oops. I forgot about the "I voted" sticker...
"Trust us. It's a better way."
I believe we are well past the point now where one could say "elections can't be rigged". And there's no way for us to know/audit/investigate because we have nothing but so-called "polls" to hint at the truth. I really find it hard to believe that 3rd party votes still come in around 3-5%. I could have sworn that almost everyone I talked to the last cycle agreed that it was time for demoblican/repubocrat thieves to go.....
For me, the greatest weakness likely being exploited in politics(after voter..... well, just voters) is likely unremovable from the process....... the secret ballot. Your right to vote secretly without coersion or consequence makes a great screen for tomfoolery.
Unless.... a statistically significant percentage of us are willing to put aside our right to a secret ballot and are willing to publically display our votes for the purpose of establishing court worthy evidence to investigate official vote outcomes that appear statistically unlikely. Perhaps all participants could indicate willingness to sign affidavit if needed?
I could see a website with anything from just a voter ID #'s and their votes database to a full featured, wizbang, get jiggy wid it US politics portal where you can record your cats vote preferences once they're allowed to vote.
But, we've got to have an alternative tally for the US vote, and, voting intentions. For all to see that there is in fact support for non dem/rep candidates, and to provide legally admissable evidence to pursue vote fraud investigations.
Does anything like this already exist?
Any web designers around here? Database admins? Security experts? ;)
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
RomneyCare, which ACA is based on, has had a decent reception in MA; and EVERY other industrial country has a gov't-assisted healthcare or healthcare insurance system. It's not like it's uncharted territory. True, the details can use tuning, but the big picture is not new.
Table-ized A.I.
If this was a Republican White House, the story would be mostly tagged "republicans". But because it's a Democratic White House, it's tagged "government". Obviously, this is a story about a Democratic administration, but somehow most of the slashdot readershit is too dumb to believe that it is because of the principles of the Democratic party that this is happening and not despite of them.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
A politician lied. What are the odds?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
...sunshine isn't the best disinfectant after all. Or the White House has an infection it doesn't want cured.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!