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Trump Administration Kills Open.Gov, Will Not Release White House Visitor Logs (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: It will never be said that the Trump presidency began with a presumption of openness. His pre-election refusal to release his tax returns set a bit of precedent in that regard. The immediate post-election muffling of government agency social media accounts made the administration's opacity goals um clearer. So, in an unsurprising move, the Trump administration will be doing the opposite of the Obama administration. The American public will no longer have the privilege of keeping tabs on White House visitors. TIME reports: "The Trump Administration will not disclose logs of those who visit the White House complex, breaking with his predecessor, the White House announced Friday. White House communications director Michael Dubke said the decision to reverse the Obama-era policy was due to 'the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.' Instead, the Trump Administration is relying on a federal court ruling that most of the logs are 'presidential records' and are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act." So, to further distance himself from the people he serves (and the people who elected him), Trump and his administration have shut down the transparency portal put in place by the previous Commander-in-Chief: "White House officials said the Administration is ending the contract for Open.gov, the Obama-era site that hosted the visitor records along with staff financial disclosures, salaries, and appointments. An official said it would save $70,000 through 2020 and that the removed disclosures, salaries and appointments would be integrated into WhiteHouse.gov in the coming months."
Did anyone feel it was ever "open" ?
I know Trump wants all the coal jobs back - but I'd think it would be hard to get back in the mines, with all these dead canaries piled up everywhere.
I'd call these warning signs of horrors to come - but the man has always been the living symbol of arrogance and greed, and if anyone didn't expect exactly the raw ineptitude and pride in that ineptitude that we're getting, I'd be amazed.
Republicans claim that Government can't solve any problems, and then make it their solemn job to prove that at every opportunity, and Trump is the latest in growing line of leaders exemplifying that determined inability to provide basic governance while wasting endless amounts of resources.
Trump will release full visitor logs five years after the current term ends.
Sure he will. Right after he released his tax returns.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Wow, we're saving $70,000 over 4 years. Why would you even say something if it's such a low figure? Seriously, it's 0.000000018% of the budget. That's like a guy that makes $100k trumpeting the fact that he saved $0.0018. Less than 2/10s of a penny. I'm sure nobody expected anything different from this president, when your whole reason for getting elected is so your family and friends can loot the treasury "openness" isn't high on your agenda.
Enigma
$70,000 is one HOLE of golf at Mar-a-Lago on any given weekend (using the standard $3M/trip metric, and assuming he plays two rounds).
or we would look more like venezuela
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Reductio ad Absurdum
Good-bye
its not about "good" or "bad"
with the way people are getting blacklisted for even meeting with trump or his team it makes perfect sense on why they wouldnt want to let that info out
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
FTFY.
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That wasn't the math I was doing. Cost of running open.org for four years = 5% of a single weekend of Darth Cheeto charging the US population for wasting time.
I think that under Bernie it would be more like France.
There were three past presidents that could reasonably be expected to have a transparency website. Clinton is arguably grandfathered in because he largely predated mainstream internet usage. Dubya is a war criminal, so that leaves Obama, who had a decent but very much inadequate start.
We should be very insistent that transparency is a one-way ratchet, as sunlight is a very effective disinfectant.
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You quoted Judicial Watch 2 times. They aren't a reliable source. They are a well known highly partisan organization, and would say anything to discredit Obama.
And the quote for Freedom of information acts, the number of requests was also at an all time high, so I would expect that more of them couldn't be fulfilled. I would be more impressed with a percentage, but even that could be off if the same unavailable documents were requested.
""Mr. Trumpâ(TM)s policy is a return to the one followed by presidents who preceded Mr. Obama." (NYT). No mention of that in the summary."
vs
" White House communications director Michael Dubke said the decision to reverse the Obama-era policy..."
Hints: "the Obama-era policy" means a policy introduced in the Obama administration.
And if Trump had created a completely new policy, it would not have been a 'reversal'. A reversal of direction implies going back where you came from.
It should be fairly reasonable to anyone without a bag of hammers standing in for a brain that *reversing* a policy Obama instituted defaults to a return to the previous policy. aka ... the policy followed by presidents who preceded Obama.
Yes, its not as explicit as coming out and saying it, but its a SUMMARY, if it included every explicit detail of the full article it would not be a summary. So the summary implied a detail that was made explicit in the full article... so what was your problem?
It's not suddenly important. It's been important all along. Trying to claim otherwise is one of those Alternate Facts that Kellyann likes to blather about.
I couldn't care less if he used a loophole. Actually, I do care – I want a loophole too. Or I want his loophole closed. What I really care about though is that he might have sources of income that would indicate he has conflicts of interest. We already do have laws that prohibit conflicts of interest by executive branch members. Google "emoluments" for more info. While some claim those laws don't apply to the president, no court has yet ruled on it, and every president going back to at least Reagan has both released his taxes and put his assets into a blind trust to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.
In the end, it's about how it looks. And Trump just looks bad for refusing to do those things. And a lot of other things too.
When you become president you give up some privacy in exchange for a huge amount of power. That power must be scrutinized by the electorate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
what world do you live in? Blacklisted from _where_ exactly? I see Trump getting buddy buddy with the Goldman-Sachs types he swore up and down he would drain the swamp of. If that's Blacklisting then sign me the f' up.
What you're doing is a classic right wing technique: divert attention with a straw man argument. The question I have is: Do you know you're doing it or are you just repeating something you picked up online or from talk radio? If the former, stop it. Best case scenario you're lowering the quality of discourse the world over and worst case you're throwing your country under a bus. If the latter I'd suggest broadening your horizons towards the left. Start with Bernie Sanders & Beth Warren.
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It's the essence of the "If you haven't done anything wrong, why is your privacy so important to you" argument.
The salient difference being that privacy is to be enjoyed in abundance by citizens qua private individuals, but should to be afforded only sparingly to public officials qua public officials. Transparency, not privacy, is the the expectation we should have of government.
History shows that the privacy enjoyed by individual citizens is inversely proportional to the privacy government officials are permitted in the exercise of their power.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Furthermore, as the politifact link says, despite purchasing the extraction rights as part of a larger deal, they they never acquired export rights. So all that uranium was never at risk of leaving the US anyway.
But holy shit the lies about that so-called scandal are deafening. Almost like there was a vast conspiracy to bamboozle the american public.
Oh please, the Russian plot narrative is ridiculous because of how much of a manchild Trump is. He's far too temperamental to reliably be part of a coherent plan. Focus on his actual shitty policies instead of trying to pretend that Clinton didn't ruin her own campaign.
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