DOJ receives a D.
The day after President Barack Obama took office, he circulated a memo to his executive agencies that urged administration officials to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure.” “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” Obama said at the time. Since then, the administration has touted
Only in Washington would political appointees think it appropriate to have secret a government workshop on transparency, and only in Washington would a politician promote his efforts on transparency while simultaneously taking steps to keep the American people in the dark about their government. That’s exactly what the Obama White House did on December 7, 2009. Judicial Watch now has the evidence to prove it.
Judicial Watch recently released documents detailing the Obama White House decision to close to reporters a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) training workshop conducted by the Office of Information Policy (OIP) in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). JW obtained the documents from the OIP in response to a FOIA request filed on the same day the workshop was held.
Read the rest at Big Government
The Obama administration is appealing a judge’s ruling that Secret Service records of visitors to the White House complex are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Justice Department filed a formal notice of appeal Friday afternoon regarding U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell’s August ruling rejecting arguments that the so-called WAVES records belong to the White House even though they are maintained and used by the Secret Service.
The decision to appeal the ruling to the D.C. Circuit would appear to be in tension with Obama’s repeated pledges to operate the most transparent administration in history. The White House announced in Sept. 2009 that it was voluntarily releasing the names of most White House visitors from Sept. 15 forward. However, the conservative group Judicial Watch sought information on visits before that date. Read the rest
The ideology comes first!
Well this kind of throws a damper on this transparency business, doesn’t it? Why am I not surprised?
Tyrants don’t like the truth, they are fearful of it. I’ve told you time and time again Obama is a tyrant. I’m going to give you another example, then you’ll maybe understand why he’s hellbent on controlling the media which includes the internet.
You probably heard about this, I didn’t post about it right away because I wanted to see how it played out without jumping to conclusions. It played out just as I expected it would.
Obama’s fundraiser in San Francisco was met with protesters. Some of them sang a little song to him about “Where’s my change?” That doesn’t fit the tyrants narrative and he didn’t want that video made public. How’s that for “openness and transparency?” I still have to pinch myself to see if I’m still in the United States, it more resembles East Germany circa, 1980.
via The Blaze:
The chronology of events is as follows:
- The President attends a Democratic Party fundraising event in San Francisco.
- Print Pool reporters (a small, pre-approved group of newspaper journalists that simultaneously feed their coverage to all outlets) are in attendance.
- A protest erupts and one of the pool reporters catches it on video. (Citizens in attendance recorded this as well)
- The reporter posts the video online.
- The White House bans the reporter from future pool coverage, threatens to ban affiliated reporters if the ban is exposed
- The ban is exposed.
- The White House denies banning reporter, denies threatening other reporters, and apparently reinstates the reporter.
And now we have this update from the San Francisco Chronicle:
In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.
Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:
Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.
The Chronicle’s report is accurate.
If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.
I was on some of those calls and can confirm Ward’s statement.
Messy ball now firmly in White House court.
Who said Obama doesn’t have an enemies list? Who said Obama doesn’t resemble Richard Nixon? You need to pull your head out of your stink hole. It’s time for Americans to rally together and remove Obama from office next year and take our country back, 2016 will be too late. Obama belongs in a prison cell, not the oval office.
Here’s the video in question:
I know, I know. What more can you possible say about the man that hasn’t been said before? And what can you say about the hacks that gave him the award, and the people that actually believe this is a transparent administration? Nothing. You can’t argue with a sick mind, so don’t try. You’ll just get upset. All you can do is gas up their flying saucers and send them on their merry way.
President Obama finally and quietly accepted his “transparency” award from the open government community this week — in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House on Monday.
The secret presentation happened almost two weeks after the White House inexplicably postponed the ceremony, which was expected to be open to the press pool.
This time, Obama met quietly in the Oval Office with Gary Bass of OMB Watch, Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org, without disclosing the meeting on his public schedule or letting photographers or print reporters into the room.
Stop the merry-go-round, I want to get off. I can’t take this insanity any longer.
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