You can tell the IRS that you are exempt, quite easily. But they very well might not accept this and act against you.
Likewise, you are not compelled to accept the White House exempting itself either.
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Much as I support the President, no, heâs not doing his best. Even if the DOJ is teeming with Republican operatives, heâs not doing his best.
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Our system only works when people are involved and active. Iâm part of the problem in that I sit back and let whatever happens at the federal level happen, but itâs no different than the parents complaining about the way the girl scout troop or soccer team is being run but donât want to do anything about it other than complain. But this system of ours falls apart when the citizens collectively say âwhateverâ and vote for the lesser of two evils â without doing anything aside from that.
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This whole attitude of âfuck your rights and we donât have to live the same society as you doâ is getting way old. I look at all the presidential candidates and just stare into the next generation of politician that has absolutely ZERO need to change a single damn thing.
At this point I wouldnât be surprised if Elizabeth Warren would run for President, win, and then at the inauguration; unzip scooby do-style and be the Goldman Sachs CEO.
âZoinkies, it was Lloyd Blankfein all along!â
âI wouldâa destroyed your economy if it werenât for you kids! Oh wait, Iâm the president now, you are so fucked, first executive order, only Corporations can have abortions, not people! muahahahahahâ.
Yea, I need my coffeeâŚ
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Anybody can play that game.
And when your president basically is the same as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, you probably should. Youâve got better chances of actually being in a separate society than persuading those exploitive sociopaths to try being fair for a change.
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Btw that was âattitude of xxxâ coming from the politicians, not the commenters, just to clarify. Yâall mutants are fun.
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This. As the article reads:
"...White House e-mails must be released under the Presidential Records Act â but not until at least five years after the end of the administration."A lot of the "Democracy is shit" @Rindan or "[Obama is] doing his best to expand the bad system he inherited" @TheRizz, or the amount of disgust you might feel @Rod_Uding, or hollow platitudes or whatever seems misplaced. The records will be made available according to the Presidential Records Act, and not, as it appears to be suggested in some comments, that Obama is on a despotic roll to hide all government-generated email.
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He clearly is trying to hide government generated email. Yes, it will get released years after he is gone. Wooo-fucking-ho. Iâm sure historians will appreciate it, but it will be a bit late for folks who want transparency in government, donât you think?
Obamaâs record on government transparency has been horrific. He is literally worse than Bush. He has prosecuted more whistle blowers and fought tooth and nail more freedom of information request than any other president. Hell the whistle blowers thing is really the worst. He has prosecuted more whistle blowers than all other presidents in the history of the US fucking combined.
For the pedantic bores out there that think that pointing out that we are a representative republic is a blindingly insightful contribution, yes we live in a democracy. Representative republic is a subset of possible democratic governments.
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Which is usually a form of democracy. China is the prominent exception.
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As the wiki article I linked said, that email will be available for review 5 years after heâs no longer POTUS, so your rhetoric is a touch thick on the âhiding emailâ front. So historians, as well as the public, will be able to appreciate those records.
As for what I think about transparency, Iâd prefer to have those records available sooner, if necessary, but the PRA sets up a system whereby the records are retained and made available in a reasonable amount of time. Thereâs no way in hell any national leader could effectively lead if her email was up for review every two weeks or even three monthsâthatâs not reasonable. Unless, of course, extraordinary circumstance require it, which is what Congress is supposed to arrange/order when necessary (even though Congressional action often reads like witchhunting, but thatâs not relevant to my thought here).
Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. No, it hasnât. The WashPo did an excellent article on that very topic a few days ago, and the last para is worth a glance as a tl;dr:
Nevertheless, at this moment, although the administration may still wind up as one of the better ones of the sunshine era, it may not serve as the model for the most transparent administration yet to come.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/16/has-obama-delivered-the-most-transparent-administration-in-history/
I like how you quoted one sentence and not the next one that points out that sharing your records 5 fucking years after you are gone is worthless for having an open and accountable government. Short of disclosing that he committed a crime so egregious that it will wind him in jail and that next president wonât pardon him for, it is worthless for oversight.
All the other presidents for the past 30 years seem to have been able to able to function with complying with FOIAA requests until Obama decided to declare they were exempt during Sunshine week. Classy.
Did we read the same article? It is pretty much an endless list of meet the new boss same as the old boss, with a few cosmetic changes here and there. The best they can give him is more less, âwell, he could have been worseâ.
His most obvious failures though are his prosecution of more whistleblowers than all other presidents over the course of the entire history of our multi-century old nation, combined and his Dubya like love for secret interpretations of the law. We donât even know how this asshole is interpreting the laws he has sworn to uphold. Judging by his mass warrantless wiretapping program in the one government agency where we got a little transparency through Snowden, I am going to go out on a limb and say that his secret interpretations of the law are a bit shit. Obama is a worthless shit when comes to transparency.
Snowden has done orders of magnitude more to bring us transparency in government than Obama has. Maybe Obama could give Snowden the same sweetheart deal he gave Petraeus? You would think that disclosing mass violations of the constitution to the US citizens would be more pardon worthy than spewing state secrets to impress your girl friend who is writing your self aggrandizing biography. I know, Obama has a secret interpretation of the 4th amendment that says that the mass warrantless spying by a military spy agency it is cool, but Snowden didnât have a copy of that secret interpretation, so I think we can give him a pass if we can give Petraeus a pass for spewing to his mistress.
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5 years isnât short enough. Then do tell: How long after a president leaves office should those records be made available? I would guess your 30 second rule is unlikely to work very well. Let me guess, weâll have a President of Presidential Records, who gets to review POTUS records every day theyâre created, and that person can decide whatâs released and what isnât within two minutes of the item being created. I keep asking for what level of oversight you want, and all I hear is crickets.
Has Obama stopped complying with FOIA requests entirely, or are you simply conflating things for more rhetorical punch? Essentially, Obama placed the Office of Administration under the coverage of the PRA, so the records will be there, theyâll just be available under the restrictions of the PRA. Besides, since weâre talking about Presidential Records, weâre only up to Clinton. Classy:
Under the PRA, the records of former presidents become subject to the FOIA five years after the end of the administration. The incumbent or former president may continue specific restrictions for up to twelve years, after which only statutory FOIA restrictions may be applied. Currently, only the records of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton are subject to the FOIA. The records of President George W. Bush will become subject to FOIA on January 20, 2014. ["5 - Presidential records subject to the FOIA under the Presidential Records Act (PRA)"
Secret interpretations of the law signed by this asshole worthless shit Obama? Do tellâŚor wait, Iâll let this quote say it (NY Mag):
If it's the use of executive orders in particular that's getting critics all riled up, though, then it's worth noting that Obama has used this lever of presidential power less frequently than every other president in modern times.I don't like the prosecutions of Manning and others either, but lets keep things in perspective. As for the bit about Snowden, Petraeus, Obama, and your knowledge of secret interpretations of the 4th amendment, I'm not so sure about that.
The point of the freedom of information act is to force the government to disclose things that shouldnât be secret. For a government and politicians that love nothing more than to to hide and delay disclosing their wrongdoings, it is a powerful weapon that can be used to find out what maleficence the government is up to and perhaps even put a stop to it. Releasing records long after a president has gone doesnât serve that purpose. The point of release records after a president is long gone is for the historical record. That is a separate and entirely different goal than releasing records to uncover corruption and needless government secrecy. 5 years is a perfectly fine time for historians to get a data dump, but I am far more worried about what they are doing now. They should be subject to freedom of information requests like any other government agency. The time period they should have to respond to the requests should be the same length of time that all other government agencies are subjected to. This should be independent of any records released later for historical purposes.
Yes, Obama has stopped complying with FOIA requests directed to the Office of Administration entirely. Send in a request and it will now get bounced with anyone ever looking at it. The PRA and FOIA are not competing methods of disclosure. You can have both. They can released historical records at whatever rate and delay they want, but they should still have to comply with FOIA requests. God forbid we have transparency in government.
Executive orders are not secret interpretations of the law. Those are two entirely different things. What is a secret interpretation of a law? Obamaâs really creative interpretation of section 215 of the hilariously named PATRIOT act tends to be the gold standard of constitutional fuckery. Basically, they took a section that said that the NSA gets to spy in limited circumstances and decided to reinterpret limited as unlimited. Instead of disclosing that this was how the the executive branch was interpreting the law, they slapped a classified stamp over the legal interpretation and told no one. We only know about it because the heroic Snowden revealed to us the governments mass warrantless spying. Folks were a bit shocked because it seemed so utterly illegal. At this point, the government was finally forced to disclose a heavily censored version of their secret interpretation of the law that more less amounted to âfuck the 4th amendmentâ scrawled in red crayon. It sure would be great to get their now less secret âfuck the 4thâ interpretation of law to see a real court, but the government has shut down each legal attempt by declaring State secrets or flat out lying about whether or not an entity has standing to challenge the law.
There are more secret interpretations of the law floating around. How you can claim to have anything even vaguely approaching a âtransparentâ government when the government wonât even disclose what they think the law means is beyond me. The fact that they tend to take a rather fucked view of reading such laws just make anyone who believes in transparency and due process violently ill.
Like I said, if it wasnât for Snowden, we would know nothing of the abominations to democracy that out government has carried out in secret.
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