Obama Cabinet Flunks Disclosure Test

Obama Cabinet Flunks Disclosure Test With 19 in 20 Ignoring Law

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-28/obama-cabinet-flunks-disclosure-test-with-19-in-20-ignoring-law.html

On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama ordered federal officials to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public.

As Obama nears the end of his term, his administration hasn’t met those goals, failing to follow the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, according to an analysis of open-government requests filed by Bloomberg News.

Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met Bloomberg’s request for those documents within the 20-day window required by the Act.

“When it comes to implementation of Obama’s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more ‘talk the talk’ rather than ‘walk the walk,’” said Daniel Metcalfe, director of the Department of Justice’s office monitoring the government’s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981 to 2007.

The Bloomberg survey was designed in part to gauge the timeliness of responses, which Attorney General Eric Holder called “an essential component of transparency” in a March 2009 memo. About half of the 57 agencies eventually disclosed the out-of-town travel expenses generated by their top official by Sept. 14, most of them well past the legal deadline.

 

Finally Reasonable Gun Stuff

County Police Chief Recommends Arming School Personnel

ST. LOUIS COUNTY (KMOX) - St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch says it is time to talk about arming civilian school personnel following Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, comparing it to arming airline pilots after September 11, 2001.

“I see it no differently,” he said. “Pilots have been armed now for many many years, we’ve not had another hijacking and the issue is, for the bad guy, he doesn’t know which airplane he’s getting on, if the pilot is armed or not.”

Fitch said the killing will not be stopped by legislation or laws. “If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.”

The chief is adamant about his plans but realizes his calls for arming school workers will be met with resistance.

“We touched on this issue with heroin problem with schools. When we first were talking about the heroin problem in St. Louis, many of the school officials ran and they just hid out, they said ‘nope, we don’t have a heroin problem in our schools,’” Fitch said.

“They started to find out some of the students were involved in this and some of the students were dying of heroin overdoses. It forced them to have this discussion and to take action, inviting us into their schools to talk about the heroin problem in St. Louis.”

Concerning the possibility of gun control, Fitch said “it’s just not going to happen,” and called for an increased focus on mental health instead.

“One of the first thing governments tend to cut back on in tight times are mental health services,” he said. “We know this individual has a mental health history in Connecticut, we’ve seen that in all the school shootings, and additional resources would be helpful.

But, last resort, somebody’s got to take action and they got to do it quickly.”

First Dope Death in WA

Great going folks.  Make dope legal there is no harm.

http://www.kptv.com/story/20368360/driver-charged-with-dui-marijuana-after-deadly-crash-in-vancouver

The Vancouver Police Department arrested a man on the charge of driving under the influence of marijuana in connection with a deadly crash in Vancouver.

 

Investigators said the driver hit and killed a pedestrian around 5:50 p.m. on East Mill Plain Boulevard and Andresen Road.

Police say the victim, a male in his 50's, was believed to be walking back from Safeway and stepped out into the middle of traffic.

The driver, Scotty Rowles, was driving westbound on East Mill Plain Boulevard and could not stop his car in time, according to police.  

Detectives says Rowles cooperated with the investigation, but after interviewing him they determined there was enough evidence to arrest him on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana.

Police believe this is the first deadly crash involving the drug since it became legal in the state of Washington.

Police say the victim was close to two different lit and controlled intersections, but chose to step out into the middle of traffic, which would clearly put him at fault.

However, because Rowles was believed to be under the influence of marijuana, Washington State law says he is technically at fault, according to police.

While it may now be legal to smoke marijuana in the state of Washington, police say it is never legal to smoke it and then get behind the wheel.

The victim's ID will be released after police notify his family.

Obama Secrecy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-open-and-shut-administration/2012/12/03/0fe12754-3d9f-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_story.html?hpid=z7

The open-and-shut administration

“My administration,” President Obama wrote on his first day in office, “is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Those were strong and hopeful words. Four years later, it is becoming more and more clear that they were just words.

On Monday afternoon, open-government advocates assembled in a congressional hearing room to ponder what had become of the Obama administration’s lofty vows of transparency.

“It’s been a really tough slog,” said Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The lack of effective leadership in the White House, in the executive branch, has really made it difficult to have more significant progress.”

“They’ve been reluctant to take positions,” said Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition, “and translate that to real action.”

“In the beginning of 2010, [Obama] said he made a significant mistake by abandoning some of his pledges related to transparency,” said Josh Gerstein of Politico, “and that going forward they would do things differently. Seems to me we are forward and it seems to me we’re not doing things any differently.”

It was a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger critique of Obama often heard from the political left, and the moderator, theSunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman, was apologetic. “We’re placing a lot of blame at the administration,” he observed. “Or blame isn’t the right word — maybe responsibility.”

No, blame is just fine. The Obama administration’s high level of opacity, though typical of modern presidencies, is troubling precisely because the president was so clear about his determination to do things differently. As recently as early last year, some open-government advocates were still hopeful, presenting Obama with an anti-secrecy award at the White House. But even then, there were signs of trouble: The award presentation wasn’t on his schedule and was closed to reporters.

By certain measures, “overall secrecy has actually increased rather than declined,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs theFederation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Criminalization of unauthorized disclosures of information to the press has risen sharply, becoming a preferred tactic. Efforts to promote public accountability in controversial aspects of counterterrorism policy such as targeted killing have been blocked by threadbare, hardly credible national security secrecy claims.”

A Washington Post report from this past summer concluded that “by some measures the government is keeping more secrets than before.” Those making Freedom of Information Act requests in 2011 were less likely than in 2010 to get material from 10 of 15 Cabinet agencies, which were more likely to exploit the law’s exemptions.

Also, the National Declassification Center, which Obama established in 2009, had by the summer of 2012 reviewed only 14 percent of the pages it was assigned to review and declassify by the end of 2013.

Now the administration is maintaining silence as lawmakers prepare to pass one of the gravest threats to government transparency in years. A bill passed by the Senate intelligence committee would ban anybody but the top officials and public-relations staff at intelligence agencies from speaking to the media. The proposal, intended to crack down on classified leaks, would significantly set back freedom of the press, thwart whistle-blowers and squelch the airing of dissenting views on intelligence issues. This is part of a broader effort to make it a crime for national security officials to talk to reporters.

The Obama administration has, to its credit, made progress in a few areas: releasing more of the White House visitor logs, disseminating more information about nuclear weapons, disclosing more about intelligence spending, and declassifying more historical records.

But these don’t amount to the “unprecedented level of openness” Obama promised. The few advances that have been made are mostly administrative changes that will end with the Obama administration. “We haven’t seen that many, if any, legislative initiatives from the White House,” Weismann lamented at Monday’s gathering of the open-government advocates.

Consider the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill with bipartisan support that would make it easier to track government spending by requiring agencies to report expenditures in a uniform way online. The legislation is so uncontroversial that it passed the House on a voice vote. But the Obama administration raised objections — and the transparency law has yet to see the light of day.