A Champion Of Open Government

Yard Dart · May 13, 2013

This current president has lied to the American people, distorted the facts on numerous occasions for political advantage and disregards the constitution on a regular basis. The sheep just keep moving down the road in the direction he is herding them towards- the cliff.

Exactly ten days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, the Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.
“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The latest revelations are sure to pour fuel on the fire of Republican-driven Richard Nixon comparisons. They come in the wake of revelations that the IRS may have improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative, tea party-linked groups. This might, in order words, not be a great time to announce a groundbreaking trip to China.
And the news threatens to pile fresh political woes on a second term already burdened by a painful gun-control defeat, a seemingly stalled economic agenda, and Republican rage at the botched response to the Sept. 12, 2012 terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
The revelations that the Justice Department may have sought AP phone records drew an angry response from Republican House Speaker John Boehner's office. “The First Amendment is first for a reason. If the Obama Administration is going after reporters’ phone records, they better have a damned good explanation," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.
And Laura Murphy, a top American Civil Liberties Union official in Washington, D.C., condemned "unwarranted surveillance" of the press and urged Holder to explain what transpired "so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again.”
Holder was expected to face questions on the issue when he appears Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia did not answer a question from Yahoo News on whether other news outlets had been targeted. The spokesman, Bill Miller, did not confirm the AP allegations, but insisted in a statement that "we take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations."
Pruitt, in his letter to Holder, fiercely disagreed.

He said that the Justice Department had obtained telephone records for more than 20 separate phone lines assigned to the AP -- the world's largest wire service -- and its journalists. The records cover a two-month span in early 2012 and cover phones lines for AP in New York City, Washington D.C., Hartford, Conn., and one line at the AP workspace in the House of Representatives.
"This action was taken without advance notice to AP or to any of the affected journalists, and even after the fact no notice has been sent to individual journalists whose home phones and cell phone records were seized by the Department," Pruitt wrote.
"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters," Pruitt wrote. "These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know."
Pruitt called it "particularly troubling" that the Justice Department "undertook this unprecedented step without providing any notice to the AP, and without taking any steps to narrow the scope of its subpoenas to matters actually relevant to an ongoing investigation."
In his statement, Miller said DoJ regulations "require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media."
And "we must notify the media organization in advance unless doing so would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation," he said. "Because we value the freedom of the press, we are always careful and deliberative in seeking to strike the right balance between the public interest in the free flow of information and the public interest in the fair and effective administration of our criminal laws."
An Associated Press news story on the Justice Department's actions noted:

The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.
A former spokesman for Holder's Justice Department, Matthew Miller, took to Twitter to rebuke journalists and underlined that Republicans called for investigations into the leaks.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>So how did people think DOJ was going to investigate classified info leaks? Reporters aren't immune from standard investigative techniques.</p>— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) <a href="Twitter / matthewamiller: So how did people think DOJ ...">May 13, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Ever since the days of his history-making 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has repeatedly cast himself as a champion of open government and reform. Aides are fond of praising "the most transparent administration in history" -- a moniker that might be accurate, but mostly because of poor standards set by his predecessors. It's like being the most powerful cricket team in Alaska.
And the Obama administration has not been shy about taking steps to deny Freedom of Information Act requests on national security grounds.
Just ten days ago, on May 3, Obama noted during a visit to Costa Rica that it was "World Press Freedom Day."
"So everybody from the American press corps, you should thank the people of Costa Rica for celebrating free speech and an independent press as essential pillars of our democracy," he said.
On Monday, Obama was scooping up cash for Democrats in New York City. His spokesman, Jay Carney, referred questions about the AP letter to the Justice Department.
"We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations, as those matters are handled independently by the Justice Department," Carney said.
Click to expand...

After Benghazi, IRS tea party probe: Govt seized AP phone records | The Ticket - Yahoo! News

AP Story Quoted Above:
Gov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe - Yahoo! News

Related Stories:
5 Questions About That Obama IRS Mess - NationalJournal.com
Benghazi, IRS Create Perfect Storm Threatening Obama's Credibility - NationalJournal.com
Obama slams GOP focus on Benghazi as politics - Yahoo! News

I think what the president has/is a cluster ___ of the greatest magnitude. How many other warriors have to die to cover up the administrations lack of leadership? How many more citizens and groups will have their rights, privacy and way of life trampled upon? My guess is this mess will continue and spiral us right into the ground if something is not done soon.

Yard Dart · May 16, 2013

An interesting Opinion piece by Judge Napolitano

Government is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels.Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth.
President Obama, like President George W. Bush, has argued that his first job is to keep America safe, and if he impairs personal freedom in the process, that is a small price to pay for safety. Many of my colleagues in the media on the left and right have bought this argument, notwithstanding its fallacies.
Until now.
This past week, we learned that the IRS has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by the Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. And during this past week we learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official version of events of what caused the murders of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.

Whose personal records will the government authorize itself to seize next?

The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying are a general rejection of government’s moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has deliberately built around government, and a glib admission that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can politically get away with it.
The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause requires that the government treat all similarly situated entities in a similar manner. The Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits the government from using the speech and expressive activities of persons in America as a basis for the disparate treatment of them.
Thus, on its face -- that is, on the basis of what the IRS has admitted and without any further investigation -- we have violations of these constitutional principles. If the IRS were to examine the applications for tax exemption of Media Matters with the same level of scrutiny as it does with Tea Party Patriots, it would not run afoul of these principles.
But Congress has given the IRS broad latitude to scrutinize the behavior of the taxpayers it chooses to scrutinize, and the IRS has given itself authority to probe, prod and plunder wherever it wishes.
I say “given itself,” because the IRS has rule-making power, which when overlooked by Congress (as is almost always the case) actually serves to enhance IRS powers beyond what Congress permits.
Short of criminal behavior such as bribery or conspiracy, the IRS employees who have singled out applications for tax exempt status for more scrutiny based on anticipated political expression are subject to removal from office, but they cannot be prosecuted or sued.
Here again, Congress is to blame, as both Republicans and Democrats have used and abused the IRS to their advantage, and neither party inwardly wants laws that will prevent it from doing so in the future.
Is this what you expect of our tax collectors?
The First Amendment also assures the right of professional journalists to seek and protect their sources, and it gives them immunity from government prosecution or retribution for truthfully publishing matters of material public interest, even when it involves information stolen from the government. The Supreme Court taught us this in the Pentagon Papers case.
Moreover, the Fourth Amendment requires that if the government wants private information about who stole its secrets, it needs a search warrant from a judge.
But the Patriot Act, which was celebrated by some in the media whose telephone records have since been seized, permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when they seek records from a third party like a telephone company and can claim that pursuit of terrorists is at stake.
The Patriot Act makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment, and the government knows that.
When the government chills free speech, we all suffer. Thomas Jefferson preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers. Whose personal records will the government authorize itself to seize next?
The lesson of Benghazi is that we had no lawful right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Libyan government.
It was unlawful for Obama to bomb Col. Qaddafi without a congressional declaration of war. The organized assault on our consulate was the unintended consequence of us using force to infuse American-style democracy on a people whose culture is unable and unwilling to accept it.
But the president’s people were terrified that the murder of our ambassador to Libya during the 2012 presidential campaign might impair Obama’s re-election chances. So they and he tried to rewrite history, and the more they and he lied, the more they and he needed to lie to cover up their original lies.
Would you retain an employee who lied to you about the deaths of innocents and lied more to cover up the original lies?
Now, back to Bush and Obama and the president’s job. According to the Constitution, the president’s first job obligation is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.
According to the Constitution, that means preserving Americans’ freedom first and safety second.
Freedom is our natural state and is the ultimate natural right. Safety is a need that we ourselves can provide when unimpeded by the government.
If the president keeps us safe but not free, he is not doing his job.
Do you know anyone who feels freer or even any safer because the government trampled personal freedoms and so far has gotten away with it?
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Storm clouds gathering -- your safety, your freedoms and the Obama White House | Fox News

"If the president keeps us safe but not free, he is not doing his job. " Exactly!!!!

Tracy · May 16, 2013

kellory · May 16, 2013

reposted

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A Champion Of Open Government

Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

Tracy Insatiably Curious Moderator Founding Member

kellory An unemployed Jester, is nobody's fool. Banned

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A Champion Of Open Government

Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

Yard Dart Vigilant Monkey Moderator

Tracy Insatiably Curious Moderator Founding Member

kellory An unemployed Jester, is nobody's fool. Banned

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