I thought we were done with the Dick Cheney Presidency. You remember him. He’s the 4th Branch guy who said it was okay for the White House, and him personally, to hold secret meetings with oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy executives to develop US energy policy.
Not only were these meetings secret, but we weren’t even entitled to know who attended and what issues were discussed, let alone what influence the mega energy corporations had on US policy. Then the Bush White House stalled/defied Court orders telling them to release their visitor logs.
That was then, but a more transparent Administration won the election, right? Well, apparently not.
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.
Updated: CREW says it filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Here’s a copy of CREW’s complaint.
. . .
The Bush administration appealed on Jan. 14, a week before the end of President Bush’s term of office.
In late January and again in May, the Obama administration had opportunities to change course, when it filed papers in the appeals court, but stuck with the Bush position.
So who’s advising the President to break his own campaign promises and resort to Cheney’s governance principles? Here’s Gibbs trying to defend, again, the legally indefensible:
Q So it’s just you’re not going either way on it now, and you’re not refusing to –
MR. GIBBS: We’re reviewing what has been the policy of — the previous policy.
Q Who is doing that review?
MR. GIBBS: The White House Counsel’s Office and other people in the administration.
Q What’s the length of the review?
MR. GIBBS: I don’t know the exact timeline.
- – - – - – - – -
Dear Mr. President:
Your legal team is a disgrace and is destroying your credibility and our support. Your White House Counsel keeps getting you in trouble, and your Department of Justice is still functioning as the Department of Justification for the last regime’s felonies, war crimes, ongoing cover-ups and inhumane discrimination against gays.
You need to clean out the stables. All of them.
Respectfully,
Us
[Added] ps — in case you forgot:
Crew wins court ruling on WH transparency
Court rules WH must reveal WH visits
Court rules against WH on Abramoff visits
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Is it possible they’re playing ‘good cop’, ‘bad cop’ with us? For too many years now things have turned out to be exactly opposite to what they appear to be (or or presented to us as being). I wonder if it even bothers Obama that he has acted, and continues to act in direct opposition to his campaign promises.
No.
I guess we can still pat ourselves on the back–because we didn’t elect McCain, we aren’t bombing Iran. Yet.
With a few exceptions here and there, Obama is Bush’s 3rd term. About 90% of the substance (as today’s war supplemental showed) is the same. Instead of change we can believe in, Obama should have run on the more honest: Not quite as bad as Bush, but almost.
Loved the letter to the president. Amen, amen.
As for Hugh’s comment above, parts of me grievously agrees. Not quite as bad as Bush, but almost.
Have downloaded the AMA address and look forward to reading it in full and then going back for Scarecrow and company’s comments.
As for EvilDrPuma, HuffPost article today about what a President McCain American would be like, is thought provoking. No matter how frustrated I am with many, many of Obama’s actions and inactions, I’m still glad he won and not McCain.
How ’bout them Iranians? The breathtaking, mind blowing pictures of the masses in protest are staggering. Can’t imagine what it would take to bring Americans out in such strength of protest for what we believe to be just and against what we believe to be grossly unjust.
Blessings to all,
I keep wondering how many of the people actually making decisions and writing briefs are Cheney’s moles. (Control the information in, or out, and you control the whole structure.)
PJ: That’s what I’m thinking. It’s disgraceful. I guess Obama needs to be embarrassed again and again. I wonder what will happen when his numbers start dropping … we should get some action then. This federal same-sex marriage benefits thing is only going to make a lot of people ~ straight AND gay ~ feel royally jerked around. Messier and messier.
Corporations control America. The energy interests have controlled every aspect of our liberties for decades and been working hard against the American people since the inauguration. In America money buys policies, not based on merit and elections.
Money is not merit. Corporate servitude is not Liberty and perceptions are not realities..
Just a question for the oh so astute here! How does one prevent increased energy cost from decimating liberty? How do you control healthcare cost if you can’t stabilize gouging energy costs?
The Life Tax (Healthcare) The Energy Tax (everything we do) War!
A corporation’s adolescent nocturnal emission!! You think?
While the king ad his cohorts in colonial crime mercantiled our forefathers many a time…… Corporate Sodomy !!
Chaney’s moles should be cut off and biopsied…they are a cancer on our infrastructue. heh
claims of unauthorized, over zealous staffer® did it ! in 5 . . . 4 . . .3 . . . .2
I wonder if it even bothers Obama that he has acted, and continues to act in direct opposition to his campaign promises.
you know what I wonder???
I wonder if he knew well and full on that he would not be honoring his campaign promises when he made them, or, better case scenario, he changed his other mind when he landed in the Oval Office.
I wonder that alllll the damned time! Newly over new issues, practically daily!
Wouldn’t you rather be watching Palin as VP taking shots at Levi Johnston and David Letterman? It’s so dignified and presidential…in a preznit sense. You betcha!
yup.
A number of my friends are gay. At least one guy is a school teacher, and a woman i know runs a homeless shelter for abused women and girls. Each is in a committed relationship.
And when i see their relationships denigrated, dismissed as the equivalent of incest or pedophilia, i take it personally. those are my friends you’re talking about motherfucker. And they’ve done a hell of a lot more good in the world than YOU’RE doing.
today’s executive order or whatever the fuck it is, giving gay couples lucky enough to work for the federal government SOME benefits but not all is nothing less than an insult.
I’m beginning to think the Warren thing was dogwhistle to the fundies that when it comes to gay marriage, Obama will talk a good game, but he’s on their side. After reading that brief, I am hard-pressed to believe otherwise.
President Obama seems to be part LBJ, part Bush and part himself. Since America is broke, out of money, and out of credit, why is Obama continuing to waste our tax dollars on these expensive, stupid, criminal, hostile imperial military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
O/T:
The AMA has been fighting against universal health insurance and universal health care since 1948, when it was proposed by President Harry Truman. Heck of job, AMA…
O/T: in terms of tightening regulations of financial markets, President Obama should totally outlaw hedge funds, derivatives, and credit swap defaults, which are just devices of corporate greed. Also, he should eliminate speculation from rigging the oil futures markets by limiting participation to players that can accept physical delivery of ten thousand barrels of oil.
We do that. Remember the Brooks Brothers Riots in 2000 in protest against the Florida Recount in Miami. Those m*therf*ckers strongly believed in stopping that recount. By God, those Republican operatives stood up for what they believed.
I think it’s important to reflect on how McCain would have handled what’s going on in Iran right now.
As frustrated as I am with Obama, and as much like Republicans as he’s seeming to track on some important issues, it’s nice to see our country take a mature, helpful approach to Iran.
McCain is demonstrating great empathy now for the people he wanted to annihilate last year.
Now there’s a man of principle.
I’ve wondered if there is a long term benefit to pursuing this claimed privilege of secrecy all the way through the courts.
If the courts rule consistently and unequivocably against such secrecy, will that strengthen the claims for limits to presidential power? Will that definitively stop the current and future presidents from blocking such transparency? Will such a decision apply to any other presidential acts of secrecy?
Put this in the wrong thread:
OT there is a fairly amazing chart at Calculated Risk which shows how much money ($6.788 trillion) the government has extended to the financial industry and how much it has pledged (nearly $14 trillion) to date.
http://www.calculatedriskblog……nment.html
The eye opener for me was that nearly half of the credit so far extended ($3.2 trillion) has been to money markets. Even stranger is that this is an estimate because, apparently, the people at Treasury don’t even know how much they have lent out. This raises the question though of what the government and the money markets have been doing with this money. I have kept hearing that money markets have something like $4 trillion on the sidelines that the government was hoping to use to re-inflate the economy. Is all of this money simply money the government itself gave to the MMs? I don’t know what the story is but there certainly seems to be a story there.
Although the Administration’s position may not be wise, Cheney v. United States District Court of Columbia suggests their position is, at a minimum, legally defensible.
if obama had run on the platform he is performing as a republican he would have easily won their nomination
this man is neither democrat nor progressive and I hope he is a one term president, let’s get a real democrat running this next election, either gore or kucinich would be fine, russ would be fine, and there are some excellant choices, we need some progressive government and pronto
I think I’m beginning to understand the Admin’s rationale. In Catholic high school, when all good Catholic girls thoughts turned to questions of whether it is a mortal sin to French kiss, some girls were known to go to several different priests for confession until they found one that did not say emphatically that French kissing is a mortal sin. Looks like the Obama Administration has decided to drag the question of whether they must disclose the contents of their visitors logs thru court after court until they find one that does not insist that the logs of visitors to “the People’s house” are public information.
It’s either that or they are trying to play the question of whether visitors logs constitute public information like the World Series: best 4 decisions out of 7 wins. When they will comply with any of the court’s orders is anyone’s guess!
“Is Dick Cheney Running Obama’s Energy Policy Team?”
Gasbagorama saying one thing and doing another? Gasbagorama saying and saying and saying… and carrying corporate water and huge wads of money?
Nah, he’s the answer. Eh, my ass…
It’s really just about expectations. He is a center left politician who has great rhetorical gifts and an overarching drive to be an accepted part of the power structure. Not a revolutionary figure. Not someone who blows up the system. But rather someone who becomes integrated into it. Who manages to put his stamp on it. For those of us who believe in our core that the system as it currently exists is broken beyond redemption and needs to be torn down to be replaced by something better within the framework of the constitution, he is bound to be deeply disappointing.
IMHO, the last time the occupant truly acted like it was “the people’s house” was November, 1963.