The Glade 4.0

PROMISES, PROMISES: Records not so open with Obama

[Bold Mine]


47,395 in 12 months for Bush (That Secretive Liar!)
70,779 in 9 months for Obama (The Champion of Transparency!)

Now that I think about it, I guess there's really no surprises here.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm sort of surprised to learn that Obama doesn't have control of the Executive Branch.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!



Now that I've gotten that out of my system... I'm thinking that undoing the secret structure of the previous administration results in a flurry of paperwork that also needs to be considered secret.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I'm also thinking that there's a number of requests out there that are sheer douchebaggery; requests for stuff that no sane government is going to reveal in public that either Obamawankers thought they'd be able to get because "unprecedented openness" meant "no secrecy whatsoever", or that morons thought they "needed" to know for no reason other than curiosity, or that might even be spurious requests just to jack the rejection numbers up.

It would be nice to see a breakdown of what's been asked for. For example, if there's a lot of requests for "how many incoming missiles can AEGIS control an engagement against at one time?" I'm going to be a lot less sympathetic to complaints about FOIA than if there's primarily requests for things like "Why'd you pick MY house to emminent domain?"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm sure you could say the same thing happened during the last administration, DE.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

It seem logical to me that more decisions (secret as well as public decisions) need to be made in the first year on the job as opposed to the last.

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In time, this too shall pass.

How does that have anything to do with the point DE made?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I doubt very much that it occured to enough people to matter to spam GWBs administration with FOIA requests to drive up the apparent rejections because "openness" wasn't the major campaign issue during either election.

I simply don't find the numbers all that meaningful without some idea of what sort of requests have been filed. I DO find the suggestion that the bureaucracy of the Executive Branch might find it acceptable to simply ignore Presidential directives, and I'd be interested to know what, if anything, he plans to do about that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The number of requests went down from 2008 to 2009.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

DE's suggestions that there are "requests for stuff that no sane government is going to reveal in public". I'm thinking more decisions = more stuff = more requests for secret stuff rejected 'cause more stuff changed.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Which, again, tells us little. It's entirely possible that spurious requests have gone up while legitimate requests have gone down.

If not, that again would bring up the concern that Obama cannot run his branch of government.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

From the article: So, a single request often generate multiple exemptions, I'm guessing it's based on the complexity of the information being requested... which would be, in my opinion, the kind of stuff that undergoes the most change when there's a change in administration.

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In time, this too shall pass.

DE:

It's entirely possible that legitimate requests have gone up while spurious requests have gone down, but hey I can only go on what I've seen.



And?

Oh wait, Obama's agencies must be citing more exemptions for each request than Bush's did; yup, got it. He really is running a transparent administration. Silly me.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I don't see why citing more exemptions per request (on average) would really be that big an issue; apparently one exemption is enough to deny it.

I'm more concerned that bureaucrats feel that they don't need to follow Presidential directives. I suppose it's possible that Obama's directive is just boilerplate to make it look like he's trying for openness, but if so all he's doing is making himself look incompetant.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I guess I just find it hard to believe that the Obama administration has gotten ~67% more spurious requests and/or chose to cite the exemptions that differently than the previous administration, all while receiving ~50,000 less requests. /shrug

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Executive Order 13233, for instance, limited access to the records of former United States Presidents.

Executive Order 13489 (January 21, 2009) completely revoked Order 13233. Now, instead of a single exemption, requests for information can conceivably require multiple exemptions because the blanket exemption isn't in effect.

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In time, this too shall pass.

...and they could conceivably require fewer exemptions.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Conceivably.

However, I'm

A) Suspicious of the press anyhow and
B) Quite willing to credit things like this to incompetance before malfeasence.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I suppose so, but I could hypothesize many more examples of it requiring more exemptions than fewer.

Obviously, mileage will vary.

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In time, this too shall pass.

DE:

I wouldn't go so far as to call it malfeasance, it's just another example of empty promises.

This seems pretty hypocritical to me, though:

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Gotta agree with Vind on this. Given Obama's rhetoric his supporters' zeal about increasing transparency, his record so far has been disappointing to say the least. And this isn't the only data point regarding Obama's view of the appropriate checks on his power as President. His defense of indefinite detention and limited due process for detainees, warrantless wiretapping, etc. also contribute to the impression that he supports a much less constrained Presidency than his rhetoric suggests. It's a big disappointment for many of his supporters, myself included.

I also am disappointed by this as well. Perhaps there are good reasons for it, I don't know nor likely ever will. But it's definately not what I had hoped for.

One party two faces.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

The thing that gets me, is that after he was elected, I remembered the things about him/his campaign that I was in favor of, and his transparency promises were in the top three, along with his stance on lobbyists and pork. It really pisses me off that the things I was against that he favored, he's going full bore on, while the things I liked, he's letting fall by the wayside.

I can't get over the feeling of being the fool for believing (part of) the hype.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

You didn't.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."