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Obama: My Administration Is The Most Transparent Ever


President Barack Obama

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President Obama released a statement today at the beginning of Sunshine Week recommitting his administration to openness and accountability and applauding those working to increase accountability. Here's the full statement:

As Sunshine Week begins, I want to applaud everyone who has worked to increase transparency in government and recommit my administration to be the most open and transparent ever, an effort that will strengthen our democracy and ensure the public's trust in their government.

We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government. We've put our White House visitor records on the Internet for the first time in history; opened up more government information than ever before on Data.gov, Recovery.gov and USAspending.gov; and issued an Executive Order fighting unnecessary secrecy, to name a few.

We are proud of these accomplishments, but our work is not done. We will continue to work toward an unmatched level of transparency, participation and accountability across the entire Administration.

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March 16, 2010 2:03 PM   

Here's what he left out:

In fact a provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

So much for transparency.

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March 16, 2010 2:30 PM    in reply to tiowally

Hang on, we don't know what those requests were. Remember a favored tactic of the right is to drown their targets in document requests.

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March 16, 2010 3:36 PM    in reply to ericf

I wish I shared your optimism(?) but it's stuff like this that I find appalling:

The White House is threatening to veto a key intelligence funding bill over what it considers to be a dangerous amount of oversight on covert agencies, according to published reports.
http://rawstory.com/2010/03/protecting-agencies-oversight-obama-threatens-veto-intelligence-funding/

I won't even go into stuff like him approving the assassination of American citizens, indefinite detentions, continued suspension of habeas corpus, the expansion of illegal wars, and on and on.

It just strikes me as "same as it ever was", if not worse. I'd truly love to be proven wrong but I really don't see that on the horizon.

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May 23, 2010 2:39 PM   

We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government. We've put our White House visitor records on the Internet for the first time in history; opened up more government information than ever before on Data.gov, Recovery.gov and USAspending.gov; and issued an Executive Order fighting unnecessary secrecy, to name a few.

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