Mar 21, 2010

Impressive

I mean, beating Bush at being a secretive asshole? Very impressive.

The Democratic administration of Barack Obama, who denounced his predecessor, George W. Bush, as the most secretive in history, is now denying more Freedom of Information Act requests than the Republican did.

Yeah, but this shit is super important.

Transparency and openness were so important to the new president that on his first full day in office, he dispatched a much-publicized memo saying: "All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA."

Also, the opposite.

An Associated Press examination of 17 major agencies' handling of FOIA requests found denials 466,872 times, an increase of nearly 50% from the 2008 fiscal year under Bush.

Yay!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not denying that it's extremely hypocritical of him to run on a platform of transparency and then do this, but is it possible that a fair number of the FOIA requests are frivolous, ie birther or tea-party driven? I doubt it's anywhere near even half of them, which still leaves a staggeringly huge number of him being a dick, but I'd bet at least part of them are.

Dave Anthony said...

Sure. The article fails to mention how many of them were upheld.

Dave Anthony said...
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