Homeland Security Politically Filtered FOIA RequestsFollow

There's also the issue of what we consider a "lobbyist". By the letter of the promise, we're just talking about professional lobbyists working for lobbying firms. And to that letter, he's done "ok". Not great, but ok. But the spirit of the promise isn't about who is professionally a "lobbyist" or not, but about influence on politics by outside organizations. What the Obama Administration has done is bypass the middleman and hire on people who worked for the organizations themselves rather than the lobbyists who worked for the firms those organizations hired to represent them in DC. I'm not sure if that's really much of an improvement. I suppose there's a fine line here somewhere, but it does seem as though the administration has been doing a careful dance between the "our influence is being bought" and "we're putting people we agree with politically in positions of power" aspects of the issue.


I'll also echo Moe's earlier statement about expectations versus reality. The uglier aspect of this particular situation is the potential that the information about requesters and delay in delivery isn't just about obstruction, but is designed to provide time to mount a defense against any potential political attacks based on the information requested. It brings up the question of some kind of "goodfact" agency operating somewhere which will act to block ideas which might threaten the "facts" they've created.


Some of us alluded to this sort of process during the past couple elections with the whole "factcheck.org" thing. The trend of winning an argument by controlling the "facts" upon which we determine right and wrong has been with us for a while now. This is just a next obvious step.

Kinda the point Smash. Some of us knew that "transparent government" was a lie during the campaign. We were shouted down by the true believers. Some of us pointed to a number of things which were blatant lies from the Obama campaign at the time and were shouted down, derided, and called racists.

Maybe next time more people will listen?

I'll repeat this since apparently some people *don't* want us to learn this lesson.



Kinda the point Smash. Some of us knew that "transparent government" was a lie during the campaign. We were shouted down by the true believers. Some of us pointed to a number of things which were blatant lies from the Obama campaign at the time and were shouted down, derided, and called racists.

Maybe next time more people will listen?

It's far too perilous.

I'm going to murder the first person to quote Monty Python.

You mean the next person, right? Er... /looks over shoulder...

Who the hell reads =4 with filters on?

If someone did, they'd probably be wondering why everyone is laughing at someone called 'Varus'.

Kinda the point Smash. Some of us knew that "transparent government" was a lie during the campaign

Wait, you knew that something pledged during a political campaign was unlikely to come to fruition?? Holy fuck, you're a psychic. Quit your job, immediately, and move to Vegas.

We were shouted down by the true believers. Some of us pointed to a number of things which were blatant lies from the Obama campaign at the time and were shouted down, derided, and called racists.

Maybe next time more people will listen?

Who cares? Morons believe all sorts of idiotic things promised to them by politicians. They believe that tax cuts generate revenue, or that deficits don't matter when you're spending money on fighter jets, but are a huge problem when you're spending the money on jobless benefits.

I mean fuck, some of the strident, rock fucking stupid true believers actually thought the Obamma birth certificate thing was going to the US Supreme Court. Haahahahaha, oh Jesus, do you remember that idiocy? They really believed the UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT was going to certify and hear a case that regular watchers of Judge Judy could see had no standing. Oh man, I'm losing it just thinking about how stupid "true believers" are.

But yeah, maybe next time people will listen to your cogent analysis and savvy prognostication of political events.

If I recall, Joph and I had a discussion about this and he said something to effect of "maybe they'll be more open, let's wait and see" and I said "are you on crack?"

At any rate this is about 298,302,034 on the list of things I worry about in terms of what this administration hasn't come through on.

No, I think people rated you down because they thought your post and the sentiment behind it were fucking stupid, not to 'censor' you. I believe this for two reasons: 1) the post was stupid and you are stupid 2) rating you down to censor you would be stupid because, as previously mentioned, no one filters sub-d posts here.



Anyone who voted for him because they earnestly believed he was their messiah, sure.

I know accuracy is often ignored for the sake of humor, but converses are never funny. Never.

It's not censorship, though; your message is not being deleted and your freedom of speech is not being infringed upon. People are using the karma feature to show their disapproval of the content of your message, as intended. No matter how much you bawl about it, that ain't gonna change.

Also, the events you are talking about never happened on a significant scale as you are implying they did. Conservatives had no problem broadcasting their doubts about Obama. They did so then and they've not stopped since. Even the cretins making the hullabaloo about his birth certificate or making racist attacks on his middle name had their views thoroughly aired.

Your entire post is essentially you saying "you're in denial" and hoping I'll say I'm not, so you can claim it as a victory. Genius, man, genius.

P.S. That is irony.

Nah. My post was originally about saying "We told you so".

That's great. Not that anyone is taking you seriously, but on the off chance they were, the enormus list of other stuff the terrified racist mass of "we" decided to "tell us" before the election was 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% completely wrong.

Good work, though.