Obama promised a new era in transparency in government. He even complained about all the oil company executives who visited the White House to write Dubya’s Energy Bill (code named “No Oil Well Left Behind”), even though Obama voted for that bill.
But now, MSNBC reports that the Obama administration is trying to block access to the names of coal company executives who visited the White House to influence Obama’s energy plan. They are actually trying to block access to the names of any White House visitors, despite the fact that a federal judge has ruled that these records are public.
Ironically, the Obama administration is borrowing the very same argument that Obama protested when the Bush administration used it — that a president doesn’t have to reveal who he talks to when making policy decisions.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has a good article on Obama and transparency. And here’s a great animation on the same subject.
2 Comments
A politician being a politician. Why am I not surprised?
The good news is that the media is actually reporting on these things rather than ignoring them as they did during the Bush administration.
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That Transparency is Strangely Hard to See Through…….
Scientific proof that transparency is good. One of President Obama’s bigger campaign issues was government transparency, a notion that the Bush administration disregarded almost as easily as it disregarded the Constitution. In fact, before he was even…
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federal public records…
I agree with what you wrote here at edwired ” Blog Archive ” The Undergraduate Curriculum (II). Good points there….