NotesBut the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.Unfurl
NotesDrake’s story puts the lie to the notion that internal channels serve as anything other than a trap for unwitting whistleblowers. What is so revealing is that if Snowden had gone through internal channels, the outcome would have been worse: the United States would have charged him with espionage and he’d be in jail for, in essence, spying on his own country on behalf of the public. It should not require martyrdom for a free citizen to challenge government abuses of power. It should not require choosing one’s conscience over one’s career, citizenship, or freedom.Unfurl
NotesThe point is, Congress’s decision to lift the sequester was even more self-serving than you probably imagined. After casting their votes on Friday, most members raced to the airport and went home.Unfurl
NotesThe lesson here is simple. At a deep ideological level, Republicans believe that federal bureaucracies are inherently inept, so when Republicans occupy the White House they have no interest in making the federal bureaucracy work. And it doesn't. Democrats, by contrast, take government services seriously and appoint people whose job is to make sure the federal bureaucracy does work. And it does.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIn truth, no private company would have been capable of developing a project like the Internet, which required years of R&D efforts spread out over scores of far-flung agencies, and which began to take off only after decades of investment. Visionary infrastructure projects such as this are part of what has allowed our economy to grow so much in the past century. Today’s op-ed is just one sad indicator of how we seem to be losing our appetite for this kind of ambition.Unfurl
NotesSo it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.Unfurl
NotesWhen a series of crackdowns on the Occupy camps suddenly occurred in, more or less, the same week, many observers wondered if perhaps the attacks had been coordinated at a national level. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan confirmed that suspicion during an appearance on the BBC - excerpted on The Takeaway radio program - when she casually mentioned taking part in a conference call with the leaders of 18 US cities right before the raids.Unfurl
NotesOver the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict “Occupy” protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night’s move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.Unfurl
Notes$16,000,000,000,000.00 had been secretly given out to US banks and corporations and foreign banks everywhere from France to Scotland. From the period between December 2007 and June 2010, the Federal Reserve had secretly bailed out many of the world’s banks, corporations, and governments. The Federal Reserve likes to refer to these secret bailouts as an all-inclusive loan program, but virtually none of the money has been returned and it was loaned out at 0% interest. Why the Federal Reserve had never been public about this or even informed the United States Congress about the $16 trillion dollar bailout is obvious - the American public would have been outraged to find out that the Federal Reserve bailed out foreign banks while Americans were struggling to find jobs.Unfurl
Notes This afternoon the House will vote on another pointless, partisan, finger-pointing bill, but at least this one doesn't directly attack women, so there's that. Today it's the Balanced Budget Amendment, just about the worst idea for the economy as a whole they could come up with. Really. Unfurl
NotesIn this new bill, Hollywood has expanded its censorship ambitions. No longer content to just blacklist entries in the Domain Name System, this version targets software developers and distributors as well. It allows the Attorney General (doing Hollywood or trademark holders' bidding) to go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders. This language is clearly aimed at Mozilla, which took a principled stand in refusing to assist the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to censor the domain name system, but we are also concerned that it could affect the open source community, internet innovation, and software freedom more broadly:Unfurl
NotesIn many respects, austerity feeds on itself. If the country needs to invest in education and rebuilding infrastructure to regain competitiveness, as many economists of varying ideological stripes argue, those initiatives are in large part precluded in a political environment that places top priority on deficit and debt reduction. Retrenchment, in effect, becomes a noose, choking off prospects for growth.EmbedUnfurl
NotesYou asked, The White House answered: "The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race"FeedUnfurl
Notes"There’s risk in confusing broadband and Internet. If the National Broadband Plan starts from the premise that the U.S. needs the innovation, increased productivity, new ideas and freedoms of expression that the Internet affords, then the Plan will be shaped around the Internet. If, instead, the Plan is premised on a need for broadband, it fails to address the ARRA’s mandated objectives directly. More importantly, the premise that broadband is the primary goal entertains the remaking of the Internet in ways that could put its benefits at risk. The primary goal of the Plan should be broadband connections to the Internet."Unfurl
Notes"So if I ask for that page of numbers as the spreadsheet it was originally, and a public records officer for a public body gives it to me as a bitmap, I'm going to ask again and keep asking publicly and perhaps uncomfortably until we both understand that this is a routine request and that compliance with routine requests is much easier than making everything an exception - because maybe, just maybe, I can replace that FOIA letter with a tiny shell script and we can just go about our business."Unfurl
Notes"I make a good living, and I suspect that I will end up paying more taxes under Barack Obama than I would have under John McCain. I am delighted to pay those taxes. My father worked his entire life for the federal government. My brother, who has cerebral palsy, lives on Social Security. Much of what I know about the world I learned in public schools and libraries. I cannot possibly repay the government for all they have done for me, but I am happy to do my share."Unfurl
Notes"If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past."Unfurl
Notes"On his first day in office, President Obama put former president Bush on notice. His administration just released an executive order that will make it difficult for Bush to shield his White House records--and those of former Vice President Dick Cheney--from public scrutiny by invoking the doctrine of executive privilege. Shortly after taking office, Bush handed down his own executive order, amending the Presidential Records Act to give current and past presidents, along with their heirs, veto power over the release of presidential records, which are considered the property of the American people. "FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License."Unfurl
Notes"Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) sat for an interview with KUSA, an NBC affiliate in Colorado. In response to a question sent to the network by a third grader at a local elementary school about what the Vice President does, Palin erroneously argued that the Vice President is “in charge of the United States Senate“"Unfurl
Notes"David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton's Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials abandon the dream of developing usable web sites, and instead focus on providing raw public data such asUnfurl
Notes"The creative and intellectual property service industries in Michigan (software developers, graphic designers, technical artists and writers, dance and music teachers) may be particularly hit hard."Unfurl
Notes"But what is apparent, is that George Bush has at his disposal none — none — of the tools presidents have used to turn bad situations around: public support, party support or skilled statecraft. He's a lame duck less than two years in to his second teUnfurl
Notes"It's the typical Daily Show mix of poking fun at the ignorance of people with power, coupled with an "OMG the 'House of Representatives filled with insane jackasses'"Unfurl
NotesI thought we got tax cuts? "A flood of income tax payments pushed up government receipts to the second-highest level in history in April, giving the country a sizable surplus for the month."Unfurl
Notes"I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble."Unfurl
Notes"One consequence was that the wealthy parasites known as the American Right, desperate to find a convincing argument against communism, seized on religion. Up to that point, the American Government had been devoutly secular, as specified by the ConstitutiUnfurl
Notes"Welcome to upside-down-land: the areas at risk for Katrina were quite remarkably the areas not included in Bush's declaration of emergency."Unfurl
Notes'What happened to the urgent call for" broadband" -- the new information infrastructure that is vital to success and survival in the global knowledge economy -- President Bush promised he would push in his second term?'Unfurl
How to trap a whistleblower - Salon.com
The Pampered World of Congressional Air Travel - Businessweek
A Case Study of Republicans vs. Democrats on FEMA | Mother Jones
The Silver Bear Cafe
Hollywood's New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation | Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Politics of Austerity - NYTimes.com
There's No Such Thing As Aliens | MetaFilter
MotherJones Blog: Obama to Bush: I Can Release Your Records. Don't Like It? Sue.
Copyright Policy | whitehouse.gov
Levin Calls For Bolstering U.S. Auto Industry : NPR
Schneier on Security: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation