White House to Restore Emails from Plame Cover-Up Period
[Note: You can hardly swing a cat without hitting a headline related, according to me, to me The Most Important Issue in the History of the Universe.]
The agreement—first reported by Mother Jones on Friday—is a major victory for the plaintiffs, some of the recovered messages could potentially shed light on controversies such as the lead-up to the Iraq war and the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity.
A Major Victory?
I can hardly stop laughing!
Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Her outing was seen as political…
7 Stories Barack Obama Doesn’t Want Told
JOHN F. HARRIS writes on the Politico:
Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.
No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.
A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving…
Lobbyists Pushed Off U.S. Advisory Panels
I’d like to read more headlines like this about the Obama administration. This is what people voted for, the idea that private influence could be less powerful than the public interest. We can dream.
Dan Eggen writes in the Washington Post:
Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street’s influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.
The new policy — issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel — may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate…
Obama Secrecy Watch: Don’t Trench on My ‘Executive Prerogatives’
Newsweek reports in its Declassified blog:
As we previously noted, our colleague Weston Kosova gave the Obama administration some much-needed grief on Friday for refusing a federal judge’s recent order to turn over documents showing how big telecommunications firms lobbied to get immunity for their participation in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.
But that is actually only one of many examples of how Obama appointees are standing up for Bush-era secrecy.
In just the last few days, virtually unnoticed by most of the news media, administration officials have:
* Rejected a new Freedom of Information request for White House visitor logs (despite their announced intention to start making such documents public).
* Appealed, yet again, to invoke “state secrets” to block a lawsuit that might shed light on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to…
