Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for February 2011

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NSFW Look for the union label?

Definitely not suitable for work,
Moe Lane posts a video of union members at work, harassing people and assaulting the camera man, at an AFSCME rally,

Elsewhere, Union Thuggery Descends On FreedomWorks and Tabitha Hale was hit while holding the camera,

More video of the protest at Freedom Works HQ in Washington, DC,

What’s on the union label? T–H–U–G–S!

UPDATE,
Welcome, Uncoverage readers.

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The White House’s hidden lobbyists

The most transparent administration evah is meeting with lobbyists at Jackson Place instead of the White House because,

It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs kept on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.

Particularly,

There are no records of meetings at the row houses just off Lafayette Square that house the White House Conference Center and the Council on Environmental Quality, home to two of the busiest meeting spaces. The White House can’t say who attended meetings there, or how often. The Secret Service doesn’t log in visitors or require a background check the way it does at the main gates of the White House.

Jeff Dunetz asks,

Remember this post on Whitehouse.gov?

Transparency like you’ve never seen before October 30, 2009 at 04:31 PM EDT ..Today marks a major milestone in government transparency — and an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure. We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would — for the first time in history — begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year.

Like much of what we were told about the Obama White House the statement above turns out to be not entirely true. First of all their disclosure policy was not exactly voluntary, it followed freedom of information requests from a host of organizations such as Judicial Watch.

The other thing that is not quite truthful is that we will now be able to have transparency regarding who is having influence over the White House Staff.

And, as if that weren’t enough, the lobbyists are made to sign confidentiality statements preventing them from disclosing who they met with and what they talked about.

The Democrats have pushed through legislation that is thousands of pages long, drafted behind closed doors, by persons unknown. These meetings at Jackson place are just one more instance of what low regard they have for democracy and for the Americans they serve.

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Finally, Obama talks about Libya

Pres. Obama did a brief TV appearance talking about Libya. He said the violence is ‘unacceptable’ and violates ‘every standard of common decency’, without mentioning Gaddafi (he of the many spellings), who, by the way, is the guy that actually ordered the Lockerbie bombing, according to Libya’s ex-justice minister,

Gadhafi has accepted Libya’s responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground, and paid compensation to the victims’ families. But he hasn’t admitted personally giving the order for the attack.

Abdel-Jalil told Expressen that Gadhafi gave the order to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing.

“To hide it, he (Gadhafi) did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Al-Megrahi was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die soon. He is still alive.≤/blockquote>Obama said he was studying a “full range of options” to pressure Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s regime to halt attacks against Libyans. However, as long as there are any Americans remaining in Libya, one can’t expect that Obama will do much.

And you can bet Gadhafi is betting on that.

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White House won’t talk about Libya, while Peru does

W.H.: Obama won’t speak on Libya

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Air Force One that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak about Libya at 2:30 p.m. He referred questions on Libya to “earlier statements,” the pool reports.

Carney added that he didn’t anticipate Obama speaking about Libya.

Therefore, Politico started its article with the advice, “Be patient”.

Patient, as in, the American hostages held by the Somali pirates,

More notes from the pool report: President Obama authorized the use of force over the weekend against the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden if a threat to hostages was imminent, Carney said.

How did that work out?

Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told Obama of the four hostages’ deaths at 4:42 a.m., he said.

Third world countries are more decisive than the Obama administration,

Peru, on the other hand, has decided that its best not to deal with Libya at all, becoming the first country to completely cut ties with Qaddafi’s regime. Meanwhile, a day after two Libyan air force jets landed in Malta, their pilots refusing orders to fire on protesting citizens, a Libyan warship ordered to bombard the breakaway city of Benghazi has also defected to the Mediterranean country.

Peru, Malta. Not the USA.

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