Free Republic

So this is how it ends, a career that was once glistening and unassailable, collapses under the weight of an unimaginable scandal? We all, those of us who observed Joe Paterno and his program over many years, felt that it would end badly for him but none of us could have concocted such a horrific denouement. Maybe he would let his anger get the best of him and he’d physically assault an official or a member of the media. Or maybe he would say something so egregious or ill-considered that he couldn’t undo it. But no one would have, could...

The Justice Department of the Obama Administration, the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration ever Proposes Letting Government to Respond to Freedom of Information Requests Denying Existence of the Documents. A longtime internal policy that allowed Justice Department officials to deny the existence of sensitive information could become the law of the land -- in effect a license to lie -- if a newly proposed rule becomes federal regulation in the coming weeks. The proposed rule directs federal law enforcement agencies, after personnel have determined that documents are too delicate to be released, to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests "as...

According to Judicial Watch, Rep. Edolphous Towns (D-NY) has introduced the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2011. That bill would do with Obama’s presidential records what Obama has already done to his personal and collegiate records: Seal them up. In an obvious effort to protect President Barack Obama, a group of congressional Democrats has introduced legislation to create an official process that will allow the commander-in-chief to keep presidential records secret after he leaves office. Ironically, Obama revoked a similar George W. Bush order in one of his first official acts as president. In 2001 Bush penned an executive order...

In an embarrassing defeat for the Obama administration, a federal court ruled on Wednesday that Secret Service White House visitor logs are agency records that are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act! U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued the decision in Judicial Watch v. Secret Service, (No. 09-2312). Here’s the bottom line: The Obama administration will now have to release all records of all visitors to the White House – or explain why White House visits should be kept secret under law.

The Arizona town that's become a YouTube sensation for its police department hauling away a woman speaking at a town-hall meeting declared a state of emergency this afternoon, leaving many local residents in fear of what officers dressed in full riot gear might do. Jennifer "Jade" Jones, 45, the woman forcibly removed by police from a recent public meeting in Quartzsite, Ariz., despite the vocal objections of the mayor, says an illegal secret meeting was held today with the public locked out of the building. "About noon today, the town council, at the request of the police chief, declared an...

Maintaining the entrenched secrecy of the California Legislature, leaders in the state Senate and Assembly have rejected a joint request by the Bay Area News Group, The Associated Press and the First Amendment Coalition to open the appointment calendars of lawmakers and their key staffers to public view. The denial, received late last week, reveals that activities remain thickly shrouded inside the state Capitol, where a 2010 series in this newspaper documented just how beholden legislators are to lobbyists and the agendas pushed by campaign contributors. Responding to multiple requests from the news organizations, the rules committees in both houses...

PROTECTING STATE secrets and safeguarding national security are paramount.

#2011-009 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY COMPTROLLER OF THE CURRENCY In the Matter of: Zions First National Bank Salt Lake City, Utah AA-EC-11-04 CONSENT ORDER The Comptroller of the Currency of the United States of America ("Comptroller"), through his national bank examiners and other staff of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC"), conducted an examination of Zions First National Bank, Salt Lake City, Utah ("Bank"), specifically of the Bank's former foreign correspondent business, including its transactions with Casa de Cambio ("CDC") money service business customers located in Mexico. The OCC identified deficiencies in the...

Last year, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet and her senior staff secretly met with a select group of Muslim, Arab, and Sikh organizations. Among the mix were three organizations directly associated with an outlawed terrorist entity — the Muslim Brotherhood, who are involved in the current uprising in Egypt. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, criticized the partnership concept: “Through the so-called ‘partnership’ between the Jihadi-sympathizer networks and U.S. bureaucracies, the U.S. government is invaded by militant groups.” Just recently, a Washington, DC-based legal group uncovered documents from the Department of...

Reader Advisory: Sexual Content Obama's mother, the oddly named Stanley Ann, died of cancer about fifteen years ago. There's little known about Stanley Ann, aside from the details provided by Obama and his handlers. Of course, the truth about Obama's past is shrouded in secrecy. But what can be pieced together about Obama's mom from the information at hand? For one, Stanley Ann was given her strange name by her strange father, Stanley Dunham, who desired a boy instead. Dunham was a volatile, hard-drinking man, who was expelled from high school for punching his principal. Mental illness may have run...

Finally, today, we get at least an attempt at an explanation of President Obama’s dead-of-night decision on December 16 to grant Interpol — the international police force — immunity from American law. (See here and here.) Unfortunately, in the habit to which we’ve grown accustomed, the Obama administration itself didn’t provide the explanation. It comes from Interpol’s secretary general, Ron Noble, via an informative report by Valerie Richardson at Human Events. (Ms. Richardson, who quotes from my posts in her story, was good enough to call me for comment; I regret that, because of the press of other business, I...

The keywords for today are “Secrecy” and “Transparency.” There are good secrets and bad secrets. Things to be concealed and things to be revealed. Some people want to know, others want to hide. Secrecy is an valuable commodity. From universities that want to protect professors’ academic freedom by keeping their controversial viewpoints from public criticism to the Central Intelligence Agency’s protection of international sources, secrecy and confidentiality allows organizations and governments to effectively achieve their goals with a degree of freedom and flexibility. On the other hand, transparency is also valuable. For instance, without whistle blowers, the American people would...

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters Thursday afternoon that the Wikileaks data breach is the result of “a system that provided too many points of access” created in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and that the Obama Administration is working to keep the full scope of the breach from congressional oversight by the intelligence committee. (Snip) Hoekstra said that in past national security breaches, the intelligence committee is historically the first panel in Congress informed about the contents of a breach. But so far, according to Hoekstra,

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go back, audio sound bite-wise, to me on my program, this program. This is March 12th of this year... RUSH ARCHIVE: The TARP money was not used for its original purpose. There's something else out there, Jordan, you need to know. The Federal Reserve, before the TARP bailout, made loans totaling $2 trillion and they will not tell us to whom. We don't know who got the money. Whether the Fed loans it or the government prints it, it's our money. So you can talk about the $700 billion TARP. You can talk about the $787...

It was Wednesday when a coast guard officer dropped a bombshell on his skipper and sparked a national sensation. The 43-year-old chief navigator of the patrol ship Uranami, stationed in Kobe, reportedly admitted he posted video clips on the Internet showing a Chinese trawler ramming Japanese patrol craft off the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, shaking the Cabinet to the core. The leak of the videos of the Sept. 7 collisions has raised two critical questions for the government and investigators: should he be punished for leaking what the government believes is " secret," and how can the...

John Montgomery's explanation for the withdrawal of The News' endorsement of Tracey Mann for Congress demonstrates that there aren't any real journalists on The News editorial board. Mann's advice to President Barack Obama about making his birth certificate public is the same basic advice journalists gave to former President Bill Clinton after discovery of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The best way for a president to defuse a controversy is to make the relevant documents public immediately. Stonewalling like President Richard Nixon did during Watergate only prolongs the situation and encourages people to believe the worst. I don't know where...

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid desperately seeks a way to force a cap-and-trade energy bill through the Senate, folks in 10 northeastern states are getting a bitter taste of what such a program really means. In the case of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that includes New Jersey New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware and Maryland, greed and secrecy appear to be the most dominant considerations. RGGI describes itself on its web site as “the first mandatory, market-based effort in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Ten Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states...

The Obama administration is urging the Senate to ratify the US-Russia Strate gic Arms Reduction Treaty -- but it won't release the negotiating record for "New START" to senators who've asked for it. Denying the Senate's requests raises all sorts of suspicions about the treaty, which would reduce the US strategic nuclear arsenal by about 30 percent and cut our missile silos, bombers and submarines by nearly 20 percent. Is there is something in the blow-by-blow transcript of the talks with the Russians that the White House doesn't want senators to see? Some fear the administration did some winking and...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's arguments as solicitor general in several cases on government secrecy were at odds with a promise of transparency made by her boss and top client, President Barack Obama. In four of five cases she dealt with involving the Freedom of Information Act, Kagan argued in favor of secrecy, Justice Department documents show. In those four lawsuits, the Supreme Court took her side and let lower court rulings in the government's favor stand. The justices haven't yet said whether they will take the fifth case, in which Kagan argued against broadening an open...

The shadow of the head of U.S. President Barack Obama falls upon a copy of the U.S. Constitution as he makes a speech on America's national security at the National Archives in Washington, May 21, 2009. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque "This is the most secretive administration I have ever covered." - Helen Thomas, 2006 And in post-Bush Obama nation? How is that sunlight before signing and transparency-thingie going? While there have been successes, there also have been some outrageous abuses of the public's right to know, perhaps most notably in the Department of Justice's refusal to disclose documents concerning the handling of...

The ‘most transparent administration in history’ stonewalls. At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall, Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to produce a list of Department of Justice employees who had been involved in representing detainees. Holder said he’d consider the request. Three months later he denied it. In a letter to Grassley on February 18, Holder acknowledged that nine Justice Department officials had worked on behalf of detainees before joining the Obama administration. The names of two of those officials—Jennifer Daskal and Neal Katyal—had been reported publicly. But Holder refused to...

The Treasury Department has records of the secret meetings that its President's Working Group on Financial Markets held to discuss the troubled financial markets, after all. That doesn't mean Washington wants us to know what was discussed, or whether Wall Street executives were in the meetings. The working group was founded by President Reagan back in 1989, after the stock market nearly sustained its second big crash in two years. Placed under the Treasury's jurisdiction, it lay dormant for years. It has been nicknamed The Plunge Protection Team because many people -- including me -- believe that in recent years...

Fed Secrecy Claims Bogus, Redacted AIG Bailout Details Already Public By Thomas Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith In September 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed out AIG, and ever since then, controversy has swirled around the motivation and terms of the bailout. A major part of the bailout funds went directly to three banks: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the French bank Société Générale (SocGen). These banks were holding CDS insurance from AIG on toxic assets, and the bailout saved them from the damage they would have suffered if AIG had gone bankrupt and that insurance...

In an article for the Heritage Foundation entitled “Congress’s Secret Plan to pass Obamacare” authored by Brian Darling layout a four step plan for Obamacare to hitch a ride on an existing piece of Legislation which has originated in the House using a rare parliamentary procedure. Steps one and Two have been completed. Mr. Darling’s scenario for Step Three was to attach Obamacare to an unrelated bill - H.R 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. Mr. Reid has instead attached the bill to H.R. 3590, which is entitled: “An Act to amend...

Democrats' apparent decision to come up with a final health care bill not only behind closed doors but within a very select group of negotiators is drawing criticism not only from expected quarters, but from the media. Both C-SPAN and House Republicans are reminding President Obama that he once pledged to have the health care negotiations carried on the gavel-to-gavel cable network. "As your respective chambers work to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate health care bills, C-SPAN requests that you open all important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage," C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb...

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write. No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007. Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former...

You can't have a closed-door meeting about the need for fewer closed-door meetings and expect anyone to take you seriously. That's like writing a memo to order fewer memos. Such folly is business as usual in the Obama White House. President Obama promised a historic level of transparency from his administration but hasn't delivered. On Dec. 7, the president had a "workshop" on government openness that was closed to the public. Perhaps Mr. Obama didn't want the public to hear about some of his less-than-glamorous transparency report cards. This comes on the heels of a purported transparency Web site -...

The Obama administration says it will release names of most visitors to the White House, starting at the end of this year. Information on visitors in the first eight months of his administration will remain secret — unless you know which names to ask for. The White House called the release of information "voluntary," continuing to argue the Bush administration's position that full disclosure is not required by the Freedom of Information Act. After being sued twice by a nonprofit organization seeking the records, the Obama administration said Friday it will post the visitor logs online. The release will be...

Czar is perhaps the perfect title for Carol Browner, the person President Obama chose to rule over his climate policy. The woman will run her kingdom like an autocrat, she will take no prisoners and she will hide all the "bodies" For Example: Until early January Carol M. Browner, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change. Then Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo...

December 12, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Down on BrownerRegression we can’t afford. By Michelle Malkin Yet another Clintonite has been wheeled out of the political morgue to serve in the Obama administration. Carol Browner, a neon-green radical who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993-2000, is widely rumored to be the president-elect’s choice for “energy czar.� But an ethical cloud still hangs over Browner’s EPA legacy. It doesn’t take a team of Ivy League lawyers to figure out that this is one more headache the Hope and Change crew doesn’t need. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, let...

Yet another Clintonite has been wheeled out of the political morgue to serve in the Obama administration. Carol Browner, a neon-green radical who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993-2000, is widely rumored to be the president-elect's choice for "energy czar." But an ethical cloud still hangs over Browner's EPA legacy. It doesn't take a team of Ivy League lawyers to figure out that this is one more headache the Hope and Change crew doesn't need. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, let me dust off the cobwebs and help out all the smarty-pants vetters on the Obama...

DICK Cheney is getting vindication from an unlikely source -- the very Obama administration he's bedeviling in all his TV interviews. The former vice president has dared to defend the Bush administration from charges that it ran a torturing, Constitution-shredding criminal enterprise for years under the guise of the "War on Terror." He's been duly subjected to the Two Minutes Hate -- on an endless loop -- from all the people who want him to slink to an undisclosed location never to emerge again. Cheney's defense is so notable because he's so lonely. As the Bush administration is accused of...

During his presidential campaign, a solemn pledge by Barack Obama that almost made me vote for him (but I'm pro-life, and he's a pro-choice extremist) was that his administration would be the most open and transparent in our history, in contrast to the deeply, darkly secret George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration. But, as with some of his other broken promises to restore the Constitution, I increasingly have less hope for a reason to believe in the Obama presidency. For a glaring example, with regard to the pervasive secrecy of his predecessors, President Obama has stunningly not only continued to invoke...

Our Liar-in-Chief is at it again. Obama Administration Maintains Bush Legal Argument for Terrorist Surveillance Secrecy President Obama's most liberal supporters are dismayed and disgusted ... because this administration is invoking the "state secrets" privilege. FOXNews.com Monday, April 13, 2009 President Obama's most liberal supporters say they are dismayed and disgusted because this administration is invoking the "state secrets" privilege -- just as former President George W. Bush did -- to shield eavesdropping programs from public exposure. "I wasn't happy when George Bush asserted that he could do these things and I'm not happy that President Obama is now agreeing...

It’s not just Paul Krugman anymore. A growing chorus on the legal left is cooling toward President Barack Obama as a result of recent actions by the Justice Department vigorously defending the Bush administration in what it termed the war on terror. “Obama Position on Illegal Spying: Worse Than Bush,” a large graphic declared over the weekend on the home page of a respected group advocating freedom on the Internet, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Obama has been pilloried by a liberal TV icon who was one of President George W. Bush’s most vociferous critics, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “During his run for...

<p>WASHINGTON - At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute at least $1 million each to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups, to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up during the last three decades.</p>

Six weeks after President Barack Obama appointed a blue-ribbon panel to help him dig America out of its economic crisis, the board has yet to hold an official public meeting. The White House initially said that the 16-member Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, would meet “every few weeks.” Last month, a spokesperson told POLITICO the group would meet monthly. And more recently, the White House said the high-powered board, set up to address what Obama has called the worst economic emergency since the Great Depression, would gather only about four times a...

ZURICH – The new chief executive of UBS AG says Switzerland should consider changing its banking secrecy laws so they no longer protect suspected tax evaders, according to an interview published Saturday. Oswald Gruebel told twice-weekly newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft that Switzerland's banking secrecy laws need to be changed in order to ease the political pressure other countries are putting on the small Alpine nation. Germany, Britain and the United States have demanded that Switzerland open itself up to foreign tax investigations. UBS is currently the subject of a major U.S. probe into whether it conspired to defraud the U.S....

Obama's administration is requiring defense officials to sign a pledge that they will not release information about the 2010 budget to anyone outside the government. The article cannot be linked directly because of a copyright complaint. Here is the link: http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3957786

FED seeks to remove anonimity of Swiss Bank Accounts In the hush-hush world of Swiss banking, the unthinkable is happening: Secrets are spilling into the open. UBS, the largest Swiss bank, agreed Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted having conspired to defraud the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping U.S. investigation into its activities. It is unclear how many of its clients' names UBS will divulge. U.S. prosecutors have been examining about 19,000...

Despite all claims to the contrary, President Obama has not been very vigilant about pursuing that idea of "transparency" he ballyhooed during the recent campaign. Politico reported on a host of documents, proclamations and executive orders that Obama has made in the last month and none of them were on-line. In fact, many were not even released at all to the press by the White House. So, where is the drumbeat of outrage about the "secret presidency" we heard for the last 6 or so years? Remember all the mavens of the Old Media establishment that kept claiming that Bush...

Reporting from Sacramento -- Under the gilded dome of the state Capitol, the Cone of Silence has descended. A veil has been drawn. Secrecy has prevailed as the wizards have labored behind the green curtain to find a way out of California's $42-billion budget hole. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the top four legislative leaders have again been meeting behind closed doors as California teeters at the brink of fiscal insolvency. Rank-and-file lawmakers, special interest groups and the public have been shut out of the bargaining process. There have been no public hearings, no chance for input -- and that has...

Obama pick faces questions over bombers' clemencyBy PETE YOST Associated Press Writer Originally published Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 2:05 PM WASHINGTON — New York police detective Anthony S. Senft's life changed forever when a bomb set by Puerto Rican separatists exploded, blowing him 15 feet in the air and blinding him in one eye. Now, he's angry that Eric Holder, who played a key role in awarding clemency to the bombers, is in line to be attorney general. Holder, as President Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general, worked closely with the Justice Department's pardon attorney to raise the possibility of...

Like a giant oil tanker with a breached hull, the SS Obama is leaving a film of sludge everywhere it goes. Starting with the phony birth certificate all the way up until the arrest of buddy Blago, his history has been one of secrets and obfuscation. We don't know where he was born. Some say Hawaii. Others say Kenya. He refuses to release his birth certificate to clear this up. We don't know who paid for his Ivy League schools. Percy Sutton, former borough president of Manhattan (NYC) says that he facilitated Obama's education by introducing him to Rashid Khalidi....

Shhhh. What's the big secret? When it comes to Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums' deliberations on matters of grave importance - they are cloaked in more secrecy than an illegal CIA counterterrorist operation. When Dellums ran for mayor in 2006, he pledged to run a transparent government. Yet at a time when Oakland needs a strong leader to deal with budget cuts and lack of leadership in several key departments, Dellums is missing in action and his decision- making process is one of the best kept secrets in Oakland City Hall. I don't think even the mayor knows what's going on...

SPIEGEL: So you support stricter regulation and more efficient control of the markets? Soros: Indeed. However, you have to recognize that regulations will never be completely successful and they will always be full of holes. You must constantly be ready to fill new holes. Actually regulation should be kept to a minimum, but there has to be some cooperation between market participants and authorities -- as was the case in the early postwar years. The Bank of England was a very successful regulator by cooperating with market participants. This cooperative spirit was broken by the market fundamentalists. SPIEGEL: Not in...

Switzerland is likely to come under further pressure from the United States over its prized system of banking secrecy after the election last week of Barack Obama, key sector players predicted. The newly-elected US president, who formally takes office in January, is known for his hard line on fiscal evasion, having jointly presented a "Tax Haven Abuse Act" to the Senate back in 2007. Switzerland was one of 34 countries listed as a potential site for tax evasion by US clients in the bill and observers said that while that particular piece of legislation is unlikely to see the light...

Jim Geraghty takes a look at longstanding blog buzz over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which the campaign refused to release to the St. Petersburg Times in April: We tried to obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public. Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates? Geraghty walks through various rumors now circulating in the wake of the Obama campaign’s birth certificate blackout, including this one: Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name...

The Texas Transportation Commission sounded the right notes last month in its first meeting under new leadership. Deirdre Delisi, recently appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to chair the commission, and her fellow commissioners finally seem to have gotten the message — the Texas Department of Transportation has lost the public's trust. For those with short memories, here are a few highlights that explain how that happened: •TxDOT fought to keep details of Perry's proposed Trans-Texas Corridor secret. It denied repeated requests from the media and landowners to let the public view a plan that calls for hundreds of miles of...

Many in the great state of Texas have a lot to say about a proposed network of toll roads and railway lines known as the Trans-Texas Corridor. The Texas Department of Transportation received more than 27,000 public comments during a three-month comment period on a proposed corridor project called the TTC-69, said TxDOT spokesman Mark Cross. Transportation officials had 47 public hearings in February and March and accepted written comments through April 18 on the environmental and social impact of the corridor. Comments ranged from flat-out opposition to the corridor to suggestions about how to lessen its impact, Cross told...