All Blog Posts from Public Eye
Rep. Hoekstra Getting "No Cooperation" for Fort Hood Probe
The top ranking Republican in the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) said Tuesday the FBI and CIA have given him "no cooperation at all" in his request for information on what the intelligence agencies knew about Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan.
"Finally they held a briefing last night for some of the senators and some of my staff, but again, the House is not in session, I've not been able to get the information at this point," he said on Tuesday's "Washington Unplugged." "I don't think they've been as cooperative as what the law requires them to be with Congress."
CBSNews.com Special Report: Fort Hood Massacre
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Netanyahu's Settlement Two-Step
(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
The optimist in me says, let's turn the page and hope for the best. The pessimist in me, weary of the same script year after year, wonders whether the U.S. will ever get the upper hand in an increasingly dysfunctional relationship.
Israel says this is all the prelude to a construction freeze - not including the current batch of apartments, naturally. Now, the Israelis say, it will be up to the Arabs to reciprocate with a demonstration of their own good will. Fat chance. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes, "the number of new housing units will not actually decline compared to previous years. The only difference is that now, that instead of construction permits being given gradually throughout the year, the government intends to issue hundreds of permits within a few days, before the official announcement of the "freeze" is made."
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Excerpts From Bush's Farewell Speech
President George W. Bush will say goodbye to a post he has held for eight years tonight on national televion at 8 p.m. E.T. The White House released the following excerpts from his highly anticipated farewell address.
After Drudge Story, McCain Gives Reporters Green Light
(AP)
That was the question political journalists were trying to answer yesterday, thanks to a story on the Drudge Report suggesting that the New York Times was investigating Sen. John McCain for alleged legislative favoritism.
The Drudge story did not get into the details of what might be in the Times' as-yet-unpublished report, leaving political reporters scratching their heads over its potential significance. It did suggest that McCain was lobbying the Times not to publish the story, which allegedly "involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation."
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McCain Drudge
How do you cover the back-and-forth over a story that hasn't come out?
That was the question political journalists were trying to answer yesterday, thanks to a story on the Drudge Report suggesting that the New York Times was investigating Sen. John McCain for alleged legislative favoritism.
The Drudge story did not get into the details of what might be in the Times' as-yet-unpublished report, leaving political reporters scratching their heads over its potential significance. It did suggest that McCain was lobbying the Times not to publish the story, which allegedly "involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation."
Continue »
That was the question political journalists were trying to answer yesterday, thanks to a story on the Drudge Report suggesting that the New York Times was investigating Sen. John McCain for alleged legislative favoritism.
The Drudge story did not get into the details of what might be in the Times' as-yet-unpublished report, leaving political reporters scratching their heads over its potential significance. It did suggest that McCain was lobbying the Times not to publish the story, which allegedly "involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation."
Continue »
McCain Drudge
How do you cover the back-and-forth over a story that hasn't come out?
That was the question political journalists were trying to answer yesterday, thanks to a story on the Drudge Report suggesting that the New York Times was investigating Sen. John McCain for alleged legislative favoritism.
The Drudge story did not get into the details of what might be in the Times' as-yet-unpublished report, leaving political reporters scratching their heads over its potential significance. It did suggest that McCain was lobbying the Times not to publish the story, which allegedly "involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation."
Continue »
That was the question political journalists were trying to answer yesterday, thanks to a story on the Drudge Report suggesting that the New York Times was investigating Sen. John McCain for alleged legislative favoritism.
The Drudge story did not get into the details of what might be in the Times' as-yet-unpublished report, leaving political reporters scratching their heads over its potential significance. It did suggest that McCain was lobbying the Times not to publish the story, which allegedly "involves a woman lobbyist who may have helped to write key telecom legislation."
Continue »
"So, Ayman: What Are You Like Behind Closed Doors?"
(AP)
Sky News reports that a new video, perportedly from the terrorist organization, includes an invitation for journalists to interview al Qaeda number two Ayman al Zawahri.
"If genuine, it represents the first such offer by the terror network to interview one of its leaders since the attacks of September 11, 2001," Sky notes.
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Is FOIA Becoming (A Little) Less Frustrating?
(AP)
It all sounds so simple at first: If you want a document or piece of unreleased but legally available information from the U.S. government, you submit a FOIA request. But government agencies are, unsurprisingly, reticent to cooperate with journalists or other individuals seeking information that could make them look bad, so the response is almost never what you're hoping for.
Instead of a few pages of documents or a neat summary of what you're looking for, you might face long response times, be offered incomplete documentation, or be told that to pay high fees. You might get buried in so much paper that it becomes extremely difficult to find what you first requested. You might never hear back at all.
Which is why it's good news that Congress has passed legislation to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act. If the president does not veto the bill, it would mandate that agencies respond to FOIA requests within 20 days – and be punished if they don't – and create a system for tracking requests, among other innovations.
"Currently, delays, staggering legal fees and mountains of red tape undercut FOIA's usefulness for citizens and journalists," David Cuillier of the Society of Professional Journalists in a statement emailed to Public Eye. "This bill is crucial for helping FOIA work better, which in turn, helps democracy work better."
In recent years, agencies' response time to FOIA requests has decreased, and the Bush administration has not exactly shown a propensity towards making information publicly available. In 2001, for example, President Bush signed an executive order allowing presidents to delay the release of many of their records indefinitely.
It is thus something of an open question whether the president will sign the legislation, which reflects a compromise crafted after the White House and Justice Department objected to some of the details, including restoration of a provision that agencies release information unless they determine it will do harm. (After Sept. 11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had instructed agencies to err on the side of not releasing information.) The Associated Press speculates that Mr. Bush might simply ignore the bill, which would have the effect of causing the new rules to go into effect after 10 days.
"This pocket-veto-in-reverse would give Bush some political cover, allowing the FOIA bill to become law without taking the affirmative step of endorsing it," notes the AP.
The Blog Turns Ten
(AP Photo)
It's of Jorn Barger, the first person to use the word "weblog." Barger coined the term, which has been shortened to the now-ubiquitous "blog," ten years ago yesterday. He used it "to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that 'logged' his internet wanderings," as Wired puts it.
In the picture, Barger, clad in a blue t-shirt, doesn't exactly look like your office IT geek. He's got a long, scraggly beard, and long tufts of hair shoot out from beneath his ratty "Google" cap. Barger looks like he was working the land in remote mountains somewhere until he gave it all up to get his startup off the ground.
And in terms of a representative of the blogging phenomenon – not to mention the whole internet, really – you couldn't ask for much more.
Think about it: Ten years ago, the truly industrious folks who wanted to share opinions or interesting articles might have had a newsletter. Today, thanks to the drastically reduced barriers to entry that the internet has provided, blogs have taken their place – there are 100 million of them at the moment, according to Technorati, and that number is growing.
Thanks to blogs, no matter how remote you might be, you're now easily interconnected. They've given us windows into warzones, shown us the minds of foreign leaders, and offered insights into everything from tort reform to gay square dancing, to mention just a tiny fraction of the total picture.
The Wired article features plenty of quotes about What It All Means, and you can head over there for the full treatment. One could write a book about how much blogs mean – in fact, folks have – but on the 10-year anniversary of the medium, this particular blog, a tiny voice in the cacophany, simply wanted to simply pay its respects. Blogs can be monumental or inconsequential, insular or wide open, enlightening or enraging. They have made the whole spectrum of human thought available, in all its messy glory, in the click of a button. And what's more revolutionary than that?
