Obama gave a great speech Tuesday, but

[JDPriestly]

"as of October – Obama had thrown whistleblowers in jail for 22 times longer than all other presidents."

. . . .
ACLU legislative counsel Gabe Rottman noted last October:

The Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution.

(Article provides examples of the prosecutions of whistleblowers and journalists. This one is especially troubling since it appears that the goal may have been to suppress information about wrongdoing by a majors institution.)

In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of the bank’s wrongdoing, the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down WikiLeaks (and see this)

The NSA and its British counterpart treated Wikileaks like a terrorist organization, going so far as to target its employees politically, and to spy on visitors to its website

More at

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/obama-has-sentenced-whistleblowers-25-times-jail-time-all-prior-us-presidents-combin

[woo me with science]

1. Watch what they do, not what they say.

If we have learned anything from these past six years...



Nothing is more important than restoring government by the people rather than by these corporations and their purchased politiicians....because they are dismantling our democracy itself.

[Scuba]

2. The most transparent adminstration ever, isn't that what we were promised?

[merrily]

4. Negotiatons for health care reform broadcast on Comcast, too.

http://pubrecord.org/nation/4678/white-house-settles-lawsuit-agrees/

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/04/white-house-to-release-logs-after-settlement-interest-group/comment-page-2/

http://www.nfoic.org/dc-circuit-rejects-foia-access-white-house-visitor-logs


Ah, 2008. Good times.

[JaneyVee]

3. Not whistleblowers, classified doc leakers.

[bigtree]

5. yep, I remember that pesky Ellsberg

. . . and his subversive leaking of the Pentagon papers - and Sen. Mike Gravel reading them into the congressional record. Regular 'doc leaking' heroes, in my book.

Someone has to provide the transparency we were promised. It's not always pretty, and the motivations aren't always pure, but secretive government brings it on itself. I think we're limited these days in our view of these doc-leakers as 'whistleblowers' because of the relative inaction by our legislators in response to the information revealed. Remember, for all the grousing over Snowden, there was a marked response from our government, from the President, at least promising reforms of their surveillance regime. It was mostly a hand feint, but there was something undeniably useful about those revelations, at least to those of us who place a value on our privacy rights.

[bahrbearian]

7. Right On

[Vattel]

6. Obama has a very disturbing authoritarian streak.