transparency - Page 3

On Monday, Democrats in Sacramento, doing their best to aid Governor Jerry Brown’s troubled high-speed rail project, attempted to grease the way for the project’s success by relaxing oversight and reporting requirements.

As questions brought up by the blockbuster book Clinton Cash continue to reverberate around the world, this week Bill Clinton sent a panicked letter to donors pleading with them not to flee his foundation.

An article by Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin has triggered wide disparagement from Moscow, where officials implied all involved in the publication of a piece reporting that Russia was using mobile crematoriums to erase the presence of soldiers in east Ukraine needed mental help. A day later, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that makes all Russian soldiers’s deaths a state secret, even in a time of peace.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered the State Department to release some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails every 30 days, starting in June.

On Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had a sparsely attended summit to discuss the state government’s official email policy. The final outcome is an eyebrow-raiser, with the governor deciding that in many cases state employees can delete any official email at will.

A federal judge’s decision to reopen a lawsuit brought on by Judicial Watch—in which the group asked for access to Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State—cannot be a good sign for the former First Lady’s presidential campaign.

Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders raised $1.5 million on his first official day as a candidate, and that’s more than most, if not all, top-tier Republicans raised.

WASHINGTON (AP)—The board of the Clinton Foundation said Wednesday night that it will continue accepting donations from foreign governments, but only from six nations, a move that appears aimed at insulating Hillary Rodham Clinton from controversies over the charity’s reliance on millions of dollars from abroad as she ramps up her presidential campaign.

Even after her big weekend debut, many Hillary operatives are still frustrated over her lack of specific policies and plans for her campaign, with one supporter saying, after a Sunday evening conference call, “I can’t believe I missed ‘Game of Thrones’ for this.”

Presumptive Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is on the record in regards to transparency. Unfortunately for her, a new Bloomberg item points out that’s not quite the case.

Italian and Vatican authorities have signed an agreement on taxation entailing “full cooperation” and “transparency,” including financial activities operated by entities that have accounts at the Vatican Bank.

The really dangerous development of the administrative state is that bureaucrats no longer fear the wrath of our elected representatives, many of whom are so interested in making the State bigger and richer that they’ll no longer countenance even token attempts at holding it responsible for its actions, because that would empower the people who want to make it smaller.

The president who came to office claiming he would have the most open and transparent presidency in history is now denying or slowing Freedom of Information Act requests for documents at an unprecedented rate.

Despite her team’s best attempts to bury the story of Hillary Clinton’s bizarre email deception blunder, inquiring minds still want to know what was going on in that server closet at the Clinton residence while Hillary was serving as Secretary of State. It is a situation that drives open government advocates like me up a wall. Fortunately, open government advocates are everywhere, including South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin.

Under the most transparent administration ever, when you read a news story about some blockbuster tidbit of information retrieved with a Freedom of Information Act “request,” the truth is that the information was almost always pried loose with a FOIA lawsuit. The requests don’t go anywhere, unless they’re for entirely innocuous info. Lawsuits are what penetrate the Obama stone wall, and those take a long time to resolve.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki finally admits there seems to be no record of Hillary Clinton signing form OF-109 before leaving office in 2013.

It’s not news, but the Clinton email scandal reminds us that the increasingly despotic Democrat Party thinks representative government should be done away with, replaced by a single election every four years to empower a unitary gridlock-free imperial executive. The emperor, or empress, can’t be distracted by peasants who forget their place and file Freedom of Information Act requests, either.

The California state legislature, which has relatively free rein to conduct much of its business without being scrutinized by the public, may soon have to face rules demanding greater transparency. Unlike other agencies of the state government, the Associated Press notes, which fall under the narrow umbrella of the California Public Records Act, the legislature has been constrained by the more lenient Legislative Open Records Act, which permits many of its actions to be shrouded in secrecy.

Hillary Clinton set up her obfuscation.com email account the same day as her confirmation hearings to be Secretary of State began. She intended all along to use a personal email account rather than a government one, which effectively gives her control of the historical record.