Guest opinion: Government openness ensures the consent of the governed – billingsgazette.com
By JOHN CORNYN, R-Texas
U.S. Senator

Just last month, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a longtime champion of open government at the federal level, and I joined forces to introduce the OPEN (Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National) Government Act of 2005, to strengthen and enhance our federal open government laws. It has been nearly a decade since Congress has approved major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And the Senate Judiciary Committee has not convened an oversight hearing to monitor compliance with FOIA since 1992. So this week, I will chair a Senate hearing to examine needed improvements to our open government laws. …

After all, open government is not a Republican or a Democrat issue; it is an American issue. Indeed, the bill is supported by a broad coalition of open government advocates and organizations across the ideological spectrum.

Open government is a fundamental principle of our democracy. As President Lincoln once said, “No man is good enough to govern another without that person’s consent”-and of course, consent is meaningless if it is not informed consent. For that very reason, the cause of open government is as American as our commitment to constitutional democracy.
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Track S.394 OPEN Governement Act

Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The “reporter” covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department’s office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed HUNDREDS of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration’s efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source. …

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

One Christian feeling hijacked by politics By Gena Caponi Tabery

I live in a country that is increasingly eager to challenge its citizens’ loyalty, among people of faith increasingly determined to dispute the faith of others. Some people who call themselves Christians – and some church leaders – are beginning to redefine Christianity in such a way as to exclude worshipers with whom they disagree. I fear a religion in which ideology is more important than theology.

If someone – like me – who has worshiped as a Christian for more than 50 years suddenly feels afraid of the extremes of that religion – what must it be like for those of different beliefs, or of unbelief? …

If I question political decisions, am I un-American? If I don’t agree with a fundamentalist, am I un-Christian? …

Nowadays, so many people are looking for a fight. I’m not. Neither am I afraid to pray in public. But I am afraid of my faith being hijacked to promote someone else’s political agenda. I am afraid of my faith being used as a weapon in a crusade against anyone who dares to think or believe differently. … I don’t want to be mistaken for a hijacker

alibi . march 3 – 9, 2005
A Culture of Secrecy
What has happened to the principle that American democracy should be accessible and transparent?
By Charles Lewis

For the most part, there is little appetite for investigative journalism. For the “suits” who control what we read, see and hear, besides potentially alienating the political power structure against their own company or industry, thereby possibly jeopardizing millions of dollars in future profits, this edgy enterprise journalism is not efficient or cost-effective. It simply takes too much time, requires too much money and incurs too many legal and other risks. Forget whether or not this is fair or accurate, or relevant given the civic obligation broadcasters and publishers have to the communities they ostensibly serve. It simply is, and it helps to explain why today we have so little independent, critical reporting and why instead we are mostly fed a steady diet of pap from morning to night.

The problem is made worse by the presence of brilliant communications tacticians in the White House who cleverly frame their controversial policy agendas, setting up the class’s stenography assignment for the day with bold, positive names: “No Child Left Behind,” the “USA Patriot Act,” the “Clear Skies” environmental policy, the “Healthy Forests Initiative.” Needless to say, such Orwellian word ploys–exacerbated by largely docile, straight news coverage–slip devilishly into common usage, leaving the public ill-equipped, unprotected and vulnerable to breathtaking, unabashed manipulation.
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Lewis, a former TV news producer, founded The Center for Public Integrity in 1990

alibi . march 3 – 9, 2005
The Death of Fiscal Conservatism
Republicans can cut taxes. They just can’t stop spending.
By Greg Payne

The first three years of the Bush administration saw a 21 percent increase in non-defense spending — and that’s before the costs of the prescription drug benefit kick in. By contrast, Ronald Reagan oversaw a 6.8 percent increase during his first three years in office while that liberal scoundrel Bill Clinton had federal spending decrease 0.7 percent during a similar time frame. …

There was a time once—at least I think there was—when the Republican Party honestly considered itself a political force for limited government and fiscal restraint. That’s what folks like Ronald Reagan said the party stood for, anyway. …

The era of fiscal conservatism is over—political bullshit … aside. Some might think that’s great news. But who would’ve thought a conservative approach to spending would be the one thing Republicans could actually manage to cut out of government?

Our Godless Constitution

by BROOKE ALLEN

[from the February 21, 2005 issue]

It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best–and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him–is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration’s current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton’s flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of “foreign aid”; according to another, he simply said “we forgot.” But as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the “only Heaven knows” sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the famous line about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: “In God We Trust” did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, “The Battle Over the Pledge,” April 5, 2004]. …

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation between church and state.” John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans–the fundamentalists of their day–would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast.” …

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists–that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.”

[read the whole article — it’s worth your time]

Online NewsHour: President Bush Ends European Trip with Meeting With Russian President Vladimir Putin — February 24, 2005

Bush: “[D]emocracies have certain things in common; they have a rule of law, and protection of minorities, a free press, and a viable political opposition.”

Consortiumnews.com

Bush also portrayed himself as a good example of a political leader who can’t get away with hiding his mistakes.

“I live in a transparent country,” Bush said. “I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open [!!!] and people are able to call people [like] me to account, which many out here do on a regular basis. … I’m perfectly comfortable in telling you, our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity.”

One Russian questioner challenged Bush on the issue of press freedom, apparently referring to pressure that Bush’s conservative supporters have brought to bear on U.S. news organizations to oust journalists who have criticized Bush.

“Why don’t you talk a lot about violation of rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired?” the questioner asked.

Bush responded with a joke, which played to the U.S. journalists in the room.

“Do any of you all still have your jobs?” Bush joshed….