Oak Ridge National Laboratory did a great deal of ENERGY research, in one case constructed a house and tested RADIANT BARRIERS for their efficacy, creating charts and graphs about the potential energy savings in each climate zone.
It happened, that the study was printed in order to study, make notes and calculations.
There were other studies available on the Oak Ridge site to assist homeowners in making their dwellings more energy efficient, saving money, increasing comfort.
These were government studies, paid for with your tax dollars.
They simply disappeared after 9/11 in the hysteria following. WHY?
EPA had a series of libraries around the nation that provided information ON LINE, studies your tax dollars paid for. Much may have been related to chemical contamination, degradation of the environment, impacts on pollution from Dirty Coal.
Any notice that Bush/Cheney closed down access? Why?
Sure, I'll make a donation!
FOCUS: Matt Taibbi | No, Matt Yglesias: Hillary Clinton's Emails Are Our Business
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi writes: "You may never see a worse case of media Stockholm Syndrome than a recent column by Matt Yglesias at Vox, entitled, 'Against Transparency.'"
READ MORE
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Taibbi writes: "You may never see a worse case of media Stockholm Syndrome than a recent column by Matt Yglesias at Vox, entitled, 'Against Transparency.'"
READ MORE
A member of the press arguing against transparency?
ou may never see a worse case of media Stockholm Syndrome than a recent column by Matt Yglesias at Vox, entitled, "Against Transparency."
Subheaded "Government officials' email should be private, just like their phone calls," the Yglesias piece basically argues that emails shouldn't be covered by laws like the Freedom of Information Act because it's the 2010s, and it's just too darn hard to use the phone if you want to keep something secret while you're on the public payroll.
I'm sure there's no shortage of reporters lining up to take a whack at Yglesias and his treasonous column this week, so I'll keep this short:
1) Government agencies already routinely blow off FOIA requests, sometimes to the point of being cheeky about it. (I have one friend in the business who was sent a single empty fax cover sheet by a particularly obnoxious federal FOIA officer.) Presidents expand the definition of "classified" seemingly every year, and at the state level whole ranges of documents are quietly excluded from FOIA all the time. Ask the families of police brutality victims in New York about section 50-A of the civil rights code, which excludes most police records from public scrutiny. It's an enormous pain in the ass just to get officials to follow the law. And now we have a fellow journalist arguing that we don't need access to emails? Thanks a lot.
2) It's kind of not our job in the media to worry about how officials might conduct politically embarrassing conversations without the press finding out. If that's what Matt stays up at night worrying about, he might need a more news-appropriate hobby, like alcoholism.
3) If George Bush had been the subject of an email scandal, Yglesias obviously wouldn't have written this article, making this a transparently partisan piece and therefore automatically pathetic.
4) I'm a private citizen and I operate on the assumption that anything I write down could end up in a newspaper tomorrow. This is too hard for public officials? Really? They need their emails to be a safe space?
5) Yglesias writes that phone calls are "journalistically indispensable" for extended interviews but that for a "routine query or point of clarification," email is "much, much better." He adds: "Besides which, like any self-respecting person born in the 1980s, I hate phone calls." The journalists I grew up around would cane me half to death and tell me to get a new job if I ever admitted to preferring email (also known as "prepared remarks") over the telephone. It's another subject for another time, I guess.
I get that Yglesias thinks that the Clinton email/Clinton Foundation business isn't a story. But whoever heard of a reporter begging for less access? We're all losing our minds.
Contribute to RSN
No comments:
Post a Comment