It is well past time for the media to take this issue to Federal Court. This is clearly a denial of freedom of the press under the First Amendment. Whether or not Trump, Pruitt, etc like it, the people have a right to know what their government is doing.
(I suspect that Thomas Jefferson is spinning in his grave over shit like this.)
More swamp hi-jinks…
Isn’t that how Hitler got his start?
How is Scott Pruitt to do Carl Icahn’s bidding if the press is going to have unfettered access to such events?
This is the face of the Reactionary’s way of regulating and making policy: the public and its representatives are excluded from what, essentially, become backroom deals between monied interests and the political class.
It’s so nouveau, so 1880s. Folks just gotta learn to go with the fashion.
Looks like more than democracy dies in darkness, given that these assholes appear to be discussing how many of us to kill.
The temperature on the fascism stove with the frog in the water is pegged at medium high.
They just don’t learn. Or care.
God forbid anyone KNOW WTF these greedy bastids are doing to our environment!
Look at the bright side: The reporters won’t get poisoned.
The idea that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” predates the First Amendment. I’m not clear on how you obtain the consent of the governed when you refuse to tell the governed what you are doing.
This one is easy
In a free country, information about citizens is protected by law. Information about the government is open to the public.
In a police state, information about the government is secret and he citizen’s lives are open books.
Such total information inversion is necessary to facilitate the crimes of government and to prevent those crimes from becoming public knowledge
As summed up by Al Gore
"By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. Because so long as the government’s actions are secret, they cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people must be transparent to the people. "
Just these two facts from today - that Jared Kushner has a security clearance and that the EPA is barring access to its meetings - are making me really wonder whether we will ever recover from the Trump years. It won’t take much more for me to feel that the question has been answered.
You can’t, hence the problem. Trump, Pence, Pruitt, DeVos, Zinke (to name just a few) are governing by fiat, possibly with the consent of a minority of Americans, though I doubt that they know enough to give informed consent.
The rest of us are in deep shit!
OT, but heartening:
BREAKING: NY Jets Owner: I’ll Pay The Fine If My Players Kneel
Imagine if Obama’s EPA was doing what Pruitt continues to do daily…the screams of outrage from Fox and others would be to loud to take. Fuckers. Pruitt will go down in the end, hope he is ready when BLOTUS implodes.
You beat me to it. And if the next Democratic President’s pick pulls this same shit, they better not say one fucking word. Especially FOX. NOT ONE.
Well, no more than the rest of us, anyway.