Author: Buck Banks

July 4, 2005, marked the 39th anniversary of the signing into law of the Freedom of Information Act, a resource for public disclosure of government documents that has become essential to keeping the process of governance at least somewhat transparent. Though first proposed by the Democratic Party in 1956, it took a decade before the FOIA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson — one day before it would have expired in a “pocket veto” if he had not signed it.

Since then, the FOIA has been instrumental in bringing to light hundreds of thousands of documents and aiding investigations from Watergate in the 1970s to prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Cuba, today.

The FOIA has spawned “sunshine law” statutes in all 50 U.S. states, and similar access laws in other nations. Only Sweden’s freedom of information law is older than ours.

According to Interpress News Service, the law is continuing to evolve through current legislation.

Efforts to strengthen FOIA are continuing, today by an unlikely partnership of one of the U.S. Senate’s most liberal members and one of its most conservative.

The odd couple is Senator John Cornyn, a conservative Republican from Texas and Senator Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat from Maine. Amid growing complaints about delays and difficulties in obtaining information from federal agencies, the pair has put together two bills.

One would create a commission to identify ways to reduce delays in processing FOIA requests. A second would establish a way for people to track their Freedom of Information Act requests on the Internet and would establish an ombudsman to mediate disputes between agencies and requesters.

It is interesting to note that with the current administration’s tight-fisted approach to information, the number of FOIA filings has increased dramatically as U.S. citizens seek to find out what our government ius up to. A recent Government Accountability Office report noted that during George Bush’s administration, FOIA requests increased 71% from 2002 to 2004, with a 68% rise in requests processed during that period, and a 14% rise in the backlog.

While the report found that 92% of 2004 requests resulted in ”responsive records” being provided in full, it noted that many of those seeking information still must sue the government to get it.

Here is a text analysis of President Bush’s speech delivered at Fort Bragg June 28, 2005.

• The speech contained 1996 words, 928 of them different words.
• The compexity factor (lexical density) was 46.3%; readability on the Gunning-Fog Index, where 6 is easy and 20 is hard, was 8.6. On another readability scale where 100 is easy and 20 is hard, and the optimal range is 60-70, the speech scored 46.
• There were 228 sentences averaging 16.04 words; the longest sentence was 48 words: I said that America’s mission in iraq is to defeat an enemy and give strength to a friend, a free representative government that is an ally in the war on terror and a beacon of hope in a part of the world that is desperate for reform.

The top 10 words in frequency (ocurrences in parentheses):

Most frequently used three-word phrases:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks earlier this week may hold unforeseen ramifications for Pensito Review. While aimed primarily at such P-to-P products as Grokster and Napster, it appears the ruling also might impact Penster, Pensito Review’s P-to-P truth-sharing network.

Penster is the backbone of Pensito Review, providing the technological means for PR’s editors and readers to “swap” truths. For eample, Trish uncovers a truth in Florida about that rascal Jeb Bush and posts it on Pensito Review. Visitors to the PR Web site can then access that truth and comment on it, thereby “swapping” their own version of the truth with their peers.

Of course, users of Penster do not pay for the truth they access, which is where Pensito Review runs afoul of the Supremes. In the current political environment created by the Bush Administration, truth has value, and that value must be tightly controlled or the truth will become devalued.

For example, the Downing Street Memo was very valuable to the administration as long as it remained a secret. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the memo’s value has plunged precipitously, according to the administration. By allowing readers to “swap” truths using Penster, Pensito Review is contributing to the devaluation of those truths, since, according to the wingnuts in Washington, the wider truths are disseminated, the less valuable they are. Hence, the admin’s tendency to discount such truths in press briefings.

We here at Pensito Review believe that peer-to-peer truth swapping via the Penster network is protected by the First Amendment.

During the Supreme Court’s debate over the matter, constitutional expert Justice Antonin Scalia maintained that there was no express guarantee of freedom of speech in the Consitution. When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out that the First Amendment to the Constitution did guarantee freedom of speech, Scalia burst out: “Amendment? What amendment? Nobody told me there were amendments to the Consitution! Jeez!”

According to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey completed in April and May, most people in the world continue to have a low, if not downright hostile, opinion of the United States (surprise!). The poll surveyed 17,000 people in 16 countries, and found that the U.S.’s rep is even worse than its president’s approval rating here at home.

In a sign that outsourcing works, however, the study found that the U.S. was most highly regarded in India, where 71% of those polled expressed a positive opinion of the United States, compared with 54% three years ago. That was our highest rating. In the world. A full 62% of Poles think we’re okay, though.

In Europe, we’ve gained a little of the ground lost after Herr Bush started stomping on Iraq, but China actually is viewed more positively by the Europeans than the country that saved their asses in WWII. The former Axis powers of Japan and Germany, and reliable France are all more highly regarded than the United States among European countries. Even (our friends)the British and (our neighbors to the North) the Canadians have a more favorable view of those three nations than they do of America.

Most Muslim countries still hate us, of course, but extreme hostility has faded slightly, with people in some Muslim countries perceiving the U.S. as supporting democracy in the Middle East. U.S. approval ratings are 23% in Turkey and Pakistan, and 21% in Jordan.

Although European publics view China more favorably than the United States, fortunately, they are opposed to the idea of China becoming a military rival to the U.S. Majorities in every European nation — except Turkey believe China’s emergence as a military superpower would be a bad thing. In Turkey and predominantly Muslim countries, where they hate us, a majority think a Chinese challenge to American military power would be a good thing (except for all that nucular fallout — unless it fell on Turkey).

There is widespread support across every country surveyed for some country or group of countries to emerge as a military rival to the U.S. In France, 85% of respondents believe the EU or another country should emerge as a military rival to the U.S. (as long as it’s not France, of course). The United States does not agree, and wants to remain the world’s biggest bully.

When asked about their perceptions of Americans, the rest of the world gets downright personal:

In most Western countries surveyed, majorities associate Americans with the positive characteristics “honest,” “inventive” and “hardworking.” At the same time, substantial numbers also associate Americans with the negative traits “greedy” and “violent.” Canadians, who presumably have the greatest contact with Americans, agree with Europeans on the negatives, but are less likely to view Americans as honest. And Canada is the only Western nation in which a majority (53 percent) regards Americans as rude.

Muslim publics, including Indonesians, are highly critical of Americans in many respects. In particular, they are much more likely than others to view the American people as immoral. Yet people in predominantly Muslim countries also see Americans as hardworking and inventive.

The Chinese are also largely critical of Americans. They are the least likely of these 16 publics to consider Americans hardworking (44 percent) and just over a third (35 percent) see Americans as honest. A majority of Chinese associate Americans with being violent (61 percent) and greedy (57 percent). The one positive trait most Chinese associate with Americans is inventive (70 percent).

By contrast, Indians hold largely positive views of the American people. Clear majorities see Americans as inventive, hardworking and honest (86%, 81% and 58%, respectively). None of the negative traits is linked with Americans by a majority in India.

But hey, we hate ourselves, too: a large percentage of the U.S. public (70 percent) characterizes American people as greedy, and nearly half (49 percent) see their fellow countrymen as violent.

MoveOn.org is currently running a poll to see if its supporters want to back a movement to get U.S. troops out of Iraq — ASAP. The proposed campaign would support the Jones-Abercrombie resolution currently before Congress that would require Herr Bush to put together a plan by the end of 2005 for bringing home all U.S. troops from Iraq, with withdrawal beginning no later than Oct. 1, 2006.

So far, of the 103,015 people who have voted, 83.9 percent want MoveOn to move on with the Jones-Abercrombie resolution. The other 16.1 percent say that MoveOn should concentrate on other issues or should try another route to get U.S. troops home. Vote here.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, an official report from the Department of Interior’s Inspector General let stand a $120 million rip-off of the public over a land deal in Florida. In 2002, the Department of the Interior paid that sum to the Collier family (Collier County is named for the family patriarch, Baron Collier) for its gas and oil holdings in the Big Cypress National Preserve, located on the western edge of the Everglades.

Because the Collier clan are in tight with both Jeb and George, they qualified for a sum that was more than 12 times the amount the supposed energy holdings were actually worth. The BIG buyout was announced at a May 2002 White House ceremony intended to bolster the Bush bros’ environmental creds. It is notable that no significant oil or gas reserves have ever been found in Florida, mainly because it is formed primarily of oolitic limestone and spent most of the last hundred million years under water.

The nearly three-year investigation did find that Interior Secretary Gale Norton placed one of her top aides, Ann Klee (now the General Counsel for the EPA) in charge of closing the deal but made no other mention of Norton except to “commend” her for actions taken after another, similar land exchange scandal in Utah. Instead, Earl Devaney, the Interior Inspector General, repeatedly cited unnamed “political appointees” or vague forces. One key but typical passage of the IG report reads as follows:

“Exploiting a combination of public policy, politics, and environmentalism, which was being fueled by the demoralization of career DOI employees, at one extreme, and synchophantical enabling, at the other, [Collier Resources Company] took complete advantage of a negotiating environment weighted heavily in its favor.”

PEER noted that beside the enormous payout, the deal also ran counter to President Bush’s drive to increase energy production on public lands and the administration’s moratorium on parkland purchases.

Congress has yet to appropriate the dough, though, so the deal’s still in limbo.

Taking my cue from CPB chairman Ken Tomlinson, I have conducted an independent, fair and balanced investigation into Pensito Review’s content and I am herewith prepared to make my findings public for the first time.

Pensito Review has been infected by LIBERAL BIAS. Indeed, my exhaustive investigation has failed to turn up a single article or link that could be construed to be the least bit CONSERVATIVE. Double-indeed, the contributors of Pensito Review, as well as its readers who post comments, appear to be consistently atheistic gender-bending commies who hate everything that Americans hold near and dear, and they don’t have any respect for elected politicians or the God-based traditions that have made this country great.

Just look at the way they pick on Gov. Arnold and Gov. Jeb, how often they employ incendiary and inflammatory rhetoric, how snarky and sarcastic they are, how often they use words like “wingnut” and “Repugs” to describe those whose political beliefs they eschew.

Granted, I, too, am a contributor to Pensito Review, but I can put aside my LIBERAL BIAS and evaluate the Weblog with PURE OBJECTIVITY. Plus, I would be willing (for an honorarium of just $20k) to appear before a wingnut Congressional witch-hunting committee and testify about my study of the content of Pensito Review.

For a few dollars more, I’ll even name names (sorry, Jon and Trish).

David Horowitz, the former left-wing nutjob turned right-wing nutjob, is crusading for a movement to, in his words, “increase academic freedom” on college and university campuses. Unfortunately for academia, Horowitz’ inversion of “freedom” means that professors would be forced to teach “serious alternative theories” (read: creationism) that might conflict with their own beliefs.

It’s worth noting that Jeb Bush has endorsed Horowitz, calling him a “fighter for freedom.” That should give you some idea of where Horowitz is on the wingnut spectrum.

As always, Florida is the incubator for new political movements, and is right in the vanguard of the “academic freedom” movement:

Horowitz recently lent his support to Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley’s (R-Ocala) Academic Freedom Bill of Rights. Rep. Baxley’s legislation, which in late-March passed out of the House Choice and Innovation Committee by an 8-to-2 vote (the only two Democrats on the committee voted against it) was a broad assault on academic freedom. Allegedly aimed at leveling the playing field for so-called beleaguered conservatives on the state’s campuses, the devil was clearly in the details.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,'” Rep. Baxley maintained.

A Florida university professor countered Baxley’s claims:

“For a biologist for whom evolution is no more a theory than is the law of gravity, to have to present ‘alternative’ religiously-oriented or inspired views would be contrary to his very understanding of the scientific method. That would be comparable to Galileo being forced to recant his scientific observations that the earth revolved around the sun, and not the opposite as ordained by the Church.”

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, students who felt their views were disrespected in the classroom or thought they were singled out for “public ridicule” by their professors would have the right to sue them and the university.

During the debate over the Baxley bill, opponents argued that allowing students to sue their professors would create chaos in the classroom and force judges to determine what might or might not be academically appropriate.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, Rep. Baxley decided to join Horowitz’s crusade after he “attended a conservative conference in St. Louis last summer where Horowitz spoke about academic freedom. The message struck a chord [and] … after talking to Horowitz,” he introduced his bill in the Florida Legislature.

While Rep. Baxley’s bill ultimately failed to garner enough support this legislative session, its introduction signaled the beginning of a battle in Florida that could go on for a number of years and eventually result in a future law.

Besides Florida, 13 other states have introduced some type of “academic freedom” legislation, including California, Maine, Colorado and Minnesota.

Editor & Publisher quotes an Annenberg poll that found that 40 percent of respondents consider Bill O’Reilly a journalist while only 30 percent consider Bob Woodward a journalist. Blowhard wingnut Rush Limbaugh was considered by 27 percent to be a journalist, and one in five consider right-wing baseball fan George Will one.

The results gave Limbaugh an opportunity to spout more nonsense:

Limbaugh said Monday he was “not really surprised” by the results showing a quarter of Americans would describe him as a journalist. The conservative talk show host said, “I am America’s anchorman, doing news play-by-play 15 hours a week for nearly 17 years now, and this is just more evidence that the old media’s monopoly-like dominance is finished.”

Annenberg also polled journalists, whose responses were quite different:

Only 3% of journalists said Limbaugh was “somewhat close” to being a journalist and 11% said that about O’Reilly, while 93% said Woodward was “somewhat close or very close” to being a journalist.

With masterful understatement, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said the poll results suggest the public defines the word “journalist” far differently than those in the press define it.

Duh!