Breaking Government News
"The General Services Administration announced that it has delivered on a promise to use Web 2.0 technology to give citizens electronic access to government information. The USA.gov Web site now is offering a governmentwide news feed service and a gallery of gadget applications.... "Additions to the USA.gov Web site include the Government News Aggregator, which is designed to use RSS feeds to deliver news and information from across the federal government." -- Feds' Web site gets Web 2.0 makeover, By Sharon Gaudin, Computer World, January 27, 2009.
- Breaking Government News, USA.gov. "Breaking news from the U.S. government."
- Government Gadget Gallery. USA.gov. "You can embed these gadgets in personalized home pages, blogs, and other sites."
New FOIA Requesting Guide from the National Security Archive
The National Security Archive has released a new guide, Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone. Its aim is to provide “comprehensive overview of how to obtain documents from federal executive branch agencies.” It is divided into six chapters and all of them are available online in PDF format. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 8
With the House voting on the Obama's economic recovery today, and the Senate taking up its consideration in the coming two week, I go back to my earlier themes about Talking Back to Democracy. Somehow, someway -- if libraries want to maintain any kind of relevance in this whitewater churn of rapid economic and political change -- we are going to have to embrace some kind of proactive stance to put the importance of government information in front of our communities every day, week, month. Not enough institutions are "connecting the dots" for people out there....libraries (and especially government information librarians) do this. See you on Day 9. Continue reading
Bush War on Terror Memos
ProPublica has a very nice page listing Bush Administration memos that dealt with the "War on Terror." The list is annotated and has links to those that are public and lists those that are still secret.
- The Missing Memos, by Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver, ProPublica, January 28, 2009.
The Bush administration’s "war on terror"—including its controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping—was all underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration chose to keep many others secret, citing security and confidentiality concerns. The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting a list of the relevant memos, both public and secret.Continue reading
Bush White House Web Site Archive
The George W. Bush Presidential Library web site has what they describe as a '"snapshot" of the Whitehouse.gov web site [of the George W. Bush administration]. This is historical material, "frozen in time." The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.'
The Bush Record page has the publications A Charge Kept: The Record of the Bush Presidency 2001–2009 and Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush and 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record. Continue reading