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Rachel Maddow finds herself in the middle of an over-reach by a conservative group. She has found that she is the subject of a FOIA request at 3 state universities.
Maddow is quoted in the Huffington Post:
The latest incarnation of this breed of conservatism weirdly involves this show,” Maddow said. As she described it, a conservative think tank in Michigan called the Mackinac Center submitted a FOIA request seeking any emails from labor professors at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Michigan State University. The center demanded any email that includes the words “Scott Walker,” “Wisconsin,” “Madison,” and “Maddow.”
Maddow said she thought that the Center’s interest in her was due to her highlighting of a controversial bill in the state that seeks to allow the state government to declare a financial emergency in a town and send in an unelected official who can actually dissolve the town.
“This show was the first national news outlet to report in detail on that policy, and now, the Mackinack [sic] Center is demanding the emails of anybody who could be an expert on that subject who might have the temerity to type the word ‘Maddow’ in any context in an email,” Maddow said. “How’s that leave me alone personal liberty thing working out for you?”
First of all, can the Mackinac Center do this? Sure. The bottom line is that the computers are owned by the state. They could also do the same thing to students. The question becomes what kind of pissing contest do they really want to get in. Scott Walker and is ilk were ushered in by people who valued personal liberties. This behavior is direct intrusion into other people’s business.
College and university professors, instructors, and students have generally enjoyed a great deal of academic freedom with very little interference. To target those who have mentioned those words is intimidation and comes close to being a first amendment violation. It continues the war on public employees. Make no mistake. It is a war and it is on all public employees, in particular, those who are educators.
The Mackinac Center and the Scott Walkerites will not win. He and other governors like him have already had serious drops in the polls. Once again they overstepped their bounds. Americans don’t like what they saw.
How long will it take before they are out of office? Extremists always screw up. They are so certain of their own rightness that they invariably overstep until many who put them in office have buyer’s regret. It’s only a matter of time.
Depends. If these governors manage to start bringing state budgets into balance and improve the economic prospects in their individual states, Rachel may need some tabasco sauce to make her words taste better. BTW, I heard today that the public employee unions are planning to bring a 1000 or so union members to Albany to do a sleep-in at the NY capitol building. Protest against that new “extremist” governor they’ve got up there.
@Wolverine
They will do what they have to do. Surely you have noticed that there is a war on public employees, in particular the education wing of that sector? Why are these governors trying to balance the budgets on the backs of these people? That is the question that needs answering. You don’t take collective bargaining away. Changes can be made for future retirees. Finding out that you aren’t going to have some benefit when you are 35 is a whole lot different that having the rung jerked out from under you at 55.
The people up there don’t make nearly as much as eduators in Virginia, even in the poorer areas.
Where would reporters be expected to get info on labor laws, movements, and history? Wouldn’t labor departments in universities in heavily union states be a good source? What better way to try to squelch the info than by trying to ferret out the sources and quiet or intimidate them.
I think a person would have to be brain-dead to think that the current Republican party really cares for personal liberty. It’s a good sales pitch, but, as Maddow points out, it isn’t reality. Women’s reproductive rights and public employees’ rights to organize are just a couple of the latest battles the Republican Party has rushed to wage. I guess we all need that strict nanny to make us all adhere to the proper moral, ethical, economic code.
I think the war on public employees comes from jealousy – and, of course, the ever-present need for a scapegoat. Conservative Republicans thought we all should be responsible for ourselves – our own retirement, our own homes, our own families and finances. We were supposed to save for our retirement by investing ourselves – we could make more money that way – and not relying on SS or other government plans. Reality has a way of slapping people in the face occasionally and the dive in the stock market, the burst bubble in the housing market, the stagnation in wages, and aging coincided to give all those “self sufficient” people a kick in the teeth. Too many people realized that they didn’t have the one or two million dollars set aside to live a relatively comfortable middle class life in their golden years. They’d been sold a bill of goods as surely as the November “personal liberty” voters had been.
@Censored
Standing ovation!!!!
Yep, reality is sure a wake up call. Hope it avoids many here, but it sure might change some of the conversation 🙄
Mh- you’re going to have to teach me another one…
That personal liberty thing is just fine. This is not government overreach. These are private entities using FOIA requests to get information. Guess what? This happens TO conservatives too. If it was the gov’t. they would need warrants.
Private emails? This is a FOIA request meaning it’s directed only at the emails he’s sent/recieved via his government email address. How is this a violation of his personal liberty?
@Juturna
colon evil colon and colon twisted colon
I hear this is pretty good for twisted colons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiz42ffF3tY
FOIA’s include related business that may be transacted on your personal computers.
evil 👿
twisted 😈
Juturna, I sent you the secret code sheet.
Yup. And I think that’s what got Ms. Palin into a heap of problems.. But, its government business…stuff taxpayers pay for and done on thier behalf. So, how is this a private civil liberties issue?
Ms. Maddow needs a lesson on FOIA.
Did Maddow say what they did was illegal? I don’t recall that.
No one is disputing that it CAN be done.
O.K., Moon, let’s hit a couple of points here:
(1) You have presented a video showing Rachel Maddow at her absolute misleading best, which sort of tells me that she considers her left-of-center audience to have just fallen off the proverbial turnip truck. She uses as her underlying theme a law which was designed to allow private citizens to gain access through legal means to documents created by their own representative government and which had hitherto been denied to them by that same government. Then she tries to make it look like use of that law by a private entity which she ideologically opposes is somehow an exercise in “big government” and a betrayal of conservative principles. Right, Rachel. And please put a topping of green cheese from the moon on my pizza.
Balderdash. A typical Maddow farce all the way. FOIA was in large part a response from the left-of-center to the misdeeds of such as J. Edgar Hoover. It was signed into law by LBJ and saw its greatest expansion under Clinton after a long battle over whether the FOIA should cover things like intelligence, military, and other ultra-sensitive information. It has now come to be accepted by most as a tool for the citizens to KEEP BIG GOVERNMENT HONEST. So, Maddow tries to put a reverse twist on the concept when that law is used by a private organization not of her liking to seek information from three universities which are governmentally controlled organizations and the staffers of which are employed by a government entity. Maddow is full of tortured BS. It is quite o.k. for organizations and individuals of the Left to use that law, but if the opposition tries to use it…whoeeee.
(2) I have been a public employee my entire adult life. So has Mrs. W. Are you trying to tell me that public employees in general have suddenly gone from a position of high respect to one of being intentionally demeaned? Hah! Ever hear of common citizen expressions such as “You can’t fight city hall!” or “bureaucratic red tape”? Public employees have been the object of a certain level of anger since the first Cro-Magnon decided to levy a leg of mammoth tax on anyone who wanted to sleep in the common cave. Citizen complaints about the bureaucrats, rightly or wrongly, have always been a part of that territory and always will be. You yourself just posted a thread in which people are complaining that social services did not respond to their previous warnings about mistreated children. So, I ask you. What else is new in the citizen vs bureaucrat thing?
Except that maybe the public employee unions got much more power over the past few decades than anyone ever suspected they would. Now we have added to the normal citizen vs bureaucrat tension some public employee unions who often appear to be bullies and, on occasion, downright thugs. And then there is that talk about certain unions having virtually open door access to the Oval Office paid for by electoral donations and agitprop — sort of Kochian in a sense, one might say. Sounds to me like a recipe for a good dustup, especially in the midst of very real fiscal stress. Kettle and pot, only the kettle is now pissed off because the pot finally decided to fight back. How dare those pots be so brash, I ask you?!!
(3) On the teacher thing I can go part of the way down the road with you. In my lifetime respect for public school teachers has been something usually kept apart from the normal citizen angst over public employees in general. However, I also think that the whole education thing got muddled up by the NEA; and I know a lot of people on the Right who still try to jump through all kinds of hoops to separate their feelings about teachers from their feelings about the NEA and the education bureaucrats. All of this in the midst of a strong feeling that the educational system in general is failing us — not because of the teachers but despite everything many of those teachers try to do. In my opinion, teachers got caught up in the current fiscal fight largely because of the visibility of the strongest union supporters among them. Ergo, I believe the claim that teachers per se are being disrespected as a group is a tad overdrawn and based largely on the stupid comments made by the kind of whackjobs you find on the edges of all organizations and then rebroadcast ad nauseum as if that represented the common opinion. I will admit that the teachers are getting pulled into a larger argument over the growing fiscal burden of education on the taxpayer. In my county you are talking over 70% of the total budget for education and the remainder of county funds subject to mad scrambles by everybody else in the public sector. But even then the wrath of the citizenry seems to be aimed at the top heavy educational administration and shenanigans over the cost of buying land and building one new school after another. Aimed at teachers just a bit at times as a sort of collateral damage but not nearly so much, in my opinion.
@Wolverine who said:
Yes. Where have you been?
I would rewatch the video to see what Rachel is really saying about being FOIA’ed. Why does anyone need to know when and if her name is mentioned?
Do you not see any of this as an abuse of the FOIA?
I only address NEA in Virginia because that is the only place I know anything about the organization. It has no power in Virginia because there is no collective bargaining or strike. I still see the disrespect so lets just say that NEA thing doesn’t hold water. VEA and PWEA all have my respect.
Marin, no one is disputing that they can FOIA. But why would they want to? Do you not see it as harrassment?
On a college campus, private email is treated very differently than say in a K-12 system. Students have private email accounts and staff and faculty often use their school accounts for private email. It is part of the culture of most universities, mainly because separating work and personal is often blurred at that level.
If I worked for PWC I would never do anything personal in email. If I worked for George Mason, I would view it differently because acceptable use policies are so very different.
But yes they can do it. It doesn’t make it right though.
To those who took issue with my words, ‘big government overreach,’ you are exactly right. I didn’t realize I had said that. It was NOT over reach by big govt. It was over reach by a conservative think tank. Sorry. I have made the correction.
I do these threads at weird hours. Sometimes that isn’t a good thing.
Moon, to be quite candid about this, there always seems to be some claims of “overreach” which surface whenever anybody, Left or Right, uses the FOIA to gain access to certain kinds of government information. Appears to me to depend on what ideological or political horse you favor in a particular race, so to speak. Personally, I have simply made up my mind that FOIA is here to stay and that any bureaucrat with brains ought to keep that in mind when applying fingers to keyboard. Be honest and candid but remember that some judge could always decide that your e-mail can be released legally to the private sector. Actually not a bad idea when it comes right down to it. Keeps a lot of crap out of government traffic. And, if you don’t like the idea that the people who pay you might someday be able to read what you write, go find a job in the private sector where they would have to get a criminal warrant, not just submit an FOIA request.
And that would be if you were suspected of criminal activity. I am not opposed to FOIA if used correctly. Its purpose is shine light on things. However, what good would it do a private think tank to see all emails involving the world Maddow?
Filling a FOIA request is time consuming. Any time an employee is involved in pulling specific FOIA requests, it can involve thousands of hours and then that employee is not doing the job he or she was hired to do.
Very often FOIA is used for gottcha purposes. We had a lot of that going on here, to the point we nicknamed a certain someone ” The FOIA Queen.”
I just don’t see the point in the situation Maddow reported. It seemed like a huge waste of time and money.
Historically, or as historical as one can get with internet, college and universities have had very liberal acceptable use policies. This probably has to do with the fact that all the folks involved are adults. Additionally, students are all using the same system. Therefore, it is totally different than a public k-12 school.
Anyone CAN do what the think tank did. The question is, why? Hopefully they had to pay for their services.
Can’t answer any of that. I would have to see the rationale presented in the FOIA request. Haven’t see anything like that yet. I’ll check around.
Gave it a cursory check. Neither the requester nor the recipients are making public what the actual FOIA request says. Michigan has a very tough FOIA law which expands on the federal law. The Mackinac Center claims that they send out about 1000 FOIA requests per year under that law, and the universities in question seem to get such requests frequently from many different inquirers. Looks like those universities are intent upon handling it in just the same way they handle all others — and they are covered by that Michigan law. They are saying that the scope of the request may bring up a whole lot of extraneous material, especially at MSU, where they actually teach collective bargaining. Other than that, it doesn’t look like the end of the world is coming here. Sorry, Rachel. No cigar. Shoot, the Mackinac Center once got a successful FOIA for every school district in the state. Apparently Michigan takes FOIA pretty seriously. Never knew that before. I’ve been away a long time.
Why is this group wasting time and money?
These colleges and universities probably have an entire fleet of workers just to answer FOIA requests over things that really don’t need to be answered.
I see nothing wrong with teaching collective bargaining. It isn’t a bad word.
Curiosity question– I wonder if it is taught at any Virginia schools?
@Moon-howler
Reply to #19. Why would they want to use FOIA? To get a look at public documents maintained and created by public employees and officials. It’s a right of the public to have access to that information and it’s not my business to say if it’s a waste of time or not. They have that right to request the information.
Do I see it as harassment? Do I see what as harassment? To have the government accountable to it’s citizens? To have public employees that work for the public actually follow the law? For the citizens to have a “check” on the work and dealings of government? No. Why *would* it be harassment?
The requestor is also under no general obligation to say what they want to do with the data.
I think Wolverine did a bang up job of explaining FOIA and why Ms. Maddow is way off base and needs to fire her researchers.
FOIA is a tool of the citizens to keep government honest. I’m not sure why you have heartburn here on it’s use.
It is also a tool that can be used to harass and bully people who are elected or who work in the public domain. Obviously you have never seen it used like that. I have. It can definitely be a gotcha.
Have you stopped to assess how much a nuisance FOIA request costs the taxpayers? If you truly want to cut down on waste, this is a place to start your search.
How can it be harassment if it’s their job to provide that information? What about transparent government accountable to the people?
Have you ever tried to file your own FOIA? Ever been rejected for unlawful reasons? Ever had to file multiple times to try and get one nugget of information that’s being hidden because it may embarass someone in “power”? Ever get a “bill” for that FOIA request to try and intimidate you from filing? It cuts both ways.
Frankly, if these people want to keep thier PUBLIC jobs they better darn well DO THEM. And that means complying with the LAW.
In response to your question about the cost of FOIA.. the cost would be reduced if public employees actually did thier jobs and ANSWERED the response the first time.
Here’s an example of a FOIA that you might actually support.. maybe. I’m still puzzled by your responses.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-01/foreign-banks-tapped-fed-s-lifeline-most-as-bernanke-kept-borrowers-secret.html
Separate data disclosed in December on temporary emergency- lending programs set up by the Fed also showed big foreign banks as borrowers. Six European banks were among the top 11 companies that sold the most debt overall — a combined $274.1 billion — to the Commercial Paper Funding Facility.
…
Those programs also loaned tens of billions of dollars to each of the biggest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley.
…
The Fed released the documents after court orders upheld FOIA requests filed by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and News Corp.’s Fox News Network LLC. In all, the Fed was ordered to release more than 29,000 pages of documents, covering the discount window and several Fed emergency-lending programs established during the crisis from August 2007 to March 2010.
With all of Ms. Maddows anger at some conservative group for daring to use FOIA against a public university.. I don’t see MSNBC trying to get information about who the Fed gave a crapton of taxpayer dollars to.