Want a Job in the 'Obama Government'? Kiss Any Privacy or Personal Life (Past and Future) Goodbye

Any bloggers or political activists out there foolishly thinking they had a shot at a substantial job in the Barack Obama uber-government, think again.

It looks like you have to bare your life and soul in order to ensure there is never the slightest personal embarrassment or revelation that might make Obama look bad.

It is most interesting that Obama wants potential administration officials, appointees, etc. to bare far more than Obama was ever himself willing to reveal in his quest for the top job in the land.

One also has to wonder if the likes of Rahm Emanuel and other top Obama cronies could ever themselves bear up to such scrutiny...or more importantly, if they must do so like everyone else being anally-probed in hopes of working for Obama.

I can understand ferreting out conflicts of interest in business, employment, or personal dealings.

But really, this seems quite excessive. C'mon...text messages? instant messages? personal diaries?

Given such depth of probing it seems more about protecting Obama's administration from anyone with a diverging viewpoint, now or ever, than about protecting the public interest.

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps. Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says.

This one seems quite ominous and invasive :

Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

I love this one :

The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”

Just in case the previous 62 questions do not ferret out any potential controversy, the 63rd is all-encompassing: “Please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect.”

The answer could duplicate the response to Question 8: “Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.”

It is quite disturbing that not only how but even just whether you (or a family member) exercised your 1st or 2nd Amendment rights now appears to be the possible stuff of litmus tests for government service under Obama.

Call me suspicious, but I doubt the Obama Stasi will ever reveal to anyone why they were really rejected (such as owning a firearm or having dared write a blog post critical of Barack Obama).

Sorry, my Obamabot friends, but this smacks of groundwork for the type of ideological and loyalty pogroms we so disgustingly saw from the Bush administration, even reaching the Justice Department.

Of course, Clintonistas of the ilk now running Obama's show (Podesta, Emanuel) are well versed at exercising such raw power over sensitive personal information, as they see fit in service to their ends.

Undoubtedly the true reasons, if not all reasons, for an applicant's rejection will be concealed from them ["Don't call us, we'll call you."]...but only after they have bared their souls and the most personal and sensitive data about themselves to the Obamapparatchicks.

Of course, the Obama Thought Gestapo know they can get away with it.

Who's to stop them?

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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