Karl Rove's Audacious Transparency Hypocrisy

[n2doc]

The Bush official's dark-money group, Crossroads GPS, gets into the transparency game. Seriously?!

— By David Corn

Wed Mar. 23, 2011 8:51 AM PDT

Karl Rove's dark-money political operation has uncovered a major piece of what it's calling "breaking news": Elizabeth Warren, the White House aide in charge of assembling the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, once "made time for dinner" with me. Alert the blogosphere! Send out the tweets! Launch an investigation!

But there's a slight problem with this supposed scoop: there was no such dinner. Nor a lunch. Not even a breakfast, or a snack.

Crossroads GPS, a non-profit co-founded by Rove that runs attack ads against Democratic candidates nationwide, has initiated an intriguing project called Wikicountability.org. This wiki site aims to post information on the Obama administration obtained by organizations, individuals, and journalists (via the Freedom of Information Act) and offer all these documents for crowd-sourcing. With this move, Rove's outfit is aligning itself with the transparency movement. Its press release announcing the site declares:

The new initiative is designed to make federal departments and agencies more accountable to the public. Groups and individuals will be able to upload their own FOIA requests and responses to the website, creating a national clearinghouse for data concerning the Obama Administration. Thousands of pages of information from the Departments of Labor and HHS have already been uploaded to the site, and Crossroads is encouraging other groups and individuals to upload their own FOIA information to the site as well.

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http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/karl-rove-crossroads-gps-david-corn