Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
 - H. L. Mencken

 Judges & lawyers have the power to kill us, to jail us, take all of our shit & commit our lives to slavery to pay off alimony & taxes. This is good enough reason to make the process of creating laws absolutely transparent.  Right now congress at the national level & state & municipal  imitations of such illustrate H.L. Mencken’s quote above.  

By absolutely transparent I mean:

1. No law of any kind should be offered for final signature without at least 1 month of public review & explanation.  It must be posted on the Internet in final form in sufficient time before signature for the following review process. Have you ever noticed that the law moves slowly when you are asking for redress? It costs a lot to get a lawyer to help you thread your way through the arcane processes? There is no hurry on that side. Congress must take that as a big fat clue & make changes to the process. If the votes only exist to pass a bill in one infinitesimal moment then that is a big fat clue that something is wrong.
2. Every member of a voting body must read the bill and add comments on the value & purpose of the bill.  If they are not capable of doing this they must be impeached & recalled or removed. 
3. Every bill must stand on it’s own & not be a conglomeration of revisions & changes to bills that are already too big & too complex to understand.
4. No bill should be originated or come up before congress until a sufficient number of the members of the public interact with their representatives supporting the idea. Congress must not just start writing laws on their own.
5. All bills must have a cause & effect analysis illustrating what the real outcomes of the law create; including the effects on the budget & the taxpayer.
6. The rules of the House & Senate must be reviewed & revised to make common sense & such revisions must adhere to the above 5 points.
7. The rules of the elections must be revised so that self-interest & the bread & circuses effect is but one third of the equation.  I’m still working on this one [see: tags threefoldness] .
8. If I were a tea party person I would demand that the above be written in the charter or platform of any candidate seeking my vote.  Failure is no option & impeachment would be the results if a candidate lied while signing his committment.
9. .... TBD (Your thoughts welcome!) One idea is that every person clerk or otherwise should make their names & contact id available so that we know who actually wrote the langueage of the law.  Another idea is that laws & bills are just the first step after that comes what the executive branch euphamistically calles regulations & administration.  How one is translated into the other must also become transparent.  Another idea is that Congress & politicians in general are not going to do this on their own; thus removing their power & purse strings & thus job security.  I suggest that we keep removing them from office until they implement such rules & keep repealing their laws at each subsequent election until such transparency has been achieved!
10. People are innately good inside & want to work for a living & share what they have in a self-respecting manner.  Funny, our governments don’t believe that do they? M$M & the power hungry create the society we see.
11. Require all campaign stops & speeches be required public & "on the record".

FYI, what more proof do we need?

I reiterate from 9027 the debacle from the Federal Reserve:

The only way to get us there is to vote out the bad guys continuously & privatize the functions of government so that there is nothing for bureaucrats to do & then fire them. Unless you want something like the French Revolution or this for government fuckups & those that betray the public trust:

TRANSPARENT! I don't know what you mean by open government.  Wikileaks is a criminal enterprise. Until we get rid of wars there will be a need for classified information & intelligence collection.  Right before our eyes here shit is going on with our money that must be stopped. Congress, itself, is another criminal enterprise. They create blank checks & the public can't figure out where the money goes. They write extremely complicated laws without reading them & then leave it to unelected regulators to make things up as they go.  We need to separate money from government & government from our money!

Getting closer to the people who represent us in government is another answer. Letters & emails don't seem to work. 14086 gives some clues on the numbers. Tea parties & the notion of an adhocracy mentioned in that item are also good ideas.

Terrorism? Wikileaks discloses a poison pill.  It certainly doesn't show up as a well-reasoned, consciencious display of ethical behavior, IMHO. 

If you are for Wikileaks you are for anarchy! Give me a BREAK!

Why don't you throw the word binary around for effect, eh?

Well your sentence "If you are for Wikileaks, you are for arnarchy" is false.  It is false not only because the propositions "[Seth] for Wikileaks" and "[Seth] for arnarchy" are not sufficiently defined, but also because they are not suffiently corrolated.  "It is not a binary choice" is just my simple and succinct way of saying all of that.  In other words the situation is not one of those kinds of situations where we can usefully apply the kind of logic you attempted to apply ... the situation is far more nuanced.  Your snip judgment offends my comprehension of that far more interesting and nuanced situation.

Nuances is where the lies hide.  Wow, something is so complex that the average citizen can't understand it so we, the government will tell you what to think & believe & what it all means. What is so nuanced that you can't see that Assange is self-aggrandizing & doesn't mind releasing classied information for his own benefits & is behaving quite openly like an anarchist.

From the Wikipedia:

Anarchy (from Greek: ἀναρχίᾱ anarchíā, "without ruler") may refer to any of the following:

• "No rulership or enforced authority."[1]
• "A social state in which there is no governing person or group of people, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder)."[2]
• "Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."[3]
• "Absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any given sphere."[4]
• "Acting without waiting for instructions or official permission... The root of anarchism is the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this." [5]

Pressure from the public is through the VOTE, not lawlessness. If you like lawlessness there are probably openings & opportunities in Afganistan & Somalia. The rule of law is slow but could speed up if we got the money out of the equation. 

Where are all those progressives who threw a hissie-fit (& conducted a witch-hunt in the Bush Administration) about the Valerie Plame being outed as a CIA operative by Armitage to a now dead reporter Robert Novak ? I wonder if Assange threatens to out CIA operatives if he will be prosecuted?

I wonder if we can force Obama to produce his real birth certificate or lack of one! I wonder if there are any wikileaks (wicki-pee) emails in the cache that weigh in on that situation.

That's not why they classify information.  Go look up the meaning of the the 3 major military classifications: Secret, Top Secret & Confidential & their relation to damage that can be done to the country.

Show me something you can't do within the law & by voting & legal political action.

... get the government officials to stop classifying information just because it is embarrassing to them.

Well, yes, that is not why they are supposed to classify information.  But that is why they do classify information.  Take a good look at the kind of information leaked and then tell me if that is really damaging the security of country, or more just damaging to the reputation of government officials.

The facts are that you know nothing about classified information except what you read in blogs & the newspaper. You have no experience handling it nor any military experience defending it, nor puting your life at risk upon its disclosure. Mostly you are blowing out your ass.

I don't know what you are saying with your parable of the Tares.

Obviously we need to keep military secrets.  That is not in question.  Strangely enough secretary of defense, Gates, said that no military secrets have been compromised ... nor did he suspect that there were any in the poison pill.  We need deal with actual military secrets differently than we deal with political secrets.  If you keep munging those together we will never reach a common understanding.

Obviously you are playing with a distinction without a difference.  Classification of information is about protecting the country.  Any number of seemingly unrelated bits of information can be used against US by enemies foreign & domestic.  Information can be strategic or tactical.  During the cold war foreign agents payed people living in the US to gather newspaper clippings of things that would help them plan & gain advantage over the US.  With the Internet that probably is not going on as much especially when wikileaks delivers the choicest bits free of charge.  Who directs wikileaks what to look for?; which networks to hack?  A large portion of what is classified will eventually be declassified when it loses its intelligence value. If you were negotiating with someone for an agreement of substance do you think it a good idea that your strategies & tactics be revealed to everyone?

... currently transparency is lacking in the senate ratification discussions in the last minute negotions (just before Christmas).  Why does something as important as national defense have to be held in secret.
The treaty is not secret. Why the rush? Remember that the confidence game depends upon urgency.

The reading of the treaty is not the bad part, the treaty itself is the bad thing.  That they are talking about it in congress behind the public's back is also bad.  You seem to be the chunk of bull in the pea soup this morning.

The one that nobody read was the omnibus spending atrocity.

Here is some a panel discussion on the Obama administration transparency.  The most egreggious lack is in the area of money - where it all has gone.

Here is another case where transparency is absolutely necessary.  When members of congress, their families, & staff learn of investigations & other things not normally available to the public they can profit from the stock market. It's a nightmare to trace out. We need more transparency see: http://www.cnbc.com/id/45249857

From Drudge this AM:

Metodi Zajkov

‎"Transparency-Watch" is a joint project by "Transparency International – Macedonia" and the "Center for International Relations" allowing citizens to report cases of corruption by sending SMS from their mobile phones, sending an email, using the web form, the hashtag #korupcijaMK on twitter or by reporting on the phone.

Examples of what happens when the Transparency of the sausage making is shrouded in darkness:


OBAMACARE WILL QUESTION YOUR SEX LIFE...

Congress gets sneaky exemption from law...

... Punishes senator who tries to stop it

'There are death panels in there'...

POLL: Confusion reigns...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/white-house-visitor-list_n_3844819.html

Why does the White House always have to do things in secret.  I'll tell you - they want NO opposition - one party rule & dictatorship in their dealings then they can work their crony capitalistic ways & bribes to get things done the way they want them.

Yep - that's why classified information for the military & the spy agencies exist.  Glad you finally arrived!   For a food coop I doubt need is for secrecy unless you are planning criminal behavior.

An example of non-transparency in election campaigns:
http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2013/09/hillary-clintons-image-control-security-swipes-mans-phone-erases-pic-of-her-at-speech.html
Saying one thing to your donors & special audiences & another to the M$M the authenticity & openness reeks with deception. Remember how Romney said something meant to be private to a group of his donors & it got spread throughout the media - something about the lower x% wont care about some money issue (because they don't!) & it got distorted by the M$M?

Another point of view: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3246

yeah funny…

   stubborn idealogs spines notwistanding

i call that progress

or at least getting past stopped.

yeah kind of like your swamp or mine
corruption is corruption,
no matter which side you are on.