ABC News’ Rick Klein was first to report, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was quite taken aback by White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips’s request that if citizens “get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy,” they “send it toflag@whitehouse.gov."
In a White House blog, Phillips said he was trying to stem the flow of “disinformation," and Linda Douglass, communications director for the White Houses Health Reform Office, appeared in a web video saying, "there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this one, take a look at this one. This one says,‘Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate Private Insurance.’
Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know, the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression."
In response,Cornyn wrote to President Obama that he’s concerned “about a new White House program to monitor American citizens' speech opposing your health care policies, and to seek your assurances that this program is being carried out in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and America's tradition of free speech and public discourse.”
The Texas Republican said it seemed “inevitable that the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House. You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program.”
And he suggested that if President Bush had “asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House,” President Obama “would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program-and I would have been at your side denouncing such heavy-handed government action. "
Asked about Cornyn's letter on Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "nobody is collecting names."
The blog and tips email was because, Gibbs said, "we have seen, and as I've discussed from this podium, a lot of misinformation around health care reform. Some of it I think spread purposely. We have used on many occasions the Web site to debunk things that are simply not true. We ask people if they have questions about health care reform and about what they're hearing about its affects on them, to let us know and we'd provide them information to show that that wasn't true."
Continued Gibbs: "but nobody is collecting names."
"Barack Obama has a snitch website. Barack Obama has a website in which he's asking for his supporters to rat out people who are spreading disinformation about health care, when in fact the only disinformation's coming from him and members of his party. Now what this essentially is, ladies and gentlemen, is Barack Obama's very own personal domestic spying program. ... I wanna know, where are all you leftist civil libertarians who were up in arms when George W. Bush was trying to catch terrorists in the act before they committed the act? The warrantless wiretap program that you said was a violation of civil liberties that, by the way, Barack Obama has expanded? Where are you today?"
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