The Most Transparent Government
by Big Dog on Jan 14, 2010 at 19:45 Political
Nancy Pelosi promised it and Barack Obama promised it but both have failed to deliver on it. These two radical liberals promised the most transparent government in the history of the universe (or something like that) and they tell us how transparent they are every chance they get.
They tell us after the emerge from closed door sessions where secret deals are struck, they tell us after they vote in the middle of the night and they tell us after they are challenged for not being transparent (as in breaking the C-SPAN promise). They honestly believe that if they say it enough people will believe it.
Joe Biden is out to correct all that. His schedule for today shows that he met with the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board.
Unfortunately the transparency meeting was CLOSED TO THE PRESS.
Here is the rest of Biden’s schedule. Notice how much of it is CLOSED.
DAILY GUIDANCE FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT, Thursday, January 14, 2010:
In the morning, the President and the Vice President will receive the Presidential Daily Briefing and the Economic Daily Briefing in the Oval Office. These briefings are closed press.At 11:30 AM, the Vice President will meet with Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to discuss the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This meeting is closed press.
Afterwards, the President and the Vice President will have lunch in the Private Dining Room. This lunch is closed press.
At 1:00 PM, the Vice President will meet with Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd al-Mahdi in the Roosevelt Room. There will be a pool spray at the bottom of this meeting; gather time is 1:45 PM in the Brady Briefing Room.
(UPDATE 2:20 p.m.: The White House issued its own report on this closed meeting. Both paragraphs are added below at the end of the VP’s schedule.)
Then, at 2:15 PM, the Vice President will meet with Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. This meeting is closed press. Los Angeles Times
I left his lunch out because I would expect that to be closed and I imagine that they have to announce that it is because some are photo ops depending upon who is eating there or whatever. No one can begrudge these men the chance to eat lunch in private. I also left out the PDB because it should be closed.
But, that leaves three meetings that are CLOSED including the one on transparency in the Recovery Act and one that is a splash, where they allow reporters in for a few brief photos after the meeting while the participants pretend they are still in a meeting.
Four meetings and not one of them was open.
How is that for transparent?
I guess Biden was trying to keep up with the rest of the Democrats who were locked in rooms where they discussed the health care debacle in private.
Yep, change you can deceive in.
UPDATE: This is at least transparent. The head of weatherization for Obama has funneled business to her husbands window company.
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Tags: biden, lies, Obama, Pelosi, transparency
Hear hear! The Obamessiah can keep the “change.”
Yea verily to all the varlets in this administration, hark thee now to my pronouncement: “YOU LIE”
BD, superb last line. Heh!
Now they are attempting to blame their lack of transparency AND their inaccurate numbers on Recovery.gov on antiquated computer equipment making the government inefficient. Seems to me that the Bush Administration did just fine on that same equipment. I think that instead of blaming the equipment, perhaps they should take a look at the operator(s).
The absurd “claim” of transparency is just that- absurd- they (or he) says these lies, and he just expects that noone will call him a liar. If I was to see him, I would have to spit on him, just to get the bad taste out of my eyes.
Regarding transparent government:
***
“Obama plans a more transparent budget
February 24, 2009
WASHINGTON — After eight years of budget practices that often camouflaged federal spending, President Obama is planning a new strategy of putting on the books as many costs as possible to demonstrate the extent of the nation’s economic troubles, senior White House officials say.”
Link
***
Transparency and Open Government
***
But transparency groups say Obama’s doing a good job — relatively speaking.
“Look at what he’s compared to,” said Jim Harper, of the libertarian Cato Institute. “He contrasts very well with the Bush administration, which didn’t even pretend to want to be transparent. So this is an improvement over a very low baseline.”
More… “…the creation late last month of a National Declassification Center to expedite the declassification of government documents, the decision in the summer to release four Justice Department memos from the Bush administration that dealt with harsh interrogation, some specific steps to enhance responses to Freedom of Information requests, the release of White House visitor logs, the banning of lobbyists from conversations with White House officials about stimulus money or from advisory committees, the release of large amounts of raw data at data.gov, and, for the most part, the government effort to track how stimulus money is spent.
“There remains a lot of work to be done, but I think if you look at the actual menu of accomplishments, we have made great progress,” Eisen said. “You had prior administrations that litigated for years over just a handful of their White House visitor records, and we just put 30,000 of them online for the world to see.” Link
Etc.
Watch one hand while the other is doing something else. The Obama WH balked at releasing those logs until he was smacked with his own transparency words. Nice try but he wanted to do the same thing as Bush and only released them (and not anywhere near all of them) because he was made to eat his words.
No, they are not transparent. None of the legislation has been put on the web like promised and there are a lot of back door deals going on.
Nice try though.
Despite his campaign promise to “make White House communications public,” the Obama administration again is blocking the public from seeing White House visitor logs, this time refusing to disclose meetings with health care executives. Tonight, less than an hour before his news conference on health care, he released some of the information only after a nonprofit group filed a federal lawsuit.
Source:
The Vast Right Wing Group MSNBC
Bigd: None of the legislation has been put on the web like promised>>
DAR
False. As my link above showed:
“That leaves 37 bills that were not posted before signing.”
Out of 124. And that ratio is expected to go up as they get their act together. By the end of eight years, it’ll all be running smoothly.
Bigd: “…and there are a lot of back door deals going on.”
DAR
Back door deals? In politics? Naw.
Hey, remember, it’s “change we can believe in,” not “change no one’s ever gonna believe.”
D.
Obama promised to change from politics as usual. No one is surprised that politicians do what they do but it was a lie if he said he would change it and then continues to do it.
The White House said Harper’s numbers are invalid because he does not count a number of bills that were posted for five days before signing, but were not easily found from the White House website’s main page. There were 47 of these by Harper’s count.
Right, some were found and some were not. Maybe it is because they were posted after the fact and hidden to make it appear as such.
This savvy team sure seems to have an awful lot of trouble operating websites.
Or perhaps that is just the excuse.
And I think it was supposed to be significant legislation. No one cares about what they name a post office.