President Barack Obama might just wish he had opened even one health care meeting to the C-SPAN cameras.
The issue is starting to follow him around.
Obama’s CSPAN lie is following him
Once again Tuesday, he faced a question about it, from a high school student in Nashua, N.H., who asked him to grade the White House’s transparency efforts, given the fact that all the health care discussions have been behind closed doors.
Obama said that after the House and Senate bills moved forward, “it is true that I then met with the leaders … to see what differences needed to be resolved. And that wasn’t on C-SPAN.”
“I made that commitment, and I probably should have put it on C-SPAN,” he said, but added that lawmakers might not have been as honest and candid if they were being televised.
During the presidential campaign, Obama had famously promised to open up health care negotiations to C-SPAN so that voters would know who was arguing for what. Instead, the backroom tussles over the bill happened well out of sight of the public, just as they always have in Washington.
Read More: By NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, Politico
Tags: Barack Obama, CSPAN Lie, Transparency“Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.”
—Charles de Gaulle
The Real Obama is shining through
I’m hearing nada from the likes of Matthews, Maddow and Olbermann regarding Obama lying to us with his many empty yet unctuous campaign promises to allow “we the plebes” a peek into the claymation of his health care crap via CSPAN.
Why the silence, sweeties? Oh, I remember why: You’re a spigot for the Obama chum slick. Silly me.
Now, you just know the aforementioned tres Chihuahuas of faux facts would have been on Bush like a condom full of PETN in Umar’s undies if Dubya would have parlayed that smack on the general populace and then failed to deliver in an oh-so-odious and obvious Obama-like way
However, when Obama lies to us all … I hear crickets … nuttin’ but crickets … from these deeply biased chicks on their severely unwatched propaganda programs.
Read More: by Doug Giles, Townhall
Tags: Barack Obama, Exposed, Transparency, Unmasked
Obama is running from his transparency promise
It’s hardly the image of transparency the Obama administration wants to project: A workshop on government openness is closed to the public.
The event Monday for federal employees is a fitting symbol of President Barack Obama’s uneven record so far on the Freedom of Information Act, a big part of keeping his campaign promise to make his administration the most transparent ever. As Obama’s first year in office ends, the government’s actions when the public and press seek information are not yet matching up with the president’s words.
"The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails," Obama told government offices on his first full day as president. "The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears."
Yet on some important issues, his administration produced information only after government watchdogs and reporters spent weeks or months pressing, in some cases suing.
Read More: AP
Tags: Access, Barack Obama, Closed Door Meetings, Transparency
President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will hold a press conference on Tuesday to field two questions, one from an American reporter, another from an Indian journalist – four if we’re lucky, according to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
so much for the most “open and transparent administration”
Over eight days in four Asian countries, Obama took all of two questions from the U.S. reporters whose organizations spent tens of thousands of dollars to follow him across the globe. White House aides shrugged off the criticism, saying they were only abiding by the rules of the host countries. A “press conference” in Beijing entailed opening statements from Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, followed by no questions at all — zero.
Now the home turf is the White House and the trend continues. Customarily, press conferences with visiting heads of state have been truncated affairs, but they usually allowed three questions, maybe four, for each side.
Read More: By Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal
Tags: Barack Obama, Lies, no access, One Question, Open Administration, TransparencyJust how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.
According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.
The Stimulus is so great it is saving jobs for people who don’t even exist
The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.
The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.
Read More: By Bill McMorris, Franklin Center for Public Integrity
Tags: Barack Obama, Economic stimulus, Phantom Congressional Districts, TransparencyBy Michael Isikoff, NEWSWEEK
Open government forget about it...
As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.” The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a “new era” of openness, “nothing has changed,” says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. “For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.”
The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama’s much-publicized Jan. 21 “transparency” memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a “presumption” of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno. But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies “if practicable” for cases involving “pending litigation.” Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other “lawyerly hedges” means the Holder memo is now “astonishingly weaker” than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)
Tags: Barack Obama, Bush, Open government, Transparency
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