Archive for March 25th, 2011
The new meaning of transparency
Transparency? Ha!
(Big Government) President Barack Obama has won praise from the media — and from himself — for putting the White House visitor logs online. Yet the visitor logs may hide more than they reveal.
The White House is still holding back “tens of thousands” of visitor logs, according to congressional testimony last week by Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, who also added that “the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration.”
We also know that some of the most important presidential visitors don’t even walk into the White House. The administration meets K Street lobbyists at Caribou Coffee, and holds secret meetings in Jackson Place townhouses where there are no visitor logs.
The visitor logs that have been released are problematic, because they are simply lists of names, with no way to verify whether a specific name belongs to a particular person.
When the first names were released on Oct. 30, 2009, late on a Friday afternoon, then-White House “ethics czar” Norm Eisen noted the lists included “false positives” — “names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else.” According to Eisen, these included ordinary visitors named “Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz.”
A number of conservative bloggers noticed the names, but not Eisen’s blog post. With speed and precision suggesting direct coordination from the top, ThinkProgress, the core of the heavily funded John Podesta/George Soros “progressive” world, gleefully attacked its ideological foes for reporting “false positives.” The next release included “Louis Farrakhan” and “James Taylor,” but this time conservatives were more careful.
Yet there is no way to prove that the “false positives” really are false, because the White House refuses to reveal identifying information about visitors. In December 2009, citing visitor logs, Big Government reported that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis had likely visited the White House on a special “staff tour” on September 5. The timing of Lewis’s visit — as the far-left regrouped in the aftermath of the health care town halls — seemed suspicious.
Ben Smith of Politico then reported that an anonymous White House source said we had the wrong Bertha Lewis. I asked Smith why, if that were the case, the White House would use an anonymous flack to put down our report, rather than busting us cleanly. Smith agreed it was weird. The next day, the official emerged, but the newly revealed Jen Psaki refused to say who the real Bertha Lewis was, citing “privacy concerns.”
With no way to verify, there is no real transparency. Of course, with Andrew Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who visited the White House over twenty times through October 2009, there is little doubt that he is the Andy Stern. That information helped establish the credibility of the visitor logs. Yet there are three “Andrew Sterns” who visited with group tours–are they just “false positives”?
What is the point of listing hundreds of thousands of tourists, if not to help create “false positives”? Eisen and the White House have created a haystack that can hide a needle. Considering that Eisen, a major Obama bundler in 2008, was responsible for smearing former Inspector General Gerald Walpin, and was elevated to an ambassadorship through a shady recess appointment, that hardly seems impossible.
Evidence has emerged to suggest the White House tried to manipulate media coverage of the visitor logs to create an impression of transparency. Indeed, Fitton reported to Congress that in the fall of 2009, Eisen “encouraged [Judicial Watch] to publicly praise the Obama administration’s commitment to transparency, saying it would be good for them and good for us.” Yet the White House still refused to provide all of the visitor logs.
In the name of “transparency,” the White House has turned the guest list into the “guess list.” Tragically, the media seem fine with that. Last week, representatives from Sunshine Week — funded by the hapless American Society of News Editors, among others — tried to give the president a “transparency” award. It was postponed — but when they hold the event, bloggers reporting the news the “real” journalists won’t report ought to beware: the Newsweek reporter in the visitor logs may not be that “Tunku Varadarajan.”
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This White House is about as transparent as a brick wall.
Boehner…caught between a rock and a hard place
John Boehner
The Tea Partiers are growing impatient with House Republicans because they are not following through with their campaign promise of cutting $100 billion from the budget. The number right now is $61 billion but some say that it may be lower than that. John Boehner is the one sitting in the hottest seat right now and Tea Party leadership is threatening to find a primary opponent to replace him in the next election cycle.
(Fox) As U.S. lawmakers seek a compromise on how much federal spending to cut in order to avoid a government shutdown, Tea Party activists who helped propel Republicans back into power are growing impatient with the debate.
When Republicans captured the House in November, vowing to slash $100 billion in federal spending from the budget year ending in September, 76 percent of Tea Party activists supported their deficit-reduction plan, according to a new Pew Research poll released last week.
But after House Republicans approved a plan last month to cut federal spending by $61 billion, that Tea Party support fell to 52 percent.
Now Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, arguably the most vocal critic of GOP leaders, is pushing for a primary opponent against House Speaker John Boehner in 2012 for breaking his campaign pledge to cut $100 billion and for what he sees as hints that he’s willing to cut less than $61 billion in a compromise with Senate Democrats.
“Charlie Sheen is now making more sense than John Boehner,” Phillips wrote in his blog earlier this month.
In an interview with FoxNews.com Thursday, Phillips said he stands by his comments and goal of seeking a primary challenger to Boehner.
“Charlie Sheen still makes more sense than John Boehner because at least Charlie Sheen is winning,” he said.
“This is the one message the Tea Party needs to be out there pushing,” he said. “If you don’t live up to your promise, we’re going to throw you out.”
Boehner’s camp acknowledged the frustration among Tea Party supporters, but didn’t accept responsibility for it.
“The speaker – and every Republican in the House – is frustrated by the pace of the debate, but the blame lies squarely with the Democrats who run Washington, D.C.,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in an e-mail to FoxNews.com.
“The House passed a bill that funds the government for the remainder of the year while cutting spending,” he said. “It’s the Democrats who are insisting on the status quo, and no one should be happy with the status quo.”
Democrats controlling the White House and Senate have only two weeks to broker a deal with Republicans in charge of the House before the latest temporary spending bill keeping the government afloat expires April 8.
House Republicans have been digging their heels in on the $61 billion in cuts they approved last month but the Senate is not going along and Obama has threatened to veto it, making it unclear where they’ll find compromise.
Levi Russell, a spokesman for the Tea Party Express, told FoxNews.com that the midterm elections in November may have set expectations too high.
“We forget the Tea Party is only influential over one third of the government,” he said. “Tea Partiers are going to continue to be disappointed by what comes out of Washington until Republicans have control of the Senate and the White House.”
The Tea Party Express has set its sights on defeating two Republican senators — Olympia Snowe of Maine and Dick Lugar of Indiana— in 2012 primaries but is not targeting Boehner or other GOP leaders.
“We may not love everything that they do; we may wish they would be on the same page with us. But we know they got the message in 2010,” he said.
Boehner’s the “least of our worries,” he added.
What has many Democrats worried is a fight over the federal debt limit, which they cannot increase without some GOP support in both the Senate and House. The administration has warned Congress that failing to raise the debt limit would lead to an unprecedented default on the national debt and derail the national economic recovery.
The Treasury Department estimates the government will hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling sometime between April 15 and May 31. But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has warned that GOP senators would not vote to increase the federal debt limit unless Obama agreed to significant long-term budget savings that could include cost curbs for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Phillips said Republicans should reject any kind of compromise over the budget, even if it leads to a government shutdown or a default.
“What is worse: a government shutdown or an economic collapse,” he said. “Is it worse to deal with a $14.3 trillion national debt or a national debt of $20 or $25 trillion and the whole thing collapses?”
So…what is Boehner to do?
Would a small victory ($61 billion) be better than an impossible to pass budget ($100 billion)?
Is $61 billion even a victory?
What are your thoughts?
Friday Open Thread: March 25th, 2011
The root of America's problems
What’s on your minds this Friday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
