Campaign promise:
"sunlight is the best disinfectant…and when there's a bill that ends up on my desk as President, you, the public, will have five days to look online and find out what's in it, before I sign it." – Barack Obama
Reality:
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – wasn't put online.
The SCHIP expansion – signed before the five day waiting period.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – passed late friday night, will be signed on tuesday, less than five days (granted, America will vaporize if Obama waits).
But Obama's promise sure sounded good to his blind and adoring followers, just like the one he broke before he even took office about not having any lobbyists on his team.
Here's what Obama said about lobbyists on the campaign trail:
"I don't take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."
Statements like these drew great applause from Obama's naive and adoring fans, but they were always hogwash. When is somebody in the media going to realize that Obama For America is itself nothing but an army of people attempting to influence legislative actions (lobbying) ? Community organizers, like Obama used to be, also mobilize people for legislative change. They are lobbyists too. So, let's stop playing political pretend about lobbyists. ALL politicians and those associated with them are LOBBYISTS, attempting to implement their political agenda for their own ends. The Democratic and Republican parties are nothing but huge, well-funded lobbying groups. Attempts to ban lobbyists are essentially an attempt to remove politics from politics. Impossible. If it's the influence of lobbyist's money that we are trying to prevent, we must agree to the public funding of political campaigns, like John McCain did, and Barack Obama DIDN'T (breaking his word again). Change We Can Believe In.
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It looks like the man appointed to take Obama's Senate seat, Roland Burris (D-IL), perjured himself during the Blagojevich pay-to-play investigation. In a sworn statement to the Illinois House panel investigating Blagojevich, Burris said he had no contacts at all with the impeached governor before his appointment in late December. But it seems Burris left out one itty bitty little detail – Blagojevich’s brother solicited $10,000 in campaign cash from Burris before Blago named Burris to Obama's seat. Oops. That sounds like contact with Blago to me, and there's no way this solicitation could have slipped Burris' mind when it was the very subject of the Blagojevich investigation.
I can hardly wait for the forthcoming "it was an innocent mistake and I'm deeply sorry for the oversight" claim from Burris.
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Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) opened her fat yap and exposed some key counterterrorism information. Feinstein revealed that unmanned CIA Predator drones monitoring terrorists are run out of an airbase inside Pakistan. It was always assumed previously that the drones came from U.S. airbases. This hints at a much deeper cooperation between the Pakistan and U.S. governments than was thought before, and causes credibility problems between the Pakistan government and it's own anti-american citizenry, complicating the fight against terrorism. Feinstein is the chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, though maybe the word "Intelligence" doesn't apply here. Pakistan possesses 100 nuclear weapons, and if you were to pick a world government most likely to be overthrown and placed under Taliban/Al Qaeda/Islamic rule, Pakistan would be it. Thanks, Diane.
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The Honorable Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) will stay on as chairman of the House Ways And Means Committee. Rangel, a tax cheat, is in charge of writing the tax code (How did Obama miss this guy for a cabinet position ?). Rangel's past is littered with one scandal after another, yet he always manages to avoid any real consequences (It's good to be a Democrat !).
Rangel's number one excuse for not paying his taxes is…are you ready for this ?…he didn't understand the tax code (that Rangel himself is in charge of writing). You couldn't make this up. Nobody would believe it.
I seem to remember something about a "culture of corruption." Wasn't it Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who coined that phrase ? Of course, she was talking about Republicans (Abramoff, Cunningham, Delay), but these days it seems a week can't go by without hearing about some new scandal involving Democrats. Daschle, Geithner, Richardson, Jefferson, Blagojevich, Kilpatrick, Murtha, Rangel, Jefferson, Spitzer, Dodd, Conrad, Mollohan, Solis…
Sure glad we restored ethics to government.
