By NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, Politico

 Obama’s CSPAN lie is following him

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.

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.

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by Doug Giles, Townhall

 The Real Obama is shining through

“Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.”

—Charles de Gaulle

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.

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AP

 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.

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By Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal

so much for the most “open and transparent administration”

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.

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.

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By Bill McMorris, Franklin Center for Public Integrity

 The Stimulus is so great it is saving jobs for people who don’t even exist

Just 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 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.

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By David Corn, Politics Daily

Obama breaks another campaign promise

If I had been at the White House daily press briefing on Thursday, I would have asked an obvious question:

Robert, The New York Times reports that the White House has cut a behind-the-scenes deal with drug industry lobbyists to prevent Congress from squeezing more than $80 billion in cost savings from Big Pharma. Where were the television cameras when White House aides were working out this agreement with the lobbyists?

Flash-back to the 2008 campaign trail: Then-candidate Barack Obama promised a new level of transparency in government — particularly concerning the sausage-making that would produce any health care reform legislation. "We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN," he said, "so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

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By Edwin Mora and Adam Brickley, CNSNEws

Obama had promised Congress would actually read bills before voting

Almost all of the House members surveyed Friday by CNSNews.com had not read the entire 1,200-page climate-change bill before they were to cast their vote Friday evening. But almost all of them knew how they were going to vote.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) said that he supported the bill the House was considering (and subsequently approved Friday evening by a narrow 219-212 vote), but he had not read the whole bill.

“You’d have to have hours and hours and hours to be able to do all that, but we’re well aware of the main items,” Rep. Abercrombie told CNSNews.com.

But the liberal member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus also said he was skeptical about “how it works out in practice.”

“Well, I think the overall goals of the bills need to be supported,” he added. “How it works out in practice, of course, is something else.”

By Michael Isikoff, NEWSWEEK

Barack Obama goes by the same rules as Bush

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.)

By JEFF ZELENY, New York Times

Obama bans lobbyists... but still accepts their money

When President Obama arrived at the Mandarin Oriental hotel for a fund-raising reception on Thursday night, the new White House rules of political purity were in order: no lobbyists allowed.

But at the same downtown hotel on Friday morning, registered lobbyists have not only been invited to attend an issues conference with Democratic leaders, but they have also been asked to come with a $5,000 check in hand if they want to stay in good favor with the party’s House and Senate re-election committees.

The practicality of Mr. Obama’s pledge to change the ways of Washington is colliding once more with the reality of how money, influence and governance interact here. He repeatedly declared while campaigning last year that he would “not take a dime” from lobbyists or political action committees.

So to follow through with that promise, Mr. Obama is simply leaving the room.

By Bill Dedman, MSNBC.com

So much for transparency, Obama adopts closed book policy

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

CREW says it filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Here’s a copy of CREW’s complaint.