I Guess Moving Chairs Around and Lobbyists in the White House was not Such a Bad Idea
By Albert N. Milliron, Editor, Politisite.com, Iron Mill Interactive Media, Inc
This writer followed Barack Obama around the campaign trail with teleprompter in toe throughout the southern United States. During that time, three major themes rang out from his podiums” Regarding John McCain as a presidential candidate, “Washington is broken and moving chairs around (making McCain President) would not be the answer. Washington needed new blood and John nor other congressman would fit the bill.
The other major theme was that Lobbyist had destroyed the power of the individual citizens power in the electorate process. Lobbyist Obama, said would have no part in his Administration.
He related that he would not return to the failed policies of the Bush Administration. Obama had a plan and it didn't include Bushes economic policies. Trickle down economics did not work and Obama would allow the Bush Error Tax cuts to expire. He added that ninety-five percent of Americans would see a tax cut in their pay checks.
He told onlookers that on every bill that was presented in congress that they would be placed on the Internet for five days, so the American people could view what the Congress has adopted. He then related they would be free of pork Barrel spending as he would go line by line on each legislation and would veto legislation that contained pork and special interest spending. He committed to open and transparent government and no more secrecy.
One additional theme he emphasized on the campaign trail was that he would be bipartisan in his approach to solve the countries problems. So far President Obama has not consulted with Republicans but has rather pushed his political agenda from the left. When the TARP program was presented there were no House Republicans that voted for the measure because the bill was not read, nor posted on the Internet, and had nearly 9000 earmarks that we included in the stimulus package.
Most of those measures were pay offs to the left that had no place in a package that was designed to stimulate the economy. Here are some of where your stimulus money will go:
4 billion for community activist programs such as ACORN,
400 million for global warming (oh I mean Climate Change) research,
50 million for National Endowment of the Arts,
2.4 billion to demonstrate “carbon capture and sequestration technologies”
50 million in grants to fund “arts projects and activities in the non-profit arts sector
8 billion for high-speed railway (including an earmark for an Los Angeles to Las Vegas)
A water park in Miami Florida
Bringing in Tons of Sand to Sandy Hook, NJ
Then the most stimulating of them all, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will study the link between drinking and having sex among homosexuals in Argentina.
The additional reason that there was not bipartisan support is that the President promised that the bill will have ample time for each Member to read the provision and debate it. Since it was toughed as a crisis legislation there could b no time for legislators to actually read the provisions in the 1073 page bill. Consequently the bill was not posted on the Internet, it was available for less then 25 hours to read a bill that had thousands of pages and was passed without congressman actually reading the legislation. What happened then? Executives from AIG had provisions for million dollar bonuses that no congressman save Senator Dodd and the Treasury Secretary had a clue that those bonus would be paid out under previous agreements. When the provisions of the AIG Bonus came to the public eye, congressman threw their arms up casting blame on AIG Executives simply because their Didn't read their own bill. The bottom line here is the Wall Street Journals annalists estimated that just 12% of the package could be considered stimulus.
So what happened in Obama's first weeks as President. He moves a few chairs around. He tapped Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Then he adds former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a presidential candidate, as The Secretary of U.S. Department of Agriculture. Then there is Attorney General Eric Holder who served as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. Another Political Insider Governor Richardson had to withdraw due to a fell “Play for play” scandal. The list continues with Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) Obama's choice for secretary of Interior. And to sum up it all up without pointing out the entire Washington “outsider” cabinet, Timothy Geithner who is Obama's choice to head the Treasury which include the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Geithner was the chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2003. He is the brain our country could not do without due to the bank crisis that was doomed to lead to catastrophe. A cabinet member so good that he blamed misunderstanding tax software program Turbo-Tax, designed for a teenager to complete his taxes, and failed to pay hundreds of thousand of dollars of your tax money.
Washington is broke Obama related to crowds across the country and moving chairs around was not the answer. New blood was needed to fix Washington. So he hired Washington insiders for his cabinet members and half of Clinton's former staff.
I don't see the “Change we can believe in” here. In fact it looks more like moving chairs around the deck of the Titanic following our economic iceberg. Politics as usual is more the word.
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Candy Crowley began her career as a gopher at WASH-FM in Washington, and has risen all the way to senior political correspondent at CNN. Along the road, she's worked everywhere from UPI and Mutual Broadcasting to the AP and NBC. Not bad for someone who's a writer at heart and only got into the TV business because it "fulfilled the need to have a paycheck." TVNewser's Brian Stelter caught up with Crowley to ask about her career.
