Transparent Steal

No that title was not meant to say “steel”.
I have maintained all along that Obama is very transparent, in his radical socialist ways and the Ministry of Truth is very transparent. If you’re willing to look at it from the jaundiced eye of a cynic.
But the illusion of transparency at least is no more. But it will be transparent that the media won’t talk about it. So I will, along with sources.

President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians.
Obama transferred “ethics czar” Norm Eisen to the Czech Republic to serve as U.S. ambassador. Some of Eisen’s duties will be handed to Domestic Policy Council member Steven Croley, but most of them, it appears, will shift over to the already-full docket of White House Counsel Bob Bauer ( his previous job as the president’s personal lawyer, as well as counsel to the Democratic National Committee).

With Mr. Eisen headed to Europe as an ambassador, his move from the White House “is the biggest lobbying success we’ve had all year,” Tony Podesta, one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington, said with a laugh.(NYT)

Bauer is renowned as a “lawyer’s lawyer” and a legal expert. His resume, however, reads more “partisan advocate” than “good-government crusader.” Bauer came to the White House from the law firm Perkins Coie, where he represented John Kerry in 2004 and Obama during his campaign.
Bauer has served as the top lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, which is the most prolific fundraising entity in the country. Then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., the caricature of a cutthroat Chicago political fixer, hired Bauer to represent the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the White House, Bauer is tight with Emanuel, having defended Emanuel’s offer of a job to Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., whom Emanuel wanted out of the Senate race.
Another Bauer client was New Jersey Sen. Robert “Torch” Torricelli back in 2001. When one Torricelli donor admitted he had reimbursed employees for their contributions to the Torch — thus circumventing contribution limits — Bauer explained, “All candidates ask their supporters to help raise money from friends, family members and professional associates.”
Bauer’s own words — gathered by the diligent folks at the Sunlight Foundation — show disdain for openness and far greater belief in the good intentions of those in power than of those trying to check the powerful. In December 2006, when the Federal Election Commission proposed more precise disclosure requirements for parties, Bauer took aim at the practice of muckraking enabled by such disclosure.
On his blog, Bauer derided the notion “that politicians and parties are pictured as forever trying to get away with something,” saying this was an idea for which “there is a market, its product cheaply manufactured and cheaply sold.” In other words — we keep too close an eye on our leaders.
In August 2006 Bauer blogged, “disclosure is a mostly unquestioned virtue deserving to be questioned.” This is the man the White House has put in charge of making this the most open White House ever.
Most telling might have been Bauer’s statements about proposed regulations of 527 organizations: “If it’s not done with 527 activity as we have seen, it will be done in other ways,” he told the Senate rules committee.
“There are other directions, to be sure, that people are actively considering as we speak. Without tipping my hand or those of others who are professionally creative, the money will find an outlet.”
This perfectly captures the Obama White House’s attitude toward disclosure. Sure, the administration publish the names of all White House visitors, but, as the New York Times reported a few weeks back, White House folks just meet their lobbyists at Caribou Coffee across the street. Sure, they restrict the work of ex-lobbyists in the administration, but lobbyists who de-list aren’t questioned.
And we’ve seen just a few of the e-mails former Google lobbyist, now Obama tech policy guru, Andrew McLaughlin traded with current Google lobbyists using his Gmail account, but who knows what else the White House whiz kids are doing to avoid the Presidential Records Act — Facebook messages? Twitter direct messages?
Did I mention Bauer was a lobbyist? At Perkins Coie, Bauer lobbied on behalf of America Votes Inc., a Democratic 527 funded by the likes of the AFL-CIO and ACORN.
As with his other reformer rhetoric, Obama’s transparency is mostly smoke and mirrors. (Washington Examiner)

I would argue he is very transparent in his disdain for anyone who isn’t the Harvard elitist liberal socialist that and his apparatchiks are. He’s so open about it that it’s nearly invisible.
And he gets all the help he needs from his socialist friends in the media.

When the open-government activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Bush administration to get the records of White House visitors from Secret Service logs, media outlets practically fell over themselves to join the effort.  Newspapers like the Washington Post and USA Today and wire services like AP and Reuters filed amicus briefs with the court, and the Obama administration eventually agreed to start releasing the records.  Now, however, the same news organizations have discovered a new sense of privacy when it comes to their attendance in an off-the-record event with Barack Obama:
White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who’ve advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors.
And guess who filed briefs supporting that argument? Virtually every newspaper that covers the White House.

Through July 20, Ms. Kumar counted 36 press conferences since Mr. Obama took office. That compares with the same number for the second President Bush, 66 for President Clinton and 54 for the elder President Bush the same amount of time into their presidencies.

But that leaves out some context.  Obama was holding press conferences every week or two in his first months in office, which is why he got to 35 by the end of July 2009, when it became clear that Obama was a gaffe machine when off of the Teleprompter.  Since then, he’s held a grand total of one, and it doesn’t look like the White House has any more planned after the late May Gulf spill presser.
When media outlets participate in off-the-record events, they give Obama a chance to spin coverage without doing so on the record.  It wouldn’t be a problem if Obama made himself regularly available in an open Q&A setting to the press corps, which complained when Obama’s predecessor would go a couple of months between pressers.  With the White House butting up Obama and keeping him off the record, participation in the luncheon is really just enabling the silence.  If media outlets felt so strongly about transparency as to demand the White House visitor logs, the least they can do is to acknowledge their own roles in letting this President off the hook for accountability and transparency. (hot air.com)

Just reinforces the fact that he is not a public servant, he is a public parent. This is the mommy-state way of saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” (comment on hot air.com).

Well, they are the Insufferably Superior Left,after all. And remember if you agree with them you are intelligent, tolerant and well mannered.
If you disagree with them you are barking mad loonie who foams at the mouth and has the IQ of a dead light bulb. You’re “stupid”, “racist”,”ignorant” a “moron”, etc. ad nauseum.
So why should anyone take a raving loonie seriously?


In fact, according to a March 2010 Associated Press analysis of FOIA responses at 17 major agencies, 466,872 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) denials were issued during the Obama administration’s first year in office – a 50 percent increase over the previous year.
In addition to denying more FOIA requests, Obama has refused to call for an audit of the secret Federal Reserve Bank and rescinded Bush-era disclosure requirements for labor union leaders – the same union bosses who provided over $100 million (and nearly half a million volunteers) for Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates in 2008.
The hypocrisy on transparency doesn’t end there, though.
As part of the draconian new financial regulations Obama and his Congressional allies are imposing on the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now virtually exempt from FOIA law.† Under a little-known provision of the new law, the SEC would not have to release any information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities” – a purposefully broad definition that encompasses virtually everything the SEC does.
You know the SEC, the ones who were too busy wanting porn 24/7 to watch either Wall Street or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to care. And now, by law they don’t have to care. More Porn for the SEC, please….
“It allows the SEC to block the public’s access to virtually all SEC records,” former agency attorney turned whistleblower Gary Aguirre told FOX News. “It permits the SEC to promulgate its own rules and regulations regarding the disclosure of records without getting the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, which typically applies to all federal agencies.”
In fact, within days of the new law being signed, the SEC was already turning down FOIA requests from media outlets citing the new exemption.
But don’t worry, Big Brother will not lie to you…


The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite the prediction so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate. This is the “how” of the Ministry of Truth’s existence. Within the novel Orwell elaborates that the deeper reason for its existence is to maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute. It cannot ever seem to change its mind (if, for instance, they perform one of their constant changes regarding enemies during war) or make a mistake (firing an official or making a grossly misjudged supply prediction), for that would imply weakness and to maintain power the Party must seem eternally right and strong. (1984)
It’s transparent in it’s complete lack of transparency or even it’s appearance therein.


doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink..    ”
“     The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words or constructions.–George Orwell
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.
How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ⁽¹⁹⁸⁴⁾
The phrase “two plus two equals five” (“2 + 2 = 5“) is a slogan used in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of an obviously false dogma one must believe, similar to other obviously false slogans by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is contrasted with the phrase “two plus two makes four”, the obvious – but politically inexpedient – truth. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes in it, does that make it true? Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Now that’s transparent and on MSNBC,CBS,NBC,ABC,CNN,Their websites, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, et al. that 2+2=5. Now you just have to believe it.
It’s so transparent it’s nearly invisible.

It's Recess Time Children

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama bypassed the Senate Wednesday and appointed Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor and patient care specialist, to run Medicare and Medicaid.

The decision to use a so-called recess appointment to install Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services drew immediate fire from the GOP. Republicans have raised concerns about Berwick’s views on rationing of care and other matters and said it was wrong for Obama to go around the normal Senate confirmation process. That view was echoed by a key Democratic committee chairman, although the recess appointment is a tool used by presidents of both parties.
“Democrats haven’t scheduled so much as a committee hearing for Donald Berwick but the mere possibility of allowing the American people the opportunity to hear what he intends to do with their health care is evidently reason enough for this administration to sneak him through without public scrutiny,” said McConnell, R-Ky.
Could that be because Dr Berwick has been quoted as saying he “loves” the NHS (the British Health Care system) and that rationing of care is absolutely necessary and that it also a “redistribution of wealth” issue??
Gee, I wonder why no one wanted to talk about that?
Berwick, 63, is a pediatrician, Harvard University professor and leader of a health care think tank, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, that works to develop and implement concepts for improving patient care. The programs he will oversee — Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly, poor and disabled, along with the Children’s Health Insurance Program — provide care to about 100 million people, or around 1 in 3 Americans.
So he’s yet another Harvard Ivy Tower Academic Liberal.
I know I’m excited.

Dr Berwin: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.“
April 2009: Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform. (and the Baucus bill was the ‘bi-partisan’ one!)
He was the Chair of the committee that wouldn’t schedule the hearings on the Doctor’s confirmation, by the way.
And The President ran around during the debate last year that saying  “rationing” was just a scare tactic.
Hmmm…
It’s just those echoes of the health care debate that Democrats would prefer not to replay on the Senate floor.
So let’s not and say we did, and just call the whole thing off and just appoint him without any coverage at all.
Let’s just sweep it under the rug…Nothing to see here….


Dr Berwin 2008: “Any health care funding plan that is just equitable civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
Redistribution of wealth? Where have I heard that before?
Karl Marx?
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.


“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.”
“But, The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.
“One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.” —That would be Illinois State Senator Barack Obama in 2001.

In Obama’s America, we’ll finally be able to break free of the “constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution” — and in so doing, achieve “social justice” through “redistributive change.”
Well, then. Fine .
But this is not the America I knew… (Michelle Malkin)

So the “transparent” President strikes again.
Only, what he’s transparent about isn’t what people thought he meant by that when they foolishly voted for him.
“I am romantic about the National Health Service,” he told a London audience in 2008, referring to the British single-payer system. “I love it,” Dr. Berwick added, going on to call it “such a seductress” and “a global treasure.” He routinely points to the NHS as a health-care model for the U.S. (WSJ)

According to a “topline message points” document on his nomination that we obtained, “The fact is, rationing is rampant in the system today, as insurers make arbitrary decisions about who can get the care they need. Don Berwick wants to see a system in which those decisions are transparent—and that the people who make them are held accountable.”
The people who can write such things with a straight face believe there is no difference between rationing through individual choices and price signals and rationing through politics and bureaucratic omniscience. In an influential 1996 book “New Rules,” Dr. Berwick and a co-author argued that one of “the primary functions” of health regulation is “to constrain decentralized, individual decision making” and “to weigh public welfare against the choices of private consumers.”

He then recommended “protocols, guidelines, and algorithms for care,” with the “common underlying notion that someone knows or can discover the ‘best way’ to carry out a task to reach a decision, and that improvement can come from standardizing processes and behaviors to conform to this ideal model.” And guess who will determine the “best way”?
As I said repeatedly during the Health care “debate”, the government wants to decide who lives and who dies.
Nothing more, Nothing Less.
Now doesn’t that make you feel better.