Lobbyists, Tax Cheats, and Earmarks, Oh My!

Trying to keep up with the lies and broken promises of Barack Obama is enough to boggle the mind.

Obama Promise: President Obama promised during his campaign that lobbyists "won't find a job in my White House."

Truth: "So far, though, at least a dozen former lobbyists have found top jobs in his administration, according to an analysis done by Republican sources and corroborated by Politico." (Source)

Obama Promise: on January 6, 2009,"We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review." He also said he would go "line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely."

Truth: Wednesday, Obama signed the massive $410 billion dollar omnibus bill which has over 9,000 unnecessarily and wasteful earmarks. (See also 'Obama Decries Earmarks, Signs Bill with 9,000 of them')

Obama Promise: To allow five days of public comment before signing bills. From his campaign web site: "As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days."

Truth: Politifact reports this as "promise broken". (Source) Both the first and second bills Obama signed, in no way considered emergency legislation, were signed before they could be posted for public consideration. Read more... Of course, Congress hasn't even had enough time to read the bills before they vote on them, so perhaps we need to start there.

Obama Promise: After criticizing President Bush for using signing statements, Obama says "We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress." (Source - video)

Truth: "Two days after he promised to roll back the use of presidential signing statements (and ordered the heads of federal agencies to ignore those issued by his predecessor), President Obama issued his first signing statement Wednesday as he set Congress's $410 billion omnibus spending bill into law." (Source)

These are just a few of the most blatant transgressions, but the outright contradictions are adding up:

--Campaigning as a tax-cutter and then letting the Bush tax cuts expire, raising taxes on the wealthy (small businesses and job creators included), and seeking a Cap & Trade program that would effectively raise taxes significantly (and disproportionately) on even the poorest Americans.

--Holding a farce of a "Fiscal Responsibility" summit hard on the heels of the Stimulus Bill which democrat and Obama supporter Camille Paglia called "that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery" (Source).

--Talking about sweeping ethics reforms while appointing several people who didn't pay their taxes to his administration, the most notable of which is Secretary Treasurer Tim 'Turbo Tax Cheat' Geithner who is ironically now running the IRS and explaining to Congress his plans to crack down on tax cheats.

--Saying he doesn't believe in big government ("Not because I believe in bigger government - I don't.") as he proposes a budget that increases government beaurocracy, government spending, the deficit, and the national debt in unprecedented ways.

I find myself in complete agreement with Eric Kohn who wrote: "we are now left with two unavoidable conclusions: that Obama is a contradiction-in-terms and has personally invested himself fully in his own clearly contradictory rhetoric, or that he's simply duplicitous..." In summary, he's not making sense or he's a liar. Either way, it's not looking good for the rest of us. It's going to be a long four years.