Approaching his third week in office, President Obama expects a stimulus bill on his desk for signing before his first month is finished.  As an advocate of complete transparency in government, Obama was a co-sponsor of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 together with 45 other senators.   This act is currently federal law passed through almost complete bipartisan support and signed by President Bush.  This bill states in part:

         So far, so good for transparency in government.  Prior to its passage two senators placed a secret hold on voting on the bill.  According to senate rules, a secret hold allows any senator to place the entire bill into purgatory without anybody knowing who the senator is, or why the hold is placed on the bill.  This kind of secret veto puts dictatorial power into the hands of an individual, an ability to bring the wheels of government to a grinding halt.  This form of outrageous behavior in the senate should be outlawed in the name of transparency, but then the proposed bill focuses upon transparency.

          After weeks of stealth and cunning the two senators were finally identified.  One was Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, a republican author of the earmarked bridge to nowhere, who subsequently resigned from the Senate under pressure of prosecution for felonies in the dark of night.  The other was senator Robert Byrd of Virginia, a democrat who has served continuously since Abraham Lincoln was in office.  Exactly why any one individual has the authority to sidetrack a piece of legislation in secrecy is a prescription for tyranny. 

          These are the same kinds of stealthy rules that allow individuals to earmark legislation and appropriate money without its ever being exposed to the light of day.  It is the kind of outrage which most Americans agree should be stopped.   While earmarks should be stopped, transparency has been the law of the land since September 26, 2008, when then President Bush singed it into law. 

          "But wait", as they say on TV ads at 3:00am in the morning.  This transparency applies to legislation only after it becomes law.   It does not apply to the house or the senate in their deliberations, and as documented above, any jerk for any reason, in complete secrecy, can bring proposed legislation to a halt.  Exactly who these folks represent, and the reasons given for stopping the wheels of progress in the Congress do not apply to any of the process which becomes law.  The above transparency rules apply only to laws on the books.  Transparency is not required for the process of lawmaking.  As usual our government exempts itself from living with the laws it enacts on the rest of us. 

          Now we come fast-forward over a year, and discover a full-bore financial crisis infecting the country's economy and the world's at large.  We elect a new president with zero experience as an executive in any capacity.  He knows all the glib rhetoric, and states his unequivocal support for transparency which will lead to a renewed trust in government.  Great words from President Obama.  Immediately he announces he wants a stimulus bill on his desk for signing into law by the middle of February, before his first full month in office. 

          In order to magically bring order to world-wide chaos, he delegates the job of writing the stimulus bill House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat, San Francisco.  This is the same house and speaker that had lower satisfaction ratings than George W. Bush from three weeks earlier.  Accepting this blemish, Pelosi solicits input from democrats far and wide, and in essentially secret sessions, develops a laundry list of all the funding grievances which have been placed on hold through actual deliberation over the past thirty years. 

          Because of the severity of the crisis and magnitude of the stimulus needed, the speaker compiles a Pandora's Box of stimuli approaching one-trillion dollars, probably upon the suggestion by Obama that there should be no holds barred on what a stimulus should consist of.  Indeed, Obama has quipped that all spending is stimulus.  This is exactly my wife's sentiment when she moves from store to store in the mall.  The difference is my wife pays her bills in full every month.  The government pays for this Pandora's Box through increasing the national debt or printing paper money, a government sleight of hand which is slicker than any magician's wand. 

          The outrage in this picture is the near complete absence of transparency concerning exactly what is included in the Pandora's Box, and deciphering and decoding the specific language by which this magnificent sum of money will be administered over the next ten years.  Give or take a few hundred billion dollars, the guts of the bill belong to Pelosi, by default from Obama.  Obama's input, his leadership style as established in the Illinois legislature, is to vote present, rather than yes or no on any piece of legislation.  With his signature on the bill, it becomes his by default. 

          The buck stops with Obama like it did with Harry Truman.  When Obama signs the bill, he is kissing Pelosi's Pig, and what a pig it is! 

The Outrage:

        While Obama's signature is required for the bill to become law, the actual outrage is that the bill consists of over 1,000 pages of verbiage, numbers, and figures all in a single document.  The document is not available for anybody to read or study or digest in order to make an informed decision on it's merit.  Up to this point there has been zero transparency about what is included in the bill.  What little has been revealed to the public at large fails to inspire any confidence.  Yet our House of Representatives and Senate members are being asked to pass this partisan bill on faith and good will.  At least in the House of Representatives, there was zero faith among each and every republican house member.  Faith is gone, as nobody has actually read the actual bill in print, including all the democrats.  Is there any wonder that faith in congress is a non-starter. 

          As Obama says, "All spending is stimulus".  It will create 4 million (4,000,000) new jobs, and get our economy back on track.  "But the perfect should not be the enemy of the good".  This form of rhetorical smoke screen thrills the academic, the lawyers, and the adolescent-type women who want to have sex with the president.  This single statement, the perfect, sweeps all the garbage of the stimulus bill under the carpet, and invites us all into the next round of stimulus spending which will ask us to increase our national debt for generations to come. 

          Two or three more trillion dollars of spending will probably be proposed before the recession, soon to become a depression, cures itself, no thanks to any stimulus created through government waste.  This spending through bureaucratic inertia will transform our capitalist economy, the goose that lays the golden egg, into a socialist welfare state before the decade is over.

          As for Speaker Pelosi's integrity, last year the democrats, with bipartisan support, passed an increase in the minimum wage for entry level jobs.  Speaker Pelosi inserted an exemption for a family owned off-shore business which would otherwise have been required to pay the increased minimum wage.  Is there any wonder that our congress exempts itself from the same rules they pass to govern the rest of their subjects.  Pelosi and integrity should never occur in the same declarative sentence. 

          As soon as Pelosi's Pandora's Box is signed into law, transparency will then be required, and the people on Main Street, and all the members of congress that vote on the law, will be able to read the law for the first time, thanks to President George W. Bush and Senator Obama in 2006. 

          And no thanks to the same congress, the entire bill will not be transparent until after it emerges from backroom dealing and is signed by President Obama.

          Transparency is a great idea.  Like shutting the barn door after the horses are gone, transparency serves no purpose when it is already too late. 

          Transparency after the deed is done is an outrage.  It suits Pelosi's pig just fine.