Posted by Tina
This stinker of a bill is being purposely hidden from the eyes of the public…why?
The bill being forced through congress by a few key democrat players has been written behind closed doors and in secret meetings with the president. The BIG question is why? Why the secrecy if it is such a good bill. And why the big hurry to pass the bill. Not a single legislator, including those who wrote it, could
possibly have had time to read this bill much less understand its ramifications and actual costs.yet they will cast their votes. This is not only an extreme case of irresponsible behavior it is absolutely against the spirit of openess the president promised on the campaign trail. From the Barack Obama Organizing for America wepage:
Obama Proposes New Era of Government on Internet, by Peter Erickson June 23, 2007
** The idea is to simply take budgets with hundreds or thousands of pages and post them on the web — to throw these volumes into the public realm. *** And this is great as a first step, and at first, Obama’s proposal seems to merely be an extension of this direction: for example, (a) by having a period of five days in which he would post legislation on the White House website before signing it, or (b) by ensuring that gratuitous earmarks are discouraged by forcing them into the light of day. And he says things like: Building on his Google for government bill, which was signed into law and allows every American to do a simple search and see exactly how federal money is being spent, Barack Obama will ensure that any tax breaks to special interests, or tax earmarks, are also publicly available by directing the Office of Management and Budget to post them on its website. **
So…is there evidence that Obama will honor this pledge? Not so far, he speaks about the urgency involved in getting this done and says nothing, even participates, in secret negotiations behind closed doors. Will he delay in signing this legislation…will he risk letting it sit on the web for days giving people time to read through it and digest it in it’s entirety? Read on…
Connie Hair, writing AT Human Events found one very disturbing portion of the bill that subverts state powers of state governments and reveals a tactic that makes finding such information very difficult:
Democrats Delay Bill Release to Conceal Details, by Connie Hair Human Events
** Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 p.m. last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot search on their home computers. *** Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document — which people can search by key words and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into pdf files, which can be read but not searched. *** Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bills provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov] website.) ***