This Will Be The Most Open ,Transperant ,Accessabile President In American History ! Right !

MarineReconDad — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:12:31 GMT

The normally savvy media mavens on Team Obama blundered badly on the opening day of his European trip, scheduling his only open event for 5:15 a.m. EDT, which forced the mainstream and cable morning news programs to fill endless hours showing live protests in London and discussing first lady Michelle Obama 's "green pencil skirt."

Unlike President Bush 's White House communications team, which usually timed press conferences abroad to coincide with the U.S. morning programs, the Obama operation began the president's first day of his first trip abroad while most Americans were still asleep. What's more, the president banned most reporters from nearly every event he held on a day heavy with bilateral talks with foreign leaders, and even held U.S. cameras at bay for his visit to Buckingham Palace to meet the queen.

As a result, the 24-hour cable shows began their morning programs with endless footage of hooligans clashing with British bobbies, a scene that played out all day on television.

"They're the only pictures being shown out of London right now," said Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent. CNN anchor Christine Romans assured viewers, "There's a lot of other hard work going on behind closed doors," although a split-screen showed only the raging protest in the streets of the city's financial district.

RE: This Will Be The Most Open ,Transperant ,Accessabile President In American History ! Right !

buckeye — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 05:18:33 GMT

The raging protests resulted in a grand total of 35 arrests. The second day of the summit was more productive then the first day (I'll wait for you to argue the point), and if you saw the stock market at the end of the summit, I am sure you made quite a bit of money.

RE: This Will Be The Most Open ,Transperant ,Accessabile President In American History ! Right !

MarineReconDad — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:52:58 GMT

Usually 1 day summits ( and that is what it really is, the first day is photo ops and state visits) are horse and pony publicity shows for ALL the G20 leaders! There has NEVER been anything that has permanently changed after these meetings. Example after the last one all the members agreed that they would open trade between member countries, the next week, the next week 5 member countries enacted "protectionist" programs!

I don't get excited about these things!

RE: This Will Be The Most Open ,Transperant ,Accessabile President In American History ! Right !

Dawg — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:57:39 GMT

Having immediacy broken his promise of a “new style” of politics before he was even elected, it seems that Obama is not exactly fulfilling his promise of being more transparent.

The first of just three questions asked of Barack Obama at his December 17 press conference [audio available here]:

CYNTHIA BOWERS, CBS News Chicago correspondent: I have a question. You ran on a platform of transparency. How difficult is all this having to wait to release your inquiry business when the American people expect transparency?

Yes, you read that correctly. Bowers prompts Obama for an answer wherein he can lament having to wait to answer questions about the nature of his interaction with indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.).

…

A better question might have been:

Sir, you ran on a platform of transparency but for the past few press conferences you’ve taken only three questions. How does this fit with your promise to be transparent when the American people see you answering so few questions from the media?

Indeed.

In fact, it seems that after spending years attacking Bush for dodging the media, some are now praising Obama for doing exactly the same thing.

It’s almost as though they’re not… objective or something.

What a difference an administration makes. During the Bush years, if a spokesman or the president himself attempted to dodge a tough question, the media would go into their Sam Donaldson impressions and pundits would see a conspiracy of silence.

But now that it’s Obama, the dodging that was once denounced is suddenly celebrated. Thus, appearing on today’s Morning Joe, Larry O’Donnell declared “impressive” Pres.-elect Obama’s stiff-arming yesterday of a reporter who dared asked Blago-related questions.

The video clip also includes a gratuitous bit of nastiness from Obama adviser David Axelrod aimed at Mika Brzezinski.

Willie Geist introduced the clip of Pres.-elect Obama cuttting John-the-reporter off, telling him not to “waste your question” as he ventured into the Blagosphere.

When O’Donnell appeared later in the show, he declared himself impressed by Obama’s artful dodging.

LARRY O’DONNELL: You know, the way Obama quashed it yesterday in the news conference was pretty impressive. And look, it’s a pretty difficult situation for a reporter. You’re sitting there, you’re going to get one shot at the President-elect. You can, as he put it, waste it on a question he’s not going to answer, or you can ask him something about education. I think [Obama] did a pretty effective job of giving him that option.

Man of the year.

Sheehs, give me a break. If this guy had had one tenth the scrutiny Palin had, he’d never have survived the Iowa caucuses.

RE: This Will Be The Most Open ,Transperant ,Accessabile President In American History ! Right !

Dawg — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:02:16 GMT

CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115.