The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be carried out with full transparency and accountability

We’re talking about a bill that had not be read completely by a single member of the House or Senate when it was voted on. But it’s going to be carried out with full transparency and accountability. That statement has to be a joke. The person in charge of the full transparency can’t even produce an American birth certificate.

This is your money. You have a right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.

The people who were elected to control how our money were spent were not even allowed to read what the money would be spent on, before they voted. Yet we read some BS about “you have a right to know”.

The recovery.gov page is a waste of space.

I’ve got an updated look at Title XV in the H.R.1 Conference Report over at Quasiblog in “Rats Redux.”

http://www.quasiblog.com/2009/02/rat-redux.html

I’m always open to correction, and I didn’t attempt to slog through the Senate’s version too, but there are a couple of substantive changes to the oversight provisions in question between HR1 as passed by the House and the ultimate Conference Report which passed into law. The short, shorter, shortest version is this:

The RAT Board now defined in Title XV, Subtitle B acquired the power to hold public hearings and subpoena witnesses, which is HUGE. Even without it the RAT Board would have altered IG operations in serious, counterproductive ways.

The place where the partisan train wreck looks likely to occur, however, is in the “Recovery Independent Advisory Panel” created in Title XV, Subtitle C to putatively make recommendations to the recommenders on the RAT Board. The President can appoint anyone he likes to this Panel, which somewhere between HR1 and the Conference Report, acquired the stunning power “to secure” any information it likes from any agency head of its choosing.

Simply digging out those two critically significant changes — after figuring out where to look for them — would probably have taken most of the allotted time between receiving the Conference Report and being compelled to vote on it. Thus is representative government subverted. The fact that the President didn’t even bother to sign it on the arbitrary deadline he, himself, set up, just piles insult on top of the injuries already inflicted on the body politic. It will be months before we have a clear picture of what’s actually in it.

So what do you suspect is the point of the RAT provision? If it doesn’t change a thing, why is it necessary? It certainly isn’t stimulative.

My understanding is that the as inspectors general have always operated without fear of White house interference. Now they won’t.

A similar situation is the census controversy (largely ignored by the press as well). The census has always been performed independently by the Commerce Dept – the secretary of which is also appointed by the President. Since Judd Gregg resigned over the politicization of the census I don’t think it is out of line to assume the same thing is going on here.

The WH can now stop investigations it doesn’t like, and presumably direct those it does. You don’t find that troubling?

My sources for point (2) and (3) are all the reports about the contents of RAT bill, including the one you provided. They all say the RAT board will be composed of IG and deputy secretaries, both of which serve the mercy of the Executive. (Actually, one of them says that the board will only be made up of IGs, not deputies. Same difference, in terms of Executive connections.)

As for (4), here’s Inouye’s proposed bill summary from January 27th:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:SN00336:@@@D&summ2=m&

The Project On Government Oversight had spotted it on January 15th:

http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/alerts/government-oversight/go-bo-20090115.html

And for the record, I’m not dismissing… I’m analyzing. “Dismissing” doesn’t properly describe burning 45 minutes of my time reading the 2008 IG amendment, or the overall hours I’ve spent today, researching my replies to this thread.

To the contrary, “dismissing” was what I did to the RAT when I went solely off the report of the single author you provided in your post.

(1) Spammer posts comment full of keywords and links to your site. Today the keywords and links may relate to ibuprofen, tomorrow it’ll be Xanax or something else.

(2) Google comes by and indexes your page, including the ibuprofen links.

(3) Meanwhile, the spammers are doing the same thing to thousands of other blog owners, many of whom don’t even pay attention to comments and let them all automatically post.

(4) Clueless User goes to Google and searches for “ibuprofen”, Google sees that hundreds or thousands of blog comments are linking to this one site selling ibuprofen, and sends CU there.

(5) Spammer takes CU’s money and laughs all the way to the bank.

I’m trying to figure out why people post multiple non-sensical posts about ibuprophen.

From my friend JMH at Quasiblog:

In awarding the RAT Board itself Inspector General status and powers, the stimulus bill creates an Uber I.G., which can initiate its own audits and reviews, conduct public hearings, and issue subpoenas. [Hello Henry!] The idea that “Nothing in this subtitle shall affect the independent authority of an inspector general to determine whether to conduct an audit or investigation of covered funds,” gets our Daily Doublespeak Award.

Read the whole thing: http://www.quasiblog.com/2009/02/who-dunnit.html

Now to be fair, I’m confident President Obama would say it’s a non-issue too – like bringing the census to the White house and hiring 12 lobbyists and a bunch of tax cheats and criminals to sit in his cabinet. And the mainstream media would certainly confirm that it’s a non-issue too. No news here, just look away.

Oh and for the record, everything in the porkulus package was slipped in – so let’s not pretend it is anything but a give-away for democrat causes.

But dismiss away.