Roll Call is reporting that during the typical Friday afternoon document dump — a practice used to hide actions that might prove somewhat embarrassing to the White House — the administration quietly announced that some of the former restrictions on lobbying ballyhooed about during the late campaign have been lifted.

Let special interests ring!

Roll Call (see here, but subscription is required) says that the administration lifted bans on lobbyists that have some part of spending “stimulus” funds. So now getting hooks into bloated federal spending is open season for the very lobbyists that Obama pretended to disdain only months ago.

So much for hopinchange.

Read More →

Update 3/31/09 by Jeff: Ho, hum, it appears Gov. Sebelius is yet another Obama nominee with a tax problem.

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius (Democrat), fresh off a losing battle against the GOP-led state legislature to solve the state budget crisis by incurring more debt while keeping expenditures exorbitant, has been selected by President Obama to head up the department of Health and Human Services. Given the amount of time between the February 3 withdrawal of Obama’s first choice for the post, former Senator and health care rationing advocate Tom Daschle (D-SD), it certainly appears that Sebelius was a very, very distant second choice (if that) to fill the empty cabinet position.

The reason she was a distant second for the post, though, probably (based on President Obama’s track record of nominees to date) had little or nothing to do with a reluctance to nominate yet another lobbyist to his cabinet.

Before being elected state Insurance Commissioner, Sebelius was executive director and chief lobbyist for the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association (an organization which has since dropped the accurate title for the more obfuscative “Kansas Association for Justice”). She continued protecting the state Trial Lawyers Association’s interests as Governor, using her veto power in 2007 to kill SB 55, a tort reform measure aimed directly at lowering health care costs by providing partial protection to health care professionals in the wake of a state Supreme Court ruling “that physicians and other health care providers could be sued under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act for disputes over the care and treatment of patients.”

Read More →

“Troubled.”  How droll. It’s Pete Visclosky (D, IN-01), by the way. I repeat it because the AP can’t seem to.

Visclosky’s ties to troubled PMA Group run deep.

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky has promised to return money from donors with ties to a troubled lobbying group, but critics say his ties to PMA Group run deep.

The northwest Indiana congressman’s former chief of staff worked as a lobbyist for the firm, and Federal Election Commission reports show he received at least $100,000 in contributions from donors tied to PMA Group between 2006 and 2008. PMA Group was the top donor to Visclosky’s 2008 re-election campaign.

Read More →

They’re apparently loving it, in fact.

K Street rebounds as many firms sign clients at fast pace

K Street’s economy appears to be on the rebound as a number of firms are reporting a sharp increase in new clients, a trend lobbyists attributed to the new president’s far-reaching agenda.

The combination of a deepening recession and the distraction of the 2008 campaign, which kept Congress out of session for much of the latter half of last year, were blamed for pushing lobbying revenues down in 2008.

Since Nov. 4, however, several top firms have signed new clients at a pace exceeding the growth periods that followed previous election cycles. Lobbyists credited the recently passed stimulus package and anticipated policy fights touching on the energy, healthcare and financial-services sectors for the uptick.

Read More →

Jake Tapper notices that Obama’s nominee for US Trade Representative, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, worked as a state and local lobbyist in Dallas; Tapper notes that he’s at least the fifth lobbyist picked for a significant position in the Obama Administration (and that’s before we consider family members like Joe Biden’s son or Tom Daschle’s wife). Here’s the Administration’s defense:

“Ron Kirk has never been a registered federal lobbyist,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC News….”How precisely is it a loophole when we never pledged to bar state lobbyists?” a Democratic official asks.

(Emphasis mine). Hey, isn’t that a tune we have heard before?

Read More →

Note: Ron Robinson noted this in the diaries.

Ah, change we can believe in:

We’re receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can’t get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What’s more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street lobbyists.

E-mails one key Democratic staffer: “K Street has the bill, or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don’t. So, the Hill is getting calls from the press (because it’s leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know—but we can’t do that because we haven’t seen the bill. Anyway, peeps up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, ‘Is this really happening?’”

Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.

Well, it’s a good thing Lobbyists have no place in President Obama’s administration, nor are they getting first access — even before Congress — to the legislation he is demanding be passed without being read so he can sign another $800 billion in debt into law at his earliest convenience.

Except that they are — but pay no attention to the goings-on behind the curtain. Only listen to the mantra of Hope and Change, and for goodness’ sake don’t look too hard at anything or ask any questions.

Wasting no time, President Obama began quickly overturning standing Bush executive orders in an effort to end nearly a decade of, what President Obama called on the campaign trail, “Bush cronyism.” Among his first moves were orders to freeze senior White House staffer’s pay and to toughen ethics and lobbying rules. As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is fond of saying, Barack Obama has instituted the strictest ethics policy in the history of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately for those voters who took Obama at his word, “strict” has an increasingly loose definition for the Obama-campaign-staffer-turned-White-House-spokesmen and his boss.

Obama’s message of “transparency” and “reform,” it seems, was nothing more than focus-group tested campaign rhetoric, and his new executive orders are nothing more than a frustrating extension of the like.

The revolving-door of politics, the junior senator from Illinois frequently crowed, would end in his administration. Lobbyists, he added, “won’t find a job in my White House.” His bold opposition to Washington’s entrenched interests took Beltway-apathetic voters by storm, but now, as the difficult realities of elected office greet Obama in the Oval Office, the President has failed to truly deliver the clean break from the last 8 years.

In the two weeks since his inauguration, Obama has issued a staggering seventeen exceptions to his short-lived no-lobbyist dicta. Despite the campaign rhetoric and present hedging, President Obama and his Cabinet-level officials have surrounded themselves with corrupt lobbyists, all of whom are all too willing to sell short the promise of America.

Read More →

For all the stories that have come out in the last month about how President Obama has executed the smoothest administrative transition in memory, and how Obama has chosen to enforce the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to the administration vetting and recruitment process, the facts sure do seem to point to an altogether different conclusion — especially in terms of cabinet nominees and senior staff.

Let’s take a quick look at a few members of the crack team Obama has tried to surround himself with since being elected President three months ago.

• Bill Richardson: Nominated to be Obama’s Secretary of Commerce; withdrew when it became public that he was “being investigated by a federal grand jury in his home state for…steering state bond business from the New Mexico Financial Authority toward…a significant campaign contributor.”
• Tim Geithner: Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary (and head of the IRS) failed to pay owed payroll taxes for several years, despite accepting reimbursement from the IMF for those taxes and signing certifications that he had paid them.
• Tom Daschle: Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services owed nearly $102,000 in taxes “on the car and driver a wealthy friend let him use from 2005 through 2007″ and neglected to “report $83,333 in consulting income in 2007.”
• Leon Panetta: The only experience Obama’s choice to be Director of Central Intelligence during the War on Terror and multiple international crises had with the CIA was fighting battles against the leadership and attempting to slash its budget while a staffer in the Clinton White House.
• William Lynn: Within hours of declaring his new no-lobbyists rule, Obama made an exception for Lynn, a lobbyist for the 3rd largest defense contractor in the nation and now an Obama nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense
• Hillary Clinton: While a Senator, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of State “intervened at least six times in government issues directly affecting companies and others that later contributed to her husband’s foundation.
• Lobbyists of the World, Unite!: Despite repeatedly promising during his campaign that lobbyists would not be welcome in his administration, Obama bent his own new rules and hired over a dozen lobbyists to fill senior staff positions.

The absurd attacks by leftists (and by “conservative” poseurs) on John McCain for his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, and the supposed incompetence of his vetting staff that selection displayed, look very hollow indeed when measured up against the apparent lack of any vetting whatsoever President Obama’s nominees for half a dozen cabinet positions (and countless more senior staff jobs).

Between the lack of vetting, the memory-holing of vital documents posted on WhiteHouse.gov during the Bush years (like, for example, the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, which is now only available via html cache), and Obama’s repeated violation of his own “ethics” rules for the purpose of filling his cabinet and senior staff rosters, the title “smoothest transition in history” appears to be almost exactly the opposite of what this incoming administration’s actions over the last few months deserve.

In fact, the only parts of this transition that have gone smoothly are the parts President Bush handled himself.

Now that should be a scary thought for all those liberals who proclaimed January 20, 2009 to be the day “competence” returned to the White House, shouldn’t it?

From the early days of his campaign, Obama made with the flourish that, should he be elected, lobbyists would not be welcome in his new tone Washington, his Washington of change and hope. Soon after the election, Obama’s spokesman John Podesta made a great show of announcing that Obama was insisting on the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to his ongoing choices for members of his administration and his transition team.

In the early November news conference, Podesta proudly proclaimed that Obama was so interested in distancing himself from the old, business-as-usual Washington that they didn’t care if they were excluding people of long Washington experience with their supposed strict ethics rules. Podesta sternly told reporters, “I’ve heard the complaint that we’re leaving all these extra people on the side, that we’re leaving all the people that know everything out in the cold. So be it. That’s a commitment that is one the American people expect and one the President-elect made.”

Yet within weeks it became clear that this new ethical standard was merely so much window dressing. Now, lobbyists abound in Obama’s administration and have since day one. Not only that, but tax cheats seem to be particularly drawn to the new president.

Read More →