Pun Salad

A couple instances of how Obamamanian promises simply vanish when embarrassing or inconvenient:

• Back in the ancient past—February 4, 2009—Jim Harper complained that President Obama had signed two bills, posting neither one at the "Five Day Review" page on the White House website as he promised.

  At the time, Jim posted a screen grab of the page, and speculated that it was "not likely to be on the site for long."

  I'm ashamed to admit that I (yes, even I) thought Jim was being unduly cynical. As it turns out, he was completely on target. You can click on http://www.whitehouse.gov/five_day_review/ all day long, and you'll get nothing but 404s out of the White House web server. You can still find the January 20 promise, however:

  Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

  Click quick before that, too, gets scrubbed from the site.

• Via Riehl World View, the American Small Business League (ASBL) is hoppin' mad. They endorsed Obama last year based on his promise:
  "I am proud to have the support of the American Small Business League and their grassroots efforts to help protect American small business. Helping American small business is part of our movement for change and the end of politics as usual," Sen. Obama said. "98 percent of all American companies have fewer than 100 employees. Over half of all Americans work for a small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our nation's economy and we must protect this great resource. It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants."

  That was then. President Obama had no problems tossing the ASBL under the bus:

  Since making that statement almost a year ago, President Obama has consistently refused to make good on his campaign promise, and support legislation to stop Fortune 500 firms from hijacking federal contracts designated for America's nearly 27 million small businesses.

  Not only has President Obama refused to propose even a single policy to address the problem, but he actually changed his website to remove the appearance that he had ever made the statement, "It is time to end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants." (http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/sbhome/)

  Unfortunately, the ASBL, not as cynical as Jim Harper, do not document that final claim with a screen grab.