It’s Spelled with a ‘Y’

Change we can believe in. It will be the end of politics as usual. There will be a new transparency in government as the era of pork-driven, special interest influenced policy is over.

The rhetoric resulted in an election win for the Obama ticket, and its Democrat coattails.

It took less than 3 weeks for all to realize that it was only rhetoric.

Let’s start with the First Family.

The January 24 edition of the New York Post reported that prior to the election, Michelle Obama worked for the University of Chicago Medical Center to run programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity and minority contracting. She was first hired in 2002.

In 2005, right after her husband became a United States Senator and requested a $1,000,000 earmark for the Center, her salary was nearly tripled from $120,000 to $317,000.

As she is now First Lady, Mrs. Obama has resigned from her position. And the hospital says that a position so crucial to its operations that it merited a salary of more than one quarter of a million dollars per year just three weeks ago will remain unfilled.

Did something dramatic happen in world of Chicago hospitals in the past three weeks, or was this position driven by the very pork we were all being told had to end?

The nominee, and now appointee, for Secretary of the Treasury was Tim Geithner. According to CNN, the IRS audited Mr. Geithner in 2006 and discovered that he had failed to pay the correct taxes for the years 2003 and 2004. He paid $16,732 to correct the error.

He did not act to address the problems with his returns of 2001 and 2002 until AFTER he had been nominated for the post of Treasury Secretary, which was over 2 years later. CNN reports that he then voluntarily corrected his errors for those years, paying $25,970.

But if he voluntarily corrected his 2001 and 2002 errors after his nomination, he knew that those errors existed. But he did nothing to fix them until he thought they would be discovered and publicly aired. Until then, he was quite satisfied to let the taxes that he knew he owed, remain unpaid.

This is the fellow who is now in charge of the IRS. And while it may seem like a good idea to have someone who obviously does not think that paying taxes is a necessity, it’s a good bet that such an attitude will not be applied to the rest of us.

Not to mention Bill Richardson, Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer and Hilda Solis, all Obama nominees who either have had to withdraw or are under fire for their failure to follow tax and/or ethics rules.

The task of the executive branch of our government is to execute, or carry out, the law. It appears that this administration believes that those who ensure that we Americans obey the laws should not be burdened by being subject to them.

There is a word for those who say one thing and do another. It’s spelled with a "y".