New Administration Transparency.

I was reading some comments made by Howard Kurtz, a commentator/columnist who has made it quite clear that he is not a big fan of the conservative cause.

In a media chatroom hosted by the Washington Post, Mr. Kurtz was asked about how he felt about the current administration essentially playing the media "like a violin" concerning the dustup around Van Jones and the press announcement at 12 AM on a saturday morning announcing his resignation.

His response: I don't buy your reasoning. We can't cover a resignation until it happens. Leaving aside online and TV coverage, the Jones resignation got plenty of attention in the Monday papers. And if Sunday hosts ask the likes of David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs about the resignation, and get tepid or incomplete answers, I think it's clear to the audience what's going on. The Obama administration may have succeeded in muting the coverage on a holiday weekend, but that Friday-night and holiday releases of bad news were also a favored tactic in previous administrations.

Mr. Kurtz is right when he says that Friday-night and holiday releases have been used by previous administrations... But I'm going to throw one back at him: Didn't President Obama disavow the usage of such tactics? He did not specifically say "We will never make a significant press release after 10:00 PM Eastern on a Friday." But what he did say was that his administration would become much more "transparent" than the previous one.

Yet Van Jones was not properly vetted. It took "rodeo clown" Glenn Beck to discover Jones' very radical past, which I will not dredge up here using a staff of 7 and "Google" web searches. The information found couldn't be refuted and was easy to locate. It painted a picture of a man who clearly supports redistribution of wealth, nationalization of private industry, and a day of "comeuppance" of the long suffering black and minority communities against the dominant white race.

I truly believe that in this case, the Administration simply believed that even if this easily to be found information was dredged up, that nobody would care. Well, that's not the transparency that many Americans voted for.

I believe that Mr. Obama has more personal advisors that have past histories that are also quite radical. It would behoove Mr. Obama to submit those advisors to Congressional scrutiny because it is quite clear that Glenn Beck and others (Hannity, Van Susteren, Limbaugh) aren't going to let up anytime soon. Mr. Obama needs to let the American people know up front what kind of people he's selecting as his closest advisors as opposed to just hoping that their past are simply not scrutinized.