President Obama has made a trademark of calling for openness and transparency in government. "Sunshine is the best disinfectant," he declared in his State of the Union address, and then, sounding like John McCain during his Presidential campaign, he called for a web site to disclose all the "earmarks" members of Congress lard onto large bills when they bring home the bacon for their districts.

This "earmark" idea, though it might have some traction with Ross Perot independents, is a pretty pitiful stab at transparency from an Administration that has taken to making many of the biggest and most expensive governing decisions behind closed doors.

This kind of governing is what brought us the bank bailout, designed and implemented secretly out of the Treasury Department, with no input from voters or their elected representatives, until a frantic up-or-down vote. Administration officials claimed the economy would go under overnight if we didn't bail out the banks, and, after an initial rebellion, they managed to ram the massive Troubled Asset Relief Program through Congress. Obama made reference to that mess in his State of the Union speech, when he claimed that he and everyone he knows "hated" the bank bailout, but we just had to do it.

Now welcome to the deficit commission--a panel of unelected experts who will decide the fate of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The Senate rejected the idea of such a commission, which takes away Congressional say-so over these enormously important matters. So now Obama is planning to use executive fiat to create the commission without Congress.

That’s transparent nonsense.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive magazine. To subscribe for just $14.97 a year, just click here.