Obama Stops White House Tours for Public After Sequestration… Childish, Punishment or Tantrum?

By Marion Algier – Ask Marion

Just when you think White House etiquette, decorum and common sense can’t get any worse after Obama’s former campaign organization, reorganized as the political advocacy group ‘Organizing for Action’, announced that there will a charge for access to the President… especially to wealthy donors, we hear that White House tours for the public have been halted because of Sequestration.  I mean really?  They are self-guided these days!

HotAir: The Obama administration is obviously putting their best efforts into making the sequester cuts as painful, visible, and wide-ranging as humanly possible in order to ensure that no ordinary American citizen should be able to escape their effects unscathed in some capacity — ’cause let’s be real, how else will they convince the country that we cannot turn back the tide of government, we must hike taxes, and that we need to elect more Democrats in 2014? Options for cutting the budget in ways that do not negatively impact the public at large need not apply.

The Obama administration spared no time announcing that the across-the-board sequester cuts will result in the cancellation of all White House tours indefinitely beginning March 9, 2013. This no doubt upset ticket holders, but it also seems to have struck a nerve with Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who introduced an amendment to a continuing resolution on the federal budget that seeks to block President Obama from using federal funds for any future golf outings until the tours are reinstated:

None of the funds made available by a division of this Act may be used to transport the President to or from a golf course until public tours of the White House resume.

Gohmert cited reports that guesstimated the $1 million cost of Obama’s trip means "341 federal employees could have kept their jobs and not been furloughed if the president had not taken his last golf outing." And considering the format of the White House tours, it would take a whole lost less than that to continue the tours of the ‘People’s House’ by the People.

According to an estimate from Florida’s WPTV, the president’s golf getaway cost local taxpayers in Florida about $78,205 in law enforcement expenses alone.

As former Press Secretary to “43” and now co-host of ‘the Five’, Dana Parino, said, “Can you imagine if this had been Bush?” She also commented that although the East Wing may no longer be available for tours to the public, whose house it is, the West Wing will no doubt be available to the donors to ‘Organizing for Action’!“  It should be noted that the access funds donated to ‘Organizing for Action’ will do nothing to help reduce the debt, re-start the White House tours, or anything else to help the American people or our government, but rather to support the ‘Organizing for Action’ organization itself and their political endeavors.  What happened to a second term U.S. president representing all the American people?

Technorati Tags: White House,Obamaland,Sequestration,Dana Parino,games,smoke and mirrors,manipulation of the public,Representative Louie Gohmert,Organizing for Action,wake-up America,stand-up America