Conflict Of Interest? What Conflict Of Interest?

Susan Bayh an issue in fight over health care
President Barack Obama called Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh to the Oval Office on July 17 for a one-on-one meeting about health-care reform, Democrat to Democrat.

The left-leaning advocacy group Move On.org recently called on Bayh to support a new government health insurance plan.

And the right-leaning group Conservatives for Patients' Rights has urged Bayh to oppose a public health plan.

But for Bayh, health care isn't just the latest high-stakes political fight in Congress. It's also a substantial part of his family's income.

As the debate over health-care reform intensifies, Bayh's wife is receiving lucrative payouts from some of the companies that could be most affected by that legislation.

Bayh contends the $2.1 million that his wife, Susan, earned from public health-care companies from 2006 to 2008 represents no conflict of interest. Questions persist, however, for at least two reasons. First, Evan Bayh has been unclear about his positions on many issues related to health-care reform. Second, there's the timing of Susan Bayh's rapid rise into corporate governance.

Susan Bayh, who was a midlevel lawyer for the politically active Eli Lilly and Co. while her husband was governor of Indiana, did not serve on the board of a single public health-care company until it was clear her husband was about to ascend to the U.S. Senate. Only one month before Evan Bayh was elected to the Senate in a landslide vote, his wife was appointed to serve on the board of what would become the nation's largest health insurance company -- and arguably the company with the most at stake in the health-care reform debate.

Within a few years, numerous companies recruited her, and she eventually served on the boards of eight companies. At least one of them asked her to reduce the number of boards she served on, apparently because she was spread too thin to be effective.

Adding to speculation about a connection between her board memberships and her husband's office is Susan Bayh's unwillingness to discuss the matter, including for this story. She has declined several requests for comment on her corporate interests, making it difficult to tell where those interests end.

[....]

Where there's smoke, you usually have some fire.

Helluva lot of smoke here.


Read it all at The IndyStar

So Much For All That Transparency

Remember way back when? You know, somewhere around January 21 or so when all the Dems were talking a good game about having transparency in government and none was a bigger spokesperson for this then The One, The Messiah, Mr HopeandChange himself, Barack Obama.

Well, just like everything else he has said or promised to reassure those who might be skeptical of him and his socialists leanings, he has also started to backtrack on this pie in the sky talk.

The White House has silently tripled the number of Web pages that it forbids Google and other search engines from accessing.

Can't have those nasty searches of the White House web sites now, can we? There has already been so many instances of the Obama cult scrubbing websites when embarrassing items are discovered or things disappearing when his actions don't meet his words, so this shouldn't be that big a surprise to those who have been chronicling these acts.

Those bloggers drunk on hope who desperately wanted to see proof of Obama's commitment to his campaign promises of transparency and Google Government now find themselves with a difficult choice: they can either accept and acknowledge that robots.txt files are not a set of digital tea leaves through which you can read the new administration, or, if robots.txt does carry weight, they can try to come up with a way of explaining a 200 percent increase in the number of directories blocked by Obama's Web team as anything but Cheney-esque secrecy.

I wonder how much his good buddies from Google are helping them in crafting these robot blocking files?