Junketeer-in-Chief

$$ Last Year in China $$

Why do I have to go to a British newspaper to discover the details of Michelle Obama's second junket this Spring (the first being a skiing trip to Aspen) ... this time to Cambodia and Japan ... with her daughters and assumed entourage ... see: UK Daily Mail Story. Has the Obama administration stopped being transparent? Try it yourself with a Google search and see if you can discover such info in the U.S. media. (This article estimates that such Obama vacations have cost U.S. taxpayers over $40 million during their term in the White House.) The cover story for this taxpayer-funded all-expense-paid luxurious Asian vacation is to promote female education in these countries ... who can quibble with that? However, I strongly suspect that Japanese girls get a far better education  than do their counterparts in the United States.

Perhaps the First Lady can next travel to Trenton, New Jersey to promote female education there? (And stay in a Motel 6?)

I really am sick of politicians of both parties taking vacations on the the taxpayers' dime and calling them trade-missions or fact-finding trips. Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts, particularly during his last years here, took many such sojourns costing millions ... see: WCVB Story. May I suggest that, at the end of such junkets, these political leeches produce a public trip report of the facts that they uncovered or the specific trade that they accomplished. Of course then they will all hide behind the term "good will" mission ... and who can argue with that?

Me, that's who. How about you?

China Blossom

President Obama’s peripatetic wife, Michelle Obama, is off on a seven day cultural-exchange trip to China with her two children and mother … see: New York Times Story. This is just a few short days after returning from a long-weekend family vacation in Key Largo, Florida (this time with Barack) and two months after an extended five weeks of sun and fun in Hawaii … two weeks of it by her lonesome.

This is, of course, is just another plutocratic expense that these many family junkets are costing the American taxpayer. But then she did just suffer through the trauma of losing the White House pastry chef … who refused to omit butter, sugar, milk and flour from his postprandial creations. So a few extra million federal dollars is clearly justifiable solace.

I think that, rather than report when our First Lady is gone from the White House, it would be a lot simpler if our national media just told us when, on those rare occasion, she was so ensconced.

Afterward: Its been pointed out that I forgot that Michelle, et alia spent the long  Presidents' Day weekend on the slopes in Aspen.  Oops, it does seem like almost two months in Washington between Hawaii and Key Largo was too large a burden for our ever-entitled First Lady to endure.

Frugal Is as Frugal Does

Michelle Obama is on another of her obsessive missions.  This time it is to save the U.S. taxpayers money.  This Spring break, instead of taking her daughters (Sasha and Malia) and an entourage of friends to Spain (or the equivalent) at a cost of (at least) a half a million dollars (like she did last August … see: Huffington Post Story) she, because she had $4,000 per night room coupons, sent her daughters to the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas (see: Breitbart Story).  Then, because these coupons were only good for four nights, she had them flown to Sun Valley, Idaho to finish out their vacation (see: Breitbart Story ... I would have referenced a main-stream media story if I could have found one) in a discounted $184,000 per week ski chalet.  And to further exhibit her frugality, she sent them both on the same Presidential jumbo jet.  (They will return to Washington next week in the same penny-pinching way.)  It is thought that she was going to accompany them, but she, because of government regulations, was forced to take a duplicate plane.

The reason that Sun Valley was chosen for this ski trip was that their previous junket to Aspen, Colorado a little over a month ago was not to their liking.  The people at Aspen were not willing to close off the Panda Pipe area for their exclusive use (see: New York Post Story).  In Sun Valley, for an undisclosed, but discount-bundled amount, they were given exclusive use of the mountain. Moreover, at both locales, Michelle had the White House chefs and food tasters flown out there too to save the cost of eating at the expensive local bistros. These chefs then could prepare their favorite waygu beef sliders and other apres ski snacks.  She also had White-House staff flown in to lay out their (cut-rate) designer ski wardrobes.

Now, aren’t we happy that our First Lady is so sensitive to the government spending sequestration and the current economic crunch in which we find ourselves … and is willing to cut back on non-essential  luxuries like the rest of us?
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