Free Republic

<p>A promise not to hire lobbyists didn't even last 2 months. A promise for sweeping ethics reforms has been all hat no cattle.</p> <p>Big donors considering whether to work the phones raising money for President Obama's reelection campaign might consider the fate of his 2008 bundlers. Many of them, it turns out, won plum jobs in his administration.</p>

The White House is launching the web portal ethics.gov, a transparency website designed to fulfill a campaign promise of open and accountable government. The portal puts various public records databases in a centralized location, including White House Visitor Records, lobbyist disclosure records, and campaign finance reports. Most of these databases were previously available online, but users can now search across all available datasets simultaneously. "President Obama promised he would 'create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format,'" the White House said in a statement. "Today, with the...