Will President Obama Announce He is Turning Off White House Air Conditioning for the Summer?
This was just brought to my attention:
Apparently, the President is going to make an address on global warming Tuesday. Fine, look forward to hearing what he has to say. But, I wonder whether he will set an example by forgoing air conditioning (one example) at the White House or, like so many in the global warming movement, consider that sacrifice is for someone else.
A good place to start would be to lower the Presidential carbon footprint by canceling his upcoming vacation to Africa that is estimated by USA Today to cost us $60,000,000 to $1000,000,000.
A good place to start would be to lower the Presidential carbon footprint by canceling his upcoming vacation to Africa that is estimated by USA Today to cost us $60,000,000 to $1000,000,000.
The sad thing about this is Obama waited for a heat wave to announce his plans. Given the cool summer, the best he could do was 90 in DC.
ReplyDeleteWhile presidential vacations are never cheap - I feel these 'cost estimates' have been very overblown for shock value.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I checked over 90% of these figures were costs that *do not go away* regardless of where the president is. These are people/staff security things that are done even if he went to Wichita :)
Anyway - yeah sad to see the drum beat on even though this has been a very mild even cold at times summer.
It ought to be noted that USA Today did not make the assertion of the estimated cost of President Obama’s trip to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, but they sourced it from an earlier article that ran in The Washington Post with information gleaned from classified documents obtained by The Post's Carol Leonnig.
ReplyDeleteCharacterizing the trip as simply a ‘vacation’ is also somewhat erroneous and misleading. Further exploration of Mr. Obama’s itinerary reveals that he will be meeting with the leaders of all of the countries he is slated to visit, as they are all strategic economic partners. While Mr. Obama is indeed bringing his family on the trip it is not at all unusual and George W. Bush brought his family on several of the 7 trips to the African continent while he was in office.
The estimated cost of this trip is indeed expensive, but so are all presidential excursions. Most of the expense stems from the simple fact that the planned destinations lack the infrastructure in situ to support the kind of security measures mandated for any presidential outing in today’s security climate.