Most transparent administration evah still opaque on White House visits

Barack Obama’s promise to let us all know who comes calling at the White House has officially expired.

Among the many weaknesses found by the Center’s review of the database:

• The “event” description in the logs is blank for more than 205,000 visits, including many that involved small meetings with the president and his key aides.

• Five junior staff aides together received more than 4,440 visits. By contrast, then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, famed for his workaholic schedule, is listed as having fewer than 500 visits.

• Less than 1 percent of the estimated 500,000 visits to the White House in Obama’s first eight months — a time when the new administration was bustling with activity — have been disclosed, according to the Center’s analysis.

• The logs include names of people cleared by the Secret Service for White House entry who apparently never showed up. The Center analysis found more than 200,000 visits with no time of arrival, an indication that the person didn’t enter the White House, though there is no way to be certain. For instance, actor Ryan Gosling is listed at a West Wing event with members of his band, Dead Man’s Bones, in October 2009. But Gosling’s representative, Carolyn Govers, said the actor did not go.

• Two-thirds of the more than 1 million names listed are people who passed through parts of the White House on guided group tours.

Meanwhile, we’re still to be assured that the Bill Ayers, Malik Shabazz, Jeremiah Wright, and Bertha Lewis and other notorious names that do appear on the visitor logs don’t belong to the controversial figures we know by those names. That little attempt at a Jedi mind trick never really worked. Now, it looks like they’re not even bothering to keep the records accurate at all.