TRANSPARENCY?

The White House is busily creating an $18 million website to shine transparency on the disbursal of stimulus funds. Quite a sum, just for creating a website, right? I bet you're curious to see what $18 million buys, aren't you? Well, you're not alone. An organization called ProPublica has sought the contract through FOIA. They were finally successful - sort of:

http://documents.propublica.org/recovery-gov-contract-documents/page/56#p=57

The contract is a 59 page technical proposal. Of those 59 pages, 25 are completely blacked out (redacted). Another 14 pages are more than half redacted. The key pieces that are redacted are (from the blog 'The Raw Story'):

the project’s management structure;
something called the “Strategic Advisory Council”;
quality assurance procedures;
five pages on user experience;
site navigation ;
four unidentified pages on which everything, even section headings, have been redacted;
every single piece of information in the document’s pricing table, including function, vendor, model, part ID, detail and quantity;
the contract’s warranty agreement.

Isn't it a little ominous that the contract to create the transparency website isn't transparent? It certainly doesn't bode well, in my opinion.

What are they trying to hide (especially as far as the pricing and key personnel goes)?

To take a page from the book of the great anchorman Ron Burgundy, 30% of the time, it's transparent all the time!