Hope and change have been disappointing at best.  Apparently hope was not a powerful enough tool.  Mayhap magic might prevail.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), under the enlightened administration of environmental superstar Dr. Jane Lubchenco, is planning a leadership conference in June.  The conference is to be held in a hotel near the NOAA Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.  No excessive travel for these parsimonious protectors of the purse strings.  

A couple of months ago, we were told of some high jinks at the GSA.  That's the Government Services Administration (GSA) that is chartered with overseeing the careful spending of our money.  They had a big conference with clowns and magic and mystics.  Then they had a big scandal. 

Maybe NOAA missed the memo. 

One of the sessions at the NOAA conference was to have a motivational theme and had the working title of "The Magic of Change."  NOAA placed an ad to find a magician and it caught the attention of Senator Scott Brown (R MA) among others.  With the GSA conference fresh in the minds of people, the reaction was immediate; ridicule, objections, outrage, you name it.  The results were viral with ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Gloucester Times, Politico, Boston.com, and the Belfast (that's right, Ireland) Telegraph and several others picking up the story.

Most of the media outlets that ran the story made the link to the GSA scandal but none made the link to the ongoing and unreported (other than the American Thinker) NOAA scandal.

I only wish that I were a fly on the wall and could have heard what Senator Brown said privately.  He released the following official statement:

It's outrageous that NOAA is advertising to hire a magician for an upcoming government conference.  This is taxpayer abuse, pure and simple, and I urge Commerce Secretary John Bryson to immediately cancel these frivolous plans.  This is a low point even by Washington's standards and an insult to the fishing families that have been harmed by NOAA's over-regulation and attitude of indifference.  The best magic that NOAA could perform would be to make this wasteful spending disappear.

NOAA listened (a strange phenomena in itself) to Senator Brown and withdrew the ad.  There will be no magic at the upcoming conference.

The clowns will still be there; they are protected by privacy screens erected by their government employee unions.  I don't think Dr. Lubchenco belongs to a union, but she's protected by the President.

Mike Johnson is a concerned citizen, a small government conservative, and a live-free-or-die resident of New Hampshire.  E-mail mnosnhoj@comcast.net