http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31373407/ns/politics-white_house/

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com’s request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

CREW says it will file a lawsuit Tuesday against the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.

What he meant was that he’d be totally transparent about what he’s hiding from everyone. See… now everything makes sense.

http://www.reuters.com/…

PepsiCo Inc. will spell out that its Aquafina bottled water is made with tap water, a concession to the growing environmental and political opposition to the bottled water industry.

According to Corporate Accountability International, a U.S. watchdog group, the world’s No. 2 beverage company will include the words “Public Water Source” on Aquafina labels.

“If this helps clarify the fact that the water originates from public sources, then it’s a reasonable thing to do,” said Michelle Naughton, a Pepsi-Cola North America spokeswoman.

This is quite funny. Some companies already do this. I suppose it’s a good thing to inform the customer of but if a person doesn’t realize that most of the bottle water is just taken from a local public filtering plant then I’m not concerned with what the label says. The whole bottled water thing is silly. You pay more per unit for water then gasoline yet you get effectively the exact same thing from the tap in 90% of the country. I really recommend Penn and Teller’s Bullshit episode to see how ridiculous it all is.