The Washington Times has this “end of transparency” headline up right now:

White House to cut access to half of federal websites

Which starts with:

As part of the Obama administration’s campaign to promote transparency, the White House announced today it intends to eliminate the public’s access to half of the federal government’s websites within the next year.

That’s a great paragraph for those who can’t handle reading whole articles, or those who might only see it in a feed reader. Of course once you get past that headline and first paragraph, you see something much different:

The White House said there are nearly 2,000 websites operated by the federal government, which it said confuses people.

“With so many separate sites, Americans often do not know where to turn for information,” the office of Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. said in a statement. “The administration will immediately put a halt to the creation of new websites. The administration will also shut down or consolidate 25% of the 2,000 sites over the next few months and set a goal of cutting the number of separate, standalone sites in half over the next year.”

It called the campaign of winnowing access to government web sites part of the president’s campaign “targeting duplication and waste.” The administration did not give an estimate of how much money it believes could be saved by halving the government’s Internet sites.

So the White House isn’t going rogue and blocking the public from all kinds of government websites, but rather they are combining some of the over 2,000 federal websites to make things easier to find and to cut spending.

We are now into my territory. I happen to know something about developing and running websites. There are numerous costs associated with keeping a website up and running. You need to make sure the data is up to date. You constantly have to tune and check for security cracks. None of that even includes the price of bandwidth to put the data out on the internet.

What we have here is President Obama trying to cut government waste, or as he says:

In a statement, Mr. Obama said, “as we work to tackle the budget deficit, we need to step up our game. No amount of waste is acceptable — not when it’s your money; not at a time when so many families are already cutting back.”

But that’s not good. In the crapspiracy theory world of the Moonie Times and Matt Drudge, this is the black, Democratic President trying to keep you all in the dark!

Don’t you just love how the right embraces government waste now?