Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/23/government-motors-repayment-fraud/

I was as surprised as anybody to hear GM CEO Ed Whitacre claim in a recent commercial that “we have repaid our government loans in full — with interest — five years ahead of the original schedule". As pointed out by a lead editorial in the Washington Times and by a Fox News report, a government watchdog has indicated that $4.7 billion of the $6.7 billion repaid came from another bailout account, and the FTC could become involved to investigate truth-in-advertising violations. And that’s not to mention that, even if the money flow had come directly from auto sales (which it didn’t), as the administration has been trying to say, the claim in the commercial leads the listener to believe that the company is free of all bailout debt (i.e. “repaid our government loans in full” seems to mean all government loans).

So you have a government-financed company lying on taxpayer-funded commercials that the taxpayer funding has been paid back. That’s rather creepily familiar: Democratic government employees used taxpayer funds in the stimulus package to lie to the taxpayers about how many jobs were being created or “saved” by the stimulus package itself. You are paying for your government to lie to you about whether it is actually working.

There have been a lot of empty promises in the age of Obama. And much that is Orwellian. But this is about as inimical to transparency and clean government as anything I’ve yet seen.