“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

The above quote is from a blog post about the Open Government Initiative on the White House blog.

I guess the concept is only good when a state is following the Administration’s orders.

…so says Peter Orszag, Obama’s Budget Director.

According to CNN’s interview, Orszag claims that “the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill which it inherited from the previous administration.”

That sounds an awful lot like an easy cop out to hard promises made on the campaign trail: “ …we can no longer accept an earmarks process in which many of the projects being funded fail to address the real needs of our country.”