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Just a few months ago, in March of this year, Michelle Obama went on the Ellen DeGeneres TV show and talked about how her life in the White House can be so hard. As Western Journalism pointed out at the time, the first lady complained, “The one thing people don’t realize is, we can’t do little things like open windows.”
Oh, no.
Not long after that little “true confession” session on Ellen, Mrs. Obama left the confines of the People’s House in Washington to wing her way to Asia to promote her pet project called “Let Girls Learn.” In Japan, Mrs. Obama ran up a tab of nearly $80,000 for a fleet of rental cars to carry her and her massive entourage to destinations such as the shrine of a Japanese rice god. Then, in Cambodia, Michelle and a delegation of U.S. government officials were booked into luxurious accommodations that cost American taxpayers close to a quarter of a million dollars.
Oh, yes.
Right around a year before that pricey Asian jaunt, the first lady made an “official visit” to China during which she was accompanied not only by her entourage of Secret Service agents and assistants, but also by her daughters and her mother. Reports out of Beijing were not so glowing about the way the first family dealt with the locals at posh accommodations.
Uh-oh.
The Daily Mail reported: “Michelle Obama and three of her family members are staying in a $8,350-per-night Beijing presidential suite, but despite a 24-hour butler and other perks that come with the lodging, her entourage has inconvenienced ‘pretty much everyone’ and made the hotel staff ‘fed up,’ a well-placed hotel staffer has told MailOnline.”
Now, according to an announcement from The White House, the first lady is soon to be back on the road again…or to be more precise, back in the air and away from those frustrating closed windows at the uncomfortable DC mansion she calls home.
And when she takes off for Europe aboard her taxpayer-funded plane, bound for a taxpayer-funded stay at an expensive hotel, where she will enjoy taxpayer-funded amenities and events, Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her two daughters and her mother, Marian Robinson.
So why is the first lady bound for London, Milan, and Vicenza, Italy, for a week in mid-June? In part, says the White House notice, Mrs. Obama will once more be promoting her Let Girls Learn initiative as she did in Japan and Cambodia. Plus, she’ll put in an appearance at the Milan Expo 2015 to push her agenda for a healthier planet by way of Let’s Move.
The announcement of the first lady’s latest tour schedule doesn’t say much about what she and her family members will be doing all the time she’s not promoting girls’ education or physical activity or briefly visiting with members of the U.S. military. The one hint that there will be a little pleasure time in the schedule: “The First Lady will also visit cultural sites in Venice before returning to Washington, DC.”
When the trip was announced on Twitter, most of the comments were favorable, supporting the first lady’s excursion. A few tweets, however, noted that the American taxpayer is once again picking up the tab for what, to some, amounts to a pretty awesome summer vacation.
This post originally appeared on Western Journalism – Equipping You With The Truth
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