In all the recent "stimulus" hoopla, President Barack Obama and Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman have found themselves in something of a war of words:

Sin City’s mayor wants President Barack Obama to apologize for saying companies shouldn’t visit Las Vegas on the taxpayer’s dime.

Oscar Goodman spoke after a regular scheduled meeting with tourism officials where he expressed concern that federal lawmakers might be discouraging travel to the city…

"You can’t get corporate jets, you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime," Obama said.

President Obama has already begun paying back Big Labor’s big money boys for spending record sums to put him in the White House. As we reported yesterday on Freedom@Work, part of this payback is the Obama Administration’s quiet attempt to delay and ultimately cancel a new rule requiring union bosses to report more specific information about how they are spending their forced dues revenue.

Members and nonmembers forced to pay dues as a condition of employment deserve the right to know where their money is going — for instance, this private LearJet, shown below taking off in Las Vegas. Machinists union bosses spent $1.8 million (from forced dues) for hangars, jet fuel, jet maintenance, mechanics, pilots, and associated loan repayments in 2006 alone.

In November, Machinists union bosses flew the jet from Canada to Ireland on workers’ dime. But the Obama Administration is moving right now to keep the ordinary unionized worker from knowing how much this and other flights by union bosses cost the employees on a per-union-official basis.

Obama claims he wants transparency and accountability — but apparently he makes an exception for union bosses.