BUSHWORLD - KGB STYLE

[Guest guest]

BushWorld - KGB Style

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drip. Drip. Drip. Yesterday, Salon revealed that a third conservative

syndicated columnist has been paid off by the Bush administration.

Michael McManus was paid $10,000 to promote President Bush's marriage

initiative, the same program Maggie Gallagher was paid to promote.

Like Gallagher and Armstrong Williams, McManus failed to disclose

that he was on the administration's payroll in his column, which

appears in 50 newspapers nationwide, including the Washington Times,

the Dallas Morning News and the Charlotte Observer.

 

WADE HORN – THE PAYOLA POINT MAN: The payoffs to both McManus and

Gallagher can be traced back to one man, Assistant Secretary of

Health and Human Services Wade F. Horn. It was Horn's staff that cut

McManus the $10,000 check. Horn is also a former board member of

Marriage Savers, the group McManus founded in 1996. (Besides the 10K

to McManus, the administration paid Marriage Savers an additional

$49,000.) According to the 1/15/04 Orlando Sentinel, prior to joining

HHS in 2001, Horn founded the National Fatherhood Initiative

and " obtained a federal grant to study the effectiveness of the

community marriage policy programs. " Twenty thousand dollars from

that grant was funneled to Maggie Gallagher. In her syndicated column

on 4/16/02, Gallagher urged HHS to adopt the recommendations of her

study, which she didn't mention was paid for with administration

money. (She also failed to mention her contract with HHS, worth

another $21,500.)

 

THE HERITAGE CONNECTION: You can find the full archive of columns

from government-funded columnists Williams and Gallagher on the

Heritage Foundation's website, Townhall.com. Heritage also helped

procure over $46,000 from HHS for Marriage Savers, which used the

money to study its efforts to convince low-income couples to get

married. The administration later touted the study in a May 2004

press conference as evidence that its " Healthy Marriage Initiative "

could work.

 

BLACK CLOUD OF SUSPICION HANGS OVER CONSERVATIVES: According to Blankley, editorial page editor of the right-wing Washington Times,

the administration's payoffs to Gallagher and Williams (and now

McManus) have cast " a cloud over conservatives. " Right-wing

columnists, aware that Payolagate threatens their own credibility,

are speaking out against the administration's actions. Debra Sanders,

a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, says she

is " appalled. " James Pinkerton, a Newsday columnist who worked for

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said, " You shouldn't

be on the government payroll. It's KGB-ish. "

 

FEDERAL SPENDING ON PR SKYROCKETS: It takes a whole lot of money to

make the Bush administration's policies look good. In 2004, the Bush

administration funneled over $88 million in taxpayer money to public

relations firms. That represents an increase of 128 percent since

2000. Worse, 40 percent of that money is awarded to firms without

competitive bidding. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services

has spent nearly $100 million over the last four years contracting

with public relations firms to sell the administration's policies to

the public.

 

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