Sending journalists to a phone sex outfit when they dial a phone number to connect to folks at the G20 meeting gives the administration’s claims of transparency a whole new meaning. Of course, the administration once again demonstrates that caring about accuracy – especially in cases like this, when news needs to be reported – is something to be sarcastically dismissed.
There was better transparency in the administration’s warnings that this year’s budget was going to be “expensive”. And though many of us told them we didn’t want it, both the House and Senate have gone ahead and put multi-trillion dollar deficit budget proposals on the table anyway. Burying our nation’s as-yet-to-be-born grandchildren under an incomprehensible amount of debt.
This goes splendidly with today’s announcement that unemployment has reached 8.5% nationwide, the highest it has been since 1983 (when we had 23% less people living here).
But if Representative Jack Murtha has his way, that niggling little problem won’t affect some people. He’s trying to score some $20 million in earmarks for current or former clients of PMA; included in the $134 million he’s earmarking overall.
I had to laugh at an article about the still-undecided Senatorial election in Minnesota. Politico reports that Democrats are loading their guns against Norm Coleman (R), on the chance he prevails and so adds another Republican voice in the Senate. J.B. Poersch, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is quoted as saying, “These [several unresolved investigations] are really serious ethical issues, and the longer Republicans entangle themselves with someone like Coleman, the more damage he does to them. We’re going to bring them up anyway, but they would be better off if he was out of the Senate.”
He could have been talking about almost anyone in Washington. Exactly how do they manage to say such things with a straight face?