Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The Cost Of Controlling The Press

Color me un-shocked:

I guess he's getting a good rate of return. Accuracy in the Media notes:

Barack Obama's White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

That is a significant increase from the Bush Administration.

Then there's this:

Obama also quadrupled the size of the public liaison staff. According to the last Bush administration staff salary report, President Bush employed three people in his liaison office at a cost of $335,500.

In other words, Obama is not just staging press events and staging questions, he's bought his own media operation to bypass the press altogether.

And their response?

Fawning adoration. He is, after all, making their job easier by writing the articles for them.

The part that really galls me is that I'm paying for this one-sidedness with my tax dollars.

The root problem here, of course, is that Obama is dumping money into propagandizing his message through the primary communication channels of the nation.  Now, let's connect some dots.  He's already spending fat cash to buy off the media, and they're readily complying.  His message (via the bought-off media) is most definitely a big part of why he won the election and continues to retain his high (though rapidly slipping) poll ratings - if Obama had had to face the kind of scrutiny that most Presidential candidates undergo, I don't believe he would have survived past the Iowa caucus.  But he didn't, so he now inhabits the White House, and to continue his mission of re-making America, he's going to need to continue buying off the media, so where is he going to continue getting all that fat cash?  Hmmm...

How about TARP?  How about the non-stimulating 'stimulus'?  How about his annual budget?  How about his cap-n-tax bill and health care 'reform' bills?  All of these are filled with massive amounts of pork that are essentially paybacks, buy-offs, and favor money to various constituency groups that have supported him in the past (and are likely to support him in the future).  His almost total lack of legitimate transparency and accountability on all of these measures proves that he doesn't really want too much scrutiny, and it's not hard to guess why.  With proper scrutiny and public exposure, none of these bills (with the possible exception of the first TARP) would have any chance of passing into law.  Connecting these dots reveals the picture: he's using our own tax dollars to fund our political opponents...and Hoyer just affirmed it.

This is as we've been predicting for months, and one of the reasons we need to fight these hysteria-driven, no-time-to-read, gigantic spending bills.


There's my two cents.

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