Bushist outrage of the week - Journalistic Payola grows

So, just a day after Pharaoh Bushohthep II stood and said "well, you know, this is bad, we shouldn't be, you know, doing this--our policies should stand on their own merits" we learn that there was yet a third journalist that was paid by a federal department to serve as a shill for the government's agenda.

To date, we have:

• Armstrong Williams, who was paid $241,000 by the Department of Education to go around the media circuit and use his own talkshows and columns to sing the praises of "No Child Left behind". [Never mind the fact that those $241 thousand could have gone to pay for not leaving some children behind in Alabama, where the failure of an referendum to raise taxes meant that teachers were being let go from the public school system because there were no funds to pay them.]
  
• Maggie Galagher, self-appointed expert in marriage, who was paid $21,500 by the Department of Health and Human Services and $20,000 by the Department of Justice to go on her columns and on the radio speaking circuit singing the praises of HHS's $300 million marriage encouragement initiative--of course, the Heterosexual marriage encouragement initiative. Never mind that Bushohthep II doesn't want gays and lesbians to marry even though they want to, they're spending $300 million to encourage heterosexuals to get married when they don't seem to be doing it in large enough numbers.
  
• Michael McManus, paid $10,000 to go on the speaking circuit praising the heterosexual marriage promotion plans (indirectly, might I add, through the former employer of a few friends of mine, the Lewin Group, which up until recently I held in reasonably high regard). His foundation, the Marriage Savers Foundation, received an additional $49,000 from HHS as well. Again, let us not ignore the irony of the Bushies spending more than $100,000 to pay for propaganda celebrating a program that encourages people to get married while at the same time insisting that gay people that want to get married are destroying the institution that those who can freely enter are obviously not doing in numbers large enough to satisfy them.
  

All in all, the Bushies spent $88 million on public-relations contracts in 2004. That's money that didn't go for AIDS patient services (Whitman Walker clinic had to shut down its housing assistance plan for HIV+ people in the DC area because of a funding shortfall that could have been covered with 1/2 of 1% of that money). That's money that didn't go for body armor for a Marine now disabled at Walter Reed hospital. That's money that didn't go for funding after school programs, No Child Left behind mandates, voting machine fixing, survivor death benefits for National Guard members killed in line of duty... I could go on.

Add to this the fact that for every 40,000 hours of right wing programming on the airwaves and television EVERY WEEK there are 3000 of liberal programming on those same airwaves, and one keeps on wondering--where exactly are these liberal media that the conservies keep on talking about? How many of the so-called "Fair and balanced" media that have been pushing a right-wing agenda over the last four years have been bought like this?