Blog-IT-o ergo sum

	8/9/2003

Press Releases as News

(alternative title: why blogs are better.)

This popped up on my yahoo home page with the following heading:

Top Stories - AP

Texas Congressman Rips GOP for Deficit

Sat Aug 9,11:06 AM ET

By REBECCA CARROLL, Associated Press Writer

The title caught my eye as I thought this must be a case of libertarian minded and heroic congressman Ron Paul of Texas taking his fellow GOPers to task for recently passing a federal government budget with a massive deficit. After being conned into clicking on the link, I was surprised to find that the congressman making headlines was instead Charlie Stenholm - a Democrat. A Democrat against deficits? I was intrigued and read on...

While I could be wrong, this "top story" sure looks like just a synopsis of a tax payer financed press release from Mr. Stenholm's congressional office. Here is the AP writer quoting Mr. Stenholm:

"The $323 billion we will spend this year for interest on our $6.7 trillion national debt represents a 'debt tax' that must be paid by all future generations and can never be repealed," he said. "Continuing to run up debt will ensure that we and our children and our grandchildren are overtaxed for the rest of our lives."

Hey. That is pretty honest work there in correctly identifying the problem and it comes from an evil "tax and spend" Democrat no less. Maybe there is hope I thought. The previous paragraph in the AP story read (I guess to show that the AP writer could re-write someone's quote to say the same thing):

Stenholm, who heads a group of conservative House Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition, said deficits are a bad legacy for future generations. He said interest payments on the nation's debt are an extra burden for taxpayers, past and future.

Who is the Blue Dog Coalition, I thought? Maybe they are a group libertarian minded congressional realists voters can work with? Didn't get to far on that one though, before I thought, well let's just look up in the Congressional Record how Mr. Stenholm voted in the 2004 fiscal budget battle. Lets see...

against the GOP lead plan to authorize a deficit of $498 billion. (The GOP plan which passed also allowed for $400 billion to overhaul Medicare and provide a prescription drug benefit.)

That's good and supports the spin put in the AP "top story." However, what the AP writer failed to do, most likely because she was just re-writing the congressman's self aggrandizing press release, was to simply check the Congressional Record further. Had she done this she would have found that the good Mr. Stenholm is clearly a hypocrite in the first degree since he voted for the Democrat Substitute resolution to the 2004 budget. This resolution (role call #81) allowed for a $528 billion dollar prescription drug benefit but in addition still authorized a whopping $376 billion dollar deficit! Boy, my kids are sleeping well at night knowing they have this sort of principled support in the US Congress helping to defend their future incomes.

If this AP "writer" was really a journalist instead of a shill, all she would have had to do is ask the congressman why he thought going with a massive deficit that was 70% of what the GOP wanted, was going to save us from "being overtaxed the rest of our lives."

I do have to give credit to my TRIM report lying on my desk that allowed me to quickly look up the voting that took place for the 2004 federal budget.

4:32:28 PM

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