More propaganda and hypocrisy

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Bush advertorials

Another conservative columnist was exposed for taking money from the Bush Administration to promote one of its programs. This time it is Michael McManus, whose column "Ethics & Religion" appears in 50 newspapers.

This guy writes a column about ethics and he did not disclose that he was being paid to promote the program that he was lauding in his column.

see: Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till at Salon.com

That bring the total to three so far.

• Michael McManus $10,000
• Maggie Gallagher $41,500
• Armstrong Williams $241,000
• 50.8% of the electorate duped into voting for a second term...Priceless

Apparently the Bush Administration knows how bad their programs are so they have to pay people in the media to promote them. They also paid a PR firm more than double what the Clinton Administration spent on PR in its second term.

Who will be next in this scandal? And has anyone in the Bush Administration lost his job because of this?

GOP steps in Al Qaqaa

Who's lying now?

Video Suggests Explosives Disappeared After U.S. Took Control
Evidence Indicates U.S. Military Opened Al-Qaqaa Bunkers, Left Them Unguarded

Oct. 28, 2004 -- The strongest evidence to date indicates that conventional explosives missing from Iraq's Al-Qaqaa installation disappeared after the United States had taken control of Iraq.

Barrels inside the Al-Qaqaa facility appear on videotape shot by ABC television affiliate KSTP of St. Paul, Minn., which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003 -- nine days after Baghdad fell.
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Pentagon Lt. Col. Barry Venable said, "Another explanation is that regime loyalists or others emptied the facility prior to coalition forces arriving in Baghdad in April." And Dubya finally responded while campaigning in Pennsylvania yesterday using the same line, "the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site."

TV Crew Photographed Explosives Cache at Al-Qaqaa
Images Suggest Explosives Were There When U.S. Troops Arrived
JOHN MASON and JOANNA HJELMELAND, KSTP-TV


Oct. 28, 2004 -- A Minnesota television station news crew reporting from Iraq in the spring of 2003 came very close to the spot where tons of high explosives are alleged to have disappeared.

Based on GPS data and confirmation from officials of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, KSTP-TV 5 Eyewitness News determined its crew was on or near the southern edge of the Al-Qaqaa installation on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.

KSTP in St. Paul is an ABC News affiliate station. Its journalists were embedded with the 101st at the time and shot exclusive footage that may raise new questions about the controversy surrounding the fate of those munitions.

Some 377 tons of high explosives -- HMX and RDX and PETN -- are said to be missing from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot and questions have arisen about what the United States knew about the site and what it did to secure it.
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Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani went on NBC's Today show to bash the troops in Iraq:

"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"