shecky said:
McManus makes three. Anyone venture to guess how prevalent this payola is?
Excellent question!
I believe there are groups putting in FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) requests to get documents that might reveal who else got contracts such as these. It's more difficult than it might sound to get the information, since unless one knows the right question to ask, and words it in exactly the right way, one may not get the documents one is seeking.
For example, apparently Williams was not contracted directly; rather, a contract was given to a PR agency which, in turn, sub-contracted Williams. So putting in an FOIA request, even though it's submitted to the correct agency, would turn up nothing if one requested contracts the agency had with Williams. One would need to know enough to ask for their contracts with the PR agency. In the kind of cheap spy novels I read, this is known as a cut-out.
Boy, I wish the president and other top government officials were required to show up regularly --
and be put under oath -- for question-and-answer sessions where they could be put questions such as
How many other people did you have contracts such as this with? Who were they?. In order to prevent abuses of the questioning power, it would be clearly understood that the president could refuse to answer any question, for any reason (such as
That's none of your business, if asked about personal matters, or
That's a stupid and loaded question, if asked whether he beats his wife), but any question he did choose to answer would be under oath and if the answer turned out to be untruthful he'd be up for perjury and possible impeachment.
What I don't get is why the govt is paying true believers to spout the party line, which they would probably do for free anyway.
Perhaps because the White House got a little more than simply columns saying (for pay) what these folks would have said anyway (for free). Williams, as I recall from coverage of this story a week or so back, was the host of some network program, with some say in who got invited as a guest, and part of what he was paid for was inviting administration shills onto the show and feeding them softball questions.
By the way: kudos to Jonah Goldberg, editor of
National Review Online (and someone for whom I previously had not come across anything to admire). If what the Salon article reports is correct, he deserves praise for his attitude and actions regarding this matter.
from the Salon article Shecky linked to:
...
"If other contracts exist, then the White House should disclose them," says Jonah Goldberg, editor at large for National Review Online.
...
Goldberg doesn't buy Gallagher's defense that she didn't recall the HHS payment. "She's doing better than I thought if she doesn't remember getting paid $21,000." He adds, "In the wake of the Armstrong story, she showed poor judgment by not coming clean about this." He notes that the National Review, which also published Gallagher, is revising the language of its writer contracts to make certain that future contributors disclose all potential conflicts of interest.
