Facts, Lies, and sins of omission

Update below

Today I finally got fed up with newspapers, TV and radio just reading/printing the news as they get it from Associated Press, Reuters, Fox News, ABC news, and all those other alphabet news agencies, some of whom I won’t honor with their initials.  What finally tipped the scales for me was this article from the Corpus Christi Caller Times online. Here’s the headline they used “NJ Gov. Christie blasts House Speaker Boehner, Republicans in Congress House delays vote on $60B aid package for Superstorm Sandy”    No where in the article is it mentioned that the bill was bloated with pork that had no relationship with the hardships the New Jerseyites were/are experiencing.    I was so fed up I actually wrote a letter to the editor, I don’t know if it will be printed or not, but here is what I said:

I would have been a little more impressed with the reporting of the Caller Times if they had bothered to do more than run the Associated Press article out of New Jersey on this topic. Why did not someone on your staff look up the reasons for this? Most of us who follow politics know there was a boat load of pork in it that had nothing to do with the disaster in New Jersey or the rest of the Sandy victims, but dealt with earmark type pork for states as far away as Alaska. Those earmark billions were the reason the vote was not taken. Shame on Caller Times and the rest of the media in Corpus Christi for not doing anything but copy work.

Without much effort I was able to find what that pork was, and as far as I am concerned it was the real story. I found it in a newsletter I get from American Heritage. So here it is:

 The estimate of insured losses from Sandy comes in around $20 billion—but the total aid package proposed is three times that amount. Roughly $28 billion of the request is marked for futuredisaster-mitigation projects.The bill includes funding for Head Start, the federal day care program. As Heritage’s Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman fellow in education policy, explains, some Head Start centers may need repairs from hurricane damage, but handing the program $100 million—as the Sandy aid package would—is a large expenditure that deserves more scrutiny.
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Other questionable items in the package, which have received wide media coverage, include money for fisheries in Alaska, free money for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and repairs to the Smithsonian. Heritage’s Patrick Louis Knudsen adds that “there is the truly audacious $17 billion in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds, an embarrassingly transparent slush fund.”

If I can find it so easily my question is why cannot people who call themselves reporters find this? I know I’ve been reading it in many places for at least a week, maybe longer.  This is the real shame of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, they know we don’t like earmarks so they hide them in essential items. Do they really think we are all so dumb, so stupid that we don’t care?   Well, maybe we are, after all we voted them in even though we are so deeply in debt my new great grandchild has at least $50,000+ tax debt on his head.

Update:     Day before yesterday I blogged about the lack of news coverage of all the pork and add ons to the Sandy Disaster Relief bill. Yesterday I started seeing more about it in many online publications and even on TV.  This morning I turned on C-Span in time to see the VP of Tax Payers for Common Sense on Washington Journal taking questions and talking about those subjects.  This led me to their site and their report on the bill. Brief Analysis of Selected Provisions in proposed Senate Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Assistance