Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Reality bites.

Convenient, right-wing myth:

...the liberals decided to attack President Bush on how his completely undeserved Presidential Inauguration would cost $50 million. They forgot how money going toward the Inauguration was not government money but private donations.

Ugly reality:

D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects...

Williams estimated that the city's costs for the inauguration will total $17.3 million, most of it related to security. City officials said they can use an unspent $5.4 million from an annual federal fund that reimburses the District for costs incurred because of its status as the capital. But that leaves $11.9 million not covered, they said...

Man, dontcha just hate it when facts get in the way of a good fairy tale? There's a reason they call us the "reality-based community."

1 comment:

CC said...

From CC:

Yes, Jay, my adorable, right-wing chew toy, I got that off your site. What gave it away? The word-for-word duplication? The actual URL link to it?

And as for updating your site, well, yes, that would be kinda nice, seeing as what you wrote isn't technically ... lessee here, what's the word we use in the reality-based community ... oh, yeah: "true".

And as for you "looking that up", yes, that would be just ducky. It's sort of like what we left-wing bloggers do on a regular basis -- we call it "research" or "fact checking". And while you're at it, you might want to actually look up a couple other things.

First, there appear to be no limits on what donors can give to the Republicans to put on this bash. If that's the case, is there any accountability for these funds? Must they all be used strictly in support of anal-retentive, middle-aged, homophobic white males and their Stepford wives to party down? Or can some of that money quietly be diverted into RNC coffers? If it's the latter, this would seem to be a clever way to get around limits on corporate campaign contributions. Seems like a fair topic for investigation, don't you think?

And about those donations, are they in fact tax deductible? If they are, then as any reasonably intelligent junior high school student knows, the taxpayers are subsidizing them. Any time someone takes a tax deduction, the resulting loss in revenue to the government has to be replaced by the taxpayers in general. So, tax deductions = general public having to fork over for Bush's appalling self-congratulatory excess.

Should we expect to see the results of any of this research on your site any time soon? Or should we be satisfied if you just correct the stuff that's wrong?

Coming soon: Jay Gatsby and Bill O'Reilly.