Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. How are the roads in your area? They are pretty much all clear in New Castle County now. The snow storm was a big bust here but Sussex and Kent are still recovering.
Haley Barbour, fresh off his white supremacist apologism, has a new problem. He loves him some government money, as long as it’s going to pay for his own comfort.
Some of Barbour’s travel may well have been worth it to Mississippi, a state that is heavily dependent on federal funds. But much of the time, he has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match — travel that has a less obvious connection to what Barbour, a former top lobbyist in Washington, has cast as his lobbying on behalf of his state.
The flight logs obtained by POLITICO indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour’s air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. And through a quirk in Mississippi law, whenever the governor is out of state, Mississippi must pay the lieutenant governor a salary differential as acting governor.
Barbour has reimbursed the state for a handful of flights, but he has more often scheduled obscure official business to coincide with the business of politics, according to the manifest and logs, which were obtained from the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration under a Mississippi Public Records Act request by a Democrat who has worked in the state, who provided them to POLITICO.
When is one of these guys going Galt already? It’s getting awfully expensive to keep supporting these anti-government government employees.
The New York Times asks a good question: is Jon Stewart our modern-day Edward R. Murrow?
Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?
Mr. Stewart declined to comment on the passage of the bill.
And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?Certainly many supporters, including New York’s two senators, as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, played critical roles in turning around what looked like a hopeless situation after a filibuster by Republican senators on Dec. 10 seemed to derail the bill.
I think the answer to that question is yes. The problem – Jon Stewart is one guy on a basic cable channel. We need to clone him and put him on every news channel. I think Stewart is as effective as he is because he’s an outsider and not an insider. How do we get more of an outsider, critical perspective to our modern media? We shouldn’t have to wait until Stewart embarrasses them.