Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Media connect dots on one side, ignore gaping holes on other side

This is beginning to be predictable from that bastion of "long since gone" credibility, the New York Times. They're getting all hot and bothered over FEMA no-bid contracts, because presumably, it is better to take time and bureaucracy to bid out aid contracts? You think the bitching is loud now about how long the federal government took? What if they didn't do fast-track bidding or no-bid contracts? The same MSM would be aghast at the delay. Damned if you do, yada-yada-yada. Anyway, from the Godfather:
There aren't too many people that do this kind of work, there aren't too many companies. Halliburton is one, Bechtel is one, and there's another group that does this called the Shaw Group. Now, one of the people coming under fire for these no-bid contracts is a lobbyist by the name of Joe Allbaugh. Now, Joe is from southeast Missouri like I am. Joe was one of Bush's campaign managers in 2000, was the first head of FEMA in the Bush administration. And as MSNBC reports, it's the same thing the New York Times said, "At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast. One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton."
Notice that the Slimes mentions the Bush connection (Allbaugh) to corporate clients who received no-bid contracts to clean up battered Gulf states; and they mention the obligatory "Halliburton, who Cheney used to work for" line. What they leave out about the Shaw Group, though, is damned telling.
Yeah, we all know that Cheney headed up Halliburton, but we don't know anything about the Shaw Group. Well, now we do. "J. M. Bernhard, Jr., is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the Shaw Group, a Fortune 500 company offering a broad range of services to the power, process, environmental, infrastructure, and emergency response markets.

(snip...)

Now, you know where I'm reading this from? I said all you have to do is go to the website. I didn't say the Shaw Group website, because I'm not reading from the Shaw Group website.

You know what I'm reading from? The Louisiana Democratic Party website. And you know what the headline is over the details I just read to you, "about our chairman." Turns out that J. M. Bernhard, Jr., founder, chairman, chief executive officer of the Shaw Group is the chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Now, why couldn't the New York Times tell you this? Why couldn't NBC tell you this on their website? Why couldn't Chris Matthews tell you this on Hardball last night? Why can't Katie Couric tell you this? Why can't anybody at CNN pass this on to you? Why doesn't anybody at any of these networks or newspapers, the Washington Post, tell you who this Shaw Group is?

(snip...)

Well, they're going to be pretty embarrassed when they find out that Joe Allbaugh, evil Republican crony of Bush and lobbyist, gave one of these no-bid contracts to the chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party.
Repeat after me: "Nope...no liberal media bias."