Mad Anthony - neither bought nor paid for...

There has been a big stink lately about conservative commentators who were also paid by the Bush administration for expressing their opinions. I think that this is much ado about little. Should they have disclosed the payments? Yes. But I don't think that someone who already has an opinion in line with a government agency doing work for that agency, and continuing to express that opinion, is shocking. The Armstrong Williams seemed like he was getting paid directly for expressing his opinion, so it might be a little shadier, but the other two don't seem like big deals at all. My guess is that paying Maggie Gallagher to be pro-marriage is like paying Mad Anthony to be pro-bacon. I'd be for it even without the money And considering I had never heard of any of these people involved in these scandels, the government seems to have thrown it's money away.

But in the interest of the full disclosure that other bloggers have been showing I want to disclose my own government ties. Not only do I have the ethical baggage of having recieved (and am still paying off) federal student laws, and recieving federal tax funds, I was very nearly paid much more by the government. After college, I was offered a position with a branch of the federal government that does economic analysis. I came very close to taking it, but decided against it because the job was in Washington DC and I realized I could not work in DC without having a nervous breakdown. Of course, this was several years before the launch of this blog, but, you know, I wanted to get this in the clear. In case anyone who cares starts reading this blog.