After Whining About Lack Of Media Coverage Of ACORN Videos, Hannity And Beck Silent About Arrest Of Videographer from Ellen at News Hounds
Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity could not get enough of the ACORN videos made by undercover filmmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the young conservative activists who, posing as a pimp and prostitute, captured a number of low-level ACORN employees offering them advice about how to get loans for a brothel with under-age girls. Just about every time Beck and Hannity trumpeted the videos, they attacked the mainstream media for ignoring what they kept holding up as such an important story (never mind that ACORN has since been exonerated by the Congressional Research Service). So you'd think, then, that O'Keefe's arrest by the FBI after allegedly trying to interfere with the telephone system in Senator Mary Landrieu's office would be worthy of at least a mention on either Beck's or Hannity's show. But no. Neither show mentioned the arrest.
The Sanctity of Military Spending
Administration officials announced last night that the President, in tomorrow's State of the Union address, will propose a multi-year freeze on certain domestic discretionary spending programs. This is an "initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit," officials told The New York Times.
But the freeze is more notable for what it excludes than what it includes. For now, it does not include the largest domestic spending programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And all "security-releated programs" are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos. What possible rationale is there for that?
The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion."
