"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Who Else Is On the Payroll?
Posted 7:30 p.m., Jan. 7, 2005
| So now we find out that the Department of Education paid the black pundit Armstrong Williams $240,000 to shill for President Bush's No Child Left Behind law and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
A reader has written into Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo suggesting that maybe some of the other pundits we see freely espoousing their well-rehearsed beliefs on the right and left might also be on the take.
"They sank a quarter of a million," Marshall's reader writes, "into one not-so-prominent commentator to push a single issue--not even one where they really needed help--and they never greased anyone else? Not so credible."
Pretty hard to argue with that. Certainly the way Robert Novak has been treated with kid gloves while the government threatens to jail other reporters over the Valerie Plame scandal--a scandal entirely of Novak's making--suggests that he has been given the kind of protected status that might be accorded a valued employee.
-- Kevin Featherly
