NATIONAL ARCHIVES CANCELS LIBERAL FORUM ON SOCIAL SECURITY

So it's okay for the Bush administration to spend millions of taxpayer money on a propaganda campaign to bring down Social Security, but "liberals" are not allowed to use a public building to house a forum on the same topic.

Even as the White House has excluded opponents of privatization from even the audience at its events, the administration forced the cancellation of one event on Social Security sponsored by liberal groups at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., on the grounds that the speakers were one-sided against Bush.
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The administration won't say how much the Social Security campaign has cost.

A White House spokesman said the costs of the White House's efforts, including travel, are not disclosed to the public. A Treasury Department spokesman said the sums expended by his agency were "minimal." The Social Security Administration said it would look into the costs of sending three officials to 10 states .

One part of the total cost can be estimated. At an estimated cost of $60,000 per hour for Air Force One, Bush's 18,850 miles of travel to 23 cities and towns to lobby on Social Security have cost the Air Force about $1.8 million so far.

The White House has estimated in the past that staff costs for out-of-town events run between $22,000 and $59,000 per day. White House staff costs for Bush's 13 days out of town would thus total between $286,000 and $767,000.

The BushCo activities are probably legal since the President and his aides are mostly exempt from the law's restrictions. But this current campaign is almost unprecedented in recent history. "There's been nothing remotely like this" in recent decades, said Stephen Hess, a scholar at the Brookings Institution specializing in presidential politics.

What really outraged me was the decision by the National Archives and Records Administration to cancel a forum on Social Security at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, to be sponsored by, among others, the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women, because it was to be "partisan." The National Organization of Women (NOW) has asked for a Congressional investigation into the decision.

You really have to read both articles to get a complete sense of the incredible hypocrisy at work here.