Crooks, Liars, and Hypocrites

The only useful purpose of a Free Press is to expose the crooks, liars, and hypocrites, whether they be public or private. Given our country's historical allowance of secrecy to corporations, news gatherers most often find these folks in the public sphere. It's much safer to leak about someone who can't take you to court for telling the truth. Mostly.

The New York Times is one of the few news organs that still does the job. Today's edition has this front page (dead trees version) story about all those fun loving haters of the Federal Gummint. I've written about the general tenor of the Hypocrites of the North on occasion, but this is just too much pass up.

The money quote (and this time, it's not just a metaphor):
Alaska's appetite for federal dollars has always been voracious and is not confined to the stimulus. A study by Prof. Scott Goldsmith of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, noted that an "extraordinary increase" in federal spending drove the state's pile-driver growth of the last 15 years.

In 1996, federal spending in Alaska was 38 percent above the national average. Thanks to the late Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who was Senate appropriations chief for several years, and to the military, which keeps expanding its bases here, Alaska's share now is 71 percent higher than the national average.


All those hardy, we don't need no stinkin' Gummint, morons. By the bye, the story also mentions, but not with sufficient emphasis, that each and every man, woman, and child in the state gets a cut of the oil profits. It's $1,300 this year. That's called socialism. Oh, no, I forgot, it's just free money. Hypocrites.