Bush's Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law

President Bush this week said that radio commentator Armstrong Williams was right to fault himself for taking $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind, the centerpiece of Bush's education policy.

But Bush found no fault with his Education Department, which suggested the arrangement and paid Williams the money.

In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.

"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."

But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.

In his most direct criticism to date, Bush leveled blame at officials at the Education Department for paying conservative commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout his landmark education plan, "No Child Left Behind."

On Thursday, a third example surfaced. Mike McManus, who writes a weekly column syndicated in 30 to 40 newspapers, said he was paid about $4,000 to train marriage mentors in 2003 and 2004. McManus was subcontracted by the Lewin Group, which had a contract to support community-based programs "to form and sustain healthy marriages."

McManus' non-profit group, Marriage Savers, also is being paid $49,000 by a group that received a Health and Human Services grant to teach similar principles to unwed couples who are having children.

Since the consulting deals began in January 2003, McManus has touted Bush's marriage initiative in several of his columns. At least three of them quoted Horn, a former member of the Marriage Savers board of directors. Horn's office manages the grant and contract under which McManus' group is paid.

McManus, who has been quoted as a marriage expert in publications

When he got out the new judge said he was agoing to make a man of him. So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he'd been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was agoing to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn't be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words; and he cried, and his wife, she cried again; pap said he'd been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy; and the judge said it was so; so they cried again. And when it was bedtime, the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:

'Look at it gentlemen and ladies all; take ahold of it; shake it. There's a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain't so no more; it's the hand of a man that's started in on a new life, and 'll die before he'll go back. You mark them words -- don't forget I said them. It's a clean hand now; shake it -- don't be afeard."

So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge's wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge -- made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night sometime he got powerful thirsty and clumb out onto the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room, they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.

This whole racket seems designed to support third-rate conservative pundits. Who the hell are these guys?

Other than "marriage experts", I mean....