Some outrageous news from The Hill today, Secretary Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign pollster, Mark Penn’s public relations firms received almost $6 million in stimulus money. Also, one of President Barack Obama’s campaign advisors also benefitted from stimulus money, Alexander Bolton reports:
Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.
Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.
Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.
The adviser, Alfredo J. Balsera, who heads a public-affairs firm based in Coral Gables, Fla., helped craft Obama’s Hispanic advertising message.
It sees shady that campaign workers are recipients of stimulus dollars. Is this the ethics and transparency we were promised? No way, this is typical Chicago politics. You help me, I’ll help you. And believe me, stimulus dollars are being used to bolster Democrats as an overwhelming majority of the money is headed to Democratic Congressional Districts, at least as seen in Ohio, where stimulus jobs must cost more in Democratic Congressional Districts. Can we believe that President Obama wants to effect change in Ohio 2010 Congressional races? Yes We Can!
Then the second thing I would like to know is why in the world would public relations/advertising be considered stimulus? Then spending to the tune of over $6.5 million on this project? I guess considering they spent $18 million to revamp Recovery.gov it shouldn’t surprise us. You know where we discovered new Congressional districts. Amazing.
How are you loving this hope-n-change?