Hacks and Cronies, Continued...

Good morning, dear reader. Your mission this Monday morning is to identify the problem with Mr McKinnon's qualifications to represent the Democrats on the Broadcasting Board, and to consider how comfortable you are with Mr Simonson's qualifications in light of the fears of a bird-flu pandemic... Good luck.

Excerpts from The New Republic:

8: Mark McKinnon
Member, Broadcasting Board of Governors (confirmation pending)

The Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees Voice of America and
other U.S. media beamed to the Middle East; and, in the spirit of accurately representing the United States, it reserves seats for members of both major political parties.

For one of the four Democratic slots, President Bush recently nominated Mark McKinnon, or "M-Cat" as he affectionately calls him. M-Cat's Democratic credentials, however, are somewhat wanting.

McKinnon's career highlights include overseeing media strategy for Bush's two presidential bids, in which capacity he masterminded a spot predicting that John Kerry would "Weaken [the] Fight Against Terrorists." And, in last year's campaign, his company, Maverick Media, accepted over $177 million in fees from Bush and the
Republican National Committee--money we assume was not intended to help return the Democrats to power.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

7: Stewart Simonson
Assistant Secretary for Public Health and Emergency Preparedness, Department of Health and Human Services

According to his official biography, Stewart Simonson is the Health
and Human Services Department's point man "on matters related to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies." Hopefully, he has taken crash courses on smallpox and avian flu, because, prior to joining HHS in 2001, Simonson's background was not in public health, but ... public transit.

He'd previously been a top official at the delay-plagued, money-hemorrhaging passenger rail company Amtrak. Before that, he was an adviser to Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, specializing in crime and prison policy.

When Thompson became HHS secretary in 2001, he hired Simonson as a legal adviser and promoted him to his current post shortly before leaving the Department last year. Simonson's biography boasts that he "supervised policy development for Project BioShield," a program designed to speed the manufacture of crucial vaccines and antidotes.

"That effort, however, has by most accounts bogged down and shown few results," The Washington Post reported last month.

| +Save/Share | |