More responsible stewardship of your tax dollars by the GOP

It sounds like the final assignment in a cake course at the local junior college: Watch TV and write a report on it.

Except, of course, this time you can earn $20 million. That's a lot of Dr. Pepper and Doritos.

The U.S. command in Baghdad is seeking bidders for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract for monitoring the tone of news stories about the Iraq war filed by U.S. and foreign media.

Proposals, due Sept. 6, ask companies to show how they would "provide continuous monitoring and near-real time reporting of Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international and U.S. media," according to the solicitation issued last week.

Contractors also will be evaluated on how they would provide analytical reports and customized briefings to the military, "including, but not limited to, tone (positive, neutral, negative) and scope of media coverage."

This hiring-someone-to-watch-TV business is clearly a GOP "thing." How many of you remember about a year ago when Ken Tomlinson, then head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and yet another specimen from the seemingly bottomless well of Bush appointees selected for their eagerness to destroy the very thing their agency is supposed to protect, spent $10 thousand of the CPB's money on a contractor to "monitor the content" of Bill Moyers' PBS show?

And oh, did Moyers have fun with that:

Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were.

Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of “TV Guide” on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 %.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Bean [sic], your favorite. Or you could have gone on line where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me -- collect -- and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He apparently decided not to share the results with his staff or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it – but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

Tomlinson, by the way, resigned shortly thereafter as head of CPB, in part because of public and congressional reaction to stunts like this, and has since gone on to become similarly embroiled in accusations of financial impropriety at his next Bush-appointed job.

Any bets on how long before we read about mismanagement of the Pentagon's $20 million study?

(Props to Doctor TV for egging me on and providing the SFGate link.)