I didn’t write anything about the Washington Post article about how under the Bush administration, Louisana received more money for civil works projects than any other state, but that Louisiana’s congressional delegation wasted it all on pork. I thought it was a good article, and perhaps one thing I should do more of on this blog is point out really exceptional articles that go beyond the conventional wisdom and find that, ironically, it turns out to be wrong. So, noted. I’ll start doing more of that right after I publish this letter from reader Bruce R., about how the Minneapolis Star-Tribune took the Post story off the wire and made some questionable edits:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an edited version of the WaPo article about how funding was directed in La. Here’s the link and headline of the StarTrib, a little misleading:
Army’s engineers spent millions on Louisiana projects labeled as pork
The original WaPo article is here;
Money Flowed to Questionable Projects
I noticed it was edited/shortened because Sean Hannity was reading from it and when he reached what I had as the last paragraph he continued on with information not in the Star Tribune version of the article. The Star Tribune ends with this;“We’ve been hollering about funding for years, but everyone would say: There goes Louisiana again, asking for more money,” said former Democratic senator John Breaux. “We’ve had some powerful people in powerful places, but we never got what we needed.”
But the WaPo version continues with this;
That may be true. But those powerful people — including former senators Breaux, Johnston and Russell Long, as well as former House committee chairmen Robert Livingston and W.J. “Billy” Tauzin — did get quite a bit of what they wanted. And the current delegation — led by Landrieu and GOP Sen. David Vitter — has continued that tradition.
Interesting choice on where to end the article…
Interesting that the Strib would cut it off to make it look like Louisiana got shortchanged? From what I know about the Strib, that’s actually pretty predictable.