Boondoggle

“The U.S. Census Bureau … squander[ed] $2.5 million on a half-minute Super Bowl ad starring D-list celebrity Ed Begley Jr., plus two pre-game blurbs and 12-second ‘vignettes’ featuring Super Bowl anchor James Brown. It’s a drop in the census boondoggle bucket (otherwise known as the tax-subsidized National Democratic Future Voter Outreach Drive). The Obama White House has allocated a total of $340 million toward an ‘unprecedented’ promotional blitz for the 2010 census. That’s on top of $1 billion in stimulus money siphoned off for increased census ‘public outreach’ and staffing. In all, the census will triple its total 2000 budget to $15 billion. Ads pimping the census have already appeared during the Golden Globe awards and will broadcast during the Daytona 500 and NCAA Final Four championships. Some $80 million will be poured into multilingual ads in 28 languages from Arabic to Yiddish. Racial and ethnic groups have been squabbling over their share of the pie. The U.S. census is a decennial census mandated by our Constitution. Should Americans know about it? Sure. Should the P.R. budget become a bottomless slush fund in recessionary times? Surely not.” –columnist Michelle Malkin
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