Tuesday, May 08, 2007

$tandards Don't Apply Redux

In this morning's paper, we find Mr. Jean-Pierre Blackburn complaining about how essential his $150K worth of aircraft time is.

Typical conservative. Gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and then whines about how unfair it is that the very standards of transparency and accountability that his party has made such a noise about are actually applied to the governing party.

Sorry, Blackburn, but complaining:

he can't do his job “by bicycle” but could not explain why his ministerial travel expenses failed to disclose a penny of almost $150,000 worth of charter flights last year.


Is completely missing the point. It's not the money. It's the fact that you have tried to cover up your expenditures under some whitewashing scheme you cooked up.

And in the Conservative's latest attempt, we see the accounting described as follows:

According to Mr. Blackburn's officials, the cost of some flights was stated as “$0” because the rental expense was accounted for elsewhere in government records.

It would be “double dipping” for Mr. Blackburn to have then also recorded those costs in his proactive disclosure, said spokeswoman Emma Welford.


Ummm...bull$h!t. You buried the expenses elsewhere in the books so that most people wouldn't see it. Saying that the cost of those flights shouldn't have been in the ministerial expenses is a dodge - rather like saying that my car payments should show as zero on my monthly expenses, because the monies come out of a different bank account.

This is little more than a sleazy, amateurish attempt to conceal questionable expenditures of taxpayer's money - on the part of the government.

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