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01/27/2005 Archived Entry: "More on Maggie Gallagher"

Everyone is atwitter about news broken by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post that the columnist Maggie Gallagher received payments totalling $21,500 from Wade Horn's Administration for Children and Families to columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote the Healthy Marriage program.

Gallagher replied with a non-apology apology: namely, that the money was the fee from a contract to help create materials promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage, not a bribe to write favorably about the Marriage program in her column. One of her tasks was to ghostwrite an article published under Horn's name. Nevertheless, Gallagher acknowledged that she should have disclosed the contract with the Bush administration. Oddly, she claimed "I would have, if I had remembered it." I wish I were in a position to forget a $20K+ payment. Unlike the black conservative columnist Armstrong Williams -- who also received money from Bush & Co. -- Gallagher's syndication deal is not in jeopardy. Bush is rushing to do damage control, however, by ordering his administration NOT to hire any more columnists, claiming that the "White House" had not known the practice was going on. Hmm...I wonder how many more columnists "on the dole" from Bush's 1st term are going to emerge.