NYT Blog Unaware of the $60 Billion Question

...But they are on top of the great lapel pin flap. In a probing analysis of the candidates' stance on lapel pins, The NYT Political Blog gives us close ups of the lapel pins each candidate is wearing. Surely our selection of President rests on what kind of lapel pin he or she is wearing. This is an issue far more important than any other, so you'll excuse them I'm sure if they lose track of the minor issues.

Their analysis can't identify the strange markings and symbols found on Bill Richardson's lapel pin. What could it possibly be? "And we are still waiting to hear back from Governor Bill Richardson's campaign on what the pin on his lapel represents" they say.

Here's the answer. Richardson's lapel pin is a pie chart of the discretionary Federal Budget. The red part is what we spend on the military. The rest of the slivers are everything else. For over 7 years now the Priorities! campaign, a broad coalition of business leaders and military experts have pressured Congress to take a scalpel to the waste in the huge red pie slice that is the Pentagon and redirect it towards children's health care, education, renewable energy, and infrastructure repair.

The Priorities! campaign has bird dogged over 600 candidate events, placed hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers across the country (including the NYT) and engineered the introduction of the Common Sense Budget Act into Congress with 39 sponsors. One of the components of the Priorities! campaign, TrueMajority.org, has sent more faxes and e-mails from it's three hundred thousand members to Congress than any other organization except perhaps MoveOn.org.

Yet our elite press isn't aware of this movement because it's too busy tracking down lapel pins, cleavage and expensive haircuts.

Everyone act surprised =:0 .