What kind of an outfit presenting a $500 million letter of credit has its “corporate offices” in a UPS store on the west side of Sin City? The kind of outfit that is part of the team behind the effort to get Rio Rancho to issue half a billion in industrial revenue bonds to launch solar start-up Green2v. Eclipse Aviation on steroids? There are some mighty strange things in this story we report at New Mexico Watchdog.
Some mighty strange things, like incomplete reporting from New Mexico Watchdog (which censors comments they don’t like) again?
In regards to Scarantino’s “phantom districts” “scoop,” a real journalist wrote:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1005.mcgann.html
“In a ‘fact check’ feature on Watchdog’s scoop, the Associated Press’s Matt Apuzzo took the step that the Watchdog reporters had not: he checked to see what was happening to the money. As it turns out, the funds were going exactly where they were supposed to go, not vanishing into black holes as the Watchdog sites had implied. The problem was simply that a handful of the local government agencies and nonprofits that had received stimulus funds had mistyped the zip codes when they entered information about their projects into the federal database. In other words, all the fuss had been over a few stray typos. “[T]he ‘phantom congressional districts’ are being used as a phantom issue to suggest that stimulus money has been misspent,” Apuzzo concluded.”
Not exactly a trustworthy news source, though what would you expect from Jim Scarantino and the Rio Grande Foundation?