This will be a very short diary. I don't know how to embed video or even if it's available from last night's 60minutes. So if anyone can do it, please go right ahead.
Last night, 60mins ran a piece on Brevard County residents and former employees at Kennedy Space Center on how the economy has hit them with the layoffs since the Shuttle's last launch.
They did everything they could to paint the President as having broken a promise to those employees without ever saying that the Constellation project was a boondoggle from the get go.
Some background if you're not aware. NASA/KSC has been laying off employees since the announcement of the end of the Shuttle program and the startup of the Constellation project back in Bush Jr's admin. 60mins chose not to say so.
Brevard County has been devastated by the economy since late 2006 early 2007. 60mins chose not to say so
The Constellation project was a huge money pit, a few millions of dollars over budget (to private contractors) without ever having one piece of machinery to show for it. 60mins chose not to say so.
Pres Obama then Candidate Obama went to KSC and promised those folks that he would do everything he could to keep them working. Well, 60mins showed that. Now they did make a one sentence mention that Congress also halved the KSC/Nasa budget, but never went into why that was detrimental to these workers.
They also showed reactions from some KSC laid off employees about how Obama lied to them. But they never showed the private contractors working at the Cape and how many of them hired KSC workers.
They never bothered to get to the why of why those workers had to be phased out and the Constellation project shelved. And why it was ultimately the Bush admin that really caused their job losses.
Now can Obama be blamed totally? No. Could his administration have done something to help these workers? Yes. They could have had some kind of retraining in place and gotten commitments from high tech companies to give these people priority placement if they qualified after retraining or if they didn't need retraining. But the hatchet job 60minutes did last night was all about making sure Brevard county votes republican this year like they did in 2010 and kicked the democrat (albeit an ineffective blue dog) out.
Who needs a superpac when you've got CBS? Mort Zuckerman have anything to do with this? I wonder.