Your Tax Dollars At Work

August 3, 2010

Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have compiled a list of the 100 Worst Uses of Stimulus Funds, and it’s a real eye-opener. You want to know where your tax dollars are going? Take a good look here.

Among the lowlights:

  1. In Amboy, WA the government is spending over half a million taxpayer dollars to replace the windows in a visitor center that has been closed for three years and is not scheduled to reopen.
  2. In Charlotte, NC the government is spending nearly three quarters of a million dollars of your money to develop “a computerized choreography program” that will, the creators insist, “define an evolving system that assists in the design and production of interactive dance performances with real-time audience interaction.”
  3. In Glassboro, NJ, $1.2 million dollars is being spent converting a long-abandoned train station into a museum that will be responsible for “interpreting local history in its proper setting.”
  4. Scientists from sunny California have been given $1.9 million dollars of your money to study exotic ants in Africa. “Everyone has run into ants…now we need to listen to them.”
  5. In Boynton, Oklahoma, the sidewalks are being replaced, despite the fact that the sidewalks were replaced only five years ago. Out of your pocket: over $89,000 dollars.
  6. Over half a million of your dollars are being spent to determine the impact of the local population on the environment. In Nepal.
  7. In Evanston, Illinois researchers at Northwestern University have received over $700,000 in order to figure out how to get a computer to make jokes. For twenty-five cents they could have just called the makers of Vista.
  8. One million taxpayer dollars are going to buy iPods for students at Kearns High School in Utah. They will use the devices in class, take them home and, if they graduate on time, they get to keep them.
  9. Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has been given the bizarre sum of $600,001 dollars to look for meteors in the Antarctic.
  10. Researchers at the University of Missouri have been given almost $200,000 taxpayer dollars to develop a better way of freezing rat sperm.

While the 100 items on this list constitute a small fraction of the total amount being spent, my guess is that there are a few hundred more items just like these. Meanwhile, unemployment continues to hover around 9.5% in direct contradiction to what the Obama Administration promised us the stimulus would achieve (unemployment rate kept below 8%), and the Tax Cheat Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warns us that the unemployment rate could go up before it comes down. Meanwhile, Hot Air notes that manufacturing has dropped by nearly 2% and private sector wages have dropped.

So…how’s the Summer of Recovery working out for you?

Here’s how it’s working out for Andrew Klavan:

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Posted by Blaknsam

Today’s Lesson In Progressive Politics: Pete Stark

August 2, 2010

Congressman Pete Stark admits what Progressives truly believe: the Federal Government has the power to do anything it wants to do, regardless of what that pesky Constitution says.

The lesson? The Constitution of the United States is irrelevant.

Of course, he wouldn’t be Pete Stark without throwing in an insultingly snide comment which he does in the seconds before the video ends. This, too, is an indicator of the “we are better/more enlightened than you” mindset that lives in the Progressive mind like a tick burrowing into your skin. The woman at this town hall asks her question eloquently and intelligently only to be reminded that it is the Pete Starks of the world who get to decide how other people can and should lead their lives.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin blasts “the bloated oracle of entrenched incumbency,” and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air expands on the Constitutional issues that were not addressed in the question posed to Stark.

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Posted by Blaknsam

The View, From Mount Olympus

July 29, 2010

Earlier today, Barack Obama made an appearance on The View, the all-women gabfest with Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and somebody else. It’s a wildly left-wing show with Hasselbeck the sole conservative who is overmatched by Walters and overwhelmed by Behar and Goldberg (and probably the other one). Hasselbeck may be on the side of the angels in the political wars, but she’s not what anyone would call a great spokesperson for conservative philosophy…especially since she has a tendency to retreat every time Behar and Goldberg flap their lips at her in that oh-so-condescendingly scornful way. Retreat in the face of liberal shouting points is unfortunately a Republican trait, perhaps, but not a conservative one.

I haven’t seen the show. I’m sure I’ll catch clips of it on the news tonight, but I have no plans to watch the show in its entirety. I already know what’s going to go on.

Obama will emerge from the curtains and warmly greet his hosts who will get all googly-eyed and weak-kneed in his presence. Walters, Goldberg, Behar and the other one will ask a series of softball questions along the lines of “How does it feel to be doing such a great job against those evil Republicans?” These questions will be followed by applause from the audience which Obama will acknowledge with his shy smile (as opposed to his big, toothy grin) and a head nod. Perhaps he will even raise his hand as if to say, “Now, now…let’s not mock the afflicted.” His answer will begin with a light joke that will only be funny to those people who are in his magnificent Presence.

Here’s where it will get interesting for approximately ten seconds. As if to suggest the slight possibility that maybe, just maybe but probably not, the Emperor isn’t wearing anything but a smile, Elizabeth Hasselbeck will ask some sort of a dull-pointed question about jobs or the economy and Obama will pause for a second to pretend that he’s considering the gravity of her question when all he’s really doing is trying to appear like the philosopher king he wants you to think he is. If the other hosts of the show don’t jump all over Hasselbeck, then Obama will respond with 1) a trite acknowledgment that there is still a long way to go; 2) a line that begins with “when we inherited…”, and; 3) a reassurance that things are going to be just peachy real soon. Hasselbeck will immediately retreat.

When the program is over, or when the segment is complete and they bring out the next guest (maybe that guy from the San Diego Zoo who will come on with a lemur and a cheetah, or maybe Rachael Ray will come on to show you 1,001 uses for turnips), Obama will ascend once again to his throne at the top of Mount Olympus secure in the knowledge that the fawning adulation he has just received is indicative of how the people really feel about him. Such is life in the echo chamber when your megalomania is aided and abetted by the adoring TV hosts and their equally adoring audience.

Last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, Charles Krauthammer said that ever since Nixon went on Laugh-In to say, “Sock it to me,” it’s been all downhill for the idea of Presidential dignity. He may be right, but I think that was more of an anomaly. To me the real downhill slide began with Bill Clinton honking into his sax while wearing sunglasses on The Arsenio Hall Show, and that slide reached NASCAR velocity when he actually answered the “Boxers or briefs” question some outrageously rude girl asked him on MTV. Since then, politicians need to run a gauntlet of Letterman, Leno, Oprah, MTV, The Daily Show, and The View in order to get elected.

I find the entire thing distasteful and a clear indicator that we’re more interested in a Celebrity-in-Chief than we are a Commander-in-Chief. Even Democrat Governor Ed Rendell compares this to appearing on Jerry Springer. The President would dignify the office by appearing on serious, substantive shows answering real, tough questions from seasoned journalists who are familiar with the talking points and insist that the President not stick to them. Let The View stick to cooking tips and movie star interviews. Anyone who goes to The View (or Oprah, Letterman, Leno, Jon Stewart, etc) for their political information needs to have their right to vote reconsidered.

The Roundup: Hot Air posted a preview last night, but I haven’t watched it.

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Posted by Blaknsam

What Liberal Media? Oh, That Liberal Media

July 21, 2010

The Daily Caller is releasing leaked emails from JournoList, an Internet cadre of journalists talking shop, free from the constraints of having to pretend that they have any sense of objectivity. Take a gander at the reaction of our hard-hitting journalists to the election of Barack Obama.

My personal favorite is Ryan Donmoyer from Bloomberg News who wrote: “Best quip I heard today, courtesy of a Facebook friend: ‘I wonder if Sarah Palin is still unclear about what a community organizer does.'”

A commenter calling himself (or herself) “Broken Window” responds: “It’s July 2010. Unemployment is way up, private investment is way down, the federal deficit has been multiplied, and racial tensions have been fanned by administration operatives…I wonder if RYAN DONMOYER of BLOOMBERG NEWS is still unclear about what a community organizer does.”

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Posted by Blaknsam

Out. Of. Touch.

July 16, 2010

I’m beginning…just beginning, mind you…to have some doubts about the sanity of our Commander-in-Chief. Sure, I’ve disagreed with almost every piece of domestic policy he’s shoved down our throats in the past year and a half, but I’ve never had any reason to doubt that his mind was as fit as his body.

But then he’s quoted in an NBC interview as claiming this his policies “got us out of this mess.” Obama would like you to believe that the drastic drop in employment in late 2008/early 2009 would have continued at the same pace in perpetuity had he not stepped in and stemmed the tide with his enormous ego fiscal policies. It’s nonsense. The massive employment drops of a year and a half ago, to the tune of roughly 700,000 a month, were never going to continue at that pace. The rate of job loss would slow as employers scaled back to the bare minimum needed to stay in business. In any time of increasing unemployment there is always a peak (or valley, if you prefer) to which the numbers both build up and recede.

Getting us “out of this mess” would not entail tepid job growth where the largest hiring firm in the nation is the Federal government. Getting us out of this mess would mean seeing job growth in the hundreds of thousands per month, not the tens. Getting us out of this mess would involve the unemployment percentage steadily dropping instead of hovering around the 9.5% mark. Let’s consider Obama’s pride and joy, the Stimulus Plan. Only about 50% of the $787 billion has been spent. If you take Obama’s ludicrous assertion that “three million” jobs have been created or saved, that amounts to spending about $131,000 per job. Now that’s government efficiency for ya. Obama promised that passing the stimulus bill would keep the unemployment rate below 8%, but now takes it as a point of pride that the unemployment rate hasn’t gone up to 15%. Why not just tell the people that without the stimulus the unemployment rate would be 20%? Or 25%? Anyone want to believe 50%? Memo to Barry: Saying “it would have been worse” is 1) unprovable, and 2) not saying much of anything at all when things are this bad. He’s starting to remind me of Igor in Young Frankenstein who cheerfully said, “Could be worse, could be raining” just before the deluge started.

George H.W. Bush was accused in 1991 of being out of touch with the common man because he downplayed a mild recession. There was some truth to that, though I think the bigger truth is that H.W. had not been in touch with the common man since he left the military after World War II. But the same media that hammered Bush as an aloof country club Republican passes over Obama as if he’d decorated the White House doorway with the blood of a thousand Republican lambs.

Does Obama really not see the world of hurt this country is in? He and his lackeys keep talking about how this is the “Summer of Recovery” when it’s really just a summer of economic pain. Yes, it’s not as bad as it was during the worst of it 18 months ago, but that’s not the same as good news. There are real people out there hurting, and people so depressed and dispirited that they have given up even looking for work. There are employers who would like to hire but won’t because of the million and one regulations that Obama/Pelosi/Reid have put into place with health care and now with financial reform. Obama has personally put thousands of people out of work with his ridiculous drilling moratorium in the Gulf. The fear of inflation, maybe hyper-inflation, is real. The stock market is bringing new meaning to the word “tumultuous.” The oil spill that Obama was so slow to react to has already crippled the economy of the Gulf areas and threatens to impact the economy of the entire nation. Yet despite all this Barack Obama is on a campaign tour telling everyone that he’s responsible for getting us out of this mess. A man with a sense of decency…a sane man…would wait until we were actually out of it before taking credit.

“Summer of Recovery” indeed.

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Posted by Blaknsam

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