Obama Says Stimulus Worked, Created Jobs… Here’s a Reminder of the Waste

In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.

1. $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years
2. $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina
3. $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota
4. $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev.
5. A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism”
6. $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics
7. Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants
8. Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there
9. $219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk
10. $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees
11. $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots
12. $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
13. Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
14. $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
15. $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work
16. $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin
17. $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania
18. $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida
19. $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma
20. $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade
21. $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there
22. $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa
23. $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen
24. North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers!
25. $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest
26. A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously

Well, obviously this is just a tiny list of the graft, waste, and useless spending in Obama’s so-called stimulus bill but it serves to illustrate the fact that stimulating the economy was far from the minds of those congressmen that voted for the bill. It was more about paying off constituents than stimulating the economy.

Obama and the Trouble With Voting ‘Present’

Weak and radical, the president looks more like Jimmy Carter all the time.

When Barack Obama announced he was running for president in February 2007, Nathan Gonzales of the Rothenberg Political Report wrote “Obama’s history of voting ‘present’” in Springfield, Ill.—even on some of the most controversial and politically explosive issues . . . raises questions . . . Voting ‘present’ is one of the three options in the Illinois Legislature (along with ‘yes’ and ‘no’) but it’s almost never an option for the occupant of the Oval Office.”

Mr. Gonzales’s words were prescient. Barack Obama may now be president, but at times he appears to be merely present. That has been the case with his response to the environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The president was late recognizing the disaster’s magnitude, late in visiting the region, late in approving requests by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and late in feigning outrage. He has never offered an independent plan to stop the leak.

Mr. Obama also seems disinterested in hearing from experts about the spill. The White House’s “Deep Water Horizon Response Timeline” doesn’t list a single meeting between Mr. Obama and industry experts, though he did send Energy Secretary Steven Chu and others to Houston May 12 to meet with BP and others.

Yet while the president says his Noble Prize-winning energy secretary has been “examining every contingency,” Mr. Chu was clueless about BP’s plans to install a cap over the well to funnel oil to a vessel on the surface. As the New York Times reported last Saturday, “After the cap was successfully placed, Mr. Chu wondered aloud why oil was still spewing.” BP engineers had to explain that oil was still coming from vents that “would be closed very slowly to ensure that mounting pressure would not force the cap off.”

Even now, Mr. Obama looks like a spectator, albeit an angry one, barking at White House aides to “plug the damn hole” (now that’s a good idea no one has thought of) and telling NBC’s Matt Lauer he’s in search of an “ass to kick.”

But the main political behind that’s being kicked is Mr. Obama’s. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll says Americans give the federal government a 69% negative rating for its handling of the spill, compared to a 62% negative rating for Washington’s handling of Katrina in August 2005.

This pattern of being merely present has been apparent almost since the first days of the Obama presidency. He may unveil his mighty teleprompter to help pass what Congress has drafted, but this White House seems strangely disconnected from crafting legislation. For example, last year’s stimulus was largely drafted by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin, one of Congress’s most liberal members. As a result, what passed was a wasteful spending bill rather than an economic growth package.

And faced with a growing mountain of debt, Mr. Obama passed the issue off to an ineffectual commission whose report is due after the election. After growing the size of the federal government by a quarter in just over a year, he now says he’d like agencies to try to find 5% cuts in their budgets.

On other controversies—the attempt of high-ranking aides to entice candidates not to challenge incumbent Democratic senators, the details of cap-and-trade legislation, the resolution of big conflicts between the House and Senate versions of financial regulation, and the drafting of comprehensive immigration reform—Mr. Obama appears to be removed, distant and detached, unwilling or unable to provide the adult supervision Washington requires.

The result is that he receives a 38% approval and 52% disapproval rating on his handling of the economy in the latest Economist/YouGov poll. The GOP enjoys a nine-point lead over Democrats in Rasmussen’s latest generic ballot.

This is causing the public to revisit concerns it’s had about Mr. Obama since he clinched the Democratic nomination in March 2008. Then the ABC/Washington Post Poll reported that 46% of Americans found him too “inexperienced” to be an effective president, the highest number ever for a major party presidential nominee. In October, just before the election, ABC/Washington Post asked the question again: 44% called Mr. Obama too inexperienced. On issue after issue, Mr. Obama is providing plenty of evidence to validate those concerns.

Americans might hope the president’s diffidence when it comes to the hard work of government might mitigate his more extreme liberal tendencies. No such luck. Mr. Obama is an odd mixture of passivity and radicalism. He’s happy to be a cheerleader for policies (like nationalizing health care) that many Americans find dangerously liberal.

The country has had another president both weak and radical at the same time: Jimmy Carter.