When Congress passed, without
reading, the $787
billion Porkulus Bill
back in February, Brother O and the Bread and Circuses Salvation Sideshow
Administration promised it would create jobs and boost the economy.
Frankly, the largest
spending bill in American history
was nothing more than a gift of taxpayer money to Democrats for their
pet projects and special interest groups. Touted for saving both jobs
and country by propagandists in the mainstream media, the bill has done
little to stimulate job or economic growth, but it did increase the
national debt, escalate unemployment rates, and produce dubious projects.
According to clueless Joe
Biden, "Every dollar being spent from Recovery
Act [Porkulus]
is helping put someone back to work."
Flash floods of stimulus spending
have put workers on the following projects:
- $300,000 for a GPS-equipped
helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit droppings at the Hanford nuclear
reservation in Washington state.
- $30 million for
a spring training baseball complex for the Arizona Diamondbacks and
Colorado Rockies.
- $11 million to build
a bridge connecting Microsoft's two headquarter campuses, which are
separated by a highway, in Redmond, Washington,.
- $430,000 to repair
a bridge, which carries 10 or fewer cars a day, in Iowa County, Wisconsin.
- $800,000 to build
a backup runway, which serves about 20 passengers a day, for the John
Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
- $219,000 for Syracuse
University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.
- $2.3 million for
the U.S. Forest Service to rear large numbers of arthropods, including
the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth, and the woolly adelgid.
- $3.4 million for
a 13-foot tunnel for turtles and other wildlife attempting to cross
U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, Florida.
- $1.15 million to
install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, Oklahoma.
- $9.38 million to
renovate a hundred year-old train depot, which has not been used for
three decades, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
- $2.5 million in
stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
- $6 million for a
snow-making facility in Duluth, Minnesota.
- $173,834 to weatherize
eight pickup trucks in Madison County, Illinois.
- $20,000 for a fish
sperm freezer at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery in South Dakota.
- $380,000 to spay
and neuter pets in Wichita, Kansas.
- $300 apiece for
thousands of signs at road construction sites across the country announcing
that the projects are funded by stimulus money.
- $1.5 million for
a fence to block would-be jumpers from leaping off the All-American
Bridge in Akron, Ohio.
- $1 million to study
the health effects of environmentally friendly public housing on 300
people in Chicago.
- $356,000 for Indiana
University to study childhood comprehension of foreign accents compared
with native speech.
- $983,952 for street
beautification in Ann Arbor, Michigan, including decorative lighting,
trees, benches and bike paths.
- $148,438 for Washington
State University to analyze the use of marijuana in conjunction with
medications like morphine.
- $462,000 to purchase
22 concrete toilets for use in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri
- $3.1 million to
transform a canal barge into a floating museum that will travel the
Erie Canal in New York state.
- $1.3 million on
government arts jobs in Maine, including $30,000 for basket makers,
$20,000 for storytelling and $12,500 for a music festival.
- $71,000 for a hybrid
car to be used by student drivers in Colchester, Vermont, as well as
a plug-in hybrid for town workers decked out with a sign touting the
vehicle's energy efficiency.
- $1 million for Portland,
Oregon, to replace 100 aging bike lockers and build a garage that would
house 250 bicycles.
The clowns in the Bread and
Circuses Administration say that $159 billion from Porkulus has created
or saved more than 640,000
jobs. Even though
more than half the jobs were in education and not in the private sector
as promised, that economists say it's impossible to calculate jobs that
are saved, and that ABC
News calculated
the cost to taxpayers for each job was $160,000, clueless Joe obstinately
insists, "we're
on track."
Come November 2010, clueless
Joe, Brother O, and his clowns in the Salvation Sideshow will discover
just how well that track and the Porkulus Act has worked out for them.
Jerry A. Kane——
Bio and Archives
Jerry A. Kane is a retired English professor who has also worked as a journalist and technical writer. His writings have been featured at Canada Free Press and some have appeared at WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and in daily and weekly newspapers across the country. His commentaries, news stories, and musings appear regularly on his blog, The Millstone Diaries.