Free Republic

There was a time when our nation was capable of large, visionary construction projects.Huntington Lake, Calif. — Our politicians love soaring platitudes followed by little, if any, action. The more Americans are promised shovel-ready stimulus projects, new sources of power, and other fantasies, the more we accept that bureaucracy, regulations, lawsuits, and impact statements will prevent much from ever being done. The president himself, after demanding nearly a trillion dollars in borrowed money for his budget, confessed that his “shovel-ready” projects had proved not so shovel-ready after all. Much of the vast sum of borrowed money instead went to subsidize...

Scandal: The ATF's gun-running disaster was funded in the stimulus bill. Think about all the criminal and drug cartel jobs saved or created. And our attorney general once bragged to a Mexican audience about implementing it. This could be, no pun intended, the proverbial smoking gun in a growing administration scandal that deserves as much mainstream media attention as Iran-Contra or Watergate. Right there in the stimulus bill that no one in Congress bothered to read is $10 million for Project Gunrunner (aka Operation Fast and Furious), which resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and increased...

Geithner’s explanation of the administration's small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009. “Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.” She then challenged Geithner on...

<p>President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness met today in Durham, NC at Cree Inc., a company that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting.</p>

----------------------------------------------------See more posts and art at The Looking Spoon (www.thelookingspoon.com)

It took 410 days to build the Empire State Building, four years to erect the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pentagon took a year and a half, the Alaska Highway just nine months. These days it takes longer to build an overpass. For instance, planning for Boston’s “Big Dig” officially began in the early 1980s with a budget of $2.6 billion, but ground wasn’t broken until 1991 and the last ramp wasn’t opened until 2006. The final estimated cost: $22 billion. According to the Boston Globe, it won’t be paid off until 2038. Meanwhile, the “race” to rebuild the World Trade...

On May 9, 1939, these words scolding the failure of FDR’s New Deal echoed the room of the House Ways and Means Committee: We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!...

In the 2nd year of the reign of His Obamaness as POTUS of the 57 States, the time of the bi-quadrennial joust between the Elephant and Donkey Clans loomed on the horizon. The Donkey Clan was sorely afraid that the lumbering pachyderms would best them in the joust, for it seemed the Donkeys had lost much favor with the People of the Realm. And so it was that His Obamaness, Lady Obamaness, and Joe the Court Jester traveled throughout the towns and villages of the Realm delivering accusations against the Elephant Clan. His Obamaness said that the Merchant & Peddler...

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on Meet the Press how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.” In interviews, job summits, and press conferences,...

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on “Meet the Press” how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.” In interviews, job summits and press conferences,...

DAVID BROOKS, NYT: Yes. Well, I shouldn’t have confessed this. He said this to me off the record about a year ago. But it hasn’t… JIM LEHRER: Off the record? So, then you can’t talk about it. DAVID BROOKS: Yes, because Peter Baker is a better than I am, because I couldn’t get him to go on the record with that thing. JIM LEHRER: He said this to you a year ago? DAVID BROOKS: It was obvious. I mean, you are trying to build a stimulus package. And when they were trying to build it, believe me, they would have...

Election '10: The future debated the past in Nevada on Thursday night, with the Tea Party's Sharron Angle demonstrating why the Democrats will no longer be the majority and Harry Reid will no longer be their leader. It was no easy task for Sen. Harry Reid to stand up there and try to explain why he deserved re-election as senator from a state with 14% unemployment and a foreclosure rate five times the national average. If the policies of an administration whose legislation he quarterbacked through the Senate were working, it is certainly not evident in Nevada. This time around,...

Liberals sit down with the New York Times the way Catholics enter the confessional: To make a clean breast of their sins and to ask for absolution. Except that the Gray Lady offers no promise of confidentiality. President Obama has given an interview to the Times Magazine that will appear in full next Sunday. Already, however, his quoted remarks are causing a political earthquake. He confesses that he did not realize there was “no such thing as a shovel-ready project” when he asked the country to borrow $787 billion — mostly from the Chinese — in a vain attempt to...

President Obama shocked America with his admission in NY Times that he realized too late: “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects”. It has the effect of the John McCain’s ‘I never said I am a maverick’ remark. There is no such thing as ‘shovel ready projects’, because the US bureaucracy is so over bloated and obese – it is dysfunctional. Plus America is already out of the Dark Ages and industrial scale construction work is done with much more sophisticated tools. Nobody really wants to go back to windmills and shovels. It is the age of ‘tweeters’, so...

To commemorate this historic moment in time, when the President finally fessed up and admitted to making a mistake [although he says he only made a 'tactical' mistake], I decided to post the following Youtube video. [Scroll down for the video] Enjoy!: But first a little background material: President Obama recently sat down for an hour-long interview with the New York Times’ White House correspondent, Peter Baker. "During our hour together," writes Baker, "Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called 'tactical lessons'." Among the lessons gleaned...

So they really are going to surrender and tear down sections of Detroit By Kevin “Coach” Collins Last June this site reported the Obama Administration was in discussions with Mayor Dave Bing of Detroit to tear down large sections of his City. In a clear admission fifty years of Democrat rule had ruined the once great city, surrendering large sections of Detroit to the wrecking ball is actually being planned. Liberal Democrats have spoken the unspeakable: "Forget about trying, lets tear it down." Ripping down sections of Detroit will reap some very clear benefits for Obama and his Party. It...

Once-presidential phrase casualty of word war DETROIT – The phrase "shovel ready," incessantly invoked by the Obama administration this year as a way to sell its $787 billion federal stimulus bill, died Thursday. The official cause of death was overuse, according to Lake Superior State University, which announced the phrase's demise in its annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness, released Thursday. "Shovel ready" dug its own grave by forcing its way into speeches and out of the mouths of the president and too many other politicians in past months....

When the Obama administration put together it stimulus package all the talk was about building roads, fixing bridges, building schools … you know, the kind of jobs that people envision when they think of jobs that the government should encourage while improving our infrastructure. That’s why we heard incessant references to “shovel ready jobs.” It brought to mind images of people actually working, wielding shovels, running construction equipment, widening roads to fix traffic congestion, replacing dilapidated schools. In other words, building things. So how’s that working out in your neighborhood, city, country or state? In Oregon, those "shovel ready jobs"...

Oklahoma is getting about $12 million to fight homelessness in the state. Funds will be used for the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which targets those who are newly or nearly homeless and are having trouble coming up with this month's rent, are behind on their utilities, or need help with a car payment. OKLAHOMA CITY -- A common criticism of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been that too much of the money is going to support or expand social programs. No wonder, then, that some people roll their eyes over the fact that $1.5 billion in...

Forty-four days before he assumed the office, Barack Obama went on Meet the Press and spoke of shovel ready projects that were supposedly awaiting a job stimulus plan: "When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door, but they've already lined up the projects and they can make them work. And now, we're going to have to prioritize it and do it not in the old traditional politics first wave. What we need to do is examine what are the projects...