Free Republic

The rest of America is just beginning to learn how Cook County politics works. Barack Obama learned his lessons well. He said as much when he let slip his real views: that politics is about "rewarding friends" and "punishing enemies." As president, Obama seems to be busy "rewarding" his home town pals at taxpayer expense. The giant slush fund known as the "stimulus" has been a rich source of payoffs that extend far beyond mega donors such as George Kaiser and his Solyndra investment. The stimulus fund has also been a honey pot to send money to personal pals of...

Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust Seattle PI Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy - able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint - and the announcement came with great fanfare. McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000...

Projects to weatherize homes are a key part of the Obama administration's fusion of stimulus spending and the green agenda. But a new report by the Department of Energy has found serious problems in stimulus-funded weatherization work -- ***problems so severe that they have resulted in homes that are not only not more energy efficient but are actually dangerous for people to live in. The study, by the Department's inspector general, examined the work of what's called the Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP, in Illinois. Last year, the Department awarded Illinois $242 million, which was expected to pay for the...

Money provided in the stimulus bill for making buildings more energy-efficient is finally starting to flow, the Department of Energy’s inspector general says. But in a report released Tuesday, his office says that in some cases it has been badly spent. An audit by the inspector general focused on some work done by the Community and Economic Development Association of Cook County, one of 35 agencies in Illinois that are expected to share $91 million over three years. The audit looked at 15 homes and found that 12 failed final inspection “because of substandard workmanship.” In some cases, technicians who...