Posted on 07/10/2009 5:22:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
Let there be no doubt: Democrats are the party with two ideas: borrow and spend. The only vigorous internal debate on the left revolves around two questions: How much and how much more? Even as the first trillion-dollar stimulus craters, the debt-o-crats are floating yet another grand act of generational theft to create the illusion of jumpstarting the economy.
Call it Spawn of Spendulus. Return of the Porkulus Beast. Crap Sandwich Redux. White House economic adviser Laura D'Andrea Tyson told an international economic conference: "We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus." Team Obama flack Robert Gibbs says the president isn't "ruling anything out, but at the same time he's not ruling anything in." Despite the inconvenient fact that less than 10 percent of the initial stimulus has been spent (or misspent), congressional Democrats remain "open" to the idea of digging a deeper fiscal hole for your children and grandchildren.
Porkulus One was a massive payoff to special interests and political constituencies (and dead people!) disguised as a job generator. A General Accounting Office analysis this week revealed that stimulus dollars allocated to states and localities are not being spent on what they're supposed to be spent on. States are making up their own criteria for spending. The most economically distressed parts of the country are getting shortchanged. School and transportation bureaucrats are using the money to preserve their own jobs instead of "stimulating" others. And assessments of the stimulative effect of the package are a joke. As House Republicans noted: "The administration has essentially 'rigged the game' of reporting the tangible effects of its stimulus program by creating an immeasurable metric -- 'jobs created or saved' -- that no one can disprove."
Irked by the mounting evidence of stimulus failure, Vice President Joe Biden griped at a spending event on Thursday: "This ain't about swimming pools and Frisbee parks and polar bear exhibits. This is about stuff that not only passed the test of jobs, but passed the smell test. ... All the talk about how we're gonna waste all this money, that's a dog that ain't barked yet. And it's not gonna bark on my watch." Yet last month, Sen. Tom Coburn exposed 100 smelly stimulus projects worth $5.5 billion, including $3.4 million for a wildlife "eco-passage" in Florida to take animals safely under a busy roadway; nearly $10 million to renovate an unused train station; and a $2 million "weatherization" contract awarded to a Nevada nonprofit recently fired for doing the same type of work.
After failing to recognize the inevitable and inexorable political forces that turned the stimulus into the mother of all Beltway boondoggles, media outlets are now playing catch up:
USA Today reported this week that "counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain."
ABC News reported this week that the failed stimulus tracking website run by the White House, Recovery.gov, will get an additional $18 million taxpayer-funded injection to support a "redesign." The Washington Examiner's David Freddoso points out that the contract was awarded to a Maryland firm whose donors have contributed $19,000 to Maryland's House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
The Washington Times reported this week that "as much as $16.1 million from the stimulus program is going to save the San Francisco Bay area habitat of, among other things, the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse" in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's backyard.
And despite all the initial focus on basic infrastructure needs, Land Line magazine reported this week that "even with federal stimulus spending that put shovels in the ground on new infrastructure projects, analysts predict an overall decline of 4.3 percent on infrastructure in 2009."
The same underhanded, transparency-defying, earmark-stuffing process that marked the porkulus beast is dominating every other pricey piece of legislation hurtling through the Democrat-led Congress. The Waxman-Markey "cap and trade" bill that passed the House two weeks ago contained bribes galore -- including a $50 million hurricane research center for Florida Democrat Alan Grayson and a $3.5 billion economic development "sweetener" package for Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur. The current health care takeover proposals feature a crucial payoff to Big Labor -- a golden exemption from any tax on union members' generous health care benefits.
The friends and patrons of Obama may be making out like bandits. But for everyone else, the Democrats' ideological bankruptcy comes at a nauseatingly steep price.
if only the republicans were different. who can we turn to for sanity?
Agree completely. If the GOP does make a comeback, it will simply borrow and spend more like it did from 2001 to 2007.
....uh...yea....but first a bit of house cleaning is in order.......
Which ones must go? The list please.....
I have to disagree.
Democrats have a third idea: Kill babies.
That is, after all, their most untouchable sacred article of faith.
WHERE DID OBAMA PUT THE FIRST STIMULUS TRILLIONS? Obama's vaunted "$787B stimulus package" is NOT working. Now his advisers are readying Plan B. Unfortunately, it's a repeat of Plan A.......this fits a definition of insanity: repeating behavior and expecting a different result. Much of the spending wouldn't take place for months, if not years.... it hasn't helped the economy, and has added hundreds of billions to the national debt.
VP Biden admitted on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos that the Obama Admin "misread" the economy when he pushed the stimulus bill. The admin thought unemployment would not exceed 8% this year it is now at 9.5%). Also discussed is the need for another trillion dollar stimulus package. (Excerpt) Read more at freedomslighthouse.com. Watch video.
POINTS TO PONDER We can safely conclude that creating jobs was apparently NOT the reason for the stimulus.
POINT ONE On June 9 President Obama called a press conference to announce, "Several financial institutions are set to pay back $68B to taxpayers." While Mr. Obama's announcement was welcome news, it was assumed that any money or profit would be returned to the general funds from whence it had come in order to pay down the debt. The truth, however, is that the money returned by the banks is finding new life as part of what amounts to a Treasury Department-controlled slush fund.
POINT TWO We keep reading and hearing Congress rushed to approve the "$787 billion stimulus package" early this year, but very little of it has been used. Now uber-Lobbyist Thomas Hale Boggs, Esq (Patton Boggs) was interviewed by nightly network news last week. Boggs said there's $2 TRILLION federal stimulus waiting to be distributed..... AND that he is getting unprecedented numbers of calls from all over the US......from those who want a piece of it. Boggs is the son of former Cong Hale Boggs and sister of ABC-TV commentator Cokie Roberts.
POINT THREE Obama tapped VP Joe Biden to "allocate" the stimlulus $$trillions. Biden's family was involved with Texas financier H. Allen Stanford, now charged with an $8 billion offshore fraud, the WSJ said. The Bidens $50 million fund was jointly branded between the Bidens' Paradigm Global Advisors LLC and a Stanford Financial Group entity, and was known as the Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund, the paper said. Stanford-related companies marketed the fund to global investors and also invested about $2.7 million of their own money in the fund, the paper said, citing a lawyer for Paradigm.......... Paradigm Global Advisors is owned through a holding company by the VP's son, Hunter, and Joe Biden's brother, James, according to newspapers.
POINT FOUR How can this be legal? A jaw-dropping policy the White House released late on a Saturday afternoon........hoping we would not notice. "Following OMB’s review, the Obama Administration has decided to make a number of changes to the rules that we think make them even tougher on special interests and more focused on merits-based decision making. First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as well as anyone else exerting influence on the process. We concluded this was necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program."
POINT FIVE The Reserve Primary Fund's recent failure was "a tragedy" said Crane Data. Without details, sounds like a very strange charge. It may just be a diversion and scapegoating in a broad "War on Wall Street" that Obama, Soros and FDIC's Sheila Bair, among others, are engaged in right now, to get complete control of our financial system.
POINT SIX Obama hid $17.5 BILLION of his $2 TRILLION stimulus in NJ (its governor is a Wall Street operator). This $17.5 BILLION cannot be accounted for. AN EDITORIAL June 22 reported NJ was promised complete transparency.....but there is virtually no information on the $17.5B federal largess via a Web site — www.recovery.nj.gov. A NJ TASK FORCE was created to review every step of the process and ensure that stimulus funds are awarded based on clear and appropriate criteria and then distributed in a prompt, fair and reasonable manner. The Web site, as currently constituted, does none of that. END EDITORIAL
WORKING THESIS Obama, Soros, and Rahm are taking control of the US financial system. Americans are prevented from knowing if trillions in stimulus are being laundered in the states, and/or is being illegally directed to Democrat campaign coffers, or wire-transferred offshore into personal accounts.
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