Our StimulusTax Money Well-Spent After All

And you thought that the 15% or so of the stimulus money spent so far was being wasted on silly things. Well, we're here to tell you otherwise. The Democrats know where their priorities are, and have spent accordingly. Thanks to a recent report from the Senate Republicans, we now get to look at a few of the projects our commandeered money has been used for. I'm impressed. See if you are.

$300,000 FOR MAPPING RADIOACTIVE RABBIT FECES: The State of Washington hired a contractor to rent a helicopter to fly 50 feet over the outback of the state to find out all those vital things we need to know about radioactive rabbits. With highly-sophisticated scanners, the helicopter covered an area of 13.7 square miles. The concept was to find out the effects on the wildlife of areas which were affected by nuclear fallout. Of course, no bomb was ever dropped or tested in Washington, and the Hanford Nuclear Plant has been given a 0% emissions report card each and every time it was routinely but intensely investigated by both private and public agencies. One comment from the California radical director of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment pretty well summed it up: "It was kind of funny, in a sick way."

$4200 to $5500 TAX CREDIT FOR PURCHASING GOLF CARTS: It seems that the cash-for-clunkers and fuel-efficient automobiles plans of the Obama administration have fared very well. In a fine bit of creativity, some citizens discovered that the lowly golf cart is a very fuel-efficient vehicle indeed. By combining federal tax incentives for purchasing electric cars with state incentives for fuel-efficiency, happy duffers are finding that they can get a really nice golf cart nearly free. Now that number in the headline may not sound like much, until you multiply its per-vehicle number by the actual number of golf carts actually purchased. Welfare recipients get free cheese. Golfers get free motorized carts.

$219,000 TO STUDY THE SEX LIVES OF FEMALE COLLEGE FRESHMEN: Now frankly, I think this is a study that needs to be done, but I would have been glad to do it for far less than that sum. The "Women's Health Project" being conducted by Syracuse University professor of psychology and medicine Michael Carey will interview five hundred Syracuse University freshwomen to check out what kind of sex they enjoy, and how often. Critics have said it's a misuse of stimulus funds which will produce no discernible economic benefit. To them I say, "it sounds pretty stimulating to me."

$1,000,000 TO RENOVATE THE SUNSET STRIP: Nothing to see here. It's just another $1 million or so to go along with the $7 million already set aside for the project. I see it as a perfectly reasonable exercise of government power to revitalize an area much beloved of the druggies, hippies and anti-war protesters from the 60s who now pine for a memorial to their youth. After all, not everyone from the 60s was able to get a job as a radical university professor.

$2.3 MILLION FOR BUG RESEARCH IN CONNECTICUT: No, we're not talking about the bugs that the Democrats have placed in Joe Liebermann's office, or the ones the Republicans have placed in Chris Dodd's office. These are real bugs. The research involved more than just observation. It provides for raising multiple generations of the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth, and my personal favorite, the woolly adelgid (aka "the infamous predator of the hemlock). And there's never anything normal about the use of these funds. They first went to the US Forest Service, and they used it to fund a non-forest rehabilitation of a quarantine research facility. But at least it's better than the last US Forest Service moneyfest for the study of forests in Washington, DC.

$6 MILLION FOR A SNOWMAKING FACILITY IN THE 15TH SNOWIEST CITY IN THE UNITED STATES: Yep, that's Duluth, Minnesota. I'm sure the locals were thrilled to find that they would now be able to shiver all 365 days of the year.

$500,000 TO STUDY SOCIAL NETWORKS LIKE FACEBOOK: Since Facebook and the other social networks are free to the user, we must find a crisis to exploit. That crisis was found by Landon Cox, A Duke University assistant professor of computer science. His concern is the issue of privacy. The good professor now has half a million bucks to intrude into the privacy of Facebook users.

$380,000 TO SPAY AND NEUTER PETS IN WICHITA, KANSAS: It is a proven fact that fertile dogs and cats produce very little in economic rewards. Females particularly tend to drag down the economy by taking a few days off work each month, and then become completely economically unproductive after giving birth. Males are even less useful to the economy, since they tend to spend most of their time sniffing around for available females rather than sticking to their jobs. So--off with their organs!

$3.4 MILLION FOR A TURTLE TUNNEL IN FLORIDA: This doesn't do a lot for the economy, but those turtles are just do damned cute. So the money will be used to create an "ecopassage" across a highway in Tallahassee, Florida. You see, without the passage, automobiles tend to make the turtles larger, but also flatter. With the passage, the little cuties can just march from their nesting sites straight to the sea without getting run over by an eco-unfriendly automobile or truck.

$30 MILLION FOR A SPRING TRAINING BASEBALL COMPLEX FOR THE ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS AND THE COLORADO ROCKIES: This facility will be built on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian lands near Scottsdale, Arizona, to a total tune of $100 million. Publicly-funded sports facilities are frequently complete boondoggles, but here we can look at the bright side. Only 1/3 of the funds will come from the stimulus package.

We're used to the government wasting our tax money on silly projects. But this bill was supposed to do one thing, and one thing only--stimulate the economy, not just create jobs where the only ones who benefit economically are the ones who already have jobs or will get jobs because of the projects. It was an economic stimulus package, not a job-perpetuation or job-creation package.

In March, President Obama pledged that the stimulus funding would be closely watched to ensure it is properly spent. Well, another promise broken. "And so I've said before--I know Joe [Biden] emphasized this point to you earlier--if we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it," said The One. So how come I got my information from a Republican Senate report?

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !