She Thinks You're Stupid: Pelosi Drops the Word 'Stimulus' From Her Vocabulary

In June 2010 she was still busy touting the alleged successes of her and Obama's failed stimulus program. Now she prtends she never heard of the word.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats have dropped the word stimulus from their vocabulary.

Though the House minority leader and her caucus are still pushing an economic stimulus agenda to save the economy, they’ve radically changed their rhetoric with the hope of winning over voters who saw “stimulus” as close to a dirty word.

Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to any stimulus, even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same.

Indeed, with President Obama scheduled Thursday to lay out his job-creation plans before a joint session of Congress, liberal Democrats and left-leaning policy groups are pressuring him to ignore short-term deficit spending concerns in favor of sweeping spending initiatives designed to boost hiring.

The Democrats’ signature “Make it in America” platform aims to create jobs by increasing infrastructure spending, providing financial help to struggling states and expanding tax credits for businesses – all of which were key elements of their 2009 economic stimulus bill.

Recognizing the unpopularity of the 2009 package, however, Democratic leaders have revised their message with less loaded language – “job creation” instead of “stimulus;” “Make it in America” in lieu of “Recovery Act” – in hopes of tackling the jobs crisis.

And in hopes of bamboozling their supporters. It isn't working.

That’s a sharp shift from last year’s messaging strategy, when Pelosi issued hundreds of press releases touting the benefits of the 2009 stimulus bill in hopes of making believers of skeptical voters.

In the four months prior to last November’s elections alone, Pelosi’s office released more than 80 “fact sheets” highlighting media reports about local projects the stimulus law was supporting.

In December, that practice abruptly stopped, with good reason.

Not only had Democrats been trounced at the polls a month earlier, but public sentiment had made “stimulus” a radioactive word and “shovel-ready” a running national joke.

Indeed, Pelosi and Obama are now national jokes. Removing words from the language won't help redeem them.

Government Efficiency: $111M in Stimulus Saved Just 55 Jobs

You know what this means, right? We need another stimulus! Of course if you complain about this outrageous waste of taxpayer money then you're reacist or something.

More than a year after Congress approved $800 billion in stimulus funds, the Los Angeles city controller has released a 40-page report on how the city spent its share, and the results are not living up to expectations.

"I'm disappointed that we've only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million," said Wendy Greuel, the city's controller. "With our local unemployment rate over 12 percent we need to do a better job cutting red tape and putting Angelenos back to work."

According to the audit, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works spent $70 million in stimulus funds -- in return, it created seven private sector jobs and saved seven workers from layoffs. Taxpayer cost per job: $1.5 million.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation created even fewer jobs per dollar, spending $40 million but netting just nine jobs. Taxpayer cost per job: $4.4 million.

Naturally this abysmal failure doesn't get a failing grade. Much like Obama these folks think way too highly of themselves.

"I would say maybe in a grade, a B- in creating the jobs," Greuel told Fox News.

Well, at least they're not blaming Bush.

What Spending Freeze? Stimulus to Cost Another $75 Billion

Smoke, meet mirror.

Last year's $787 billion economic stimulus bill is going to be even more expensive — $75 billion more.

The new Congressional Budget Office estimate, released Tuesday, provides more ammunition for Republicans who say the stimulus has been long on spending and short on creating promised jobs. The additional cost also eats into the savings forecast from the budget freeze President Barack Obama is expected to propose Wednesday night during his State of the Union address.

Almost half of the additional cost, $34 billion, is because the food stamp program won't be able to take advantage of lower-than-expected inflation rates and will instead have benefits set by the stimulus bill.

Higher unemployment insurance costs added $21 billion to the bill, and stimulus-subsidized bonds to pay for infrastructure projects have proven more popular than expected with state and local governments.

The $75 billion increase would erase one-third of the $250 billion in 10-year savings that would come from the partial domestic spending freeze being proposed by Obama. The boost in unemployment payments alone would more than erase the $10 billion to $15 billion in first-year savings from such a freeze.

More nonsense from Teleprompter Man.

U.S. President Barack Obama will freeze the salaries of senior White House officials and other top political appointees for savings of $4 million in fiscal 2011, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

The official told Reuters that Obama, in his State of the Union address on Wednesday, would likely mention the move, which will expand on the pay freeze he ordered last year.

Wow, a whole $4 million a year from now. A regular fiscal conservative, this one.

Maybe Joe Wilson can interrupt the SOTU tomorrow and let him know he's still lying.

Depends On Your Definition of Open

What the hell is up with Charlie Rangel? He looks like he has been raiding Max Baucus' liquor cabinet.

Here the Democrat leadership tries to respond to the letter they received from CSPAN asking them to open up the process in regards to the health care legislation, like Barry O promised on the campaign trail.

The "most open and transparent congress evah" tries to explain how holding closed door sessions, inserting million, even billion dollar earmarks into the healthcare bill, and just hiding from the public in general was actually some sort of Orwellian example of openness.

For the Democrats this is known as business as usual under the new normal. Here is Rep Tom Price (R-GA) showing the hypocrisy during the cram down stimulus legislation debate, when once again Republicans were left standing out in the hall while the Dems made their deals in private and then hoisted an $800 billion dollar, earmark laden bill on the American taxpayers.

File this under "Fail".

Only 6.1 Million Jobs Not Saved or Created Since Stimulus

You know what this means, don't you? We need another stimulus!.

Heckuva job, Barack.

According to the data, 49 States have lost jobs since the stimulus was enacted as unemployment has skyrocketed to 10 percent. Only North Dakota and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation following the February 2009 stimulus (though both fall short of seeing the promised level of job creation). While President Obama claimed the result of his stimulus bill would be the creation of 3.5 million jobs, the Nation has already lost over 2.6 million – a difference of 6.1 million jobs.

Change is coming next November.

Click the image to see how truly disastrous Obama's jobs record is.

Not Complete Until The Paperwork Is Done

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has decided to go after parties that received stimulus funds but have not filed the necessary reports back to the federal government that details how the money was spent. However in typical government fashion, at least some of the missing reports are as a result of the bureaucratic red tape inherent in the system that they set up.

Propublica.org, for example, exposed this week how a report for the North Georgia city of Blue Ridge [GA] is not on recovery.gov as it should be. The city received a $12.9 million federal stimulus loan to improve and expand its drinking water system. The work is already under way, but it has not created or saved any jobs at this point, according to city clerk April Grizzell.

Grizzell said she tried several times to file her city’s report in October as required, but a federal Web site kept kicking it back. She said she later realized she had not registered some information about her city on another federal Web site as required prior to trying to file the city's report. By that time, the reporting deadline had passed and the federal system site had locked her out, Grizzell said.

Grizzell said: “It wasn’t from lack of trying.”

I am naturally suspicious of any organization which incorporates the dot org tag in their title since 9 times out of 10 they tend to be the domain of liberal progressives. They have really taken ownership of that particular label so I decided to look up the group in question and found this.

ProPublica is a team of journalists – the largest investigative staff in the nation – who produce the kind of hard-hitting and high-impact journalism that’s falling by the industry’s wayside.

I was actually kind of surprised that they actually do decent reporting and from what I could browse through, no I didn't take an in depth analysis of all of their stories, they appear to be very straight forward. They mostly link to other news agencies and their reporting and limit the amount of commentary.

The whole point though is just like several car dealerships had problems trying to enter information during the "cash for clunkers" program we have yet another example of how the federal government can't seem to get out of their own way.

Yeah I really want them running my healthcare.

Democrat Pollster Got $6 Million in Stimulus Money

Here I thought the money spent on clown shows was bad. This should really make your blood boil.

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn (photo above), Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.

Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.

Wow. Three whole jobs save for a mere $6 million. How stimulating.

Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the three jobs saved at Burson-Marsteller represented a poor value for taxpayers.

“It illustrates a very poor way to create jobs,” Kyl said.

Kyl said the appropriateness of Democratic strategists receiving funds “depends on whether they exerted some influence.”

Well, I'd recommend Congressional hearing on this, but you expect the Democrats to go along with that when their own pollsters are raking in the money?

It Figures: Stimulus Money Used to Fund Research on How to Raise Taxes

The government never works harder than when they're trying to separate you from your money. This certainly is a creative way of doing it.

There's more proof that the administration is high on soda taxes as a way to curb obesity and fund healthcare reform. Two pro-free-market groups have discovered a $1 million stimulus grant to the University of Illinois to fund a study of the relationship between fat taxes and food consumption, diet quality, and obesity. Of concern is that the study results might be preordained.

Which, of course, will be an effort to tax certain foods and beverages at higher rates in order to slake their unquenchable thirst for more revenue. David Paterson floated this in New York not so long ago and met was with fierce resistance, so you can expect the same nationwide. But that never stopped this merry band of thieves in Washington.

The makers of the target products—sodas, juices, and sports drinks—have been warning that the administration wants to raise the tax on their products. They also say that higher soda taxes in some states have not led to a drop in obesity, calling into question the societal benefit of such taxes.

The Illinois Policy Institute concluded that "taxpayers are in essence funding a study that will likely call for even higher taxes on the products we consume every day. This isn't change we can believe in." And the Club for Growth's Andy Roth tells Whispers, "The stimulus-financed study about fat taxes proves that the fat cats in Washington show no restraint when it comes to spending our hard-earned tax dollars. Is there any project that would fail to meet Congress's unbelievably low standards? I doubt it."

Thanks to Katherine for passing this along. She says "So the government is taking our money and using it to study new ways to take even more of our money. It just never ends."

Indeed, it never does.

Another Stimulus Success Story: Cash for Criminals

This will no doubt go over well.

The federal government sent about 3,900 economic stimulus payments of $250 each this spring to people who were in no position to use the money to help stimulate the economy: prison inmates.

The checks were part of the massive economic recovery package approved by Congress and President Barack Obama in February. About 52 million Social Security recipients, railroad retirees and those receiving Supplemental Security Income were eligible for the one-time checks.

Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration. They were eligible because they weren't incarcerated in any of the three months before the recovery package was enacted.

"The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment," Lassiter said.

The other 1,700 checks? That was a mistake.

Checks were sent to those inmates because government records didn't accurately show they were in prison, Lassiter said. He said most of those checks were returned by the prisons.

The Boston Herald first reported that the checks were sent to inmates.

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is performing an audit to make sure no checks went to ineligible recipients, spokesman George E. Penn said.

The audit, which had already been planned, will examine whether checks incorrectly went to inmates, dead people, fugitive felons or people living outside the U.S., Penn said.

Basically all the people any stimulus money should not be going to. Glad to see my tax money being so well spent.

Stimulus Money Finally Being Put to Good Use

Who said the stimulus money wasn't being well spent? It's about time such important research was funded.

Among the most titillating grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health are studies that would:

* Examine "barriers to correct condom use" at Indiana University, at a cost of $221,000.

* Study "hookups" among adolescents at Syracuse University. Study's cost: $219,000.

* Evaluate "drug use as a sex enhancer" in an analysis of "high-risk community sex networks" at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That study will cost $123,000.

* Study how methamphetamine, thought to produce an "insatiable need" for sex among users, "enhances the motivation for female rat sexual behavior." Some $28,000 has been awarded for the University of Maryland at Baltimore study.

This Is How You Stimulate An Economy

This story has everything liberals hate. Big pharma, wealthy capitalist handing out bonuses, evil southern, no doubt racist, (unproven but who needs proof it is Alabama after all) and just a hint of religion.