Harry Reid Waves White Flag, Pulls Omnibus Spending Bill

From Andrew Malcolm:

Sen Democratic Leader Harry Reid pulls $1.2 trillion spending bill, says he'll work w/GOP on smaller, short term bill. via Fox News

Reid is, however, pushing for passage of the DREAM (Amnesty) Act and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He's not done screwing up America just yet.

Biden: GOP Spending $200 BILLION on Ads

Uh, not really, Joe:

Conservative groups have not dumped $200 billion in political ads on the heads of Democratic candidates.

It evidently just feels that way to the White House.

In an interview with Al Hunt of Bloomberg News scheduled to be shown Friday night, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. commented on the need for disclosure when corporate interests contribute to political groups.

“I was amazed at the amount of money, this $200 billion of money that is — where there’s no accountability,” he said. “When I say accountability, we don’t know where it’s coming from. There’s no disclosure, so the folks watching the ad can’t make a judgment based upon motive when you say it’s paid for by so-and-so.”

Mr. Biden clearly meant “million” with an “M,” not “billion” with a “B.”

But his tongue slipped again a moment later. “So it really — I’ve never seen this before, so the only caveat I’d put in terms of the House is how much impact this $200 billion are going to mean.”

Even if the GOP spent $200 billion it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the $800 billion Obama spent on a Porkulus bill that accomplished nothing. At least the GOP ads will generate actual results.

And if he's so worried about accountability, how about making the unions reveal all their donors?  After all, they're the biggest spenders in this election.

Another "Hail Barry" Stimulus

Obama wants to throw another "Hail Barry" stimulus bill at the failing economy:

Vowing to find new ways to stimulate the sputtering economy, President Barack Obama will call for long-term investments in the nation's roads, railways and runways that would cost at least $50 billion.

The infrastructure investments are one part of a package of targeted proposals the White House is expected to announce in hopes of jump-starting the economy ahead of the November election. Obama will outline the infrastructure proposal Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

While the proposal calls for investments over six years, the White House said spending would be front-loaded with an initial $50 billion to help create jobs in the near future.

The goals of the infrastructure plan include: rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads; constructing and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, enough to go coast-to-coast; and rehabilitating or reconstructing 150 miles of airport runways, while also installing a new air navigation system designed to reduce travel times and delays.

Obama will also call for the creation of a permanent infrastructure bank that would focus on funding national and regional infrastructure projects.

Administration officials wouldn't say what the total cost of the infrastructure investments would be, but did say the initial $50 billion represents a significant percentage. Officials said the White House would consider closing a number of special tax breaks for oil and gas companies to pay for the proposal.

If $814 billion wouldn't turn the economy around why would we think $50 billion would make any difference? And who would most of those jobs go to? Labor union members. This is just another giveaway of our tax dollars to the labor unions.

At this point I have my doubts Obama can even get the bill out of Congress.

Political Photo of the Day

From Rush Limbaugh (h/t Don Surber):

Hope. Change.

US Heading Down an Unsustainable Road

Obama's socialist redistribution scheme is having a damaging effect on the economy:

Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.

Hope. Change.

"We Have to Spend Our Way Out of the Recession"

Really? We've already committed nearly $1 trillion dollars - how's that working?

The U.S. government must spend its way out of the recession, the Democrats' third-ranking House leader stressed Monday.

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, said that trying to find greater savings in the budget, which was released by President Barack Obama this morning, wouldn't help alleviate the recession.

"We've got to make some decisions here as to what's in the best interests of our country going forward," Clyburn said during an appearance on Fox News. "And I think the best interest is to invest in education, control these deficits, while at the same time trying to get people back to work."

"We're not going to save our way out of this recession," the majority whip added. "We've got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that."

Actually spending our way out of a recession has largely been discredited both by economists and by the actual results from stimulus bill. When government funds are committed to political paybacks and slush funds, as has happened with the stimulus bill, little if any good is done for the economy since few jobs were actually created. That money has been largely wasted, and since the government had to print it to spend it, the inflationary effects have yet to be seen.

The massive government spending proposed by Clyburn will simply serve to devalue the dollar, spur huge inflation, and send the economy into a complete tailspin. Democrats just don't get it.

Great Moments in Stimulus Spending

I just noticed these items from the area we visited this last weekend:

Call it fire money. In Oakland, $50,000 is going to a nonprofit best known for its fiery performance art.

Call it wine money. In Napa County, $54 million is going to protect the tracks on which a train hauls tourists through vineyards as they sip chardonnay.

Call it Indian money. In Sonoma County, $272,578 is going to provide housing assistance to two tribes that reap millions a year from lucrative gambling casinos, including one in Contra Costa County.

Call it nightclub money. In Berkeley, $499,384 is going for field studies of what kind of booze young people pound down in bars and other hot spots.

And this will increase employment...how??

Nine Big Stories the Mainstream Media Missed (or Ignored)

Fox News has a slideshow of the nine big 2009 news stories the mainstream media missed. The stories include Van Jones, the ACORN tapes, Science Czar John Holdren, ClimateGate, Politicizing the NEA, Chas Freeman, the Tea Party Protest, Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings, and the Democratic Stimulus. All of these stories were bad news for liberals which explains the mainstream media's reluctance to have anything to do with them.

You can review the details of each at the link.

Porkulus Bill One Big Democrat Slush Fund

I've known all along that the Porkulus Bill was never intended to create jobs or stimulate the economy, but was intended as a slush fund to prop up Democrat candidates and special interests. This report seems to confirm that:

A new analysis of the $157 billion distributed by the American Reinvestment and Recovery act, popularly known as the stimulus bill, shows that the funds were distributed without regard for what states were most in need of jobs.

“You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. "But we don't find any correlation."

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia is one of the nation's most respected economic and regulatory think tanks and has a Nobel prize-winning economist on staff. The econometric analysis was done using data provided by Recovery.gov -- the government website devoted to tracking the stimulus data -- as well as a host of other government databases.

Additionally, Mercatus found that stimulus funds were not disbursed geographically with any special regard for low-income Americans. “We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report.

The Mercatus Center analysis also found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the funding of Republican congressional districts. Republican congressional districts received on average $232 million in stimulus funds while Democratic districts received $439 million on average.

“We found that there is a correlation [relating to the partisanship of congressional districts],” de Rugy said. Her regression analysis found that stimulus funds are expected to decrease by 24.19 percent if a district is represented by a Republican.

Obama promised us that if the Porkulus Bill passed unemployment would peak at 8%. It's now over 10%. It's a dramatic failure, and yet just this week another %155 billion in Porkulus funds were authorized by Congress without a single GOP vote.

They must be really worried about the 2010 elections.

Porkulus Bill Paying off Clinton/Obama Cronies

We've known all along that the Porkulus Bill was little more than a slush fund for Democrat special interest groups and activists, so this isn't all that surprising:

Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn, 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.

Federal records also show that a former adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign received nearly $70,000 from that contract to help alert viewers in difficult-to-reach communities that their televisions would soon no longer receive broadcast signals.

The adviser, Alfredo J. Balsera, who heads a public-affairs firm based in Coral Gables, Fla., helped craft Obama’s Hispanic advertising message.

Republicans on Tuesday criticized the federal spending on the advertising project as a waste of taxpayer dollars. They noted that the advertising campaign took place on May 5, only 39 days before the digital television transition was scheduled (June 12)

GOP Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.) held a news conference Tuesday to blast 100 “wasteful” projects funded by the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year, concluding that at least $7 billion of the $217 billion spent through November was wasteful and mismanaged.

Just wait until next year when there's a mid-term election on the line. The Porlulus money will be flying. Remember, only about 14% has actually been spent so far.

Economic Graph of the Day

From the Heritage Foundation:

Harry Reid calls this "progress".

Ten Outrageous Stimulus Claims

From the House GOP (h/t Red State):

The White House will convene a “jobs summit” tomorrow against a backdrop of rising unemployment, soaring debt, and declining public confidence in the Obama Administration’s economic program. Washington Democrats staked their credibility on a nearly trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ that was supposed to be about putting people back to work, but has instead produced countless examples of wasteful government spending while more than three million more Americans have lost their jobs. Even the accounting methods designed to keep track of the ‘stimulus’ have been widely discredited. Given the last 11 months of outrageous ‘stimulus’ claims, the American people are right to wonder whether Washington Democrats can be trusted to create jobs and cut the deficit:

1. CLAIM: “Just 10 days before taking office, Obama’s top economic advisers [Christina Romer & Jared Bernstein] released a report predicting unemployment would remain at eight percent or below through this year if an economic stimulus plan won congressional approval.” (Associated Press, 6/14/09)

FACT: The nation’s unemployment rate now stands at 10.2%. The President and several members of his economic team explicitly stated that the ‘stimulus’ was needed to avert double-digit unemployment.

2. CLAIM: “Q: If the president gets his way and gets this package approved, he signs it into law, how soon before — the American public starts to feel results, the creation of jobs? NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL DIRECTOR LAWRENCE SUMMERS: You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately.” (CNN, 2/9/09)

FACT: The U.S. economy has lost more than three million jobs since the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ became law. One House Democrat this week referred to the ‘stimulus’ as the “jobless American Recovery Act.” A recent survey found that fewer than one in ten Americans believe the ‘stimulus’ has helped create jobs.

3. CLAIM: “More than 90 percent of the jobs created by this plan will be in the private sector.” – President Obama (News conference, 2/9/09)

FACT: “Although President Obama initially said that 90 percent of the jobs created by the stimulus program would be in the private sector, the data suggests that well over half of the jobs claimed so far have been in the public sector.” (The New York Times, 11/4/09)

4. CLAIM: “There will be no earmarks or pet projects in this bill.” – Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Floor statement, 2/13/09)

FACT: The trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ has produced countless examples of wasteful government spending, including repairs to a bridge that reportedly carries about 260 cars per day, many to a place called Rusty’s Backwater Saloon in Wisconsin, and in North Carolina, where ‘stimulus’ funds were reportedly used by one town to hire a new worker whose job is to apply for more ‘stimulus’ funds from Washington.

5. CLAIM: “We must make sure the public understands this is a very fiscally sound package.” – Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Talk Radio News Service, 3/10/09)

FACT: With the help of the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus,’ the Obama Administration spent more in its first 100 days than all previous presidents have combined. The national debt has topped $12 trillion for the first time in U.S. history. The federal government is now operating on a budget that doubles the national debt in five years and triples it in ten.

6. CLAIM: “The second hundred days you’re going to see a lot more jobs created.” – Vice President Joe Biden (ABC’s This Week, 7/5/09)

FACT: The U.S. economy lost roughly 930,000 jobs in June, July, and August. It was during this period that the President proclaimed he could “see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

7. CLAIM: “There is a lot more ammunition left in the stimulus package.” – Jared Bernstein, chief economist to the Vice President (MSNBC, 10/30/09)

FACT: “The government’s economic stimulus spending has already had its biggest impact and probably won’t contribute to significant growth next year, a top White House adviser said Thursday.” (Associated Press, 10/22/09) “An interesting tidbit from Dr. Christina Romer’s testimony before the Joint Economic Committee. Citing economic analysts she says the fiscal stimulus will have its greatest impact on growth in the second and third quarters of 2009. (Editor’s note – those quarters are now behind us).” (ABC News, 10/22/09)

8. CLAIM: “I think we got the Recovery Act right. … It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” – National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers (The Washington Post, 11/8/09)

FACT: The Obama Administration’s attempt to suddenly make job creation seem like a lesser goal of the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ flies in the face of numerous public statements made in the days before the bill was passed, including the President’s statement that creating jobs was his “bottom line number one.”

9. CLAIM: “If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job.” – Department of Health and Human Services spokesman (Associated Press, 11/4/09)

FACT: This is one of several attempts by the Obama Administration to define a job “saved or created” by the ‘stimulus.’ In this particular case, the AP found “more than 9,300 existing employees in more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.” In a newly released report, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office states that “it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.”

10. CLAIM: “We’ve been in business seven, eight months. You haven’t seen wasteful spending. No one has said we spent $2 million on things that didn’t exist.” – Vice President Joe Biden (The Daily Show, 11/17/09)

FACT: “Stimulus jobs reported in non-existent congressional districts. … Of all the problems found in the latest round of stimulus reporting, add another one: congressional districts that don’t exist. ABC News reported yesterday that White House officials have found 700 mistakenly credited congressional districts out of more than 130,000 stimulus grants.” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11/18/09) “The reports on jobs created or saved by the $787 billion economic stimulus package are ‘riddled with inaccuracies and contradictions,’ the federal watchdog overseeing the spending acknowledged Thursday.” (USA TODAY, 11/19/09)

The jobs summit will be a photo op - nothing more.

Pelosi: America Wants Us to Screw Up Again

That's pretty much my read on this story:

Building the case for a brand new jobs-creation bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says most Americans would not mind inflating the already-gaping deficit in exchange for more jobs.

The California Democrat said on a conference call Tuesday that Americans could "absorb" the hit to the federal budget, and she argued that their biggest complaint is not that the deficit is big -- it's that they're not seeing any benefit in return for increasing the U.S. debt load.

Despite the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent in October. While critics cite the jobless rate as a sign that the stimulus has failed, Pelosi argues that the federal government is just not trying hard enough.

"We have to shed any weakness that anybody may have about not wanting to be confrontational on this subject for fear that we'd be labeled not sensitive to the deficit," Pelosi said, in a recording posted by Think Progress.

"The American people have an anger about the growth of the deficit because they're not getting anything for it. ... If somebody has the idea that the percentage of GDP of what our national debt is will go up a bit, but they will now -- and their neighbors and their children -- will have jobs, I think they could absorb that, and then we ride it out and bring money in," she said.

"But I think if anybody is asking the public, 'Would you rather have a job or the percentage of GDP of our national debt would go up a little bit?' I think that everybody wants a job."

House Democrats are not calling the expected jobs proposal a "stimulus," though it would probably include similar measures like infrastructure spending.

Of the $787 billion in "stimulus" funds, something like a measly 15% has actually been spent, with the bulk of the spending coming in 2010 in the form of slush funds for Democrat special interest groups. How about just canceling all of that stuff and if you must spend the money, put it into something that will generate real economic growth, like tax cuts for small businesses.

Jobs Saved or Created in Fictional Congressional Districts

Does anyone in Washington know what they're doing?

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 9th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight congressional districts.

There's no 86th congressional district in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

All smoke and mirrors....

$77,000 Buys 160 Full-time Stimulus Jobs in Massachusetts

That works out to about $481 per full-time job. They work cheap in Massachusetts:

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

The Globe’s finding is based on the federal government’s just-released accounts of stimulus spending at the end of October. It lists the nearly $4 billion in stimulus awards made to an array of Massachusetts government agencies, universities, hospitals, private businesses, and nonprofit organizations, and notes how many jobs each created or saved.

But in interviews with recipients, the Globe found that several openly acknowledged creating far fewer jobs than they have been credited for.

One of the largest reported jobs figures comes from Bridgewater State College, which is listed as using $77,181 in stimulus money for 160 full-time work-study jobs for students. But Bridgewater State spokesman Bryan Baldwin said the college made a mistake and the actual number of new jobs was “almost nothing.’’ Bridgewater has submitted a correction, but it is not yet reflected in the report.

How desperate are some people to keep the gravy train moving and prop up the floundering administration? Desperate enough to just create numbers out of thin air. It's all smoke and mirrors.

Lots of Jobs "Saved" That Were Never in Danger

My daughter attends a California State University school, and is in fact one of their employees since she gets paid by them for tutoring and teaching ear training. Apparently the university system was responsible for a huge number of Obama's "saved" jobs, but further examination shows that those many of those jobs were never in danger:

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.

California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states.

In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.

That total represents more than half of CSU's statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

"This is not really a real number of people," CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. "It's like a budget number."

I think I'll start claiming all of my readers as "jobs created" - the job of reading this blog everyday. It doesn't pay anything...it's sort of a budget number.

10.2%

From the Heritage Foundation:

When President Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus to the American people he promised unemployment would never rise above 7.8% and that by 2010 the U.S. economy would employ 138.6 million jobs.

Today, BLS released its monthly jobs report and the numbers speak for themselves. The economy shed another 190,000 jobs in October, bringing the number of jobs lost since Obama was sworn in to 3.8 million. Worse still, the unemployment rate rose from 9.8% to 10.2% percent. With only 130.8 million jobs in the U.S. economy, President Obama is now 7.8 million jobs short of what he promised the American people. That makes President Obama’s stimulus an objective failure.

Hope. Change. Time for a new plan.

Stimulus Voodoo Math

Is it not yet clear the Democrats think you're stupid?

President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government's job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.

The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data "to determine how and if it will be counted."

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

The latest stimulus report, released Friday, significantly overstates the number of jobs spared with money from programs serving families and children, mostly the Head Start preschool program. The report shows hundreds of the programs used nearly $323 million to provide pay raises and other benefits to their existing employees.

The raises themselves were appropriate — the stimulus law set aside money for Head Start salary increases — but converting that number into jobs proved difficult. The Obama administration told Head Start officials to consider a fraction of each employee as a job saved.

"That's more than ridiculous," said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Many Head Start programs around the country went further, counting everyone who received a raise as a job saved.

It's all smoke and mirrors, folks. Smoke and mirrors.

Shocker: Stimulus Claims Are Full of Baloney

It's not really that much of a shocker:

An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

• A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.

• A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.

• A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.

There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president’s promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

Perhaps if we only had more jobs chasing after radioactive rabbit feces (see post below).

Come to think of it, this whole program has a lot to do with excrement, at least of the bovine kind.

And now, according to Don Surber, the White House is declaring war on the Associated Press for pointing all of this out. They're going to have to add another page to their enemies list.

Stimulus Money Used to Track Radioactive Rabbit Feces

Yeah, I had to read that twice too:

Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.

The Hanford site, overseen by the federal Department of Energy, produced roughly two-thirds of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, beginning in World War II and ending in the 1980s. Today it is the focus of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup, an effort that has cost tens of billions of dollars and is expected to continue for decades.

Yet the helicopter flights, which covered 13.7 square miles and were paid for with $300,000 in federal stimulus money, took place in an area that had never been used by the bomb makers.

The area had, however, been used by rabbits that had also burrowed into other areas that were contaminated. Many of the contaminants were in the form of salts, which attract wildlife. The rabbits carried strontium and cesium, which emit gamma rays, back out of the area in their digestive tracts.

So, how many jobs did that "save or create"?