June 16, 2009
The Stimulus: Spending money where we can!

Posted at 8:18 am, in: Earmarks, Stimulus
Tags: Brendan Daly, FutureGen, Nancy Pelosi

Barack Obama’s pet project receives funding from stimulus bill:

It became a sort of poster child for fiscal responsibility — a clean-coal power plant in Illinois that was one of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s pet projects.

Democrats insisted they were so serious about keeping pork out of the stimulus bill that it was President Obama himself who blocked the FutureGen project from the massive spending package.

“It shows that we’re serious about it,” Brendan Daly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, said at the time. “The speaker said it, and the president said it: There will not be earmarks in this bill.”

Earmarks? Perhaps not. But funding for FutureGen? Absolutely, to the tune of $1 billion.

The Department of Energy on Friday announced that the FutureGen project is on track after all, committing federal stimulus money to advance the project to its next stage. One reason: It was the only shovel-ready project that fits the requirements of the stimulus bill.

I hope America is paying attention. When projects that shouldn’t be receiving funding are all of a sudden receiving funding because they were the only one’s “shovel-ready” the politicians are so blatantly wasting our money it would be laughable if it weren’t so scary. That’s like your wife coming home and saying she bought that $1000 pair of shoes because they were the only pair they had in her size.

Remember when Obama said that there would be no earmarks in the stimulus bill? Those were the days, weren’t they? I forgot, though. This isn’t pork, according to the Dems. Like I said, it just happened to be the only project that was “shovel-ready.”