Hard Times (11/4/09)

Behold the Obama economic groundscrew frenetically running all over the field with the goal posts in hand trying desperately to keep the lipstick on Hogzilla's snout:

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.

Wow.  Good thing I received a 1% raise this year, or according to Godbama I wouldn't have a job anymore.  Other than they one I keep going to every day, anyway.

No, they're not kidding:

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.

A "portion"?  How do you save part of a job?  How does a government-subsidized raise equate to enough hours to qualify as full-time, which is the only way I can fathom how such a so-called metric could possibly be defined?

The closest thing to a responsive Obamunist answer?  They have to MSU to offset "undercounting".

I swear, I wish I were making this up:

Ed DeSeve, who oversees the stimulus at the White House, said the Head Start numbers “represent a few percent of all jobs reported” and said the problems would probably be balanced out by other errors that underreported jobs.

And no, the "saving" of jobs that never existed in the first place isn't isolated to Georgia:

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers. …

The Obama administration last week released the first round of data designed to underpin the worthiness of its economic stimulus plan, which so far has directed $1.25 billion to Illinois schools. That money has helped save or create 14,330 school jobs in the state, the administration claimed.

But those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity, according to a Tribune analysis of district-by-district stimulus spending and other state data. Many local school officials were perplexed by the stimulus data attributed to their districts.

In the official report, Wilmette Public Schools District 39 was credited with 166 jobs saved by stimulus aid. Superintendent Raymond Lechner said the number should be zero.

At Dolton-Riverdale School District 148, stimulus funds were said to have saved the equivalent of 382 full-time teaching jobs — 142 more than the district actually has.

A similar discrepancy was found in data for Kankakee School District 111, where the stimulus report logged the equivalent of 665 full-time jobs saved. “That’s impossible,” a top Kankakee school official said, adding that the entire payroll — full and part time — is 600 workers.

This serial fraud is so blatant that I'm coming to believe, especially in light of Tuesday's election results, that the 112th Congress is going to cut off the funding spigot for Hogzilla as its first order of business by big enough margins to override an Obama veto.  You can count on this nonsense being high on the GOP "JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS" 2010 campaign agenda.

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Sodomarriage bites the dust - for the thirty-first time:

The stars seemed aligned for supporters of gay marriage. They had Maine’s governor, legislative leaders and major newspapers on their side, plus a huge edge in campaign funding. So losing a landmark referendum was a devastating blow, for activists in Maine and nationwide.

In an election that had been billed for weeks as too close to call, Maine’s often unpredictable voters repealed a state law Tuesday that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed. Gay marriage has now lost in all 31 states in which it has been put to a popular vote — a trend that the gay-rights movement had believed it could end in Maine.

“Today’s heartbreaking defeat unfortunately shows that lies and fear can still win at the ballot box,” said Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

With 87 percent of the precincts reporting, gay-marriage foes had 53% of the vote. They prevailed in many of Maine’s far-flung small towns and lost by a less-than-expected margin in the state’s biggest city, Portland.

“The institution of marriage has been preserved in Maine and across the nation,” declared Frank Schubert, chief organizer for the winning side.

Why did the lavender lobby lose yet again?  I'll tell you why: They will not give up their "cause"'s biggest in-your-face liability - insisting upon using the word "marriage" and thereby DEMANDING that society acknowledge the moral equivalence of sodomarriage to REAL marriage.

How do they get around that stubborn obstacle?  By being, um, less stubborn about it:

As far as protecting the “institution of marriage,” though, the states gave up on that decades ago with no-fault divorce.  Marriage is the only contract that one partner can abrogate without penalty.  People would be better protected by partnership contracts, where property and child access would be decided and agreed long before problems appeared in the relationship, and leave marriage to the churches, which are much better suited to protect the institution.

That is, in essence, what the Washington Legislature did this year when it passed what became dubbed the "Everything But Marriage" Act.  It established LEGAL equivalence between traditional marriage and sodomarriage - essentially, everything that the Maine referendum and Prop 8 and every other failed overt queer subversion of marriage around the country has sought to do - with the lone difference that it does not use the term "marriage".

It was put before Evergreen State voters as well - and approved by the same margin by which the sodomarriage measure was defeated in Maine.  Which simply reflects, particularly in deep "blue" states, that (regrettably) most of the public is libertarianly fine with "civil unions" and other "sodomarriage-in-everything-but-name" dodges, as long as the full reality of what these statutes actually mean does not, like the proverbial elephant in the birdcage, have to be overtly acknowledged.

Homosexuals can have everything of substance that they want from mainstream society at the lone cost of the pagan symbolism they crave.  Seems like letting go of that one little word would be worth the vast return if "civil rights" is truly all with which they are concerned.

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Look who gave the "not a news organization" network a full eleven minute interview to try and dolefully spin Tuesday's electoral disaster.  Then look at how THE Obama-approved news outlet ran a rerun of Olbermann's spittle-spewing hatemongering in lieu of ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE.

I remember well David Brinkley snapping his pencil in half and storming off the ABC set on Election Night 1994.  But at least he was still doing his job (sort of).  I guess the ObamaHouse party line is that if MSNBC doesn't cover something - like a huge GOP sweep - it never happened.  Which suggests that Olby's dad is going to have quite a few hospital stays over the next three years.