Category Archives: EPA Environmental Protection Agency

Civil Society Collapses with no Diesel Fuel

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The Biden Green agenda will soon destroy the nation, there is no dispute. Having a war on fossil fuel is one thing but being so derelict when it comes to diesel is destructive beyond description. It is also evil and deadly to citizens, business and national security.

In 2021, the Biden White House published a trucking fact sheet endorsing the trucking industry. But it omits the real issues facing the industry and that includes regulations and the ridiculous high cost of diesel.

There was to be some kind of a listening session. In part: DOL and DOT will kick off listening sessions with drivers, industry and labor leaders, and advocates to hear their perspectives, profile promising practices, and source scalable solutions to retention and job quality issues for truckers. The first events in this series are happening today in South Carolina with Secretary Buttigieg, Deputy Administrator Joshi, and representatives from DOL and at the White House co-chaired by Secretary Buttigieg, Secretary Walsh, and National Economic Council Director Deese.

Now, facing November with the midterm elections and the coming holidays….the White House is flat-footed on the diesel crisis.

The Biden administration says it is keeping a close watch on diesel inventories and working to boost supplies following news that reserves have been depleted and could run out in less than a month if not replenished, sparking fears of shortages and rising prices.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported this week that, as of Oct. 14, the U.S. had only 25 days of reserve diesel supply, a low not seen since 2008. National Economic Council Director Brian Deese acknowledged to Bloomberg that the level is “unacceptably low,” and “all options are on the table” to address the situation.
The EIA also said that distillate fuel includes heating oil inventories and is about 20% below the five-year average for this time of year. But areas in the Northeast are already rationing heating oil as temperatures drop, driving concerns that energy costs will surge further. source

Diesel fuel is used for many tasks

Diesel engines in trucks, trains, boats, and barges help transport nearly all products people consume. Diesel fuel is commonly used in public buses and school buses.

Diesel fuel powers most of the farm and construction equipment in the United States. The construction industry also depends on the power diesel fuel provides. Diesel engines can do demanding construction work, such as lifting steel beams, digging foundations and trenches, drilling wells, paving roads, and moving soil safely and efficiently.

The U.S. military uses diesel fuel in tanks and trucks because diesel fuel is less flammable and less explosive than other fuels. Diesel engines are also less likely to stall than gasoline-fueled engines.

Diesel fuel is also used in diesel engine generators to generate electricity. Many industrial facilities, large buildings, institutional facilities, hospitals, and electric utilities have diesel generators for backup and emergency power supply. Most remote villages in Alaska use diesel generators as the primary source of electricity. source

The US economy cannot run and sustain itself without the essential work of truck drivers. Their deliveries affect every industry we depend on like food, construction, medicine, fuel, and retail. Apart from day-to-day needs, truck drivers ensure first responders and healthcare workers have the tools they need to save lives. more here

Introducing Air-scrubbing Machines of Carbon Dioxide

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NEW YORK (AP) — On a field ringed by rolling green hills in Iceland, fans attached to metal structures that look like an industrial-sized Lego project are spinning. Their mission is to scrub the atmosphere by sucking carbon dioxide from the air and storing it safely underground.

Just a few years ago, this technology, known as “direct air capture,” was seen by many as an unrealistic fantasy. But the technology has evolved to where people consider it a serious tool in fighting climate change.

Orca - World's Biggest Carbon Capturing Machine Has Been ...

The Iceland plant, called Orca, is the largest such facility in the world, capturing about 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. But compared to what the planet needs, the amount is tiny. Experts say 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be removed annually by mid-century.

“Effectively, in 30 years’ time, we need a worldwide enterprise that is twice as big as the oil and gas industry, and that works in reverse,” said Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

RELATED READING: THE BENEFITS OF CARBON DIOXIDE

Leading scientific agencies including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that even if the world manages to stop producing harmful emissions, that still won’t be enough to avert a climate catastrophe. They say we need to suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and put it back underground — yielding what some call “negative emissions.”

“We have already failed on climate to the extent to which direct air capture is one of the many things we must do,” Friedmann said. “We have already emitted so many greenhouse gases at such an incredible volume and rate that CO2 removal at enormous scales is required, as well as reduction of emissions.”

As dire warnings have accelerated, technology to vacuum carbon dioxide from the air has advanced. Currently, a handful of companies operate such plants on a commercial scale, including Climeworks, which built the Orca plant in Iceland, and Carbon Engineering, which built a different type of direct air capture plant in British Columbia. And now that the technology has been proven, both companies have ambitions for major expansion. source

 

DIRECT AIR CAPTURE AT WORK

At Climeworks’ Orca plant near Reykjavik, fans suck air into big, black collection boxes where the carbon dioxide accumulates on a filter. Then it’s heated with geothermal energy and is combined with water and pumped deep underground into basalt rock formations. Within a few years, Climeworks says, the carbon dioxide turns into stone.

It takes energy to build and run Climeworks’ plants. Throughout the life cycle of the Orca plant, including construction, 10 tons of carbon dioxide are emitted for every 100 tons of carbon dioxide removed from the air. Carbon Engineering’s plants can run on renewable energy or natural gas, and when natural gas is used, the carbon dioxide generated during combustion is captured.

Carbon dioxide can also be injected into geological reservoirs such as depleted oil and gas fields. Carbon Engineering is taking that approach in partnership with Occidental Petroleum to build what’s expected to be the world’s largest direct air capture facility in the Southwest’s Permian Basin — the most productive U.S. oil field.

Direct air capture plants globally are removing about 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually, according to the International Energy Agency.

Climeworks built its first direct air capture plant in 2017 in Hinwil, Switzerland, which captured 900 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually that was sold to companies for use in fizzy beverages and fertilizer. The company built another plant, called Artic Fox, in Iceland that same year; it captured up to 50 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually that was injected underground.

“Today we are on a level that we can say it’s on an industrial scale, but it’s not on a level where we need to be to make a difference in stopping climate change,” said Daniel Egger, chief commercial officer at Climeworks.

BIG PLANS, CHALLENGES

Their plans call for scaling up to remove several million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030. And Eggers said that would mean increasing capacity by a factor of 10 almost every three years.

It’s a lofty, and expensive, goal.

Estimates vary, but it currently costs about $500 to $600 per ton to remove carbon dioxide using direct air capture, said Colin McCormick, chief innovation officer at Carbon Direct, which invests in carbon removal projects and advises businesses on buying such services.

As with any new technology, costs can decrease over time. Within the next decade, experts say, the cost of direct air capture could fall to about $200 per ton or lower.

For years, companies bought carbon offsets by doing things like investing in reforestation projects. But recent studies have shown many offsets don’t deliver the promised environmental benefits. So McCormick said companies are looking for more verifiable carbon removal services and are investing in direct air capture, considered the “gold standard.”

“This is really exploding. We really didn’t see hardly any of this until a couple of years ago,” he said, referring to companies investing in the technology. “Two years ago Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify were really the leaders on this who first went out and said, ‘We want to procure carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.’”

Companies are setting targets of net zero carbon emissions for their operations but can only reduce emissions so far. That’s where purchasing carbon removal services such as direct air capture comes in.

Individuals can buy atmosphere-scrubbing services too: Climeworks offers subscriptions starting at $8 a month to people who want to offset emissions.

In the U.S., direct air capture facilities can get a tax credit of $50 a ton, but there are efforts in Congress to increase that to up to $180 a ton, which if passed, could stimulate development.

The Department of Energy announced Friday a goal to reduce the cost of carbon removal and storage to $100 per metric ton, saying it would collaborate with communities, industry and academia to spur technological innovation.

Oil companies such as Occidental and Exxon have been practicing a different form of carbon capture for decades. For the most part, they are taking carbon dioxide emissions from production facilities and injecting it underground to shake loose more oil and gas from between rocks.

Some question the environmental benefits of using captured CO2 to produce more fossil fuels that are eventually burned, producing greenhouse gases. But Occidental says part of the goal is to make products such as aviation fuel with a smaller carbon footprint — since while producing the fuel, they’re also removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground.

Capturing carbon dioxide from oil and gas operations or industrial facilities such as steel plants or coal-burning power plants is technically easier and less costly than drawing it from the air, because plant emissions have much more highly concentrated CO2.

Still, most companies are not capturing carbon dioxide that leaves their facilities.

Worldwide, industrial facilities capturing carbon dioxide from their operations had a combined capacity to capture 40 million tons annually, triple the amount in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency.

But that’s less than 1% of the total emissions that could be captured from industrial facilities globally, said Sean McCoy, assistant professor in the department of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary.

If governments created policies to penalize carbon dioxide emissions, that would drive more carbon removal projects and push companies to switch to lower-carbon fuels, McCoy said.

“Direct air capture is something you get people to pay for because they want it,” he said. “Nobody who operates a power plant wants (carbon capture and storage). You’re going to have to hit them with sticks.”

___

Associated Press reporter Jamey Keaten contributed from Geneva.

But What is NOT in Fauci’s Emails?

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That is the question(s)…

While many are calling for the resignation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, I say hold on. Why? Often, in fact most often, former government employees rarely are investigated, charged or prosecuted. I say just suspend him without pay until a full commission is launched.

There are all kinds of people reading through all the released Fauci emails and rightly so. While reading through many articles and posts relating to the emails where so appear to be smoking guns…we must consider what is not in the emails.

As Joe Biden has ordered the intelligence agencies to go through a full review and report back, a long application of strategic thinking is also in order. The reader is invited to ask their own questions in the comments section of this post.

For some context and courtesy of Bloomberg News in part:

No matter where the inquiry leads, the history of lab safety shows, at the very least, that leaks of pathogens have happened in the past — sometimes with deadly consequences. It also shows that even transparent, thorough investigations into the origins of an outbreak can end in uncertainty.

By the late 1970s, smallpox had been eradicated in nature, but work on it continued in a handful of labs around the world, including a facility in Birmingham, England, which had access to a particularly virulent strain. In the summer of 1978, a medical photographer working there named Janet Parker fell ill. When pustules spread across her upper body, a local doctor diagnosed it as a bad case of chickenpox.

It was the third leak of smallpox that decade from a British lab. The British government moved aggressively to contain the outbreak, quarantining hundreds of people and vaccinating many more. Thanks to their efforts, only one other person — Parker’s mother — developed the disease. But Parker died an excruciating, lonely death in an isolation ward — the last known victim of smallpox.

But there were other victims. At the time, the newspapers covering the episode fixated on the director of the laboratory, an expert on pox viruses named Henry Bedson. Despite an absence of evidence, the press blamed him for the outbreak. Quarantined at home and despondent, Bedson went out to his garden shed and slit his own throat; he died soon afterward.

The British government commissioned a thorough investigation into the outbreak. It turned up evidence that Bedson may not have observed sufficient safety protocols and speculated that Parker must have somehow contracted smallpox through contamination in the air ducts. Later, a lawsuit effectively refuted this explanation, leading to the unsettling possibility that Parker herself may have entered one of the work spaces without proper protection. The debate continues to this day.

When lab leaks take place in a secretive society, the difficult job of confirming the source of an outbreak gets much harder. A good case in point was the infamous anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, an isolated city in the Soviet Union.

In 1979, rumors of anthrax killing dozens — or even thousands — began trickling out to the West. Later that year, Soviet journals confirmed some of these reports, noting that upward of a hundred people had contracted anthrax after ingesting contaminated meat; over 60 had died. A tragedy, yes, but perhaps inevitable: Anthrax was endemic in local animal populations.

Intelligence officials in the U.S. weren’t convinced. Satellite imagery showed what looked like decontamination trucks around the city, with considerable activity focused on a mysterious military facility known as Compound 19. CIA analysts hypothesized that the Soviets had mistakenly released a weaponized form of anthrax. More here.

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Remember, Dr. Fauci has the Director of the NIAID since 1984. He not only knows the history of super bugs and pandemics but he also has access to the files and documentation of global laboratories and scientists.

Can we quit saying ‘lab leaks’, which infers an accident? Perhaps ‘released’ should replace ‘leak’. Anyway, moving on.

Exactly why was the CIA not called in by Fauci or the suggestion of that in 2019 or earlier like around the time of the warning cables that were sent by U.S. Embassy officials back to the State Department in 2018?

How come Dr. Fauci’s emails did not include communication exchanges with other countries that provided big financial aid to the Wuhan Lab like France and Canada?

As the Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to release uncensored internal documents, a Conservative MP says he wants to know how far Canada’s collaboration with China on Level-4 pathogens went — and why two federal scientists were let go by the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg in January.

“We need these documents. We need to know what the Government of Canada was doing through the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg with respect to cooperating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China,” Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong said during a special parliamentary committee hearing on Canada-China relations Monday night.

The special committee has demanded to know why two federal government scientists were escorted out of Canada’s only Level 4 Lab in July 2019, just four months after one of them shipped samples of the Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — stories first published by CBC News.

Two months after that shipment, on May 24, 2019, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) referred an “administrative matter” to RCMP that resulted in the removal of two Chinese research scientists — Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng — and several international students on July 5.

No where in the Fauci emails is the request for the medical files of ‘patient zero’ or of any Chinese scientists that fell ill or died. Why?

Did Dr. Fauci reach out to the Galveston National Laboratory which is part of the University of Texas for any pandemic details? Not so much, why?

Galveston bio lab explains connections to Wuhan | Local ...

How come Dr. Fauci only had Dr. Deborah Birx as an addition to the White House Virus Task Force and other virology experts were not called on like other world health leaders?

How about any references to expert white papers that Dr. Fauci made? He only said data…what data?

There are hundreds of questions and standing up a full commission is past due. Meanwhile, suspect the doctor and start the real interviews and subpoenas. There are likely hundreds if not thousands more across the world that know more with evidence….Dr. Fauci makes no email inquiries and the same goes for the intelligence agencies, unless they have and that is being embargoed too.

Joe Will Force the U.S. into The Great Reset, Beware

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We will be forced to change our behavior and every day common things around us that we rely on will fade away. Biden will put the United States back into the Paris Accord….but read on…

Read the website.

For decades, progressives have attempted to use climate change to justify liberal policy changes. But their latest attempt – a new proposal called the “Great Reset” – is the most ambitious and radical plan the world has seen in more than a generation.

At a virtual meeting earlier in June hosted by the World Economic Forum, some of the planet’s most powerful business leaders, government officials and activists announced a proposal to “reset” the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, the high-profile group said the world should adopt more socialistic policies, such as wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive Green New Deal-like government programs.

“Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article published on WEF’s website. “In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Schwab also said that “all aspects of our societies and economies” must be “revamped,” “from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

Joining Schwab at the WEF event was Prince Charles, one of the primary proponents of the Great Reset; Gina Gopinath, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; and CEOs and presidents of major international corporations, such as Microsoft and BP.

Activists from groups such as Greenpeace International and a variety of academics also attended the event or have expressed their support for the Great Reset.

Although many details about the Great Reset won’t be rolled out until the World Economic Forum meets in Davos in January 2021, the general principles of the plan are clear: The world needs massive new government programs and far-reaching policies comparable to those offered by American socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in their Green New Deal plan.

Or, put another way, we need a form of socialism — a word the World Economic Forum has deliberately avoided using, all while calling for countless socialist and progressive plans.

“We need to design policies to align with investment in people and the environment,” said the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow. “But above all, the longer-term perspective is about rebalancing economies.”

One of the main themes of the June meeting was that the coronavirus pandemic has created an important “opportunity” for many of the World Economic Forum’s members to enact their radical transformation of capitalism, which they acknowledged would likely not have been made possible without the pandemic.

“We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis — its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,” said Prince Charles at the meeting, adding later, “It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.”

You might be wondering how these leaders plan to convince the world to completely alter its economy over the long run, since the COVID-19 pandemic most assuredly won’t remain a crisis forever. The answer is that they’ve already identified another “crisis” that will require expansive government intervention: Climate change.

“The threat of climate change has been more gradual [than COVID-19]—but its devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its ever greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of Covid-19,” Prince Charles said.

Of course, these government officials, activists and influencers can’t impose a systemic change of this size on their own. Which is why they have already started to activate vast networks of left-wing activists from around the world, who will throughout 2021 demand changes in line with the Great Reset.

According to the World Economic Forum, its 2021 Davos summit will include thousands of members of the Global Shapers Community, youth activists located in 400 cities across the planet.

The Global Shapers program was involved in the widespread “climate strikes” of 2019, and more than 1,300 have already been trained by the Climate Reality Project, the highly influential, well-funded climate activist organization run by former Vice President Al Gore, who serves on the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees.

For those of us who support free markets, the Great Reset is nothing short of terrifying. Our current crony capitalist system has many flaws, to be sure, but granting more power to the government agents who created that crony system and eroding property rights is not the best way forward. America is the world’s most powerful, prosperous nation precisely because of the very market principles the Great Reset supporters loathe, not in spite of them.

Making matters worse, the left has already proven throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that it can radically transform political realities in the midst of a crisis, so it’s not hard to see how the Great Reset could eventually come to fruition.

2009, A Refresher Course on Sheriff Joe Biden and the Stimulus Fraud

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February 23, 2009

President Barack Obama announced Vice President Joe Biden will oversee the Administration’s implementation of the Recovery Act’s provisions and the appointment of Earl Devaney as Chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board in a meeting with the Nation’s Governors this morning. The Vice President will meet regularly with key members of the Cabinet, Governors and Mayors to make sure their efforts are speedy and effective. He will also make regular, public reports to the President on implementation and those will be posted on Recovery.gov. The Chair of the Transparency and Accountability Board Earl Devaney will report to the Vice President.
“Beginning this week, Vice President Biden will meet regularly with key members of my cabinet to make sure our efforts are not just swift, but efficient and effective. He’ll also work closely with our nation’s Governors, and our Mayors, and everyone else involved in this effort, to keep things on track. The fact that I am asking the Vice President to personally lead this effort shows how important it is for our country and our future to get this right, and I thank him for his willingness to take on this critical task,” President Obama told a group of Governors this morning. “I am also proud to announce the appointment of Earl Devaney as Chair of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. For nearly a decade as Inspector General at the Interior Department, Earl has doggedly pursued waste, fraud and mismanagement, and Joe and I can’t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people have entrusted us to wisely invest.”
$800 BILLION
Missing in Action: Stimulus Sheriff Joe Biden
***
Then in 2011 as reported:
The Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus package will cost $43 billion more than estimated. The stimulus package is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. As Michelle Malkin notes:

Last week, the Treasury Department inspector general found that the tax police have failed to prevent fraud in the stimulus law’s energy tax credit program. Some $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners have been claimed — but the inspector general’s audit found that 30 percent of credit-claimers had no record of homeownership. The recipients included prisoners and minors. “I am troubled by the IRS’s continued failure to develop appropriate verification methods for distributing Recovery Act credits,” the Treasury Inspector watchdog said.  Moreover, when the IRS wasn’t falling down on its job policing outside fraud, its own workers were committing their own stimulus fraud — by cheating the system and claiming a first-time homebuyer tax credit included in the 2008 and 2009 economic stimulus packages. At least 128 IRS employees claimed the credit, according to a recent Treasury Department audit, yet weren’t first-time buyers or violated other basic eligibility criteria.

Moreover, the stimulus package has also “redistributed wealth to prison inmates, flaky researchers, social justice boondoggles, infrastructure to nowhere, foreign companies, dead people and ghost congressional districts — not to mention $20 million in chump change to pay for campaign-style stimulus-hyping road signs across the country emblazoned with the shovel-ready logo.” Only a small fraction of the stimulus package went to infrastructure spending, and maintenance-of-effort provisions elsewhere in the stimulus package required states to maintain or increase welfare spending, resulting in cash-strapped states cutting back their own spending on useful things like transportation. As a result, Investor’s Business Daily noted, economists “found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.” The $800 billion stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women. “A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Two economics professors recently estimated that the stimulus had actually wiped out 550,000 jobs. The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. This claim was as dishonest as his claim that he would enact a “net spending cut” (which he flouted as soon as he took office) and that America would undergo an “irreversible decline” if the stimulus package wasn’t enacted (when even the CBO admitted that the stimulus will actually shrink the economy over the long run).

***
Then in 2012:

According to Investor’s Business Daily this week, a new analysis by Ohio State University economics professor Bill Dupor reported that “(m)ore than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by President Obama’s economic stimulus in the first year were in government.”

Dupor and another colleague had earlier concluded that the porkulus was a predictable jobs-killer that crowded out non-government jobs with make-work public jobs and programs. Indeed, the massive wealth redistribution scheme “destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs” by siphoning tax dollars “to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.”

Will this Keynesian wreckage come up during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate? It should be a centerpiece of domestic policy discussion. Nowhere is the gulf between Obama/Biden rhetoric and reality on jobs wider.

Remember: Obama’s Ivy League eggheads behind the stimulus promised that “(m)ore than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector.” These are the same feckless economic advisers who infamously vowed that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent — and that unemployment would drop below 6 percent sometime this year.

Sheriff Joe rebuked the “naysayers” who decried the behemoth stimulus program’s waste, fraud and abuse. “You know what? They were wrong,” he crowed.

But Biden was radio silent about the nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients who received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes. (Cash for Tax Cheats, anyone?)

He had nothing to say about the $6 billion in stimulus energy credits for homeowners that went to nearly a third of credit-claimers who had no record of homeownership, including minors and prisoners.

And the $530 million dumped into the profligate Detroit public schools for laptops and other computer equipment that have had little, if any, measurable academic benefits.

And the whopping $6.7 million cost per job under the $50 billion stimulus-funded green energy loan program — which funded politically connected but now bankrupt solar firms Solyndra ($535 million), Abound Solar ($400 million), Beacon Power ($43 million), A123 ($250 million) and Ener1 ($119 million). (The con game of just Solyndra for extra credit reading)

And the $1 million in stimulus cash that went to Big Bird and Sesame Street “to promote healthy eating,” which created a theoretical “1.47” jobs. (As Sean Higgins of The Examiner noted, “(T)hat comes out to about $726,000 per job created.”)

And the hundreds of millions in stimulus money steered to General Services Administrations junkets in Las Vegas and Hawaii, ghost congressional districts, dead people, infrastructure to nowhere and ubiquitous stimulus propaganda road signs stamped with the shovel-ready logo.

Of course, there’s no example of unfettered stimulus squandering more fitting than the one named after Keystone Fiscal Kop Joe Biden himself. Government-funded Amtrak’s Wilmington, Del., station raked in $20 million in “recovery” money after heavy personal lobbying by the state’s most prominent customer and cheerleader. In return, the station (which came in $6 million over budget, according to The Washington Times) renamed its facility after Biden.

Bloated costs. Crony political narcissism. Glaring conflicts of interest. Monumental waste. This is the Obama/Biden stimulus legacy bequeathed to our children and their grandchildren. Sheriff Joe and his plundering boss need to be run out of town on a rail. More here.