EPA duped on Energy Star program

One of the EPA's signature programs is Energy Star, which awards tax breaks and other incentives to consumers who purchase low-energy appliances. You've probably seen the small, blue Energy Star label on everything from washing machines to light bulbs. Most recently, the EPA awarded $500,000 to two buildings in Hawaii that replaced more than 20,000 incandescent bulbs.

There's just one really serious problem: The entire program is fraudulent.

The Environmental Protection Agency certified that a “gas-powered clock radio” was an energy-efficient product under the government’s Energy Star program, despite the fact that neither the clock nor its manufacturer ever existed.

The clock and 14 other phony products were part of an investigation into the Energy Star program conducted by the Government Accountability Office, which submitted 20 fraudulent Energy Star applications from four fake companies. The EPA evaluated 16 of those products while the Department of Energy (DOE) evaluated four.

Fifteen of the phony products – including the gas-powered alarm clock – and all four of the fake companies were certified by EPA/DOE under the Energy Star program.

...

One of the phony products, which GAO submitted as an energy-efficient air cleaner, was pictured on a phony Web site as nothing more than a space heater with a feather duster taped to it.

The EPA was so clueless on this one, it almost seems like the GAO was having a little fun. Let's see what absurd thing we can run past them next. The Energy Star program is a pet favorite of the president's, who awarded states $300 million in his stimulus for the purchase of Energy Star appliances. Obama also started a new program called Home Star, a $6 million initiative designed to make homes more green.

This isn't the first time Energy Star has been knocked by independent investigations. An Inspector General report released in 2008 determined that statements made by Energy Star about its effect on reducing greenhouse gases were grossly exaggerated. EPA chief Lisa Jackson has yet to comment on any of this.

Stimulus grants reveal Obama's plans for transportation

More on Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's admission that he wants to coerce people out of their cars. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Partnership for Sustainable Development is the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant. $1.5 billion was allotted in the stimulus for these grants, which are supposed to be awarded "on a competitive basis for capital investments in surface transportation projects that will have a significant impact on the Nation, a metropolitan area or a region."

In reality, the grants were used to pump money into so-called "green" transportation projects, particularly those that emphasized bicycling and public transportation. Within hours of the data being released, the Sierra Club was crowing about how walking and cycling were "big winners" on their website.

We took a closer look at the more than 50 TIGER grants that were awarded by LaHood's Department of Transportation. Of these, three funded projects exclusively focused on cycling and walking, including a $23 million bike path through Philadelphia and southern New Jersey. A further 14 of these grants went to projects that encouraged multiple forms of transportation. Most of these were so-called "multimodal" initiatives, which were usually projects that did some fixing up of existing roads while retrofitting or connecting them with bike paths and rail lines. The DOT says these projects were intended to "encourage transportation options" -- in other words, get people out of their cars and onto a train, bus, or path. Rail service cleaned up under TIGER with 11 new grants. Six more went to ports and five to buses. The remaining 12 were spent on highways and roads.

Some of the funding went to green bugaboos that had little to do with transportation. One $14 million grant went to make Maine's ports more environmentally-friendly. Another $22.3 million went to a business park in Rhode Island that is home to several wind power companies.

Of the TIGER grants, which were supposed to be awarded on the basis of effectiveness, less than a quarter went to road and highway projects. This is despite the fact that 91% of commuters drive to work in their cars. This is the future of transportation according to Obama: railroads, bicycles, and running shoes. LaHood's Department of Transportation has been kicking money to other forms of transportation at the expense of the good old-fashioned American car.

Obama refuses to buy American again

As many Americans lose their homes and put up the house for a second mortgage, Hillary Clinton is spending $5.4 million to buy new crystal stemware for American embassies. But don't expect that money to help boost the American economy.

The contract was given to a tiny Washington, DC, interior designer, which in turn subcontracted the crystal work to a Swedish firm -- snubbing such US companies as the famous manufacturer in Clinton's own back yard, Steuben Crystal of upstate Corning.

The firm didn't even get a chance to bid on the contract, which will outfit embassies and ambassadors' residences with fancy crystal for ritzy functions.

Ironically, under the no-bid contract, some of the crystal is to be custom-crafted to include the seal of the United States, although Swedes will do all of the manufacturing.

This isn't the first time the Obama Administration has refused to buy American with taxpayer money. One of the many "green jobs" programs in the stimulus plan spent $2.1 million funding wind energy and the construction of new windmills. But 80% of the money went to foreign manufacturers and was thus lost to the American economy.

More than two-thirds of stimulus jobs at Department of Education

BigGovernment.com's Veronique de Rugy has a great story up about where the stimulus money was really being spent. According to her analysis of Recovery.gov, which monitors stimulus spending, more than two-thirds of the jobs alledgedly "saved" or "created" were with funds from the Department of Education.

The stimulus, then, was creating lots and lots of new teachers. As de Rugy points out, a third of all union jobs are in the education sector, and 33% of the education sector is unionized. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the two biggest teachers unions in the country, both heartily supported the stimulus bill.

Obama originally advertised that stimulus funds would be creating blue-collar "shovel ready" jobs. So far, most of those jobs have gone to the schoolhouse bureaucracies.

The stimulus is racist!

We already know that the stimulus has been a spectacular failure. Last week's unchanged unemployment numbers clearly showed that. But did you know that the stimulus is also racist??

Hispanic and black businesses are receiving a disproportionately small number of federal stimulus contracts, creating a rising chorus of demands for the Obama administration to be more inclusive and more closely track who receives government-financed work.

Latinos and blacks have faced obstacles to winning government contracts long before the stimulus. They own 6.8 and 5.2 percent of all businesses, respectively, according to census figures. Yet Latino-owned business have received only 1.7 percent of $46 billion in federal stimulus contracts recorded in U.S. government data, and black-owned businesses have received just 1.1 percent.

Racist minority interest groups, like the Latino supremacist La Raza, cleaned up thanks to the stimulus. Meanwhile minority-owned businesses, who actually contribute something to the economy, got the shaft. Black and Hispanic companies are also often located in poorer areas and were hit harder by the recession.

Damn, that stimulus is doing a bang-up job!

So remember that $787 billion stimulus, much of which was thrown away to left-wing groups and imaginary zip codes? You probably do since Obama won't stop harping on how it saved the nation from losing countless jobs. The unemployment numbers for February are out today and the nation is still losing countless jobs.

According to the Department of Labor, the economy shed 36,000 jobs during February and unemployment remains mired at 9.7 percent. Obama promised that, if his stimulus boondoggle was passed, unemployment wouldn't surpass 8 percent. Since then, we've been to 11 percent unemployment and back.

Calculated Risk Blog has a graph showing just how bad our situation is, shown above.

Everything after month 14 on the y-axis of that graph is since the stimulus was passed. During that time, one-third of the stimulus has been spent, with almost no discernible effect. If anything, this recession is more prolonged than anything else in our history. The economy began plunging in December 2007 and has continued sinking for more than two years. The job losses are finally starting to abate, but we're still looking at net losses of jobs.

The only difference is that our government is $787 billion shorter now, thanks to the president's fiscal delusions.

UPDATE: It occurs to us that the unemployment rate is likely much higher since many people have stopped looking for jobs since the recession began. These people aren't counted in the unemployment tally. Some estimates have the real unemployment rate at 20%. Good going, Mr. President.

Finally: The stimulus creates lots of jobs!

Finally, after months of failure, the stimulus finally seems to be bringing down unemployment! Unemployment in other countries, that is.

Naturally, one of the largest programs in the Recovery Act funds renewable energy (progressive-speak for "windmills"). But there's just one problem, according to the Investigative Reporting Workshop:

"[M]ore than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms. Since then, the administration has stopped making announcements of new grants to wind, solar and geothermal companies, but has handed out another $1 billion, bringing the total given out to $2.1 billion and the total that went to companies based overseas to more than 79 percent.

In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company that built a Texas wind farm using turbines made by a Japanese company."

Finally, outsourcing we can believe in. It's gotten so bad that a group of Democrat senators has sent a letter to Department of Treasury demanding that the program be halted until the government starts buying American. The effort is being led by Sen. Chuck Schumer. When even Chuck Schumer is bashing your spending program, you know it's a spectacular failure. Meanwhile the unemployment rate is still almost 10% and the national debt is still skyrocketing. So the stimulus has thus far spent money in imaginary zip codes and foreign countries. It's high time Obama got the program back on track and make sure its aid goes to all 57 states.

Confirmed: Obama's stimulus a massive waste of money

The president has been going around bragging about his stimulus bill again. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office recently announced that the stimulus supposedly saved or created anywhere from 1 million to 2.1 million jobs. Of course, that's an enormous range of difference...and unemployment has skyrocketed since the stimulus passed...and the CBO was the same collection of bean counters who claimed the health care reform bill would somehow save money.

But let's say they're right. Let's pretend the stimulus has created, say, 1.5 million jobs. Roughly one-third of the stimulus money has been spent so far. That means we spent $1,746,000 per job! The median household income in America is only $46,000 per year!

It's difficult to think of ways Obama could have wasted that money more inefficiently. Rather than passing a stimulus bill, why didn't Obama just give every American citizen (around 300 million) $100,000? He could have instantly stimulated the economy and done it for half the price.

Barack Obama gets Serious about cronyism

General Electric isn't the only company profiting from Obama's environmental nuttiness. Here's a conflict of interest so outrageous it will make your head spin.

Cathy Zoi is the Assistant Secretary for Energy. She's a first class green loony who has said the United States needs to "reorient the economy" to produce more green buildings. And if that doesn't work, then there's always "neighborhood-by-neighborhood mobilization that may be like the Peace Corps meets the military where literally SWAT teams go into neighborhoods and they retrofit every single house and every single business on Main Street."

Yes, Obama's assistant secretary of energy has actually called for a Green Gestapo to kick people's doors down. If only that were the worst of it.

Zoi is married to Robin Roy, a top executive at Serious Materials, which manufactures "sustainable green building materials." Zoi and Roy (yeah, really) own 120,000 stock options at Serious. Specifically, Serious Materials is responsible for manufacturing green windows, which are apparently all the rage in the new green economy. Obama is a huge fan of the idea, so much so that he allotted $16.8 billion in the stimulus bill for green programs, including a $1,500 tax credit for any homeowner who installs energy-efficient windows like the ones made by Serious Materials. The bureaucrat overseeing the distribution of that stimulus money? Cathy Zoi.

In fact, it looks like the Obama administration practically created Serious Materials. Prior to Obama's green binge, Serious was just a small manufacturing company in California. But with Zoi whispering in his ear, Obama gave the company front-and-center attention, holding a 22-minute press conference to praise Serious and beginning an address to the nation by mentioning the company. Joe Biden called Serious the "poster child" for a green recovery. Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious, has said that his company is "very close" to both the White House and the Department of Energy. Business for Serious has since exploded.

For more, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota has put together a brilliant video documenting Obama's disgusting cronyism with Serious Materials.

Again, when it comes to Barack Obama, follow the money every time. For anti-capitalists, these left-wing crazies sure like to make a quick buck. Too bad it's with our tax dollars.

Obama: "All the economists in the universe think I've created jobs!"

Barack Obama used to criticize politicians who were inside the "Washington bubble." It looks like he's become trapped inside it himself.

Here's an actual quote from Obama in Nashua, New Hampshire recently: “Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment. But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost. The problem is, 7 million jobs were lost during the course of this recession.”

No, he wasn't kidding. Obama actually said every economist thinks his absurd stimulus boondoggle created two million jobs. This is news to the economists in Obama's own White House who predicted that 650,000 to 1.6 million jobs were created as a result of the stimulus. It's also news to economists Dan Mitchell, J.D. Foster, Peter Schiff, Larry Kudlow, and Jim Cramer. Schiff went so far as to call the stimulus an "unmitigated disaster." Meanwhile 200 other economists took out an advertisement in the New York Times opposing the stimulus.

Ex-ACORN criminal coming to a university near you!

Brown University has long benefited from Barack Obama. He gave a key campaign speech there back in 2006. Brown's researchers received more than $31 million under the stimulus. And Barack Obama's half-brother, Craig Robinson, coaches basketball at Brown.

Radical leftist Obama worship is the norm at the Ivy League Brown. Now the university has announced that they're inviting Wade Rathke, co-founder of the Obama-associated criminal organization ACORN, to give a speech. Rathke is a die-hard left-wing nutcase who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society during college, the radical group that produced the violent Weathermen terrorists. He was ultimately too corrupt even for the slimy community organizers at ACORN and stepped down after it was revealed he helped his brother cover up $5 million he'd embezzled.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has strong ties to both Brown and Obama, was one of the few senators to vote against cutting off taxpayer funds to ACORN.

The top lies in Barack Obama's State of the Union. And the winners are...

Of course the entire speech was a deceptive charade but here are the worst of the whoppers.

LIE: "But we know that our schools don’t just need more resources. They need more reform. ... We’ll invest in innovative programs that are already helping schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. And we will expand our commitment to charter schools."

FACTS: Obama doesn't give a damn about education beyond what the teachers unions want. One of his first acts as president was to destroy the Washington, DC school voucher program. Hundreds of students given the opportunity to succeed on a voucher were thrown back into DC's failing public school system.

LIE: "Because of the steps we took [meaning the stimulus], there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed."

FACTS: Last month, the administration reported that government stimulus had created 650,000 jobs. That number apparently jumped by 1,350,000 in the month of January alone. The truth is no one has any idea how many jobs, if any, have been created by Obama's alleged stimulus. The stimulus' error-filled website, Recovery.org, showed jobs created in congressional districts that didn't exist. At one point it claimed that the purchase of a single lawn mower had created 50 jobs.

LIE: "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections."

FACTS: This lie caused Justice Sam Alito to shake his head in disbelief. The Supreme Court ruling involved whether or not corporations could advertise on TV promoting or attacking a candidate. It had nothing to do with the early 20th-century law, which stopped corporations from donating directly to candidates. That floodgate is still shut, and Obama knows it.

LIE: "That's why -- for the first time in history -- my administration posts our White House visitors online. And that's why we've excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions."

FACTS: It's true that Obama signed an executive limiting -- not banning -- the role of lobbyists in his administration. But he keeps waiving it over and over again for people he likes. Lobbyists or former lobbyists in the Obama administration include Eric Holder, Tom Vilsack, Patrick Gaspard, William Lynn, William Corr, David Hayes, Mark Patterson, Ron Klain, Mona Sutphen, Melody Barnes, Cecilia Munoz, and Michael Strautmanis.

LIE: At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

FACTS: There he goes with the Bush bashing again. That $3 trillion didn't just appear out of nowhere because of "the recession." It was caused by Obama's reckless bills like the spending omnibus and the stimulus. (The stimulus alone cost close to $1 trillion.) When will Obama man up and accept responsibility? This is his recession and his deficit.

LIE: "To close that credibility gap we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give our people the government they deserve."

FACTS: That credibility gap is owned by Obama, who meets in closed-door meetings with union bosses, invites health care lobbyists into the White House, makes back room deals with senators so they'll support ObamaCare, and refuses to allow C-SPAN cameras into the final health care negotiations.

LIE: "Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers."

FACTS: If that were true then businesses would have responded well to the omnibus spending bill, or the stimulus bill, or credit card reforms, or something Obama has done. But Barack Obama's government can't help businesses. It can only get in the way.

TARP was profitable yet Obama's still blaming Bush for "inherited mess"

Barack Obama and his Dem friends have been whining for a year about the economic mess they inherited from the Bush Administration. Note: it's not like they unexpectedly inherited a hog farm from a distant relative -- they went after this job knowing full well what problems it entailed. And remember, the Democratic Congress voted for TARP. And everyone knew it was a global meltdown.

So let's look at the facts.

Consider the money that Bush & Pelosi & Reid and everyone who voted for TARP lent to U.S. banks back in 2008. The current liberal whine is that Bush sold out America by giving them free money. Total BS. When Bush loaned the $350 billion, it was with the stipulation that the executives of major banks couldn't receive bonuses until the money was paid back. And ta-da, over the next year the big banks including Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and many others, paid back their TARP money with interest, creating a $4 billion profit for the government that Obama could blow on pointless spending programs.

As usual, Obama did his best to make the situation worse. True to his tax-and-spend ways, he immediately blew the remaining $350 billion in the TARP fund on a financial industry "stimulus" and a further $757 billion recovery binge. Results to-date: unemployment has surged to over 10%, the economy still lags and non-interventionist countries are already out of recession.

Obama Administration to ramp up its lying about stimulus jobs

The results of Barack Obama's $787 billion pork-filled stimulus package have already been wildly exaggerated, including claims of jobs created in congressional districts that don't even exist. Now the Office of Management and Budget has announced that it's about to get even more deceptive. OMB released a memo claiming they'll no longer report jobs "created" or "saved" by the stimulus, as they did before, but instead jobs funded.

In other words, if the stimulus spent money with the intention of creating a job, even if that job was never created in the first place, the Obama Administration will claim credit for it.

When asked to explain this transparently corrupt decision, an OMB spokesman said, "No one understood what created or saved meant. So we are using a more easy to understand definition." The White House actually believes that Americans, 10% of whom are unemployed, wouldn't understand what it meant to create a job. It's just another example of why you can't believe anything said by anyone in Barack Obama's government.