This the bill that had to be passed before anyone could read it. Americans wee duped.

Federal Stimulus Dirty Dozen

It’s a “dirty dozen” of stimulus projects — efforts so wacky and wasteful they call into question the sanity of last year’s $787 billion federal stimulus effort. In all, this “dirty dozen” account for a whopping $23,084,512 in taxpayer money — and create a total of, at most, 71 jobs, according to grant applications. That's $325,133.97 per job. Newsmax has taken a close look at a 12 stimulus schemes that leave us scratching our heads, and asking, “What were they thinking?”

It’s a long way from Alaska to Texas, but not so far that TKC Global Solutions LLC of Anchorage couldn’t win a stimulus grant of $7,783,648 to provide 11,208 personal computers and monitors to the U.S. Labor Department’s Job Corps vocational training unit in the Lone Star State. With an order that size, the government should have gotten a better deal from any computer company than the $700 per PC It is paying
Total jobs created: Zero

Hormel’s Jennie-O Turkey Store in Willmar, Minn., scored $7,144,000 for “production and delivery of small cooked deli breasts.” The turkey breasts are part of a larger $100 million package of grants for canned fruit, canned pork, and sliced ham to stock food pantries nationwide, presumably for the needy and jobless folks who didn’t get hired despite the flood of federal stimulus funds. Initially, Jennie-O said the project would create or save 384 jobs. However, those employees worked for just one week to fill the orders.
Actual permanent jobs created: Zero

The Trustees of Boston University got $499,636 in taxpayer dollars to “test the hypothesis that meditation reduces stress-related inflammatory responses via reduction in autonomic activation in the face of perceived psychosocial stress.” The project hopes to measure changes in body temperature during meditation practices such as yoga.
New jobs: Zero

Perhaps worried that students are getting a little too husky, the University of Connecticut got a $239,241 grant for “a pilot study that will seek to decrease alcohol use by engaging sedentary, hazardous-drinking college students in an exercise program.” This presumably does not include playing quarters or beer pong. But the tax-funded effort to get college students off of their widening, booze-soaked butts doesn’t win a lot of points with critics.
No permanent jobs created.

If ever there were a perfect metaphor for stimulus grants, it’s the $1,075,873 sent to Vanderbilt University to study supermassive black holes. Tax-funded research will delve into how these black holes merge, grow, and react to galactic influences. As an aside, the grant calls for the school to “execute a comprehensive plan that will address the underrepresentation of women and minorities in astrophysics.”
Jobs created: Zero

This is enough to cause aches and chills. A grant of $882,991 went to Harrison Maldonado Associates Inc. of Washington, D.C., “to conduct a project to convince Hispanics to get immunized against the flu.” To do this, the company assembled focus groups to discuss “an approach for creating Spanish-language health marketing materials.”
One job saved: That of Yvonne Garcia, the project director.

Deployment Essentials LLC of Land O Lakes, Fla., got tuned in to a $1,473,000 grant through the Federal Communications Commission to help folks in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas install DTV converter boxes. So far, the service has helped hook up 5,113 tech-challenged customers; another 1,023 people were referred to the DTV help line.
Jobs created: 67 temporary positions

Why did the turtle cross the road? Probably to get a piece of the $3,402,062 stimulus fund action awarded to the Florida Department of Transportation to build fences and tunnels around and under State Road 63. The purpose of the project is to allow the safe passage of wildlife — chiefly the slow, shelled, reptilian kind — and cut down on roadkill.
One new job.

It seems like a simple enough message: If you’re a drug user wear a condom. But the folks at the University of Washington think the Real Men Are Safe project, which stresses that message, only appeals to white men. So they’ll be using $448,112 in public funds to make the program “more culturally relevant” to black and Hispanic men. To accomplish this, they will convene a panel “of academic and community based-experts knowledgeable in HIV prevention in African-American and Hispanic communities” to revise materials to be more minority friendly.
No jobs created.

The National Science Foundation coughed up $447,492 to the University of North Carolina for an Ebonics study that will follow 70 low-income black students to witness “development of African-American English.” The goal is to see if speaking proper English makes for better, more literate students. The going hypothesis is that those “bilingual” kids who can switch seamlessly between Alex P. Keaton and Flavor Flav will “demonstrate higher levels of reading achievement.” Word.
Jobs saved: one

The National Science Foundation actually bores into taxpayers’ wallets several times, including this $454,632 boondoggle to study “a sediment core recovered by a major drilling project on Lake Malawi in 2005, to determine how temperature and rainfall has varied in tropical East Africa over the past 150,000 years.”
It will create one job.

Call it change they can believe in The University of California is using $233,825 in stimulus finds to study “vote choice in sub-Saharan Africa through extensive analysis of exit poll data.” The project promises, “these efforts will result in a robust understanding of how Africans vote, which will in turn allow for a better targeting of our external aid funds aimed at promoting democracy on the continent.”
It creates no jobs.