Something…somethings gotta be worth more to the public interest than a hodgepodge of pet projects.

ernesto on January 31, 2009 at 6:24 PM

Alternate energy would be a biggy. Isnt it time some of the futuristic ideas finally come out? This is afterall the future from say 70 years ago. Our cars and homes would be able to run cheaply thus allowing us some money to maybe do our own stimulus. Its still expensive to run our homes and our fuel prices are slowly going back up if you haven’t noticed. Almost like its scripted that way actually.

Story #1: Heritage Finds Climate Change Garbage in Porkulus

RUSH: My friends, my other friends at the Heritage Foundation had found something else in the Porkulus bill. Listen to this. This is from http://www.Heritage.org: “President Barack Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus plan,” the Porkulus plan, “has morphed into an appropriations bill devoid of debate. The process forgoes any pretense of targeting unemployed people and resources. For instance, the [Porkulus] bill reads ‘Provided further, that not less than $140,000,000 shall be available for climate data modeling.’ This raises the question of how many unemployed climate modelers are out there pounding the pavement. When presented with that question, last Friday, Pat Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists stated ‘I don’t know one unemployed modeler.’

Representing numbers as areas understates there actual difference. Other then that… nice chart.

Micheal on January 30, 2009 at 8:22 PM

Well said, Michael. This was my point in my earlier post (second from the top). The graphics appeared as spheres to me.

I once had a college course called “How to lie with statistics” (or something like that). Of all the sh!t I learned in college, that has been probably the most useful in my marketing career!

Can we buy Canada?

Better idea…let’s sell them California.

People tend to think in 1 dimension. A simple bar chart would have better driven home that “WOAH! This bill is twice the cost of the Iraq War!” because the bar would be twice as long.

In this case the diameter of the circles changed only by a factor of the square root of two. (~1.41)

Representing numbers as areas understates there actual difference. Other then that… nice chart.

How much did WWII cost?

bilups on January 30, 2009 at 4:19 PM

In inflation-adjusted dollars, somewhere around $3.6 billion. I don’t know whether that includes the interest on the war bonds and other bonds sold to finance the war.

Of note, the WWII war effort represented most of America’s economic output.

“Not one person felt his or her district needed to have any of this assistance?” Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, asked of the Republicans. “That can’t be.”

It’s not that people need assistance.
It’s where the money is going.

The Louisiana Purchase: $217,000,000,000. (No wonder people thought Jefferson was insane.)

Didn’t the Louisiana Purchase cost $15,000,000? I was pretty sure it did.

I really hope the Democrat Party remembers forgot what happened the last time.

But the Idiot in Chief doesn’t think it’s big enough.

Maybe it doesn’t destroy the middle class fast enough to satisfy his handlers.

notagool on January 30, 2009 at 5:24 PM

Leave it to idiots to vote for him.

Hand raised by the Communist Democrat Party.

Laura in Maryland on January 30, 2009 at 4:42 PM

And the US Postal Service, that paragon of government efficiency, is going to save money by…. NOT DELIVERING MAIL (on Tuesdays, or maybe Saturdays).

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night… but our own inefficiency will definitely stay us from our appointed rounds.