Recently Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released a list of what they considered to be the 100 most wasteful stimulus projects in the country, including things like cocaine for monkeys and new windows for a federal interpretive center that’s closed and has no plans to re-open.

As a North Dakotan, I was interested in noting that #80 on that list was a project in my state. It was $6.1 million in federal funding for a new visitors center at the Audubon National Wildlife Refuge. This facility is actually located near Lake Audubon, where my family owns a lake cabin. I saw in the Minot Daily News that the facility was just opened and “dedicated” this last week (complete with “Fuel Efficient Vehicle Parking Only” signs in front), and since my family and I were spending the Labor Day holiday weekend at the lake anyway I thought I’d stop by and see what my tax dollars paid for.

After all, the proponents of the funding claim that this attraction brought in 80 visitors per day on average even before the new visitors center. I didn’t want to miss something that popular (though if there’s really that many visitors I’ll eat my hat).

So off we went on the four wheelers, taking the long and scenic way around the lake to find this new building. And what did we find when we got there? The place is closed on what is perhaps one of the busiest weekends for the Lake Audubon area all year. In fact, according to the sign on the door, the visitors center is closed every federal holiday. And it’s only regularly open 8am – 4:30pm, Monday – Friday.

The Minot Daily News quotes Audubon Manager Lloyd Jones as saying that the building is an “increased opportunity for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to tell the story about wetlands and grasslands.” He goes on:

We really want to emphasize that it’s a public facility. The commitment the service is making to this facility is an example of how important this region is. It’s the most important waterfowl breeding habitat in North America. Now we have a state of the art interpretive facility for the public to come and learn and enjoy and see what the prairie ecosystem is all about.

Well sure. They want the public to come…but only 8am – 4:30pm, Monday through Friday when it’s not a holiday. Otherwise, it’s just not that important. By the way, the half hour we were walking around outside taking pictures, about half a dozen cars full of people pulled up and then left when they realized the facility was closed.

I guess they’ll have to take time off work next week and come back.

Anyway, the building also has wind turbines outside because it’s a “green” facility as well as stimulus signs inside and a portrait of Barack Obama so that we’ll all know who brought us this marvelous…waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

Here are the wind turbines that supposedly power the facility:

And car pool-only parking…for the people who come during the scant few hours the facility is actually open.

Discussion question: How is this stimulating the economy? The only jobs that seem to have been created here are…government jobs.

Second discussion question: My four wheeler is fuel-efficient, right?

My most recent Washington Examiner piece is up. An excerpt:

Bill Clinton once told an audience in Philadelphia, “You know one of the things that’s wrong with this country? Everybody gets a chance to have their fair say.” It was intended as a humorous response to a crowd of hecklers who was giving him fits as he tried to deliver a speech, but it’s not hard to imagine that Democrats have taken that sentiment to heart of late.

Seton Motley notes a letter sent to book publishers Simon & Schuster by the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee accusing the company of making an in-kind donation to Republicans with the publishing of Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders which is about Republican House candidates. In a letter to the publisher, Democrats allege that the book is an “in-kind” donation and make ominous statements (given the party’s current control of Congress and its investigatory/regulatory power) about ensuring that the marketing of the book is “legal.”

Of course, corporations are allowed to make independent political expenditures. And how can this book be an in-kind contribution when it is set to be published, and sold, for profit?

Read the whole thing. Check out the Examiner’s Opinion Zone.

You can read all of my contributions here.

With the election looming, and Democrats suffering from an utter lack of trust with the electorate when it comes to economic issues, the White House is scheming for an “October surprise” of sorts in the form what they’re calling tax breaks for businesses.

Except, I don’t think that “tax breaks” is the right term given that we’re talking about temporary tax credits that only kick in when businesses meet specific criteria.

With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars – to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.

First, isn’t it Democrats who tell us that any attempt to let Americans keep more of their own money through tax relief creates budget deficits? If that’s true (and it is true as far as it goes, though I’d argue that our deficit problem lays with spending not taxes) then how can they justify a payroll tax holiday that takes billions in revenues from gigantic entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare?

We have a big budget problem here in America, and the most acute areas of that budget problem lay in the funding of Social Security and Medicare. If fiscal responsibility is really what Democrats want, how can they justify cutting revenues for those programs while simultaneously opposing any attempt to cut expenditures in those programs as well?

Even setting that aside, the idea that this is going to lead to any short term or long term economic stimulus is the stuff of fairy tales. If you suppose that businesses would hire workers, or begin research and development, to get a tax (and that’s a bit of a stretch), if that hiring or that research is dependent upon government tax credits the jobs/research will only last as long as the tax credits do.

Hardly the stuff of long-term, substantial economic growth.

What Obama is proposing is an economic policy gimmick motivated more by politics than a desire to foment prosperity.

If you wear baggy, drooping clothing in Dublin, Georgia you could be fined:

DUBLIN, Ga. — City leaders in Dublin could soon fine people if their sagging pants or skirts expose their underpants.

Dublin Mayor Phil Best told WMAZ-TV that he plans to sign an ordinance Tuesday that would fine violators $25 for a first offense and $200 for an additional offense.

The rule passed this week by the city council prohibits people from wearing pants or skirts more than three inches below the tops of the hips and exposing any skin or underwear below.

I wonder if this ordinance applies to plumbers?

Regardless, the notion that a city can (or should) outlaw certain fashion choices seems ridiculous to me. Indecent exposure is one thing. Making it illegal for your pants to ride low and expose a bit of underwear is something else entirely.

Society is not high school. Our elected leaders are not our principals or our parents. I think the authorities in Dublin may have better things to do than send cops around with tape measures to ensure that people wear their pants at an appropriate height.

What’s next, a prohibition on t-shirts that advertise alcohol or tobacco? If we allow ridiculous ordinances like this to stand, then that sort of absurdity is exactly where we’re headed.

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine told Fox News recently that Democrats shouldn’t be running away from being Democrats. “If you run away from who you are and you’re a Democrat, it’s foolish,” he said. “It’s foolish because you’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

Actions speak louder than words and judging by the actions of a lot of Democrats – including Texas governor candidate Bill White and now Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold – they’re not proud of what they’ve done at all.

President Barack Obama’s spending Labor Day afternoon in Milwaukee at an annual union festival. It’s quite a party: Parade organizers were still looking for volunteers to help carry the giant protest puppets of the Earth Goddess and such. Pity, then, that Russ Feingold, the incumbent Democratic senator in a neck-and-neck race, can’t hang out with the president.

But Obama and puppetry just aren’t the right atmospherics these days, are they?

Feingold, three terms in office and now tied with a plastics manufacturer no one heard of five months ago, will be at Laborfest earlier in the day. By afternoon, he’ll have scampered far from Obama, to a parade in his hometown, Janesville, where the General Motors bailout didn’t save the truck plant and unemployment is now double-digit. A spokesman said Feingold asked the White House to change its schedule, but you know how these things go.

Ask yourself: If you were an embattled senator, famously progressive and customarily elected by students, unions, peaceniks and others who dig giant protest puppets, and your state was going to be visited by a president who two years ago drew swooning arena-sized crowds of just such voters, do you think you could rearrange your schedule to absorb his magic?

Well sure, but the problem is that magic is gone.

And it’s not just the candidates who are running from Obama. Democrat party leadership has been telling their candidates to avoid talking about the policies they’ve passed over the last several years. Which is no doubt why Rep. Earl Pomeroy, as an example of the national trend, has been running a campaign blitz since April that hasn’t once mentioned a single thing he’s done in Congress recently.

Rather, it attacks his opponent Rick Berg and tries to cast Pomeroy as being an outsider from his own party.

If Democrats can’t campaign on what they’ve accomplished with their political majorities, maybe they don’t even believe that those policies will be good for the country.

But that’s the term the New York Times is using for efforts by Democrats to try and salvage something out of the House elections this season. Last week DCCC Chairman Rep. Chris Van Hollen was telling reporters that candidates who weren’t meeting expectations would see their national funding cut off.

At the time, I speculated that those comments were directed and candidates like Rep. Earl Pomeroy here in North Dakota. Today, the Times confirms it:

WASHINGTON — As Democrats brace for a November wave that threatens their control of the House, party leaders are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority.

In the next two weeks, Democratic leaders will review new polls and other data that show whether vulnerable incumbents have a path to victory. If not, the party is poised to redirect money to concentrate on trying to protect up to two dozen lawmakers who appear to be in the strongest position to fend off their challengers.

“We are going to have to win these races one by one,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, conceding that the party would ultimately cut loose members who had not gained ground. …

Representatives John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, chairman of the Budget Committee, and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, who is seeking a 10th term, are among the senior Democrats who have appeared to gain little ground in the summer months in the toxic political environment.

The polling numbers in the next month in the Berg/Pomeroy race are going to be momentous. Not only are national Democrats going to be deciding whether or not to write off Pomeroy based on them, but you have to remember that Pomeroy has been on a negative campaign ad blitz against Rep. Rick Berg for weeks now.

If Pomeroy continues to trail significantly in the polls for an eight month, post-Labor Day and after a heavy campaign attacking Berg and attempting to define him as not being right for North Dakota, I believe this race may well be over. There is an air of desperation around Pomeroy of late. From his campaign’s rather ludicrous attack on the NDSU College Republicans to his in-your-face tracking of Berg with operatives sporting cameras and tripods, the voters are starting to pick up on it.

Over-confident? Perhaps. You can never entirely count a nine-term incumbent out of the race. But at the very least, if Berg is still ahead in the next polling I think it’d be safe to say that it’s his race to lose.

The headline for this AP story about a debate between South Dakota’s governor candidates reads “Candidates for SD governor disagree on environment.” Except, when you read the article:

HURON, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota’s candidates for governor clashed over environmental issues Saturday, with Democrat Scott Heidepriem saying the governor hasn’t done enough to promote renewable energy and Republican Dennis Daugaard claiming huge growth in the industry.

There’s no disagreement about the environment here. Both candidates believe in the global warming hoax, and both believe that they need to dump lots and lots of taxpayer dollars onto nebulous “green energy” schemes.

The only disagreement is the degree of the government largess, I guess.

And, really, this seems like a microcosm for the national “green energy” debate. We seem to have abandoned any notion that research, development and innovation in the energy markets should be driven by private investment.

In the future, judging from the status quo, all energy development and innovation will be driven not by private capital flowing to the prospects most likely to efficiently and effectively satisfy public demand but rather by the decisions of politicians whose favor will flow to the prospects and projects with the best lobbyists.

Remember how, in the wake of 9/11 when our security authorities were telling Americans to be on the look out for suspicious people? And CAIR twisted that into a warning to be on the lookout for suspicious Muslims and accused/sued the government for racial profiling?

Well, here’s CAIR warning Muslims to be on the lookout for suspicious non-Muslims looking to commit hate crimes around mosques on the anniversary of 9/11.

“We’re telling everyone to keep their eyes open and report anything suspicious to authorities and call us,” said Ramzy Kilic of the Tampa, Fla., chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

NEW YORK (AP) — American Muslims are boosting security at mosques, seeking help from leaders of other faiths and airing ads underscoring their loyalty to the United States – all ahead of a 9/11 anniversary they fear could bring more trouble for their communities.

Their goal is not only to protect Muslims, but also to prevent them from retaliating if provoked. One Sept. 11 protest in New York against the proposed mosque near ground zero is expected to feature Geert Wilders, the aggressively anti-Islam Dutch lawmaker. The same day in Gainesville, Fla., the Dove World Outreach Center plans to burn copies of the Quran.

“We can expect crazy people out there will do things, but we don’t want to create a hysteria,” among Muslims, said Victor Begg of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan. “Americans, in general, they support pluralism. It’s just that there’s a lot of misinformation out there that has created confusion.”

The ACLU will be filing suit shortly, I’m sure.

(via Dan Riehl)

This cynical double-speak from US Senate candidate Tracy Potter (who is actually polling worse against John Hoeven than national joke candidate Alvin Greene is polling against Senator Jim DeMint in South Carolina) made me chuckle:

BISMARCK — Reductions in military spending, including large cuts in the size of the U.S. Army, are necessary to reduce the federal budget, North Dakota Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tracy Potter said Friday.

Potter said he did not believe military spending cuts would need to include closing one or both of North Dakota’s U.S. Air Force bases in Minot and Grand Forks.

“I believe that our nation will be able to sustain a much smaller standing army than it has today and still be powerful,” Potter said. “This is where savings can come, and they have to.”

This reminds me of the “fiscal conservatives” and “deficit hawks” who attack national deficit spending, but then get red in the face defending the federal earmark for the local golf course. Because that spending is a-ok, right?

That’s a big part of what’s wrong with politics in America. Everyone wants fiscally responsible government, but nobody wants fiscal responsibility at the expense of their pet projects.

Anyway, I actually agree with Potter in so far as reductions in our military goes. Our military is still stationed throughout the world as if we were facing WWII/Cold War era threats. Not only does our global deployment not realize more modern threat sources, it doesn’t take into account the capabilities of modern military technology.

Our military could be cheaper, and more efficient, after a radical realignment. Unfortunately, though our military is one of the few things our federal government is doing that it should be doing it operates a lot like even the most pointless, waste-of-space bureaucracy in that a lot of times it wants to grow just for the sake of growing. And it never, ever wants to be downsized even if that downsizing could make it more effective.

And military leadership is often the worst sort of bureaucrat. They argue endlessly for more funding, and more power, just like other bureaucrats except in their case the politicians are usually afraid to take them on. Because they use our national security like a trump card for any challenge to their spending.

Though if we want to talk about federal spending problems, the military is about the worst of our worries. In 2007 global military spending, meaning all the spending on the military and wars in all the world including the United States, hit about $1.2 trillion. Or roughly $120 billion less than what America spent on entitlements in a single year in 2005.

If we want to get federal spending under control, we need to focus on the entitlements.

A sad commentary in a nation where the federal government is running over $1 trillion in deficits annually, and some 44 states are running deficits of their own.

Who are America’s fastest-growing class of millionaires? They are police officers, firefighters, teachers and federal bureaucrats, who, unless things change drastically, will be paid something near their full salaries every year–until death–after retiring in their mid-50s. That is equivalent to a retirement sum worth millions of dollars.

The whole thing is worth a read.

In a lot of ways, these government jobs and the domestic auto industry are in situations that aren’t at all dissimilar. The auto worker unions drove the auto companies to bankruptcy with ridiculous labor contracts. The government worker unions have done the same thing, except Big Government, unlike Big Auto, has the capacity to deficit spend endlessly and print more money when needed.