Democrats Used Stimulus Money To Study Monkeys With Cocaine Problems

You have to see it to believe it:

Revelations that some of the stimulus money shelled out under President Obama’s Recovery Act has been squandered on less-than-deserving projects are nothing new. But now, thanks to GOP Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain, a large portion of these allegedly unworthy ventures have been exposed and criticized in a handy-dandy list.

The report, called Summertime Blues, was released today on Coburn’s website. It outlines 100 projects that have received funding from the stimulus bill, but according to Coburn and McCain, have either not created new jobs, taken away job opportunities, or are just plain stupid. Some of them (like their number one example of a $554,763 window repair job for a vacant building) are rightfully irritating. But others, listed below according to their rank in the report, are almost too absurd to be mad about:

6) $1.9 million provided for California scientists to “capture, photograph, and analyze” ants.

25) $298,543 to predict the weather on other planets.

28) $144,541 for Wake Forest University scientists to give monkeys cocaine and see what happens. Even scarier: they’re having the monkeys administer the coke themselves. No word yet if part of the cost is allocated to rolled up hundred dollar bills.

36) $712,883 to build a machine that tells jokes (presumably funnier than the ones Coburn and McCain tried to crack in this report).

38) $294,958 on a program to reduce menopausal hot flashes with yoga classes.

39) $1.2 million for research how elderly people react to playing video games.

95) $180,935 to discover a better method for freezing rat sperm.

100) $112,437 for three high school students and three college students to study alcohol in laboratories (read: pound shots out of test tubes)

Sen. McCain has been using his Twitter to slowly release throughout the day his own list of the top ten “wasteful projects from the stimulus” with examples taken from the report.

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Bill O’Reilly Takes Sen. Tom Coburn To The Woodshed For Criticizing Fox News

Mediaite.com:

Bill O'Reilly had Senator Tom Coburn on his show to address derisive comments he made last week towards Fox News. Coburn had told constituents upset with the recently passed health care reform that “the intention is not to put any one in jail. That makes for good TV news on FOX.” O’Reilly pushed back hard, insisting that nobody on FNC has ever said “you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance” Well, he’s wrong.

Senator Coburn’s comments made some news when, particularly coming off similar comments from conservative David Frum, who claimed that “Fox News…has an interest In marginalizing the GOP.” At the time we asked if this was the start of a larger trend of GOP officials distancing themselves from Fox News.

Well not only has that not become a trend, but Coburn was effectively taken to the wood shed for his comments by Bill O’Reilly. The civil discussion was spirited at times, but O’Reilly’s primary point was that nobody on Fox News has claimed that not following health care would result in prison time:

“We researched to find if anyone on Fox News ever said you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance…nobody’s ever said it…so it seems to be what you did was you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there.”

Tom Coburn: Rachel Maddow "Demonizes Me"

Newsbusters.org:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) got himself in some hot water this weekend when he said that Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is a nice lady while seeming to take a shot at Fox News.

With this in mind, the folks at Daily Caller decided to interview the Senator to see if "the famously ferocious conservative from Muskogee [has] gone soft."

"If we're gonna win things, we have to look at other side," said Coburn.

"But if we're going to win debates we have to win on facts and caring attitudes, not demonize people."

The Senator then used a perfect example:

"Look at Rachel Maddow. She comes at me on the basis of emotion. She demonizes me. I don't want conservatives to win on the basis of emotion. If we lower ourselves to the level they operate on, we hurt ourselves and our arguments."

Tough to argue with that. In fact, this is very much what we see from liberal media members these days: attack the messenger NOT the message.

Rachel Maddow is not a journalist, she's a staunch liberal with a vehicle to push Barry's radically-Left agenda, facts be damned. For any conservative to go on her show, much less seriously engage her in political discourse anywhere, is just a waste of time.

Tom Coburn Takes Away Barack's "Gift" To Hollywood Liberals

Tom Coburn is my new hero:

Senate Republicans yesterday stripped a special $246 million tax break for Hollywood producers from President Obama's stimulus package.

"This isn't stimulus. This is a gift," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who wrote the amendment to strike out the giveaway for some of the Democrats' most generous political supporters.

"It's not going to stimulate the economy at all," he said. "What it's going to do is line the pockets of very wealthy individuals already not experiencing the downside of the economy."

The 52-45 vote was largely along party lines, with nearly every Republican voting to remove the Hollywood tax break, joined by 13 Democrats and independent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Under the measure, Hollywood moguls would have been allowed to write off half the production and filming costs of big-budget films and TV shows.

Backed by Walt Disney and the Motion Picture Association of America, the provision amounted to an estimated $246 million tax break over 11 years.

Of course RINO Arlen Specter was one of the few Republicans to sign off on BO's bogus stimulus plan. Specter is an embarrassment, with the likes of his kind the GOP needs Norm Coleman to defeat Al Franken BAD in Minnesota, thank goodness Coleman received some really good news today.