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If that's the case, DC, you can take your stimulus $$$ back

Posted by Kevin Fischer on July 8, 2010

I praised Democrats, state Senator Jeff Plale and state Representative Christine Sinicki for their stance that some stimulus money earmarked for exorbitantly foolish high speed rail  between Milwaukee and someplace in Madison (Jim Doyle can't make up his mind  and has already incompetently suggested three possible stops in Dane County) be used to fix the crumbling  Hoan Bridge.

I am stunned that my lefty friends in the blogosphere have not raced to their terminals to extol me abundantly.

Plale and Sinicki correctly argue money is needed on the already existing Hoan Bridge that is being used each and every day rather than waiting years for the money to see a train that, in my view, will never be self-sustaining and will be used sparingly, at best.

Another Democrat has weighed in, this time through a mouthpiece. From the Daily Reporter:

“David Frey, spokesman for Congresswoman Gwen Moore, D-Wis., said the high-speed rail money cannot be shifted. 

‘If the funding isn’t used as applied for, it won’t be used in Wisconsin,’ he said. ‘It will go to another state for use there.’ 

Frey cited California, New York and Florida as examples of other states that could use Wisconsin’s share of stimulus money for high-speed rail projects of their own.”  

Hey, Gwen, then by all means, take this mountain of tax money and send it and spend it somewhere else. Please!

I’d prefer some other grubby-handed communities get it and then have to wrestle with how to pay for the additional millions of annual operating costs for the high speed rail the stimulus won’t cover.

Only a true tax and spend liberal would cry, using the argument that we can’t let this money slip away only to be used by somebody else.

Finally, also from the Daily Reporter, this quote from Senator Plale:

“A train would be nice, and maybe someday it will be possible. But in the real world you have to look at what’s the priority and that’s this bridge in desperate need of repair. I would hope that lawmakers still have some common sense and can decide what is the highest and best use of stimulus money.” 

From the website, Big Government, Obama says stimulus worked, created jobs…..here’s a reminder…….

• $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years
• $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina
• $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota
• $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev.
• A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism”
• $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics
• Another $450,000 went to Univ. of Arizona to study ants
• Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there
• $219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk
• $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees  
• $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots
• $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart
• Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks
• $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino
• $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work
• $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin
• $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania
• $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida
• $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma
• $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade
• $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there
• $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa
• $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen  
• North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers!
• $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest
• A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously

Seems to me the Hoan is a perfect stimulus project.

Fix the damn bridge!