Barbara Hollingsworth

Brown victory boosts fundraising for Reid challenger

Danny Tarkanian, the Republican running against embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, says that Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts Tuesday is making it much easier for other Senate challengers like him to raise money. “I had a good trip to New York, where I met with six contributors who all helped Brown and are now looking to help elsewhere,” Tarkanian told The Examiner. “I noticed a lot more enthusiasm.” Campaigning on a platform of limited government, no pork barrel spending and no bailouts, Tarkanian says ten recent polls have him beating Reid beyond the margin of error. But “I made my official announcement the last day in...

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UPDATE: Even with a real zip code, it takes 7 hours to report on $2,000 contract

As if dozens of fraudulent congressional districts, phony stimulus jobs, and fake zip codes found on Recovery.gov aren’t enough, we now learn that the website used by stimulus recipients to report their use of federal money is also a mess. The owner of a small Midwestern firm told The Examiner that it took him and his staff at least seven hours to record receipt of a $2,000 stimulus contract. The website – www.federalreporting.gov - is so poorly designed, he said, that it kept timing out before they could finish inputting their data which, by the way, is done after the money has all been spent. In addition, the website apparently only accepts stimulus spending reports ten...

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Phantom zip codes also found in Virginia

As much as $9.5 million in federal stimulus dollars went to 14 zip codes in Virginia that don’t exist or are in other states, Old Dominion Watchdog (http://virginia.watchdog.org) reports. The fake zip codes were listed on Recovery.gov, the federal Web site that is supposed to track how the stimulus money is being used. The phony zip codes are a new wrinkle in Recovery.gov’s increasingly tattered credibility. In November, Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said a rash of phantom congressional districts found on the website were the result of confusion by fund recipients, who apparently didn’t know who their...

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Stimulus Watch: Now it’s fake zip codes

Recovery.gov, the Obama administration’s supposedly transparent attempt to let citizens know how every dollar of the $787 billion stimulus package was spent, is turning out to be a lot more comic fiction than fact. Not only have fake jobs been reported in phantom congressional districts, Steve Allen Adams of NewMexicoWatchdog.org discovered that some of the $27 million of federal money his state received also went to nonexistent zip codes: “Closer examination of the latest recovery.gov report for New Mexico shows hundreds of thousands of dollars sent to and credited with creating jobs in zip codes that do not exist in New Mexico or anywhere else. Moreover, funds reported as...

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Build more nukes or head back to the Dark Ages?

If reducing carbon emissions to stave off imminent climactic disaster is really their main goal, you’d think environmental groups would be clamoring to replace coal-burning power plants with nuclear reactors, which don’t emit any carbon. Surprise! Not only are they steadfastly opposed to nuclear power, they’re now arguing that building nuclear plants will actually “set America back in the race against global warming” because – get this – thanks to them, there’s no new reactors under construction, and it could take a decade or more to cut through all the bureaucratic red tape. A new report by Environment America also claims that even if a...

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Baucus claims it's too difficult to put health care bill online

A proposal by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., that would have required the Senate Finance Committee to post the final language of the $900 billion health care reform bill, as well as a Congressional Budget Office cost analysis, on the committee’s website for 72 hours prior to a vote was rejected 12-11. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., was the only Democrat to side with Bunning. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, who is not a member of the Finance Committee, said she also supported Bunning’s proposal. Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., himself admitted that “This probably sounds a little crazy to some people that we are voting on something before we have seen legislative language.”...

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Poll: Public wants to rein-in the Fed

There is a growing public consensus that the highly secretive Federal Reserve System, which controls the nation’s money supply and sets interest rates, needs to do business out in the open. A new Rasmussen poll finds that a large majority of Americans (75 percent) want Congress to audit the Fed, which has not accounted for the trillions of public dollars it spent over the last year and a half in an attempt to shore up failing financial institutions. More than half of the members of the House of Representatives have co-sponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Ron Paul, R-TX, to require a public accounting of the Fed’s activities. The Obama administration wants to give the private...

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Is America really over?

Think you still live in the last, best hope of mankind? Get over yourself. That's the basic message of National Journal correspondent Paul Starobin's new book, "After America," which can only be classified as a clarion call to Americans to downsize their expectations for the future. The Falls Church resident acknowledges in his book that "optimism stands out as a signature trait of the American mind-set," but his outlook for the future of the United States is anything but. "America has reached the end of its political and economic cultural ascendancy," he told me in an interview from Los Angeles. In his view, there's nowhere for us to go but down. The...

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FAA fudges FOIA on glider safety

Attorney General Eric Holder issued new guidelines March 19 regarding release of non-classified information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. That statute, better known as the FOIA when it was first approved in 1966, says all federal documents should be made public on request unless there are strong grounds – which are described in detail in the law - for keeping them behind closed doors. Holder’s memo to executive branch departments and agencies rescinded more restrictive rules issued by his predecessor, John Ashcroft in 2001. Holder said he wanted to restore “the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information...

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Commentary: The continuing foster care fiasco

Despite evidence that removing children from their homes traumatizes them, millions are still being forced to live with strangers or adopted out like shelter pets. One activist recently told Congress that many children are sent to “clearly inadequate families” just so social service agencies “can ‘succeed’ by boosting their numbers.” Children like 13-year-old Alexis "Lexie" Agyepong-Glover, who was dumped, still alive, into an icy creek in Prince William County and left to die. Lexie was never removed from adopted mother Alfreedia Gregg-Glover’s home despite numerous reports of abuse. She ran away three times in the weeks prior to her...

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