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There are some extra congressional districts in California receiving stimulus dollars…the trouble is, they don’t exist.

Recovery.gov, the web portal designed by the administration to provide transparency and information on where and how the President’s stimulus dollars were being spent lists 9 congressional districts in California that don’t exist, yet they apparently have received $5,740,757 in stimulus dollars, creating 24.2 jobs, which equates to about $237,221 per job.  This odd reporting isn’t limited to California either; ABC News has reported that instances of the same problems are popping up all over the country.

When asked about the problem, Ed Pound, director of communications for recovery.gov said "We're not certifying the accuracy of the information.”  Asked why recipients would pluck random numbers - 26, 45, 14 - to fill in for their congressional district, Pound replied, "who knows, man, who really knows. There are 130,000 reports out there.''

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see how the White House can allocate over $1 million in stimulus dollars to California’s 00 District, nor how you can claim to create jobs in a district that doesn’t exist…but if the White House can’t keep track of $787 billion, how are they going to track the $1.6 trillion for health care?!

It is a bit like throwing the baby in the swimming pool to see if it swims.

At some future time, after careful parsing of the data and studying people's decisions, we may have a much better estimate of the effectiveness of debt-financed government spending of this sort. One should keep in mind, however, that the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the programs to combat the Great Depression in the 1930s is still a matter of great debate.

Emergency grants from the National Endowment for the Arts may be going to help fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night "pervert" revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco.

This morning, the DC Examiner, a beltway newspaper, featured an interesting editorial about President Obama’s rhetoric versus actions on earmarks.

The editorial highlights a question from Time Magazine, “Does Obama have a double standard on earmarks?”  I am not sure if you caught it, but during the President’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress, he boasted that there were no earmarks (however, earmarks have a multitude of guises) in his $787 billion dollar ‘Big Spending Package’ disguised as “Stimulus.”  Yet the President remains quiet when Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats ram a bill through Congress the very next day, neatly stuffed with nearly 9,000 earmarks.

To say that each of these earmarks is ‘worthy’ is complete fantasy, here is a healthy sampling courtesy of the Examiner’s Editorial Department:

“$1.8 million to manage swine manure in Iowa, $190,000 for a “Buffalo Bill Historical Center” in Wyoming, $2.2 million to study grape genetics in New York, $175,000 for “fa?ade improvements” on a dilapidated theater in Pennsylvania, $162,000 for cricket control in Utah, and a total of $41.5 million for the presidential libraries of three former Democratic presidents: FDR, JFK and Lyndon Johnson.”

Nevertheless, the American taxpayer will be on the hook for these projects, worthy or not.  President Obama has repeatedly said he “Get’s It,” but perhaps it is time he gets on board with the rest of America on earmark reform.  Even Congress is slowly beginning to get the message; this issue is not going away.