Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Recovery.gov

Obama promised transparency, but he never said it would be accurate information.

Despite Biden's seal of approval, the latest data from Recovery.gov is riddled with blatant inaccuracies. Very basic blunders are rampant. For example, the money and jobs saved are compiled by congressional district. Yet there are entries in most states for districts that don't even exist.

You would think someone would check that out and restrict posting to non-existent districts. But no one did. Oops.

And we aren't talking about transposing numbers here. We are talking about obvious errors like districts "99" and "69" in the U S Virgin Islands.
But there is an official government answer for these inaccuracies. The PR Director for the Recovery Board is a man by the name of Ed Pound. Ed says: "We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes."
(I guess he just came from lunch with Tim Geithner.)

Perhaps the same geniuses helped Senator Dick Durbin with his survey on the public option. He claims to have over 80,000 responses and here's what he came up with.
What about people who want no public option at all? Durbin could find only 11% support for the idea:
But ABC/Washington Post did a poll during the same time frame and found that 43% of people were dead set against the public option. Even after the poll-taker tried to talk them out of it, they still had 28% opposition.

My message to Dick Durbin. Go away! And wipe that goofy smile off your face.

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