Stimulus serves up Obama Pork To "Little Dick" Durbin Back Home in Illinois(1 Bil. Worth Plus On This Deal Alone)

This is another story involving "DICK" the other being his stock dumping problem we talk about in another post today

This little Obama present to Durbin is just a tip of the pork divvied out to dems and their districts in the Porkulus spending, along with the followup "disgraceful" omnibus treasury rape and pillage that Obama has managed to pull off with the "all dem wink wink" 11th congress.

Acting as if the country and "we,the people in it" can't read the news or simply don't care about this wasteful clear cut theft that's gone on since Jan 20th.

As a matter of fact, you remember what Senator Chuckles Schumer said about you and when referred to us all as the "chattering class"that didn't give a damn about their pork cutlets they all take home and pocket for all their buddies and business interests that no one has time to keep track of nor investigate since the media has now become the Obama Ministry of Propaganda....

Well Chuckie, we care, and this Durbin project should and is beginning to raise many eyebrows and should result in some serious investigations into fraud and cronyism at it's worst over this clean coal plant in my backyard per se called FutureGen and was a HUGE pet project of the One himself back here in CrimIllinois....

Here's a photoshop I made in 2007 which looks pretty prescient today....

Stimulus serves up Obama pork

- Eamon Javers - POLITICO.com: "It became a sort of poster child for fiscal responsibility — a clean-coal power plant in Illinois that was one of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s pet projects.

Democrats insisted they were so serious about keeping pork out of the stimulus bill that it was President Obama himself who blocked the FutureGen project from the massive spending package.

“It shows that we’re serious about it,” Brendan Daly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, said at the time. “The speaker said it, and the president said it: There will not be earmarks in this bill.”

Earmarks? Perhaps not. But funding for FutureGen? Absolutely, to the tune of $1 billion.

The Department of Energy on Friday announced that the FutureGen project is on track after all, committing federal stimulus money to advance the project to its next stage. One reason: It was the only shovel-ready project that fits the requirements of the stimulus bill.

Administration officials and the project’s other big backer, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), insist that’s not an earmark at all, as promised — because the stimulus bill doesn’t specifically name the FutureGen project as a recipient of the money."

But others say that’s a distinction without a difference — that FutureGen is merely an earmark by another name, a project that had powerful patrons, funding straight out of the stimulus bill and requirements for the money targeted so narrowly that only a few projects would fit the bill.

The funding is attracting harsh criticism from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who will release a report Tuesday blasting 100 wasteful projects in the federal stimulus spending. The FutureGen project is on his top 10. “FutureGen is the most expensive earmark in history,” Coburn said. “And it is one of the most egregious examples of stimulus dollars being handed out on the basis of politics rather than merit or need.”

The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight also reacted with skepticism. “Whenever federal funds are appropriated or have the appearance of being ‘steered’ to a specific company or cause, it deserves a higher level of scrutiny to ensure that the project is one that benefits all taxpayers and is not simply one which unduly benefits a few,” said the group’s director of communications, Marthena Cowart.

So how did a project that Democrats swore not to include as an earmark end up being paid for by stimulus money?

The answer is a complicated tale of money, politics and power that could happen only in Washington.

FutureGen is a public-private partnership to build a coal-fueled, near-zero emissions power plant in Mattoon, Ill. It got its start in 2005, when a coalition of the largest electric utilities and coal companies in the United States banded together to advance the project — which would produce enough electricity to power 150,000 homes. The new technology will be used to pump carbon emissions deep into the earth’s surface, instead of pumping them into the air as pollution.

But by 2008, then-Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman announced he was pulling the plug, citing increases in the estimated cost. He also said he’d prefer to build several smaller high-tech plants, rather than a single giant demonstration project.Read more: starts at page 2

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