List Compiled By Warner Todd Huston:
•$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 Uinv. 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**