• Love this - Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's backyard -- where a $54 million no-bid contract was awarded to a firm with little experience to relocate a luxury Bay Area wine train due to flood concerns.

• So in effect the inclusion of $2 billion for a near zero emissions powerplant amounts to a staggering earmark—one that's nine times the cost of the bridge to nowhere. It's also substantially larger than Congress' previous earmark record of $1.5 billion for the DC metro system last year.

  After FutureGen was abandoned, disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich paid Cassidy and Associates, a major Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, $468,000 in public funds to lobby to restart the project. The Illinois delegation in Congress has also been pushing hard for the FutureGen earmark, despite the fact that the Obama administration has been vocal about their opposition to earmarks in the stimulus, and has even specfically said they are oppposed to including funding for FutureGen in the bill.

  The Wall Street Journal estimates that the FutureGen would generate about 2,675 new jobs—and only 150 of those are permanent. Congress would be spending just shy of $750,000 per new job.

  The language is still in the stimulus, though Senator Tom Coburn—the Van Helsing of earmark hunters—has introduced an amendment (#108) to strike the FutureGen funding from the bill.  (http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjQ3OGIwMjFkOGUyYjVjYzc0ODg5ZjM4OTliOTlmYTQ)

•  

• Ms. Malkin mentioned FUTUREGEN clean coal....this Obama - remember when he said no one could open up a coal plant without being taxed out of business.  NO DOUBT -- he's got interests in this failed FUTUREGEN project that he had 1 billion dollars directed to in the Stimulus package.  http://www.futuregenalliance.org/

• California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, who had already extracted $12 million in TARP funds for OneUnited, a minority-owned bank that is one of her key campaign donors and a company in which both Waters and her husband own massive amounts of stock.

Twitter Tapping

A former top climate scientist who had become of one the scientific world's most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth's atmosphere was sentenced to probation Tuesday after pleading guilty to steering lucrative no-bid contracts to his wife's company.

In addition to a year's probation, former NASA manager Mark Schoeberl, 60, of Silver Spring, was also fined $10,000 and ordered to put in 50 hours of community service. He admitted in the late summer that he had hid some $50,000 in NASA contracts for a company called Animated Earth, which was run by Schoeberl's wife, Barbara. Prosecutors alleged that Schoeberl tried to help his wife's firm for years. When his colleagues balked at giving no-bid contracts to his wife's firm, Schoeberl pressured them to steer money to his wife through indirect means.

Schoeberl was the chief scientist of the Goddard Space Flight Center's Earth Sciences Division and the head of the Aura Project, a NASA mission to study the Earth's ozone layer, air quality and climate. He has written extensively about the depletion of the ozone level, and the influence of humans on global climate change.

Animated Earth offers plasma-screen kiosks that carry satellite images of the Earth's climate and atmosphere.

"It's an important conviction because it vindicates the principle that federal employees have to act in the public's interest," U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told The Examiner. "The goal here, really, is ... to promote a fair field for contractors."

As early as 2004, Schoeberl began asking about ways to direct no-bid contracts to Animated Earth, he admitted in his plea agreement.

WASHINGTON — The government watchdog overseeing economic stimulus spending says the White House was too quick to take credit for saving or creating 640,000 jobs.

The White House trumpeted job figures released last month, saying they proved the administration is on track to save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

But Earl Devaney, whose agency collected and released the data, said Thursday there are too many errors to know how many jobs have been created. Under questioning on Capitol Hill, he agreed the White House should have acknowledged the doubt surrounding the numbers.

He said the downside of the unprecedented transparency is embarrassment, and there's enough embarrassment over the accounting problems to go around.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

 

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Today’s roundup of stimulus coverage:

http://www.propublica.org/ion/stimulus/item/gao-audit-provides-ammo-for-both-sides-1120

 

Yesterday’s GAO report [1] (PDF), looking at errors and inaccuracies in the first round of reports provided by recipients of stimulus money, is covered from a variety of angles. Reuters’ Lisa Lambert looks at [2] the audit itself, while and the New York Times’ Michael Cooper notes [3] the accompanying Congressional testimony of Earl Devaney, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, that the actual job numbers could be higher or lower than claimed. Meanwhile, ABC’s Rick Klein reports [4] in The Note that Republicans are using the discrepancies in stimulus reporting to bolster their argument that the government shouldn’t be allowed to play a greater role in health care.

 

Acting U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro of the Government Accountability Office; Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board; Deputy Education Secretary Anthony Wilder Miller; and Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari are sworn in before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

ProPublica’s Jennifer LaFleur and Michael Grabell have noted that the data errors at Recovery.gov should be kept in perspective [5].

Jared Bernstein, the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told an audience at the Brookings Institution that the administration was open to more stimulus, the Washington Post‘s Alec MacGillis reports [6]. “Bernstein emphasized that he was not expressing any official administration preferences about how to proceed,” MacGillis writes. “But his comments showed far more openness to more direct approaches to hiring or retaining workers than he signaled just three weeks ago in a speech at American University, where he dismissed a question about direct government job creation by arguing that public works programs take longer to get going than people realize.”

Finally today, the Boston Globe‘s Green Blog reports [7] that the University of New Hampshire is getting $700,000 in stimulus money to test “the nation’s first floating deepwater wind turbine.” The Globe reports that the beauty of the project is the possibility of moving offshore wind farms far enough away from coastlines that they don’t sully the view, thus reducing public opposition.

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The Government Accountability Office released a report [1] (PDF) today criticizing the quality of the data used to calculate how many jobs have been generated by the stimulus.

The findings echo media reports [2] in recent weeks. Some highlights:

• Nearly 4,000 reports filed by recipients of stimulus money showed no dollar amount received. Yet those same reports claimed to have created or saved more than 50,000 jobs.
• Some 9,200 reports showed no jobs, even though they spent a total of almost $1 billion in stimulus money.
• Nearly one in 10 stimulus recipients failed to file reports.
• Almost one quarter of reports from primary stimulus recipients were not reviewed by a federal agency.
• Recipients used different formulas to calculate how many jobs they had created or saved.

The Washington Post said coverage of the glitches may be undermining confidence in the stimulus [3]:

The constant barrage of such stories may be taking a toll. In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 23 percent of respondents say they think the stimulus act has hurt the economy, and 39 percent say that it has made no difference.

For more context, see today’s piece [4] by ProPublica’s Jennifer LaFleur and Michael Grabell about why some criticism might be overblown. And don’t forget our Unofficial Guide to Recovery.gov [5], which points out some of the tricks and traps in the government’s data.

 

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This year’s $787 billion stimulus bill is under scrutiny from a watchdog group that says it’s not living up to its promise.
    At issue is the President’s claim the stimulus package would help create 3.5 million jobs over the next two years.
    The government watchdog says the White House is overstating the success.
    The Stimulus Oversight Board says the data is full of inaccuracies and errors.
    Those errors include reporting that jobs were created in congressional districts that don’t exist.
    The Government Accountability Office also says some reports claim jobs were created or saved with money that hasn’t been spent yet.
    Republicans call it White House propaganda.
    “The whole jobs created/saved metrics is not only trouble, it is entirely deceitful. No government agency, private sector group or research economics has any idea what the reliable calculation track for these numbers would be,” Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California.
    White House officials acknowledged that job numbers could change and that some forms were filled out incorrectly.
    They also say the focus should be on creating jobs, not counting them.

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?" AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.

In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: "[T]ry and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."

When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn't work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. "The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we're all using is this," he wrote. "IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on."

It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.

For the record, when we've asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he "won't dignify that question with a response." Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he "did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way," but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn't to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann's work, much less his right to remain silent.

However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.