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Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Dos Equis:
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--- Quote from: 333386 on August 21, 2012, 02:38:38 PM ---Labor Department spends stimulus funds for ads during Olbermann, Maddow shows
By Jim McElhatton
The Washington Times
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
The Labor Department paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus funds to a public relations firm to run more than 100 commercials touting the Obama administration’s “green training” job efforts on two popular MSNBC cable shows, records show.
The commercials ran on MSNBC on shows hosted by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann in 2009, but the contract didn’t report any jobs created, according to records recently reviewed by The Washington Times.
Spending reports under the federal Recovery Act show $495,000 paid to McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC, which the Labor Department hired to raise awareness “among employers and influencers about the [Job Corps] program’s existing and new training initiatives in high growth and environmentally friendly career areas” as well as spreading the word to prospective Job Corps enrollees.
Ultimately, the firm negotiated ad buys for “two approved spots” airing 14 times per week for two months on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and “The Rachel Maddow Show,” according to a project report, which listed the number zero under a section of the report asking how many jobs had been created through the stimulus contract.
David Williams, president of the nonprofit watchdog Taxpayers Protection Alliance, called the contract “questionable” because it created no jobs and because of the placement of the ads on shows viewed as friendly to the administration’s policies.
“Hiring a PR firm does not create jobs and this was obviously meant for selling a particular political agenda,” Mr. Williams said. “The placement really reeks of a political ad rather than a job ad, and taxpayers see through this.
“Taxpayers would be a lot happier at the end of the day to see a completed road rather than a bunch of ads on cable television,” he said.
The public relations firm did not respond to inquiries from The Times about who directed the ads to appear on MSNBC, but Labor Department officials defended the expenditures, saying the decision to place the ads on the network — now NBC News — had nothing to do with politics.
In a joint e-mail statement to The Times from two Labor Department spokesmen, David Roberts and Michael Volpe, officials said the money was used for outreach efforts to raise awareness among potential employers about the Job Corps’ green training in career areas, including automotive, advanced manufacturing and solar panel installation.
Mr. Roberts and Mr. Volpe also said Labor Department research showed advertisements would reach the target demographic of business owners and managers interested in hiring “green trained” employees through a programming list that initially also included shows hosted by CNN’s Larry King and public television’s Jim Lehrer, as well as the two MSNBC programs where the ads eventually appeared.
But public television was eliminated because advertising rates were too high, according Labor officials. And Larry King was dropped because MSNBC held the potential to reach more viewers, officials said. Officials gave no indication whether their research indicated if Fox News, ESPN or other cable outlets were considered for the Job Corps ads.
The Labor Department said that as measured in “gross impressions per spot”, the two MSNBC shows — Mr. Olbermann is no longer with the network — were twice as effective as compared to running ads on Mr. King’s show, which also is no longer on the air.
The use of tax dollars to promote administration programs and policies is hardly new. It’s a practice that came under sharp scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers upset about advertising during the Bush administration.
In 2006, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study requested by Democrats found more than $1.6 billion in public relations and media spending by the Bush administration during a two and a half year span.
A search of GAO reports in recent years doesn’t reveal any comparable studies reviewing public relations and media expenditures during the Obama administration. But federal purchasing records available online show thousands of contract actions since the changeover in administrations under specific purchasing codes both for advertising and public relations services.
Read more: Labor Department spends stimulus funds for ads during Olbermann, Maddow shows - Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/21/stimulus-funds-spent-obama-ads-olbermann-maddow
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Dos Equis:
Feds Spend $2.2 Million To Study “Why Lesbians Are Obese”
More waste of money! KCTV7 reports that $2,202,873 of tax payers money was wasted to study why lesbians are fat.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the money to study the biological and social factors that cause a large number of lesbians to be obese. According to NIH three-quarters of lesbians are obese even though gay males are not — they call it an issue of “high public-health significance.”
A hospital in Boston, Brigham and Women’s, received grants to carry out the study. The overall goal is to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.
Part of the grant reads, “Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today. Racial and socioeconomic disparities in the determinants, distribution, and consequences of obesity are receiving increasing attention.”
“However, one area that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation in obesity disparities,” it continues, “is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic. In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.”
The Washington Free Beacon reports, “The project has survived budget cuts due to sequestration, which the NIH warned would ‘delay progress in medical breakthroughs.’”
Despite the NIH claiming that the cuts are “delaying progress” in the development of cancer drugs, the lesbian study continues to receive funding.
The NIH said, “NIH research addresses the full spectrum of human health across all populations of Americans. Research into unhealthy human behaviors that are estimated to be the proximal cause of more than half of the disease burden in the U.S. will continue to be an important area of research supported by NIH.”
Is this study worth of $2 million, or is it a waste of tax dollars? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
http://www.thepcmdgazette.com/news/feds-spend-2-2-million-to-study-why-lesbians-are-obese/
Dos Equis:
Government-Funded Study: Why Is Wikipedia Sexist?
$202,000 to address ‘gender bias’ in world’s biggest online encyclopedia
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
July 30, 2014
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist.
The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopedia.
“Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and has since become the world’s single most important reference tool and information clearinghouse,” the grant states. “Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are controlled by experts, Wikipedia was supposed to have democratized knowledge.”
“Yet an emerging body of research indicates that Wikipedia suffers from systematic gender bias with respect to both contributors and content,” it continues. “How and why is this bias produced?”
A $132,000 grant was awarded to Julia Adams, a sociology professor at Yale, followed by $70,000 to Hannah Brueckner, the associate dean of social sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi.
The research intends to contribute to efforts to address gender bias, such as the work of Deanna Zandt, a “media technologist” who gives speeches encouraging women to edit Wikipedia.
“The investigators are committed to the goal of training new social scientists amid a landscape of enhanced interdisciplinary understanding,” the grant said. “Yet the potential impact of this project reaches far beyond the academy.”
“Under-representation of female scholars and associated scholarship reduces the quality and completeness of Wikipedia, imposing significant costs on the millions of readers who rely on it,” it said. “The findings from this research should clarify where in the complex chain of knowledge gender disparities arise. The findings should also bolster ongoing efforts to address those disparities, in this case by improving quality and reducing bias on academic—and more general—Wikipedia.”
An ongoing debate exists over whether the website has sexist undertones.
Zandt argues that Wikipedia is biased because the majority of its editors are “young, white, child-free men.”
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with a young, white, child-free man’s perspective, of course—it’s just that there are tons of other perspectives in the world that should influence how a story gets told,” Zandt wrote in an editorial for Forbes last year, entitled, “Yes, Wikipedia Is Sexist—That’s Why It Needs You.”
“It’s not enough to sit back and hope for the best when finding sexist, racist, homophobic, trans*phobic, etc., language or information on Wikipedia,” she said. “In order to fix it, we need lots of different kinds of people to jump in and start editing Wikipedia, too.”
Last year, a New York Times op-ed leveled charges of sexism against Wikipedia because it created a separate entry dedicated to women American novelists, removing female writers from the “American Novelists” page.
Noam Cohen, a columnist for the Times who does not have a Wikipedia page, has asserted the encyclopedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards.
“And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on ‘Sex and the City’ includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on ‘The Sopranos’ includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.
However, the Wikipedia page for “Woman” is much longer than the entry for “Man.”
Slate published a rebuttal to Cohen’s piece, arguing that a gender gap in the number of male contributors does not mean Wikipedia is sexist.
“Wikipedia’s gender imbalance is a non-problem in search of a misguided solution,” wrote Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Besides, the vast majority of men don’t contribute to Wikipedia, just as the vast majority of women don’t. The site has only 91,000 active contributors; that leaves a lot of men whose ‘voices’ are also not being heard.”
http://freebeacon.com/issues/government-funded-study-why-is-wikipedia-sexist/
JOHN MATRIX:
'Waste, fraud, and abuse' - the official democrat motto :D
Dos Equis:
Transparency troubles: Audit finds $619B gap in federal spending site
Published August 06, 2014
FoxNews.com
The Obama administration failed to properly account for how it spent nearly $619 billion, according to a watchdog audit of the main federal website meant to track where taxpayer money is going.
The report from the Government Accountability Office picked apart the website USASpending.gov, and the agencies feeding information to it.
The database of government spending and contracts was created out of a 2006 transparency law, but the GAO found it continues to have serious problems. The Department of Health and Human Services was the worst offender, during the 2012 period GAO examined.
“Although agencies generally reported information for contracts to USASpending.gov, they did not properly report information on assistance awards, totaling nearly $619 billion,” the GAO reported.
USA Today first reported on the GAO audit.
According to the GAO findings, funding for more than 300 programs was not reported correctly. HHS topped the list of scofflaws, failing to report or reporting late $543.8 billion worth of spending. Part of the reason the number was so high is the agency was not providing information about direct payments to individuals, like for the massive Medicaid program HHS administers.
The Department of Veterans Affairs was next on the list, with $64 billion in spending not properly accounted for.
Further, the report found few contracts and grants were properly reported with all the required information. The GAO found just 2-7 percent of the awards had information “fully consistent” with agencies’ own records.
A spokesman for the White House budget office told USA Today that the administration is trying to improve the data on the site.
“OMB is committed to federal spending transparency and working with agencies to improve the completeness and accuracy of data submissions," he said in a statement.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/08/06/transparency-troubles-audit-finds-61b-gap-in-federal-spending-site/
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