-By Warner Todd Huston
Jim McElhatton of the Washington Times has revealed that in 2009 Obama’s Dept. of Labor used Obama stimulus bucks to fund advertising on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann shows.
We all thought the stimulus was a failure but I guess Obama really did stimulate someone’s economy.
The advertisements were created to flog Obama’s so-called “green training” job programs and were handled by the PR firm McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC at a cost of $495,000 to the taxpayers.
Two video ads ran for two months, 14 times a week in 2009 during Countdown With Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show.
In a joint email 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.
Records seem to show that the number of jobs created with the program was zero. Nadda. The big goose egg.
Strangely, few other TV outlets were much considered as hosts for the ads. PBS was apparently rejected because ad rates were too expensive and Fox, ESPN, and others aren’t even mentioned in the report. The ads did run on CNN after the stint on MSNBC.
So, shockingly, MSNBC, along with CNN, were the lucky recipients of Obama’s stimulus bucks for a jobs program that netted no new jobs.
“The placement really reeks of a political ad rather than a job ad, and taxpayers see through this,” David Williams of the nonprofit watchdog Taxpayers Protection Alliance told the Washington Times.
That is certainly an understatement.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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