And from the looks of it, there is no way the nation will add 600,000 new jobs (ed: referring to Obama’s claim last week of “creating or saving” 150,000 jobs and doing the same for 600,000 more in the next 100 days) as a result of the federal government’s largesse if job postings reflect job openings. My search of www.usajobs.com, a federal government database, shows 43 positions available connected to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act nationally. There are, however, 47,958 federal government jobs available worldwide.

When I clicked on the “Recovery Act Jobs” link on Maryland’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation Web site, 28 jobs popped up, many of them temporary, paying minimum wage. The highest paying job was listed as a “Financial Compliance Auditor Trainee” for $43,055 – which is about $5,000 less than the average per capita wage in the state. Dividing $4 billion – the amount Maryland received from the package – by 28 jobs, it works out to be about $143 million investment per job created, surely a new record in employment cost-benefit analyses.

Your Gormogons have already pointed out the spin that you’ll hear from the current administration. There is a difference between a child and an adult when facing the fact that you were wrong. The child misdirects (“Bob made me do it”, “It wasn’t me”), blames others (“Susie did it”), resorts to lying and fails to admit the mistake, learn and move on. Most (I hope) adults are wise enough to admit their mistakes, learn from them and does better the next time. Hopefully, this current administration has finished blaming others, misdirecting the cause and lying (or at least masking) about the issues.