Unicorn Sighting

Hardly a day passes without the Administration trumpeting its promotion of green jobs. The Stimulus Package alone appropriated $80 billion to create them; additional funding came from the Department of Labor. Yet -- like a unicorn -- nobody's ever seen one, because they don't exist. But I assumed unicorn believers would recognize one if they saw it.

Silly me. In March, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics sought suggestions for a definition of Green jobs:

There is no widely accepted standard definition of "green jobs." While this topic is of interest across government, academia, and the business community, various studies define the term differently. . .

BLS is considering using Federal product ratings or standards, where they exist, to determine which goods and services to include in this category. Such standards will be used to provide an objective method to distinguish green goods and services from other goods or services generally used for the same purpose. These standards will also help BLS clearly communicate to respondents what goods and services they produce that should be reported on the planned survey, and to communicate to data users what products and services are represented in the resulting data on associated jobs.

Got that? Not only has Obama invented a mythical beast, he's giving billions to those claiming to be one. As Senator Grassley (R-Ia) has asked, "Without a specific definition of a "green job", how did [the government] determine whether recipient funding applications and spending programs met necessary requirements for being green?"

Answer: They made it up. Welcome to transparency and accountability--Obama style. And you thought "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards" was confined to the Looking Glass world.

(via Planet Gore)