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Obama Stimulus Money to Study Monkey Cocaine Use

By: Brian Darling (Diary)  |  August 3rd, 2010 at 08:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ) have put out an excellent report on how your stimulus money is being spent.  The report, Summertime Blues, has one example of Obama Stimulus money being used to study the effects of how “monkeys react under the influence of cocaine.”

28. Monkeys Get High for Science (Winston-Salem, NC) – $144,541
Researchers at Wake Forest University think that, in at least one case, it is good to monkey around with your stimulus dollars. The Department of Health and Human Services has sent $144,541 to the Winston-Salem college to see how monkeys react under the influence of cocaine. The project, titled “Effect of Cocaine Self-Administration on Metabotropic Glutamate Systems,” would have the monkeys self-administer the drugs while researchers monitor and study their glutamate levels. When asked how studying drug-crazed primates would improve the national economy, a Wake Forest University Medical School Spokesman said, “It’s actually the continuation of a job that might not still be there if it hadn’t been for the stimulus funding. And it’s a good job.” He added, “It’s also very worthwhile research.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

UPDATE:  Just checked Recovery.gov and they claim that this project reported “0.43″ jobs created as a result of this award.  This may explain the inflated numbers of jobs “saved or created” by the Obama Stimulus plan.

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  • RedBeard

    Now we know how the Obama cabal came up with the text of that monstrous “health care” bill. Take the old probability scenario with an unlimited number of monkeys in a room with an unlimited number of typewriters, add an unlimited supply of cocaine, and voila!

    • stephaniet

      You’re probably right! Wow!

  • epaulzy

    I’m glad Coburn and McCain are bringing this to the publics attention but I’m sorry I still believe that McCain is part of the problem in D-C. He had a chance to stop this from happening and he did nothing but cowtow to the middle of the road in the 2008 election. As far as I’m concerned anything he does from here on out is tainted. Just like how he’s all the sudden concerned about illegal immigration in Arizona when it was just a couple of years ago he was championing a bill to give them amnesty. Sorry John you need to go along with about 104 of your senate pals.

    • Superheater

      Yeah, like he’s not going to go back to advocating open borders, cap and tax, restricting free speech after the election…for now, his coreless lackey Lindsey Graham is busy making cow eyes @ Kagan, and doing the dirty work of making the nomination “bipartisan”. JSM will go right back to his reliable unreliable self as soon as the good citizens of Arizona give him six more years. I’m not buying the indignant fiscal watchdog masquerade..its electoral bait and switch.

      • Doc Holliday

        You guys can do what you want, but railing against McCain as he moves further to the right (something he has been doing since Obama beat him) is an exercise in futility. We all know McCain is not a true conservative, he has played the game in DC and tried to be buddies with the lefty press. But it seems he is planning on retiring as a conservative, and it seems to everyone but the dead enders that he is going to wipe the floor with JD.

        Now you guys will probably be bashing McCain for being conservative? lol, until the primary and probably after. But ask yourself, could you put your energy to better uses for the conservative cause? We have an election to win in a few months, we need as many R’s in Congress as possible.

        there are many old school McCain haters on this site and almost all of them have moved on to better pursuits. My advice is to do likewise. Feel free to ignore said advice, heck, some times burning energy is healthy, even if it does not produce a result.

        • RedBeard

          If we had a viable conservative running against McCain, I would be on his bandwagon blowing the trumpet. But we don’t. McCain will win.

          Early on, I had high hopes for unseating McCain, but at this point, we need to hope he will retain the seat and not let it go to a Democrat.

          • Brian Darling

            Say what you will about Senator McCain, but he has been a leader in fighting earmarks and in exposing federal waste. McCain has a bill to abolish the appropriations committee and is the only member I have heard say that three parties rule in Washington, DC – “Repubicans, Democrats and Appropriators.” You can knock him on many issues he has had over the years with conservatives, but he is the undisputed leader in the Senate on fighting against the waste of the federal bureaucrats and the appropriators. Coburn has also been an excelent leader on this important issue.
            This report shows the problems with the federal government attempting to stimulate the economy. Even hard core Keynsians have to blush when they read some of the silly projects funded in the report.

          • tara2009

            Could this be for future use?mehpensacola,fl
            Actually I think Obama and his whole administration are monkeys Monkey see monkey do. Send the monkeys back to the jungle.mehpensacola,fl

        • epaulzy

          You’re right that it’s a waste of time railing against him. I guess my big concern is when the senate and house are taken back by conservatives in November that he’s going to want a chairmanship and I don’t think that helps the conservative cause. He’s proven unreliable at best when it comes to many things and I just don’t trust him. I guess that’s my big concern with McCain.

  • snowshooze

    Used to be that anything we got was 65% PLUS…now they are using the good stuff for monkeys.( Ya suuure, it is for the monkey study…) ( Ahhh…for the old days…) How does the study reflect reality if the monkeys have a USDA approved source? It presses it into the hypothetical where the monkeys are compared to people who do not have access to the government drug locker.
    Unfair!!! Monkeys on really good clean dope have little in common with people whom have to suffer product which has been stepped on so many times that it reeks of tennis shoes… lol
    Therefore, I disqualify the study on the grounds that it’s relevance is dubious granted the only decent distributor is not available to the general public.
    Ha.

  • davidsongirl

    addicted to cocaine:
    http://ouramericandream-mmb.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-home-for-cocaine-addicted-rats.html

    Davidson College professor Mark Smith received $67,000 to have a custom home built for his addicted rats.

    • snowshooze

      Yep, 5 kilos for the rats today. Yepyepyep5keys5keys5keysanweneedum nownownow….
      Meanwhile, the rats, back at the ranch…ae reclining on lounge chairs and worrking on crossword puzzles..

      • davidsongirl

        here: http://www.redstate.com/jeffdunetz/2010/03/09/hot-flashes-dead-bugs-and-cocaine-for-monkeys-even-more-stupid-stimulus-tricks/

        snowshooze: rofl!

  • http://imscattershot.wordpress.com rws197

    No amount of work will convince me McCain is suddenly NOT progressive. Anyway… THANK GOODNESS we’ll finally get to the bottom of Monkey Cocaine Addiction.

  • http://www.redstate.com/etcartman Kenny Solomon

    The setup is beyond transparent, but no, I gotta take a pass on this one.

    Oh c’mon, you know you want to.

    NO !….. Stop it…… You can’t make me.

    Look, the snark writes itself. You even said it a few times here.

    STOP IT !!…… I’m not touching this with a ten foot pole…… or a nine foot spoon.

    ;)

  • stephaniet

    Dear Lord. I think I about choked on my own uvula from laughter.

  • romans12n2

    Somebody please tell me they are at least requiring the researchers to submit to weekly drug testing.

    • stephaniet

      Because that would be logical. If there’s one thing this Congress and administration do not have, it’s a grasp of proper, sane logic. Sure, they have logic, but it’s circular, since they’re able to justify any stupidity they can concoct.

      The lack of proper logic, common sense, and skillful, accurate reasoning is making Sherlock Holmes spin in his (fictional) grave.

  • callawyn

    Their focusing on trivial wasteful make-work projects. Sad to say, this was the ‘good’ part of the stimulus bill.

    The real outrage, and the vast majority of the money, was spent on redistribution of wealth and bailouts of states. The day it passed, Obama was on TV proclaiming that over 1/3 of the bill was for ‘tax cuts’. What tax rate did they lower? Well, none, of course, because in ObamaSpeak “cutting taxes” = raising refundable tax credits. His % was about right, over 300 Billion in increased, or new, refundable tax credits. They also removed the requirement to work even part time to qualify for some of them (well, not technically, what they did was drop the annual income requirement to $0 from about $12,500).

    Number of new jobs created by paying people not to work = 0

    The hundreds of billions distributed to the states went mostly to the states in most need, Blue States of course, which was used mainly for paying debt owed on Medicaid and also to plug budget gaps – which means they didn’t have to fire public employees (mostly unionized) or deal in any meaningful way with their out of control spending and outrageous benefits packages to unionized public employees.

    Number of new jobs created by filling State budget holes = 0

    All we hear about when ppl complain about how wasteful the stimulus was is about the makework highway projects and these idiotic earmark type spending idiocies, but the $ figure for all of them combined is trivial compared to the redistribution and state bailout parts of the bill.

    Oh yeah, and if you really want something to outrage people over on the Stimulus bill, point out that they slipped the funding for “Comparative Effectiveness Research” into it, a year before Obamacare passed. This will be our equivalent of the UK’s government rationing board (at least they have the cojones to call things what they are). If you still don’t get it, this will be our “Death Panel”. So, technically, the D’s were right to deny that there were no death panels in Obamacare, they’d already created it in the stimulus bill.

  • Mike

    If we’ve gotta know how cocaine affects monkeys, why not just ask Robin Williams?

    Personal experience, plus he can communicate reasonably well with the scientists…

  • wannabeanncoulter

    Sorry, but we’ve been through this before: politicians drawing up lists of government-funded research involving monkeys, fruitflies, certain worm types, etc, etc.

    I’ve been involved in medical research for nearly 30 years, and I keep having to explain this over and over. Many (if not most) new medical breakthroughs involve studying chimps, rats, fruitflies, worms, etc. To lay people, that just seems silly, almost preposterous. But that is how the research is done.

    If you want to argue how economically “stimulative” it might be to continue a particular research study, be my guest. Just don’t laugh at the coked-up monkeys because they’re coked-up monkeys.

    • stephaniet

      I missed that one. Did they put them in a jar and make them fly in synchronized, counter-clockwise circles using certain musical chords?

      Sorry. I watched the Sherlock Holmes movie (the one with Robert Downey Jr.) recently. I can say one thing for Holmes, at least: he didn’t require millions and billions of dollars to perform his fruit fly experiments…

      • zeteo

        “one of the most commonly used model organisms in biology, including studies in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis and life history evolution because they are easy to take care of, breed quickly, and lay many eggs.”

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster

        Pretty much any biology major/ pre-med in this country has worked with these flies, at one point or another.

        Now I’m not saying that all this money is necessarily well-spent. But the projects, in themselves, are worthwhile. If it wasn’t for this kind of animal research, the hospitals would not be able to offer you and your family top-notch treatments the next time, God forbid, you are in need of it.

  • strikeeagle

    Because I haven’t heard him go to Winston-Salem and say: “This was a stupid idea.”

    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june09/othernews_03-18.html

  • http://www.twitter.com/RS_yoyo yoyo

    I can see why Congress and this administration would want to know how cocaine affects the behavior of monkeys. Seriously. No, SERIOUSLY.

    If the researchers can determine how monkeys will act and what affect cocaine has on their decision making processes, then they could report back to Congress their results, thus allowing Congress and this Administration the ability to determine how THEY will act and forecast their own decisions, based on that research.

    Cuz, we all know that the Dems have been acting like a bunch of megalomaniac, cocaine addled, paranoid-schizophrenic primates with delusions of grandeur.

    The whole lot of them.

    • tngal

      Yoyo, you forget that some of them, when not being coke sniffing monkees are behaving like sex crazed poodles. We really need someone adept at animal husbandry to decipher the nuances. Maybe another grant could buy another researcher to look into it.

      • stephaniet

        …also involves breeding. The very idea of breeding certain Congress members, even if the idea is put forth in jest, makes me want to go hurl chunks.

        However, under the umbrella of animal husbandry, do we get to call Pelosi a fat cow? Wait. I’ve already been doing that. Never mind…

        • tngal

          Create a whole new job. And then write the duties leaving out any references to breeding or procreating but leaving in specifics to bovines.

          • http://www.twitter.com/RS_yoyo yoyo

            Maybe it is nothing more than self-preservation. You know, save and save alike?

            Rat/Mouse and Weasles are the same thing, no? Both are rodents?

  • gfwarhol

    are the people who make the decisions as to where the money goes. I don’t find any of this the least bit amusing! This crap happens in all administrations, and I do not understand why it is tolerated.

  • Read Chesterton
  • pirate55

    Having been employed in urban law enforcement for over 36 years and having worked in Homicide and other Death Investigations from 1982 thru 1996, I conducted a study which establishes that the unlawful abuse of cocaine equals significant crime. Now, that said, where’s my money?

    • epaulzy

      Does that mean that crime in the research lab at Wake Forest has sky-rocketed since this study began?

      • pirate55

        …what happens when the supply runs out? Do the monkeys get to go thru rehab and who pays for it? Are they going to be required to get medical insurance? Which gangs get dibs on their Wake Forest turf and will there be an increase in gun violence before all is said and done? Maybe the lab can do a gun buyback program and send neighborhood organizers into the lab to stem the impending violence. If the monkeys are undocumented do we jail them or deport them? I’m sure the monkeys are going to be sure to tell us. Some already are.

  • ihateliberals

    back to every tax form filed each person would have approximately $5000 cash. when you consider there were 155 million tax returns filed that would have stimulated the economy a 100 times more than what the Obama plan did. Money in the hands of the individual is what keeps the economy thriving. It’s called the free market.

  • spiff

    How many members of Congress are going to participate in this study?
    Spiff

  • miroco

    It is possible to despise McCain, Goober, and still be glad they are helping Coburn. The reason the Dimocrit congress could not take the place of the monkeys was their prerequisite brain damage membership requirement kept messing up the curve. One of them got so high he almost told the truth. JD should be able to replace one monkey— you do not challenge a guy whose wife has a half a billion dollars when you have a low limit visa card.

  • ac7880

    Just study Obama and coacaine instead of monkeys and cocaine.

    Obama is already a self admitted former coke head. Let’s study in what ways that affected his mind.

  • Brian Darling

    Just checked Recovery.gov and they claim that this project reported “0.43″ jobs created as a result of this award. This may explain the inflated numbers of jobs “saved or created” by the Obama Stimulus plan.

  • http://theminorityreportblog.com Repair_Man_Jack

    Monkey See, Monkey Snort!

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