A Presidential visit means keeping your job

A Presidential visit can change many things… such as getting to work late while the Presidential motorcade stops rush hour traffic… or losing out on dining at a certain restaurant when the Prez suddenly decides to eat there.

Sometimes the change is much larger… like being able to keep your job.

Last week, 32 people were fired from high-paying positions at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. To them, all was lost and their worlds were put on its end.

That was until President Bush decided to visit the laboratory on Tuesday to promote his proposals for renewable energy (which, by the way, would require a good bit of new research by this very institution)

All of a sudden, the universe expanded, the planets aligned and the earth moved… and by that I mean someone in the White House deduced that the president might be coming to Colorado with a mixed message, talking about the promise of renewable energy while some of the very people working on it just got pink-slipped.

And so Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) announced that the thirty-two jobs that had been slashed are being restored immediately… if not sooner.

How were these thirty-two jobs, jobs that had been paid very high wages mind you, restored?

Easy… by shifting around “unused funding” from other Energy Department Accounts… at least that’ what Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told him. (Never mind that that raises a separate question of why there is any “unused funding” in the department in the first place while other programs promoting energy efficiency are seeing cuts in the president’s new budget, but that’s fodder for another post)

So there you have it… President Bush was personally responsible for lowering the Colorado unemployment rate by thirty-two this week. Good for you George… now if only you could do that for the rest of the country…