Taxpayers pay for studies of concubinage, M*A*S*H, and Mother Goose

Government out of control: No, this is not about funding the military stupid. With a $16 trillion deficit; and a people so weak they have to borrow from China to pay for their government - the weaklings- what kind of leadership would let a man or woman go to work all day then tax them to pay for someone else to do a study on - get this - the background music of the movie M*A*S*H? If you told this to beings, say on another planet - one where they had some common sense - they wouldn’t believe you.

Think of this smarty pants: When you go to work today. the taxes that come out of your paycheck will go directly to someone much smarter than you who will get money to study “priests (example in bed right) and their concubines (example in bed left).” That should please you, you unselfish liberal, you!

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is funding over half a million dollars in summer stipends for scholars and teachers to examine a variety of projects, a large number of which range from the irrelevant to the bizarre.

Kalamazoo College received $6,000 in summer stipends to study “Priests and Concubines in England, 1375-1559.

”It will “examine both cultural perceptions of clerical concubinage and the lived experiences of priests, concubines, and their children in late medieval England.¨

At Ohio University, a professor used $6,000 for her scholastic inquest into romantic literature and suicide in Britain.

And the list rolls on: $6,000 for a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor to lead a project titled “Music in the Films of Robert Altman: From M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home Companion,¨ and another $6,000 was awarded to the University of Utah to lead a project titled, “The Mother Goose Translation Project.”

Though not a summer study, a grant to Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., may ironically provide the best example of misguided spending at NEH. Titled “Defining Moral Communities: Respect, Dignity, and the Reactive Attitudes,¨ the $50,400 project addresses our nation’s most pressing problem: the moral obligation to rein in the mounting debt and deficits by respecting the founding principles of a limited federal government.