Hmmm. Not surprising, Sawzaw. How does a chief executive compel hundreds of thousands of different officials in thousands of different places to spend available funds on exactly the right stuff and not the wrong stuff? ;-) How would he do it? Go to each location and take charge personally? Hire a hand-picked staff of 100,000 totally trustworthy people to go all over the country and oversee how each packet of money is spent?

Naww...impossible.

Graft, corruption, favors to old friends, and sheer convenience is what happens to stimulus money in the real world, and a president is in fact pretty much helpless to do anything about that, because he can't personally control every link in the chain.

Emiliano Zapata, after becoming the new president of Mexico, discovered that his sincere efforts to reform the society were impossible to achieve, because the corruption of the entire governmental structure around him utterly confounded every order he gave and every law he passed.

He soon resigned in disgust and went back home to Morelos. He's the only man in the history of Mexico who freely and willingly resigned the presidency at the height of his power because he found that he couldn't achieve anything useful through it, due to almost universal corruption all around him.

If I were Obama, I would also resign in disgust and go home, knowing that there's nothing I can really do in that $ySStem. But he won't. He's much more a part of the established system than Zapata ever was.

They killed Zapata for having the nerve to walk away from ultimate power over issues of principle. Men that honest simply cannot be allowed to live in such a system once they attain a position of real influence.