They are: “success, culture, media, games, social norms, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus.”

I kid you not!

But that’s only  if your are applying for a grant from the US government. I have blogged some time ago about how the new republican majority in the US has launched an Internet site “YouCut”, where citizens can propose targets for cutting government spending.

In the video, Republican Congressman Adrian Smith calls for a Citizen Review of Government Agencies, and in particular asks people to identify wasteful spending at the The National Science Foundation (NSF). His instructions are to look for questionable grants and to submit their award numbers to his office. He also gave examples of “questionable projects” that his office had uncovered. Both are related to the mathematical sciences (statistical and computer sciences), and have “questionable words” in their titles: “soccer” in one and “video games” in another.

According to “The Black Hole”,  who refers to an article from Live Science (that we could not access) “Republicans Call for Public Scrutiny of NSF grants”, Republican Majority Leader-Elect Eric Cantor (R-VA) also gives instructions on his website on how to search the NSF database  for “questionable projects”. The trick is to start searching for terms such as those listed above. No explanation is given on why these particular terms were chosen.

Now, having politicians go through a list of titles of funded grants, take them out of context and cry for taxpayers’ money, is not foreign to the Canadian landscape.  Do you remember our own Randy White?

As reminded by the Black Box, “Fair and balanced” Fox news are often in this business.