Some of you may recall Sen. Obama promising a New Deal to provide lots of make-work for slackers, becasue taxing the productive sector to spend money on many such things is really good for the economy. As I noted at the time, the Chosen One said: “we are going to spend billions of dollars on solar, wind, and biodiesel.” Yes. It’s criminal that we haven’t done that yet.

The details of how those billions would be spent were less amusing: “We will hire young people who don’t have a trade and give them a trade making homes more energy efficient, insulating homes, changing light bulbs, reducing our dependence on dirty power plants.” So, the idealistic, modern-day version of the “ask not what your country can do for you” consists of telling slackers that the government will provide windmill and lightbulb-changing jobs after graduation?

My colleague Myron Ebell just chuckled about a similarly themed e-mail sent out today by NRDC. OK, funny guys, laugh it up. but the truth is more hilarious than fiction.

Get a load of Dingell-Boucher’s global warming draft legislation . . . but do NOT be drinking milk or anything else you don’t want shooting out of inappropriate orifices when you read it. Sec. 727 Green Jobs Training, (C) Energy Efficiency Engineers Program.

It even offers:

‘(3) GRANTS.—The program under this subsection shall include grants from the Secretary to companies hiring and training energy efficiency engineers to match up to 50 percent of the salaries and apprenticeship training costs for those engineers. The grants shall be made available only upon the completion by the engineers of a minimum apprenticeship period of 2 years.

Man, this is gonna be fun.

And then really expensive and stupid.