Your tax dollars at work:  Our U.S. government has no problem spending a trillion dollars on an optional war in Iraq.  Or spending many trillions bailing out rich Wall Street bankers to reward their greed and avarice.  But when it comes to deploying a FREE, open-source Web browser on government computers?  Now you’ve really gone too far, man!

The U.S. State Department currently uses Microsoft Internet Explorer as its one and only Web browser.  At a town hall meeting led by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, a new State Department employee asked Clinton to “please let the staff use” the Mozilla Firefox browser.  The employee pointed out that Firefox had been “approved for the entire intelligence community,” and that it’s a “much safer program.”  The rookie’s question was met with a chorus of applause from the audience.

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What, Congress hasn’t plunged us deep enough in debt?  They won’t be happy until our future is completely mortgaged and the Chinese own America?

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he would consider supporting a second economic stimulus bill, but that people need to give the first package more time to work.  There have been many complaints that the $800 billion stimulus bill passed in February (without a single Republican vote) has failed to boost the U.S. economy.

While promoting the stimulus bill, the Obama administration said money would be paid out quickly and would save or create 750,000 jobs by early August.  Without the bill, administration officials argued that unemployment could top 9 percent by 2010.

Well, here we are in July 2009, and less than 10% of the stimulus funds have been allocated thus far, and over 2.3 million jobs have been lost since the bill was passed, resulting in a 9.5% unemployment rate.  Thus, the bill has failed terribly on both counts.  Does that mean the money was wasted?

“Certainly, I don’t think we can make a determination as to whether or not that’s been successful — certainly as successful as we want it to be, certainly not as quickly as we want it to be,” Hoyer said.  But he added that job losses have “substantially decreased” in recent months, and that the stimulus bill has prevented many people from being laid off from their jobs.  “In fact, we believe it is working,” he said.

Where’s the proof?

Story at CNN

Walt Handelsman has produced a catchy musical animation that describes the global recession and government bailouts in a parody of West Side Story.

Wor$t $lide $tory: A Musical Revue

Today I received this email:

I cannot believe how much time CNN has devoted to Michael Jackson…so glad there is Fox News as an alternative.

No one seems to be adequately covering the "Cap & Trade Bill." Scary that there is a provision in the bill that if jobs are lost, Social Security and Medicare can dip into the General Fund to take monies that are lost as the result of lost jobs. Guess Congress realizes the bill could be a disaster…The provision that would allow the government to come in and do an energy audit if you are selling your home, and require that you retrofit your home to conform to global energy requirements, sure smacks of more big Government on the way…interfering in our lives. It was not real comforting that an Obama official that the Administration does not intend to do that. He pointed out the language was the "Government could…"

There is also a provision that would double the low income credit for single folks, and it will adjust for inflation every year. Did your representative read any/or all of the 1500 pages. Doubt if mine did. So scary these days what Congress is doing. Thank God their on vacation for awhile…

Hang onto your wallets, it’s going to be a wild ride…

My response:

Social engineering through governmental policy is dicey at best, disaster at worst. Heavy federal subsidies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a Fed-suppressed prime lending rate resulted in a surge of sub-prime loans to unqualified buyers and helped bring about the largest global financial collapse since the Great Depression. Years of tax cuts to the wealthy during two expensive wars helped turn the largest budget surplus in U.S. history into the largest deficit (in actual dollars). I could go on and on…

But that said, if our government is going to use its heavy hand to enact social change, then pushing us toward clean energy and weaning us from expensive dirty oil sold by totalitarian countries that want us dead is one of our government’s better policies. But leave it to Congress to turn a good idea into a smelly pile by producing an expensive, bloated piece of legislation that is so unwieldy that nobody has even bothered to read the entire bill.

As Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others." In spite of all our problems, we still live in the greatest country on Earth.

God Bless America on our 233rd birthday. Happy 4th of July everyone!