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