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the marsupial master of miniscule rants about the republican attempts to bleedout the american government.

Again and again I have wondered what is going on with government spending. Congress keeps authorizing money to buy body armor, to up-armor vehicles, to hire Border Patrol agents, to reconstruct Iraq, etc., but the money isn’t being spent. Where is it and what’s going on?

There are tens of billions of dollars unaccounted for in this administration. You have parts of the Homeland Security Department that have run out of money on paper, but no one is sure if they are out of money or have “lost” it in accounting errors.

The whole government needs a major audit by an outside group to find out what in hell is going on. A billion dollars in $100 bills weighs approximately 2040 pounds. It’s not something that just gets lost.

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How about if a banker suggested that you pay a special fee so your money didn’t “disappear” from his bank?

The father of Catblogging highlights a new “service” offered by ChoicePoint, the incompetents whose allowed criminals to loot their databases.

Hmmm…maybe we could charge under extortion laws, or the RICO law. I wonder what Eliot Spitzer thinks? I hope they offer the service to a New Yorker.

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The BBC has this obituary of a man whose instruments people either love or hate.

Science Fiction films would have never been the same without his work.

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On Day to Day Madeleine Brand talked to Christian Science Monitor correspondent Dan Murphy, reporting from Baghdad about the Iraqi Constitution. During their conservation Ms. Brand asked if the Kurds and Shi’ia forced through a constitution, wouldn’t that start a civil war, to which Mr. Murphy responded [my paraphrase] – wake up and smell the cordite, the civil war is in progress.

Mr. Murphy apparently thinks because he is in Iraq with Iraqi sources, listening to the gunfire and explosions, he gets to tell people about the reality without clearing it with Karen Hughes.

I just heard [4PM, CDT] that the Kurds and Shi’ia sent a constitution to the parliament, but the deadline has been extended by three days for more work because of Sunni objections.

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Rubber Hose wonders why there isn’t more interest in the 400 bombs set off in Bangladesh.

The World Today on the BBC World Service has been reporting on it and posting things like Bangladesh bombs suspect arrested.

The interesting thing in the reporting is that the Bangladeshi government has been downplaying the problem of Muslim extremists in the country. This attitude has angered just about everyone following the controlled explosions.

The Islamic political parties are saying that the government can’t start attacking them having said there was no problem for years. The secular opposition party says that the government was too incompetent to deal with the problem so they ignored it.

It’s nice to know that we aren’t the country in the world with a government disconnected from reality.

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According to a US-UK scientific team Republican culture ‘confirmed’.

Interesting, if true.

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