What, you thought they shut this program down because Congress told them to? How naïve can some people be? Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra was in charge of the program. For those who have forgotten, Iran-Contra was a scheme to fund a program that Congress told the executive to shut down, and refused to fund.

Steve Bates of Yellow Doggerel Democrat writes about military credit searches and wiretaps, and people wonder what’s going on?

Charles at the Fulcrum thinks that the Shrubbery may be stealing because $5.6 billion for the deployment of 21,500 troops is totally out of line. Consider the fact that most of this increase is achieved by extending deployments and deploying people early, not with troops from outside the system. Most of these costs should already be accounted for in the current appropriations.
They are still gathering information and plugging it into their TIA project. Since Congress refused to fund it and told them to stop it, I think for some time the Pentagon has been moving money out of other accounts to pay for it.

Congress funded body and vehicle armor, but it never showed up. Congress funded the utility bills of military bases, but the bases haven’t paid them. We have depots filled with vehicles that need to be fixed, but there is no money to do it.

I don’t have the slightest doubt that a real audit of any of the current departments of this administration would reveal multiple sets of books, or no recognizable accounting system in place. None of their budget numbers have any significance or meaning.

A number of people have said they are running the government like a business – Enron. We should be so lucky. Enron was creative, but there were books that you could use to figure out what they were doing. I don’t think these people actually know where their money is, or where it is going.

Six years of Republican Congresses have been involved in one of the biggest frauds in history, and it doesn’t make much difference if it was caused by criminal intent or incompetence.

The next President needs Eliot Spitzer for Attorney General. He knows how to prosecute these cases and could get some of our money back.

If the Iraqi “Justice” ministry is going to insist on being medieval in their sentences they might avoid a lot of world condemnation if they would just go out to the ‘Net and look at the the Wikipedia article on Hanging which includes a link to the Official Table of Drops prepared by the UK Home Office.

I’m sure people thought I was just being sarcastic when I said there was a manual on how to do this sort of thing, but torturer and executioner have been civil service positions since the very beginnings of the system in China. Wherever you have civil servants, you have rules and regulations.

First Draft has a new home at TypePad: first-draft-blog.typepad.com.

Their old host blames First Draft for the outages that they have been experiencing, where as a competent tech would have noticed the recent surge in spam clogging the “tubes.” There were “irreconcilable differences”, hence the move.

A hint to hosting companies – you sell bandwidth, so it behooves you to have a supply available. If you don’t have the resources and expertise to operate your business become an American Enterprise Institute fellow, because everyone else expects you to actually be able to do your job.

Hosting blogs can be a lucrative business if they don’t take off and become popular.  If you host them, you need to read them and spot the ones that getting popular.  Your server software provides the statistics to spot the trends, so you shouldn’t be blind-sided.