Reuters has this to report about Afghanistan contracts: The United States has spent over $23 billion on reconstruction and development contracts in Afghanistan since 2002, and auditors say about $1 billion of this is waste, a U.S. senator said on Thursday.... McCaskill said the waste identified by auditors amounted to nearly one in six dollars spent on Afghan contracts so far. Right off the bat, I can see the numbers are wrong here. If a billion dollars is waste, and that waste amounts to "nearly one in six dollars," then the amount spent is nearly six billion dollars. Where does the $23 billion ...
Archive for December, 2009
What Do I Know?
Friday, December 18th, 2009‘Tis the Season – For Spending!
Friday, December 18th, 2009Lots of last minute surprises from the jerks in D.C.: Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill The House approved a $155 billion jobs bill: I guess the stimulus package wasn't enough to create jobs, so spend yourself further into debt, it's the American way! The House raised the debt ceiling by $290 billion to finance six more weeks of spending: A $12.1 trillion debt limit, really, how quaint! And $290 billion over six weeks? C'mon Big Daddy-O, that's not an allowance, it's a pittance! Well, that's $1.1 trillion spent, with another $445 billion, in just one day. Does anyone even notice anymore? Pelosi hasn't ...
An Expert’s Opinion
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009Shortly after I started this blog, I was going over google listings to see how it was faring, and I came across this article by one Frank Schaeffer: The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward -- there-is-no-global-warming -- rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled. While I somewhat agree on what he says about the Republican base, I don't consider myself part of that base - ...
The Fox is Guarding the Hen-house
Friday, December 4th, 2009From a research paper published by some Berkeley researchers: The Obama Administration is considering whether to change policy concerning the use of HTTP cookies on government websites. Currently, government officials require a “compelling need” to use persistent HTTP cookies, and must disclose their use in a privacy policy. In light of this we arbitrarily chose six government websites to determine whether Flash was being used to assign unique values to visitors. Of the 6 government sites we tested, 3 had Flash cookies. Three were set by whitehouse.gov, one of which was labeled, “userId.” Five of these sites used persistent HTTP cookies. Whitehouse.gov disclosed ...