Politics: Your Tax Dollars At Work

Do you suffer from chronically low blood pressure? Feel dizzy when you stand up or get out of bed too quickly?

Now, there's a cure that doesn't require trips to the (unaffordable) doctor, expensive (unaffordable) medication, or even a (unaffordable) health care plan! Yes, even as the economy, national and personal, swirls around the toilet bowl of the Bush years, you can safely raise your blood pressure while planning &mdash and possibly even ensuring &mdash that tropical vacation you've always longed for! A paradise of fully taxpayer-funded health care and regular meals with plenty of privacy awaits you at Guantanamo Bay!

What, you ask, does this selling of snake oil on our part entail? Simple. Your taxpayer dollars are making it possible for the spy agencies of America to spend lots and lots of time on &mdash MySpace, YouTube, and the blogosphere.
Nice job, huh? Spend the whole day surfing the net, get health care, benes, a pension &mdash all at the expense of the very same people you're (probably) spying on. Let's face it, al Qaeda or some other loony terrorists might smuggle an occasional video clip on to YouTube, or put up a blog or set up a MySpace page, but quite honestly? We think they're way too busy schlepping explosives about, drawing up plans for the next site or person to bomb, putting their recruits through their paces, et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam.

Mind you, the spy agencies are the same schmucks who want to set up a vast biometrics database that will cost $1 billion in taxpayer dollars (which if each of us got some of that sweet cash, we could afford, oh, maybe a half-caf decaf soy latte)?

"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.

We just hope this putz is not in any way related to the vast horde of other bushes who have been stealing the American public blind lo these forty years or so.

In the world's first large-scale, scientific study on how well face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The study found that the technology was able to match travelers' faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.

Nice to know, eh?

Mind you, these are the same dumb schmucks whose failure to cooperate with each other jeopardizes the very taxpayer whose pockets they're vacuuming.

Finally, here's a look at the FBI's IT system. It is to larf.

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