Free Talk Live

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its final major audit over the weekend, delivering quite a bottom line: it cannot say how much U.S taxpayers lost while trying to rebuild Iraq, but it was a lot. The U.S. government Iraq relief and reconstruction program had serious internal control weaknesses that put billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of fraud, waste, and abuse. The precise amount lost to fraud and waste may never be known, but SIGIR’s audits and investigations have demonstrated that the amount could be substantial.

Photographer Zach Hyman snaps pictures of naked woman inside the Metropolitan Museum. Kathleen Neill, 26, was busted yesterday among the other classic nudes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for posing naked.

What do robotic squirrels, menus for Martian meals and a musical about climate change have in common? They've all been made possible with taxpayer assistance, according to the latest survey of government waste put out by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Known simply as the Waste Book, the report is a watchlist of eye-opening expenditures, which Coburn blames on a "let them eat caviar" attitude in Washington -- at a time when "23 million of our fellow Americans do not have good jobs," Coburn notes.

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Not sure I understand what is going on here, it seems like there is a lot more to the story. However, the military and government in general like to portray that they are so effective and good stewards of our tax money, are they?

1 in 20 East Germans were informants. "The Lives of Others" is a sad and unsettling movie about what results when Soviet statism is executed with German efficiency: The Stasi. Funny how much of East German communist assets like this museum were homesteaded, and now the "kindler, gentler" western state wants to seize it all over again. Never again!

The Albuquerque police chief is using Twitter to call out delinquent judges. Not a huge story, but I always like stories like this. He's calling it "a huge waste of taxpayer money." I don't think Twitter allows enough characters for him to include the complete list of waste.

Sheep were crossed with a jellyfish protein in Uruguay to make glow in the dark sheep! This was funded by a non-profit. Uruguay has a government almost identical to our own, so I would say that the non-profit is probably publicly funded. What I think is most important in this article is that it challenges many USA Americans' ethnocentric view of education and science in the Western/Northern world versus places found in the southern hemisphere. One commenter brings up the possibility of easier to spot teenagers, but could this technology be used against people? For people?

"There are no jobs!" That is what people told me outside a government "jobs center" in New York City. But, 4 researchers quickly found 40 job openings. So what goes on at these government "job centers?" I asked a college intern, to find out. Her conclusions:
--It's easier to get welfare than to work.
--The government would rather sign me up for welfare than help me find work.
--America has taxpayer-funded bureaucracies that encourage people to be dependent. They incentivize people to take "free stuff," not to take initiative.