Gee, I would have expected them to be much more attractive. They wouldn’t be worth the money or risk to me. Now I think even less of those secret service agents.
Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.
Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.
All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.
Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.
Actually, while I do think it’s a federal responsibility to keep an eye out for impactors, it’s not clear that it’s NASA’s job. It’s one of the things we need a Space Guard for.
And they wonder why conservatives and other sensible people don’t have faith in scientific institutions. As Glenn notes, all the government funding leads to corruption, and not just in the climate-change industrial complex.
I’m not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he’s ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about “disruption” and “innovation” what they usually mean is “opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be”. Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)
Emphasis mine. Jonah Goldberg, hit this guy with a cluebat.
I just got an email from Kim Kardashian that her celebrity stylists are going to pick out my shoes for me. I’m so excited that I haven’t even responded to her email yet. I may remain in that state of excitement for quite a while.