Brian Gongol
Break out lots of tin foil -- nutty ideas and bad thinking were all the rage this week:
Britain decided to go for a national ID card -- even though there's really no justification for it. ID cards don't really make anyone safer. The only good to come of this is that the UK will get to show the US just how ineffective a national ID system would be. Yes, there are lots of Americans who want a national ID card.
Meantime, here in the US, the Federal government thinks it'll cost $9.5 billion to replace the New Orleans levee system -- that's $19,000 per pre-Katrina resident. That's nearly the annual budget of the state of Iowa...and it's money we just don't have. Where's the cash going to come from when we have a nationwide disaster like an influenza epidemic that requires massive amounts of cash? We're in trouble unless the government learns to start saying "No" sometimes.