More firepower!

I'm rapidly falling in love with Matt Tiabbi, who writes for Rolling Stone and is also published on AlterNet. His latest (here) can be summed up thusly:

We're spending over $360 million per plane to build a whole bunch of new fighter jets that are apparently plagued with problems. We're doing this because while our current fleet works fine other countries are catching up to us, mostly because we keep selling our tech to them. So we're slashing social programs, such as child welfare, all over so we can build these new planes and stay ahead of the evil terrorists, who obviously have been using fighter jets against us.

We're also selling this brand-new fighter-plane technology to the countries we're trying to stay ahead of.

Meanwhile, little children in Detroit rely on their underfunded schools not so much for an education (because there's no money for supplies or well-trained teachers) but for the required two-warm meals a day, because their mother doesn't have a degree and lost her job at the Ford plant, and therefore finds herself working for $5.25 an hour at Wal-Mart.

...I'd been feeling a bit homesick lately. That did the trick quite nicely.