Oh, the budget will get amended to include them after the elections. Political donors are invested in the company from which the government buys the machines. First rule of an election year is to understand that anything said, promised or done in favor of the citizens is an attempt to buy their votes. Once the citizens have cast the votes bought by the politicians (foolishly believing anything a politician said), everything will resume it's normal path of securing more power for the government and funneling more money to politically-connected donors.

While I understand their reasons for doing this, it's not going to matter much. We've reached the point in technology where the answer to the Fermi Paradox will be paying us a visit. Technology has advanced far beyond our social evolution and will lead to a catastrophic event, either intentional or accidental, that will decimate or annihilate us. Looking at the big picture of human's existence on Earth, whatever time this might buy us won't matter much, so why bother.

While I agree that this is a popular item on the conservative side of things, I've not seen any mention of it being an "Obama" nanny-state issue, just nanny-state in general. The majority of people who get riled up over this would get riled up over nanny-state issues caused by either the right or left. Personally, I think it's reported more widely and derisively on the right side of things because the left is generally more accepting of higher levels of government involvement in people's lives.

The most frightening thing about this is the sheeple-ish aspect to it. I live in an earthquake zone and I sure as hell do not count on what the government predicts to determine my actions. It's as bad as people who expect the government to come in after a major disaster and take care of them. Hope you enjoy drinking your own piss. What does it say about the state of humanity that people working for the government say, "Nothing to see here, move along." and people just abandon any sense of personal responsilbity towards their own safety. I can only hope that governments start telling people to go jump off cliffs so we can weed those people out.

Just to play devil's advocate. If regulators had not kept AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile, AT&T would have been able to use the additional spectrum available to them from that merger to help solve this issue. In fact, this is one of the very issues AT&T was trying to solve by acquiring T-Mobile. Your likely response would be to mention what could happen if there was a lack of competition, and there are valid points there. However, that does not change the fact that regulators did just keep AT&T from doing something that was, among other things, intended to help correct this issue.

This might be a dup post. I posted as an AC mistakenly the first time: The operation under Bush was called "Wide Receiver", not "Gunrunner". It was a much smaller operation and included working with the Mexican government to capture the gun-walkers. Estimates are that 200 weapon got through untracked as a result of the Mexican government not properly intercepting the smugglers they were informed of (including when and where they crossed the border). Those failed interceptions caused a recommendation that the weapons no longer be allowed to go south across the border. This is opposed to the estimated 2000 weapons that F&F allowed to walk across with no attempt to track or involve the Mexican government in any way. Comparing the two operations is disingenuous. One's purpose was to allow the Mexican government to intercept and arrest the gun-walkers. The other...well, no one seems to be able to explain how it had any valid law-enforcement purpose for it. In fact, the whistleblowers said that was nothing they could do from a law-enformcement viewpoint once the weapons went across the border. I'm usually not a conspiracy-type of person, but I've come to believe that I have a pretty good idea what Obama meant when he told the Brady group that he was working "under the radar" on gun control.

"This was an unexpected outcome and is most unfortunate." Solyndra chief executive Brian Harrison said in a statement. "Regulatory and policy uncertainties" made it impossible to raise capital to quickly rescue the operation, he said. The same environmental and labor groups that champion the cause of green energy have created so much regulation that even a half-billion-dollar-subsidized, presidential-pet, green-energy company can't make it. * The title credit goes to Glenn Reynolds, but I thought it was appropriate.