Still not convinced that the trillion-dollar-plus giveaway was a bad idea? Every time you look around, it gets worse, as the Bush Administration keeps throwing more money onto the deficit heap. With the uppermost classes paying less than they were, that deficit -- and the interest that adds up on a daily basis -- falls to the rest of us, even as unemployment rises and wages fall. Now our fanciful boy-president isn't just throwing straws onto the camel's back; he's throwing a few ballistic missiles on there as well. Bush has ordered the Pentagon to come up with a rudimentary missile defense system within two years. Having no idea what the final price tag might be, Bush will ask his conservative cronies in Congress for ONE POINT FIVE BILLION DOLLARS (I hate to shout, but you don't seem to hear me otherwise) for this little booster shot.

That's on top of the EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR that has already been budgeted for Ronald Reagan's old science project. So Donald Rumsfeld strikes me as more than a bit Alzheimer's stricken when he calls the head-start missile defense program "better than nothing."

So you can see how I might have this wild idea that the Bush tax cut isn't really in anyone's best interest, unless they happen to have contributed a few hundred thousand dollars to the various George W. Bush campaigns over the years. If the "Star Wars" idea had its roots in real science, and not in whimsy (as the Union of Concerned Scientists contends), then maybe I wouldn't be bringing you this public service message in such loud terms. But we have absolutely no reason to believe that we can hit a missile with another missile, any more than our soldiers in combat are able to knock down a bullet with another bullet.

If you are dumb enough to bring up the Patriot missile, as in the Gulf War, then let's just remind everyone that the Scuds that Saddam was lobbing around (A) weren't going to hit anything anyway, and (B) were comprised of forty-year old technology. And the rate of success for the Patriot was something like one out of a hundred, and it wasn't based on ships bobbing around on the ocean, or on satellites tearing through space at twenty thousand miles an hour.

But never mind your useless arguments; there is quite simply no need whatsoever for a missile defense system in this day and age. If a legitimate threat, meaning one that would warrant that much of our money being spent, were present, we would know about it. Satellite photos have revealed such threats before; that, too, is forty-year old technology, and it has come an awful long way. Why are all those rather expensive cameras in orbit if not to detect such threats? They're not up there so we can read other people's newspapers (unless your name is Ashcroft or Poindexter).

What's more, with all those rather expensive Triton nuclear submarines constantly cruising around in the oceans, capable of popping up and delivering all manner of Hell to anyplace on Earth in six hours' time, wiping out potential threats is even easier for us than discovering them. Better yet, those aren't secret weapons; everyone knows about them, and they make for a fine deterrent, and have done so since before Reagan lost his mind somewhere in his first term. Are all of these rather expensive systems now obsolete? Is that why Bush wants to spend tens of billions of our dollars on a bunch of new toys that will themselves be obsolete the moment someone comes up with a faster missile than our computers were built to handle?

Meanwhile, we continue to gear up for an all-out war with Iraq, a country that is light years (since we're talking science fiction here anyway) from developing the kinds of weapons Bush is boondoggling about right now. Iran is a lot closer to having ballistic nuclear weapons than Iraq is, and North Korea is already there. But, for all the tough talk coming from the Oval Office about "preemptive strikes", we're not about to address those situations, not in any meaningful way. Besides, that kind of response doesn't fatten up anybody's daddy's stock portfolios.

Of course, the Congress will give King George any damn thing he wants, whether you give them the OK to do so or not. That's called arrogance. That's called malfeasance. That's called taxation without representation, which is what caused this country to be birthed in the first place. Keep in mind that the hemorrhage caused back then nearly killed our mother country, and that was over some rather inexpensive tea.

Meanwhile, the Feds have asked their fire managers to give back some of the overtime they were paid for fighting some of the largest forest fires ever seen last year, including the devastating Rodeo-Chediski fire here in Arizona. It seems that there's a bureaucratic "cap" on what a fire manager can make ($121,600 to be exact). Anything they were paid beyond that must be returned to the government by the end of this month, or it will start ringing up interest at four and a half percent. That's a fine way to say "Merry Christmas" to some of your most important employees.

Oh, I'm sorry; this is the government we're talking about" I meant to say HAPPY SPARKLE DAY.