If you want a good example of the sort of sheer government incompetence that is sure to mismanage this "bailout", try applying for a government grant. I did. I just spent the past three and a half hours solid trying to upload the application to the government grants website; grants.gov. I tried for a couple of hours in the afternoon and couldn't get it to work so at the advice of the grants.gov help desk I tried again this evening. Tried repeatedly, in fact, for those precious many hours. Since this involves inexhaustibly typing in passwords and then having to respond to little boxes it is not hard to lose your mind. The grant was due tonight by 11:59, which is why I was attempting with such vigor. Alas, I never could get it submitted and now I won't even have the pleasure of being rejected for it...

(could I have done it earlier? Do I only have myself to blame? Yes to the first question, but for the second I would have to say that it is the government's fault.)

Why the application can't be emailed in by the deadline I am not sure. It is easier to list stuff on ebay, and that has inumerable simultaneous transactions. Why the official U.S. government webpage for grants is unable to handle more than a few grant applications at one time I can't imagine either. Oh, yeah, now I remember--because the U.S. is, as Paul Krugman opined recently, a "banana republic with nukes" ( as well as wild imbalances between rich and poor, runaway public debt, high levels of corruption and instability, a dependence on imported manufactured good, and official government torture policies, to name a few key attributes).

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