So here's a twist for you all out there: I agree with the Prez. This port deal isn't really a big deal. It won't compromise our security any more than our security already is. And I'm not just saying this because I live in a desert with no port within a thousand or so miles.

This is a watershed moment for us. Maybe, as the Prez said about Iraq recently, a moment of choosing. Even though I'm not sure what the Prez is talking about when he says "choosing," I will echo his nonchalance about the whole deal.

We could, right now, choose to stop being idiots.

We could, right now, realize that spending billions and trillions of dollars fighting everyone in the world, skimming money off for a department (Homeland Security) that does nothing for us (and can't even decide who to blame when they continually screw up), and promoting useless cronies into positions of responsibility is doing us no good.

The Prez presented a budget that increases money for defense and security, even though everything we've done in the last four plus years since (never forget) 9/11 in this area has pretty much been a miserable failure. He decided, instead, to cut domestic spending.

Decrease spending to help the poverty stricken, the elderly and veterans who will have to do with fewer health benefits because we want to "protect" our national values by exporting our money. Decrease spending on education. Decrease spending on our own infrastructure so we can blow up other countries.

This port deal, and the administrations' protests against everyone else's protests, just points to the biggest problem we have in this country. Which is we're spending money on the wrong things.

I'd like our country to spend money to rebuild our own country.

I'd like to know my grandmother can still get meals on wheels, because I know she doesn't want to have to cook or try to drive at 89.

I'd like to help people spread out all over the country as a result of natural disasters on the Gulf Coast.

I'd like to ensure the new New Orleans is still a diversified and cultural mecca when it gets rebuilt.

I'd like to do something about the 46 million and counting US Citizens (including myself) who have no health insurance.

I'd like to raise the minimum wage, so low level jobs aren't so much like old time indentured servitude.

I'd like to pay less for gas. I'd like to NOT have to take off my shoes to get into an airplane. I'd like to know people around the world have kind feelings toward my country, rather than looking at us like some kind of idiot bully who must try and defend every little decision it makes to the rest of the world.

And the best way to do that is to cut defense and military spending. Cut any future nuclear weapon programs (no one else should have nuclear weapons, but we want to make new ones?) and missile defense systems. And completely dismantle this boondoggle of government bureaucracy called Homeland Security.

It is obvious, especially after the extreme failure at the wet and windy hands of Hurricane Katrina, that creating the Department of Homeland Security did nothing except add more levels of bureaucracy to an already way too layered system of government agencies. They are pointing the finger at everyone, but the real problem is no one actually gave them a mission. No one explained they were actually supposed to do something when bad stuff happened inside our borders. They thought, I guess, that they were useless ambassadors to the people of America from the government of America.

Ambassadors, as we all know, are cush jobs given to people who give and/or raise tons of money for elections. They are dispensers of bullshit to other countries. Well, we already get enough bullshit from our own government, we didn't need another layer of bullshit to be created. Because, I have to say, this department stinks with it.

So let the port deal go through. Let's get back to priorities. I'm not saying isolationism, I'm saying let's rebuild our house before we try to make other countries in our own fractured image.

Because you catch more flies with honey.

And because it's completely obvious we suck at "creating a better world" within other countries borders.

Matt Worley would like to remind the federal government Lent is coming up. They could give up stupidity, y'know, just to see how it feels.