In this week’s stupid news headlines, our theme is: Things that seemed like a good idea, but turned out to be a complete waste. Let’s take a look at the stupid stuff your tax money was frittered away on.

• You know those police sobriety checkpoints? Well, they aren’t catching drunk drivers. And it seems they aren’t even intended to. Danbury, Conn., set one up, and out of 1,000 cars it checked, caught one drunk driver. It did, however, write 29 tickets for a whole bunch of other stuff. And cops there actually caught six drunk drivers that same week without using a checkpoint!
• So far, $5.6 billion of your money has gone into Project Bioshield, which was supposed to protect us from germ attacks by creating new vaccines. Instead, all we got was a whole bunch of bureaucracy.
• “I’d like to be able to pick the terrorist out. I’d like a detector ‘tricorder’ for intent or evil. I’d like to know ahead of time that this person is planning to hurt other people with the use of IEDs,” Office of Naval Research chief scientist Starnes Walker told National Defense magazine. So the Navy wants to build a computer system which will tell where terrorists will strike next. “Maybe it could even predict politicians’ behavior, too,” writes Defense Tech, not at all impressed with the idea.
• And finally, President Bush made a “raft of controversial recess appointments” who will be able to serve for a year before the Senate can confirm or reject them. Most of them are cronies with little in the way of qualifications or experience. Among them is Julie Myers, “a niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard B. Myers and the wife of the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,” who will take over Immigration and Customs Enforcement.