To the editor:

With the primaries going on and the up-coming one in our state, I feel that the voting public should be thinking of taxes; where they go/how they are spent. So, let me show you how some of them are “wasted,” through an agency set up to help fight the war on terrorism, Homeland Security, run by a former governor with no military experience, yet paid approximately $270K per year for her very stupid direction.

Listed here are a few of our tax dollars at work.

• A Nebraska county with very few people persuaded Homeland Security that Al-Qaeda could use a ski boat to attack a dam and received $42,000 for diving gear, boats, and radios. Wow, nowhere near the coast.

• Another county received thousands of Homeland Security monies for cattle nose leads, halters, and electric prods, in case terrorists mounted warfare against cows.

• Police, in Glendale, Calif., feared that terrorists might be targeting DreamWorks Animation or the Disney creative campus due to their films on war, and received a grant to purchase (and they did) a nine-ton Bear Cat armored vehicle complete with a turret.

• North Pole, Alaska, and its 1,500 residents, has received more than $557,000 in rescue and communications equipment from a Homeland Security grant.

• West Virginia got $3,000 for ‘some kind’ of antiterrorist lapel pins?

• And now, the big one: the feds spent $1 billion on the so-called “Secure Border Initiative,” which promised to install/use cameras, radar, and hi-tech sensors to slow/stop the flow of illegal immigration from South of the Border. Then, after spending this money, they canceled the program. Well, with no transparency or balanced budget, where did the money go?

Then, this “Super Committee” was ‘selected’ to try and cut $1.2 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years and failed to do so. Duh!

And, our present sitting president could change this but, NO, he chooses to sit and dictate instead of lead. I know that Bush set up the Homeland Security, but Obama could shut it down.

Steven A. Bryant

Andalusia