The Drum Major Institute has an intriguing new website up- themiddleclass.org- where you can basically track legislation that matters to the "current and aspiring" middle class, and get a reliable perspective on what it's all about.

Its unveiling is a good opportunity to rundown a couple other really useful sites that help everyone -myself included- hold the government accountable.

• OpenCongress.Org- like Thomas, but understandable.
• OpenSecrets.Org- complete records of campaign donations.
• Congresspedia- a wiki site on Congress that anyone can update.
• And of course, OMB Watch's FedSpending.Org- to see what the end result of all this puttering around is.

In the Guardian, Greg Anrig has a comprehensive look at rightist ideology and how its been neither efficient nor effective in practice.

In a recent speech, former business consultant and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sang from the conservative movement's hymnal when he intoned: "Compared to free markets and free enterprises, government is slow to act, wasteful, duplicative, bureaucratic, inefficient, ineffective and unresponsive." That same mindset under the Bush administration impelled a massive increase in reliance on private contractors to provide goods and services that previously the government had been more directly responsible for producing and overseeing. The upshot has been far more egregious and pervasive wastefulness of taxpayer dollars than anything documented in the past.

The state department's contracting failures closely resemble those uncovered last month by the government accountability office (GAO) in its investigation of the department of homeland security's (DHS) outsourcing. The GAO, which scrutinized 117 DHS contracts, found that "the level of oversight provided did not always ensure accountability for decisions or the ability to judge whether the contractor was performing as required." Other studies have documented egregious wastefulness connected to post-Katrina government contracts with private providers, as well as the defence department's outsourcing to companies like Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons and the Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

As the problems with contracting get worse, the right's rhetoric on government gets even more supportive of contracting and the market and less supportive of government. The contradicting evidence provided by Blackwater and all the other contracting mishaps that Anrig documents is merely a test of the faithful, a way of sorting out the true believers from the casually observant. And Romney's quote shows that the true believers have increasing control over the Republican Party.

A cool new site called governmentisgood.com. Next time that uncle you and everyone else has goes off about "big government," tell him to visit it.

The federal government wastes a tremendous amount of money. I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

But no, it's not on mob-infested unions, lazy bureaucrats or degenerate poor people. Most of it is spent on everyday people.

For more, check out this testimony by CBO director Peter Orszag on performance budgeting for Medicare, Medicaid, and tax expenditures- the biggest money wasters of them all.

The Allard amendment that would automatically cut programs in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill should OMB hand down an "ineffective" PART rating was hammered back by the Senate this evening by a vote of 68-21.

Thanks to everyone who contacted Senators to urge them to vote against this dangerous policy.

The Senate is debating the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill today (and probably tomorrow), and Sen. Wayne Allard has introduced a disturbing amendment that would automatically cut the budget of any program that was given an "ineffective" PART rating by the Office of Management and Budget. Under Allard's amendment, any program that is listed as "ineffective" under the PART would be automatically cut by 10 percent, with the amount cut used to pay down the national debt. To see which programs would be cut, see this list of "ineffective" programs on the ExpectMore.gov website: programs rated ineffective. The list includes Even Start, the Perkins loan program, vocational education grants, Upward Bound, the Workforce Investment Act programs for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers and Youth, the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant, and the Healthy Community Access program, among others.

But there is a larger issue at play here than where you come down on these programs or the PART itself (and you should come down against it). Congress is granted the authority to appropriate public funds under the Constitution, not the executive branch. Enacting this amendment would transfer that authority to the executive branch, and more specifically to a number of unelected public employees whose sole job is to carry out the policy preferences of the president. Why would any Senator want to vote to give him or herself less power?

What's more, imagine the degree or manipulation of future PART scores for programs covered under this bill if this administration (or any future one) knew a rating of "ineffective" would bring an automatic 10 percent cut. Something tells me we would start to see a whole lot more "ineffective" ratings for programs in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services.

A vote on the amendment is likely later today or tomorrow morning. Please take 5 minutes to call your Senators offices to tell them to vote no on the Allard amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education bill.

Be sure to read a great op-ed by our own Matt Lewis in TomPaine.com today on larger lessons to be learned from the privatization of security services in Iraq. Here's the key passage:

Citizens who believe in government as a tool to advance the public interest ought to be concerned about excessive privatization of public services. Contractors like Blackwater USA are alienating would-be friends abroad and the public back home. Instead of rushing to privatize public services at every turn, our government should carefully review the services it currently oursources—keeping in mind the role of government should be to serve the public interest.