Yesterday was the 200th day since Obama signed the Recovery Act into law, and the White House is celebrating the occasion with another report from its Recovery Act czar, Vice President Joe Biden. You might remember Biden's last Recovery Act report, from the bill's 100 day anniversary, which consisted of a collection of news reports on Recovery Act projects. Pretty much everyone roundly panned the report as a PR move with little useful information, and one would hope that they took the criticism to heart.

Eyebrows were raised in June when ABC News wrote about an inquiry by the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice as to whether the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) was under the thumb of supervised and directed by the Treasury Secretary.

The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that as part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's effort to turn around the fight in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is planning to replace between 6,000 and 14,000 non-combat troops with contractors. This would allow the Army and Marines Corps to bring in more "trigger-pullers" without increasing the overall number of troops in theater, currently a contentious issue with the American public. With the military having experienced so many issues of waste, fraud, and abuse with contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, some analysts – including this one – are questioning whether increasing their numbers will not produce more problems than solutions, including the prospect of increasingly jeopardizing soldiers' safety.