That runaway blimp is also running away with your tax dollars

Did you hear the one about the runaway blimp that attacked Pennsylvania? No, this really happened on this Wednesday afternoon in America, as anyone who wandered by TV set tuned to cable news or logged onto to Twitter or Facebook knows. Indeed, there were moments on Twitter when it seemed like all the runaway-blimp memes -- the Michelin Man or Chris Christie or Moby Dick or the loft airship dressed as a New York Met or whatever -- seemed destined to collide in cyberspace, a 21st Century version of the Hindenburg disaster. Oh, the virtual humanity!

I guess the good news is that the large unmanned Army surveillance blimp that broke loose from its mooring (haven't we all, at times?) in Maryland and then flew across a good chunk of the Keystone State didn't harm any people -- or cows -- when it finally came down in a rural area near Bloomsburg, Pa. The bad news is that it sliced through power lines and put as many as 30,000 people in the dark.

Oh, and it also probably sent $180 million of our tax dollars -- the cost of the errant blimp -- down the drain, unless someone knows the name of a decent blimp repair shop around these parts. And that's not the worst of it. It turns out that just last month, the Baltimore Sun wrote a remarkably prescient investigative story about this $2.7 billion (with a "b") military blimp program. and it sounds the biggest waste of government dollars since, well, a few dozen other wasteful military programs, but still...

The Army is testing giant high-tech blimps east of Baltimore to assess their ability to provide an early warning if the national capital area were attacked with cruise missiles, drones or other low-flying weapons.

But after 17 years of research and $2.7 billion spent by the Pentagon, the system known as JLENS doesn't work as envisioned. The 240-foot-long, milk-white blimps, visible for miles around, have been hobbled by defective software, vulnerability to bad weather and poor reliability.

In videos and news releases, Raytheon Co., the Pentagon's lead contractor for JLENS, has asserted that the system is "proven," "capable," "performing well right now" and "ready to deploy today."

But JLENS is a stark example of what defense specialists call a "zombie" program: costly, ineffectual and seemingly impossible to kill.

The Sun found that the JLENS program was plagued by software glitches, repeatedly flunked tests, was vulnerable to attack and struggled to detect the different between friendly aircraft and potential enemies. What's more, even if the high-tech system magically started working right. it would probably prove too costly for the government to deploy along our borders.

Other than that it was going pretty well.

Meanwhile, the runaway blimp program is getting wads of attention at the same time that Washington is passing a budget deal that squeezes popular domestic programs like Medicare and Social Security disability payments, so that we can build more of these dubious dirigible-like thingees. And this also happened while the Republican presidential candidates were getting ready to debate economic issues on CNBC -- with a guarantee that one of the issues that WON'T be talked about is how America has the most insanely expensive military on the plant. And apparently the most wasteful.