Government of the people, by the people, for the people...

Following are some excerpts from NY Times articles. The first is on the problems with survivor benefits for spouses of those killed in Iraq. The second deals with the massive scale of mismanagement and fraud that accompanied the hurricane disaster relief efforts. A fine example of how, as the signs all say in big bold print at every public works project, YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK."

These were my husband's dying wishes: to take care of his children. You honor his wishes. That's his blood money."LAURA YOUNGBLOOD, the widow of a U.S. sailor killed in Iraq, on problems with his Navy death benefits.

For military widows, many of them young, stay-at-home mothers, the shock of losing a husband is often followed by the confounding task of untangling a collection of benefits from assorted bureaucracies.

While the process runs smoothly for many widows, for others it is characterized by lost files, long delays, an avalanche of paperwork, misinformation and gaps in the patchwork of laws governing survivor benefits.

Sometimes it is simply the Pentagon's massive bureaucracy that poses the problem. In other cases, laws exclude widows whose husbands died too early in the war or were killed in training rather than in combat. The result is that scores of families — it is impossible to know how many — lose out on money and benefits that they expected to receive or believed they were owed, say widows, advocates and legislators.

Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.

The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which this month estimated that perhaps as much as 21 percent of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been improperly distributed.