Live to your computer screen...It's a bird, it's a plane...Nah, just another half-bright plan by the Governor....

As if blogging wasn't enough to fill the web universe, a report out of The Monitor this morning reveals a plan by Gov. Perry to install live webcams along the Rio Grande River. "Gov. Rick Perry wants to install hundreds of cameras along the Rio Grande so Internet viewers can watch illegal crossings in real time and report them to officers on the border."

According to the report the cameras are priced at $5 million. No word though on what might happen if this type of move backfires. And who's stuck paying for it.

There's a web site, and for the life of me I can't remember the name of it, but it has to do with a ghost that supposedly haunts a library somewhere in the northeast United States. What the library did was install web cams so that millions of viewers in real time can sit in front of their monitors and wait. And hope. And wait. And...oh, geeez, was that...no. Then hope. Then wait some more. The basic idea is to capture the ghost by clicking on the webcam any time you think you see a flash of light, or a distinctive blur on the monitor. Now, if what you capture turns out to be a moth, or just a blip on the screen, hey no harm, no foul.

But, if you install webcams at a price of $5 million dollars with the overall plan to send law enforcement out to the scene of the crime at that very moment, well, it's not inconceivable to think that we're setting ourselves up for a lot of false alarms. A lot of pranksters out there with nothing else better to do than waste our law enforcement officers time. Or, we could be looking at overzealous viewers who call law enforcement officers on the "hunch" that they saw something "clear as day" make their way across the screen.

Come on, let's think this type of thing through before asking the legislature to spend money on something that may very well do nothing to stop the influx of drug smuggling, or human trafficking. What's next, setting up webcams in the brush country between San Manuel and Falfurrias to capture UFO's?