The federal government is paying $150K per year to keep two retired police detectives glued to sexually explicit websites—all day long, every day. Good lord, couldn’t they get volunteers?

Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

It gets worse: the program is overseen by Morality in Media, a conservative religious organization founded in 1962 to “rid the world of pornography.” Considering Morality in Media’s track record—please note that MIM was founded before Deepthroat, before Debbie did Dallas, before Powertool, before the Jeff Stryker dildo, before phone sex, before the Internet, before webcams, before Pony took over the Cha Cha’s old space.—it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this program is an ineffectual joke and a waste of public money.

In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.

The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero.

So… 150K per year, tens of thousands of referrals and—thankfully—not one prosecution. The program was created by an earmark crammed into the federal budget by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, a Republican of Virginia. Considering the number of Republicans that have recently been spotted legislating against their own sexual interests (see Foley, Mark; Vitter, David; Allen, Bob), I’d say odds are good that Mr. Wolf devours internet porn in his spare time.