As Queer As A $100 Bill

The U.S. Mint produced 1.1 billion $100 bills — or $110 billion worth — that are all riddled with errors tied to the bill’s new anti-counterfeiting measures, which the Treasury Department evidently couldn’t quite get right. The “3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell” are among the Benjamin’s new security detail, although big government is saying which new features are responsible for the queering of the currency. So the bills are being stored in a vault in Ft. Worth, where they’ll likely be destroyed since sorting through all of them to find the bad ones is too arduous a process. Which means the bills that were to be the first to feature Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s signature are DOA; instead the government is printing more of the old bills featuring George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s scrawl.