Now showing on WhiteHouse.gov: Cheesy mortgage ads

It's not an entirely rhetorical question. I don't visit WhiteHouse.gov regularly, but I went there this morning to see if I could find some information about an event they're putting on . . . and whoa. Imagine my excitement when I found I could enter my credit score and see if I qualify for a mortgage refinance! For all I know they've been doing this for awhile and I only just now noticed it, but it seems it would have stuck out before this. Tell me if you know.

Now there are lots of web sites that employ various types of online advertising to enhance their revenue, and this is one of them, so I'm not casting aspersions on these kinds of companies in general. I'm just wondering when government web sites decided they needed to jump in and start monetizing their sites, especially under an administration that doesn't exactly celebrate capitalism. You should know, however, that Brand Thunder is not universally loved, at least among Mozilla users:

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When I open Firefox for the first time I get a blank page. This is what I want, but when I open more tabs I get the 'BrandThunder' web page. How can I stop this? . . . If you don't have Personas Interactive or any Brand Thunder theme installed, but you are still seeing the new tab page, I apologize for that. It was an uninstall bug that is fixed on our latest version.

Anyhoo . . . now you can read ObamaCare "success stories" and tell Brand Thunder clients your credit score all on the same page. Pretty cool, huh? Once you find out your new ObamaCare premium you'll probably be thinking about refinancing because anything that helps your cash flow will pretty much have to be on the table. You could just call your bank, of course, but now that Dodd-Frank has put all the banks through the ringer, maybe the people who help to monetize WhiteHouse.gov have to be a viable option. Say, isn't this the sort of thing that Obama derides as "cut-rate" when you use it to get your health insurance? Oh well. A guy's gotta make a living, and you greedy capitalists keep resisting when he tries to "ask the wealthy to pay a little more," so he needs to get your money somehow.