It almost goes without saying that the Fed's primary job is to ensure a stable currency. Most of the time, that means preventing inflation (unanticipated inflation, to be more precise), but sometimes it means preventing deflation.
Currently, the Fed's lever of choice for accomplishing that goal is the target interest rate banks charge each other to meet the Fed's reserve requirements. A target of 5.25% has been the policy for more than a year, but it might change tomorrow (9/18) when the Fed meets again.
When I sample internet forum discussions about money and the Fed, the "money supply" is mentioned frequently, because many people still equate a growing money supply to growing inflation. What is almost never mentioned, however, is "money demand"—which is curious, because when the supply of money grows in tandem with the demand for money to support the real economy, inflation is unaffected. Not only that, but the demand for money is what the Fed is strongly influencing when it targets the interest rate to implement monetary policy. Supply and demand together are just as important for monetary analysis as for goods and services.
A fact of life is that targeting the interest rate means giving up control of the money supply. Conversely, if the policy were to target the money supply, it would mean giving up control of the interest rate (...and high interest rates of the early '80s, when the Fed was targeting the money supply, are a good example). Here are two simple illustrations showing what the Fed can control (red line) and cannot control (yellow circle), as the demand for money grows steadily, as it must when the real economy grows steadily.
So today, with the Fed targeting the interest rate, the level of the money supply is an outcome, not a control variable. It's a result of the demand for money and the price of money (i.e., the interest rate). The Fed's job isn't easy in any case; measuring the inflation rate and growth rate accurately is difficult, and measuring the money supply is even more difficult if not impossible. Bottom line: the Fed's ability to gauge true inflation rates and real growth rates are much more to the point than the money supply level.
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For further reading, here's a concise summary, Formulating Monetary Policy, by William F. Hummel.
With some suitable technology or chemistry to store hydrogen on-board, fuel cells could eventually replace the combustion engine that recharges the nickel-metal-hydride battery pack in hybrid-electric cars... If solar-electric power is used to extract hydrogen from water, there will be no more need for big central power plants and filling stations. We will decommission the nuclear power plants, shut down the strip mines, and scrap the offshore oil wells. Silicon and hydrogen will completely displace uranium and carbon.
The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others... He thinks there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities... The businessmen are just the opposite—every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has asked Congress for an increase in the federal debt ceiling as soon as possible, from $8.965 trillion to $9.82 trillion. That proposal leaves room for improvement; I'll explain why below. 
In the old days, when a community had a problem they didn't understand, they threw some more virgins in the volcano. Now, we're much more sophisticated. We throw jobs in the volcano of debt reduction. 
