Turning The Ballot Box Against Republicans

Source, please.

We need the media. If some of it is cowplop - don't use it and let the sponsors know. Ask Rush Limpbaugh or Glen Bork if it doesn't work.

Buying into the right wing meme that the "federal government is useless" has just about cost us our freedoms and financial security. Don't buy into the "media is all screwed up" meme, either. Faux Snews, most (MOST) rightwing blogs need to go, but not all media.

That coming from the guy who didn't provide one for his own little pie graph.

I see you found a wonderful portrait of Hawkeye, his basement "command post" is ... errrr ... creative and accurately lampooned.

Really? http://able2know.org/topic/267070-125#post-6060419

You already have the media and the news media. Who do you think owns the movie and tv industry. The very fact the movie "Truth" was even made should be proof of that.

What about "black" appropriations for both the military and intelligence and other security programs. I'd to see a complete budget for NSA, for example, or the Air Force.

How about a complete audit of govt spending? It would be interesting to see what is spent and where it is spent. Every program should be evaluated for it's success and failure according to what it's mission statement is. There is plenty of pork and waste to be cut across all levels of govt. Including the military and all social welfare programs.

I dont know how much there is but I saw a lot of waste while I was working for a contractor that feeds soldiers at JBLM in Tacoma. They get paid on a cost plus basis and they collect the food from Army Troop Issue Subsistence Activity or TISA....it was not uncommon to throw away more than half the food, it was never even served. There were times when I was working Warrior Forge in the summer that their would be a miscommunication about whether the soldiers were coming back for lunch, normally they did but sometimes they would be out training all day and would eat MRE's....more than once we cooked everything and then threw everything away. We were using WW2 buildings and could not chill and reheat the food if we wanted to. The contractor did not give a ****, they get paid what ever cost they had plus an overhead, and the Army did not seem to care too much either.

Also, most of the time too many DFAC's were being run by the contractor, who needed to get paid, because the officers wanted to use the army cooks for some other unfunded job. All they had to do was to claim that they did not have enough soldiers to operate the DFAC and it got put out on contract.

In the area in which I live its all right wing bs. Sometimes I think i'm the only liberal in the area. Almost all the articles start democrates are the spawn of the devil for the first 6 paragraphs and in the last one say by the way the first 5 paragraphs are lies knowing that the readers attention span is only good for three paragraphs.

Bullshit, my pie-graph has its source right where you can see it. You accepted it. What are you trying to hide?

Take Social security. Thats one of the only things on your graph that isn't funded by the budget - its been in the black and has been for over seventy year. The only tax money that goes to it is to replace money "borrowed "out of it to pay for things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Get Congresses hands out of the SS cookie jar.

I live in central Texas. I know about RW BS.

From today's news.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34703279

Thats chickenfeed:

US Turns $486 Million Afghan Air Fleet into $32,000 of Scrap Metal

(brand spanking new and never flown by the Afghanis.)

By Luis Martinez

Oct 9, 2014, 4:47 PM ET

/pd_g222_afghanistan_scrapped_kb_141009_12x5_1600.jpg
PHOTO: This image was included in a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force showing a G222 shredded for scrap, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 2014. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
This image was included in a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force showing a G222 shredded for scrap, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 2014.

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The U.S. has destroyed 16 cargo planes it purchased for almost half a billion dollars for the Afghan Air Force and sold the scrap metal for $32,000.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) is asking the Air Force why the fleet of G222 aircraft were turned into scrap metal this past August. They had sat idle for years on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport.

The remaining four G-222 aircraft are now in storage at the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany. No final decision has been made on their future.

In 2008, NATO purchased 20 of the Italian-made aircraft for $486 million in hopes that they could serve cargo and transit needs for Afghanistan’s new air force. But it quickly became apparent that the aircraft were not suited for the dusty conditions found in Afghanistan and required constant maintenance and spare parts.

According to a letter sent by SIGAR to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the G222 program was terminated in March 2013 “after sustained, serious performance, maintenance, and spare parts problems and the planes were grounded.”

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, wrote to Hagel that his office had been reviewing the purchase of the planes, but said he had recently been made aware that the aircraft “were turned over to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and have since been scrapped.”

In a separate letter to Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, Sopko wrote that the aircraft had been recently “towed to the far side of the airport and scrapped by the Defense Logistics Agency.”

“I was also informed that an Afghan construction company paid approximately 6 cents a pound for the scraped planes, which came to a total of $32,000, ”said Sopko.

Sopko said he was concerned that the American defense officials involved in the scrapping of the aircraft “may not have considered other possible alternatives in order to salvage taxpayer dollars."

According to Sopko’s office the aircraft never met expectations and only flew 234 of the 4,500 flight hours required from January to September 2012 because of constant maintenance issues and a lack of spare parts.

A defense spokesman said the planes were purchased “as an interim solution to meet the medium airlift needs of Afghanistan.”

Major Bradlee Avots confirmed that the aircraft at the airport in Kabul had been destroyed “to minimize impact on drawdown of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.” The American military force is currently drawing down from its current levels of 26,000 to a force of 9,800 that for the next two years will continue to advise and assist Afghanistan’s security forces.

Avots said that the DOD and the Air Force are still determining what to do with the remaining four aircraft including “screening for outside interest.” He noted that working in a wartime environment presents challenges “and we continually seek to improve our processes.”

Sopko is requesting that the Air Force provide all documents related to the decision to scrap the aircraft in Kabul.

New Air Force Planes Go Directly to 'Boneyard'

129 comments
Dayton Daily News | Oct 07, 2013

New cargo planes on order for the U.S. Air Force are being delivered straight into storage in the Arizona desert because the military has no use for them, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.

A dozen nearly new C-27J Spartans from Ohio and elsewhere have already been taken out of service and shipped to the so-called boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Five more are expected to be built by April 2014, all of which are headed to the boneyard unless another use for them is found.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 C-27J aircraft since 2007, according to purchasing officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Sixteen had been delivered by the end of September.

The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will, the newspaper found. A solicitation issued from Wright-Patterson in May sought vendors to build more C-27Js, citing Congressional language requiring the military to spend money budgeted for the planes, despite Pentagon protests.

Congress put the brakes on the expenditure, which was the right thing to do according to government watchers such as Mike O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute. He said the planned additional purchase would have been "simply wasting precious taxpayer money."

The military initally wanted the C-27J because it had unique capabilities, such as the ability to take off and land on less developed runways, according to Ethan Rosenkranz, national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. But when sequestration hit, the military realized the planes weren't a necessity, but instead a luxury it couldn't afford, he said.

"When they start discarding these programs, it's wasteful," he said.

O'Hanlon said their near-resurrection was largely due to parochialism.

"It's too bad, and a waste," he said. "I'm not sure the program was ever a white elephant, and yet given budget cuts I'm not sure it should be saved now."

National defense, or a jobs program?

Ohio's Senate delegation was among the most ardent defenders of the C-27J when a mission at Mansfield Air National Guard Base, and 800 jobs there, were dependent on it.

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and six other Democratic senators wrote a letter in 2011 urging the military to purchase up to 42 of the aircraft, saying too few planes "will weaken our national and homeland defense."

Then came sequestration, and a nearly trillion dollar cut to the Pentagon's projected spending over the next nine years. That will bring the military's budget down to roughly 2006-2007 levels, Rosenkranz said.

Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz testified before Congress last year that the military wanted to divest its C-27J fleet to come in line with budget cuts. He said the C-130 can do everything currently asked for and costs $213 million to fly over its 25-year lifespan. The C-27J, on the other hand, would cost $308 million per aircraft.

"In this fiscal environment it certainly caught our attention," Schwartz said.

That put the Mansfield base in peril, and Brown along with Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who in February 2012 called the aircraft "critically important," worked to save the C-27J.

But President Barack Obama, after making a campaign stop in Mansfield last year, promised to "find a mission" for the base. This led to eight C-130s being transferred to the base, giving it about 40 more full-time and 200 more part-time military positions. That also left it with the same mission it had prior to a cost-saving round of base closures in 2005.

Now the U.S. Senate is poised to strip the requirement that the Pentagon spend money on new planes from the 2014 defense budget, and Wright-Patterson officials are saying they were told to put a hold on purchasing. Ohio's senators are not opposing the change of plans.

"Sen. Brown is encouraged that the Air Force is looking for new opportunities to redeploy existing C-27J aircraft for use in the Forest Service and Coast Guard, and if requested by the appropriate agencies would support continued C-27J construction for homeland security needs," Brown spokesman Ben Famous told the Daily News.

Parked in the desert

When asked why the Air Force can't simply put the brakes on having the other five planes delivered, Air Force spokesman Darryl Mayer responded, "They are too near completion for a termination to be cost effective and other government agencies have requested the aircraft."

Military officials are working to find another user for the planes. In the meantime they will be kept operational by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, overseen by Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson. It was established near Tucson after World War II because the region's low rainfall, humidity and soil minimize deterioration and corrosion. Also, the soil is so hard that no tarmac is needed.

The sprawling desert complex currently stores more than 4,400 unused aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles from all branches of the military and NASA, with a total value of more than $35 billion.

"This aerospace fleet provides a unique savings account from which military units throughout the world may withdraw parts and aircraft," according to the base's website. "The government earns additional income by selling aircraft to our allies."

"It is anything but just a boneyard or a storage facility," said Ron Fry, Materiel Command spokesman. "They have a very robust mission to turn aircraft and equipment back into service."

Other unwanted projects kept

A Daily News investigation last year identified the C-27J as one of several weapons systems and programs the Pentagon wanted to cut but Congress budgeted billions of dollars for anyway.

Others included the M-1 Abrams tank and the Global Hawk drone, both of which were protected by Ohio lawmakers and linked to Ohio jobs, leading critics to call the moves the new face of pork barrel spending. Lawmakers said they believed the systems are needed for national defense.

Congress specifically forbade the military from sending Global Hawk drones to the boneyard, putting language in the defense authorization budget saying the military can't spend a dime to "retire, prepare to retire, or place in storage" a Global Hawk drone.

The C-27J is manufactured by Alenia North America -- a part of the Italian firm Finmeccanica Inc. -- and prime contractor L-3 Communications.

Finmeccanica and L-3 Communications both have multi-million dollar lobbying efforts and the two companies and their PACs spent more than $1 million on campaign contributions during last year's election cycle, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

POGO's Rosenkranz said lawmakers are partially driven to protect these programs both by campaign and lobbying money, and by the desire to save jobs in their districts with military spending.

"Clearly, money has a role to play in this, and clearly where these systems are manufactured, where they are based and located is very important," he said.
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U.S. Builds Afghan Air Base, But Where Are the Planes?

Wall Street Journal
By NATHAN HODGE
July 24, 2012
SHINDAND, Afghanistan

Shindand Air Base has an 8,000-foot runway, a gleaming new headquarters complex and a cadre of motivated Afghan pilot candidates.

Because of the way Washington operates, however, it lacks warplanes.

The budding Afghan air force was supposed to receive $355 million worth of planes custom-made for fighting guerrillas well ahead of the U.S. withdrawal in 2014. Equipped with machine guns, missiles and bombs, those reliable, rugged turboprop aircraft are cheaper to operate and easier to maintain than fighter jets.

The Afghans won't get the planes on time. The Air Force initially awarded a contract to a U.S. company to supply Brazilian-designed planes. But it canceled the contract after a Kansas-based plane maker filed suit to block it, and the Air Force decided the contract had insufficient documentation. The Kansas congressional delegation also lobbied hard against the Brazilian plane. The Air Force has started the bidding process again, and a new contract likely won't be awarded until next year.

Afghanistan is unlikely to gain an independent, fully functioning air force until around 2016 or 2017, two to three years after the U.S. pullout, said Air Force Brig. Gen. Timothy Ray, who heads the NATO air training command in Afghanistan.

"They have wasted the most precious commodity they have in combat, which is time," says Edward Timperlake, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot who served as a director of technology assessment at the Pentagon until 2009 and is now retired.

Problems with the Afghan warplanes add to a separate controversy over a $275 million fleet of U.S.-provided C-27A cargo planes that has remained grounded for months because of lack of maintenance and spare parts, information first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

At a meeting with President Hamid Karzai and security officials in late May, the Afghan military expressed "unease" over the slow pace of the air force's revival and asked for urgent talks with the U.S. and allies to tackle the issue, according to a presidential statement.

Obtaining these attack planes "is very important for us in order to support our infantry, the army on the ground," says Afghan Lt. Gen. Mohammad Dawran, chief of staff for the Afghan air force, in an interview. "We desperately need to intensify the capacity of our air force."

Air power is essential for policing Afghanistan, a mountainous land with forbidding terrain, harsh weather and few roads. Recent events have underscored its importance in quelling the insurgency. When the Taliban staged attacks in Kabul and across the country in April, Afghan security forces managed to end the assault thanks to U.S. air support.

The country's previous occupiers knew this well: As the Soviets withdrew in 1989, they left to the Afghans over 400 military aircraft, including over 200 Soviet-made fighter jets. Remnants of that defunct air force—rusting supersonic Su-22 attack planes, bullet-perforated Mi-6 heavy lift helicopters—now litter the boneyard of Shindand, the hub of the Afghan air force near the Iranian border.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Baqi, the top Afghan air force commander at Shindand, likes to bring young Afghan trainees here for a history lesson. The scrap heap, he says, is a reminder of "what a strong air force we had" before the base was battered by Afghanistan's civil war, and before its runway was cratered by U.S. bombs during the 2001 campaign to oust the Taliban.

"We don't want the same thing to happen to our new air force that happened to the last one," he says.

Across from the Shindand scrap heap these days, hundreds of Afghan construction workers in hard hats and reflective vests are putting the finishing touches on a headquarters facility for the Afghan air force. Concrete for aircraft parking spaces is freshly poured; dormitories for enlisted personnel are coated with canary-yellow paint; and spacious new aircraft hangars with curved roofs rise over the flight line.

U.S. Air Force Col. John Hokaj, until recently the commander of the advisory group that helps oversee the training of Afghan aviators, had signs placed in front of the construction site advertising it as the "home of the Afghan air force," a gesture to Afghanistan's sovereignty.

All told, the U.S. has spent nearly $300 million on upgrading the Shindand facilities. The base has a brand-new fleet of small fixed-wing aircraft: Six Cessna C-182T training planes and 12 Cessna C-208B short-haul transports, both propeller-driven aircraft painted in military gray with Afghan air force livery.

Young Afghan helicopter pilots are flying the MD-530F, high-performance training helicopters made by MD Helicopters Inc. of Mesa, Ariz. They eventually graduate to the Russian-made Mi-17, a workhorse transport chopper.

Shindand's training program, Gen. Baqi said, was on track to turn out a competent new group of pilots. Problem is these pilots will have no actual aircraft for close-air support missions once their training is completed.

"We have a commando unit here, we have a police garrison, we have district center police; whenever they need air support they ask us and we say, 'Oh, this is a training unit, we don't have any air support,' " the Afghan general lamented.

The U.S. Air Force was supposed to be remedying that situation by now. At the height of the Iraq war, as the conflict in Afghanistan simmered, the Air Force began studying options for "counterinsurgency" aircraft, light planes equipped with sensors and weapons that could provide affordable close-air support. One of the best-known options on the market was a Brazilian-made plane, the Super Tucano. The rugged fighter plane is flown by the militaries of Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Colombia, where it is used in counterinsurgency and drug-interdiction missions similar to those required by Afghanistan.

Sierra Nevada Corp., based in Sparks, Nev., joined with Brazil-based Embraer SA ERJ -1.93% in 2010 to offer the Super Tucano to the Air Force. Rival aircraft manufacturer Hawker Beechcraft Corp., based in Wichita, Kan., offered the AT-6, a modified version of a plane that the U.S. military currently operates as a basic trainer for Air Force and Navy pilots.

In 2009, Sen. Sam Brownback and Rep. Todd Tiahrt, both Republicans of Kansas, sent a letter to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates voicing "strong and unequivocal objection" to any possible deal between the U.S. and Brazil for the Pentagon to acquire the Super Tucanos as light-attack planes.

The following spring, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top commander in Afghanistan, sent an urgent request to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to acquire four Super Tucanos to provide extra air power to support Special Operations troops in Afghanistan.

The project stalled after lawmakers blocked a $44 million request for funding. The Kansas congressional delegation played a major role in stopping the funds, said Mr. Tiahrt, who left Congress last year after losing the Kansas GOP Senate primary.

The former Kansas representative said he was concerned the deal would give Embraer a leg up in any future Pentagon contest to buy light-attack planes. Mr. Tiahrt, who has worked as a consultant to Hawker Beechcraft and other U.S. aviation companies since leaving office, added that he and other lawmakers "wanted to give American workers a chance to compete for the tax dollars." Former Sen. Brownback, who is now governor of Kansas, declined to comment on the issue.

Despite such lobbying, the U.S. Air Force excluded the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 planes from running for the Afghan warplane contract in November 2011, effectively handing the deal to the U.S.-Brazilian consortium.

Hawker Beechcraft responded by lodging a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The GAO dismissed the protest in December. According to the GAO, the Air Force found "significant weaknesses" in Hawker Beechcraft's proposal that made its offer too risky. The Air Force, citing competitive sensitivity and litigation, hasn't given a detailed explanation of that decision. But proponents of the Embraer plane point to a core difference between the two aircraft: The Super Tucano is in service with many militaries, while the AT-6 is a modified version of a training plane that is untested as a combat aircraft. Hawker counters that the Super Tucano is the riskier choice, because the AT-6 is based on a plane that is already used by the U.S. military and has an existing training and parts-supply base.

Last December, the service awarded a contract worth $355 million to Sierra Nevada for 20 Super Tucanos to the Sierra Nevada/Embraer team. Hawker Beechcraft then filed suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to stop the Air Force from moving forward with the contract. In the suit, Hawker argued it was improperly excluded from the contest. "It was a flawed process," said Bill Boisture, the chairman of Hawker and the head of its Hawker Beechcraft Defense Co. subsidiary.

In late February, the U.S. Air Force moved to cancel the contract for Super Tucanos and restart the contest. In a statement, the service said that top procurement officials were "not satisfied with the documentation" in the original round of bidding. Both Hawker Beechcraft and the Sierra Nevada/Embraer team are vying for the contract the Air Force now expects to award early next year.

Sierra Nevada subsequently sued the Air Force to reinstate the December contract. "We do think that we won on technical merits, we do think we have the only solution that's out there," said Taco Gilbert, vice president of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance business development at Sierra Nevada.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said the cancellation of the original contract for the light-attack planes "was profoundly disappointing" for the service. "We know our Afghan partners need this capability, and we restarted the acquisition as quickly as we could," he said in a statement.

For both Embraer and Hawker, the stakes of winning the contract are high. For Embraer, a win would provide an entry into the U.S. defense market, the largest in the world. For Hawker Beechcraft, which filed for bankruptcy protection in early May in the midst of the restarted competition, a contract would keep production lines open.

In a new twist, the company recently disclosed discussions with a Chinese firm, Superior Aviation Beijing Co., over the sale of most of its businesses, but Hawker said a potential transaction with Superior wouldn't include its military aircraft segment.

The procurement delays represent another setback for the U.S. Air Force, which saw its reputation suffer during a decadelong fight over a multibillion-dollar contest to build a fleet of aerial refueling tankers. That competition, which pitted Boeing Co. BA -1.21% against the U.S.-incorporated unit of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., EAD +0.48% or EADS, became one of the most politicized Pentagon acquisition projects in recent years. Boeing eventually won the tanker order in 2011, but only after the collapse of a scandal-tainted lease deal and a successful protest of a contract award to EADS.

"The whole Washington environment for source selection is polluted, is toxic," says retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tome Walters, former head of the Pentagon agency that oversees foreign military sales.

Big-ticket weapons deals such as the Afghan air force contract have become "a life or death issue" for many defense firms, leading to protests and litigation that stall delivery, he added. "There is no downside, there's no penalty for filing a protest. In an era of a decreasing number of contracts, it's taken as almost a given that the losers are going to protest."

In Shindand, meanwhile, Afghan pilot candidates—who include three young women—are hoping that the promised warplanes will arrive here one day. Like young pilots in any air force, they are dreaming of speed.

Second Lt. Emal Azizi and 2nd Lt. Walid Noori said they initially expected to be assigned to transport planes such as the C-208B or the C-27A once they graduate this year. Both, however, said they yearn to fly combat missions against the Taliban.

"In Afghanistan most war is like a guerrilla war, so we need fighters," said Lt. Azizi. Lt. Noori added with a grin: "I want to be a fighter pilot."

Bumper Sticker Moment: "How Can They Stand Up To Putin If They Can't Even Handle CNBC Moderators?"



Exactly so. We're supposed to believe that these bozos will put Putin in his place when they can't even take a softball question from a simpering toady like John Harwood?