WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - Poland's agreement to host part of a U.S. missile shield for Europe should generate significant sales for American defense contractors, but critics say the whole effort amounts to a multibillion-dollar sham.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7740548

I find it funny, I used to want more space funding, and I still do, I just have a severe distaste for this new Republican fascination with it.

I admit, I've got a liberal lens over my view, but when Republicans like Bush and McCain talk about wanting men on Mars, it sounds like self aggrandizement, but when Kennedy talked about it, it sounded like an inspirational effort for our future.

Might be the banning of stem cell research, despise for public education, denial of the need to reduce carbon emissions, and support for creationism in schools that has me doubting their dedication to scientific exploration. Or maybe I'm just biased against "small government conservatives" who want to embark on hundred billion-dollar investments over decades that will largely go to defense contractors.

"the pentagon is not stupid."


11 billion
"The F-22 is arguably the Pentagon's most useless weapon system. Not only is it the world's most expensive fighter jet, but it was conceived in 1985 to fight a Soviet fighter jet that was never built. As wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo show, U.S. air superiority is not in doubt." -Think Progress

or

"the $81-billion submarine pushed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, presumably to fight al-Qaida’s navy." -Truthdig

"Of the 72 programs GAO assessed this year, none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes." - GAO report

Or how about...

"the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program estimated to be worth $300 billion in sales to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, the nation’s biggest defense contractor and most generous donor to lobbyists and politicians’ campaigns. The program to build what Lockheed boasts is “the most complex fighter ever built” is also the most expensive, with estimated acquisition costs having increased a whopping $55 billion in just the last three years.

Lockheed need not worry about future profits, because the procurement schedule on this troubled plane has been stretched out to the year 2034." -Truthdig again

Nah, the Pentagon wouldn't waste money on stupid things would they?

bah, i've been reading about this and similar acoustic non-lethal horseshyt for at least 20 years. It doesn't exist and never will. If it's non-damaging then it's Useless, if it Is damaging and lethal then it's no better than bullets or pepper cannons or other conventional systems.

This is just another defense contractors scheme to suck up billions in "research" funding.

good stuff.
lots of tasty morsels here for a libertarian to munch on.

>> ^blankfist:
> I wish neo-conservatism was more like conservatism.

fiscally, yeah. you, me, ron paul, and a massive majority of the sift, and the internet in general, clearly wish that. which means the younger fiscal conservatives. the ones whose opinions will actually matter in 10 years.

> I don't know when the Republican Party changed...

reagan.
for better, and worse, but undeniably pivotal. he changed things.

> ...but they've strayed so far from their original small government, non-interventionist platform.

no doubt. here's a quick outline of how i see some of the important bits.

basically, (fiscal conserv) republicans got sick of watching (fisc lib) democrats get so much mileage out of what they saw as often milking the middle class, with the false promise of helping the poor, with your tax money.
but often helping themselves first. the poor get some crumbs. that way, you'll always have more poor people around, to beg on behalf of.

but hey. the social safety net sells well.
getting up to debate it, and replying, "instead, i promise not to raise anyone's taxes, or coerce you with the comforting illusion of security, supposedly provided by a more powerful and centralized government."

no. we want smiling poor, soft pillows, and free beer.

that was a watershed where many republicans said fuck fiscal conservatism because otherwise we'll keep getting our asses kicked.
party fundraising is noticeably easier in the free beer tent.

ergo, neither party is fiscally conservative anymore.

so we'll take the same taxes, and instead of feeding the crumbs down to the bottom of the system, we'll feed them into the top of the system and let it just sorta...
trickle
down.
aka corporate welfare, and a very un-free market.

which reagan's own vp, ghw bush, referred to at the time as...
anyone? anyone?
voodoo economics.

oh, and reagan himself wasn't really a neo-con. but enough of his cabinet was, and many were still-embittered nixon aides. some with ties to large defense contractors, hence...

> They're like the nation-building spendthrifts of the Democratic Party but with a heavy heaping of religious arrogance thrown into the mix.

and that was the other seismic shift with reagan. prior to that, it was the democrats who were perceived to be god's party. because they wanted (or pretended) to help the poor.

> I think the two parties just need to fuck and get it over with.

party at my place in november.

> Then we can just call that party the DemoPublican Party and we'll all continue to lose.

one of many alternate scenarios i'm clinging to:
whichever party starts getting real about fiscal solvency, continues to enjoy the kind of response ron paul has been getting.
often across previously well-established party lines.

lines drawn by those 2 parties, neither of which existed in 1776.

lines neatly down the middle, of what i believe to be the government we clearly started with.
socially liberal.
fiscally conservative.

damn. that's so much more than i had intended to write, and i haven't even gotten to a 10th of what i wanted to say here. oh, hey. i've got one o them blogothingies, maybe i oughtta' use that again sometime soon...

it's totally working... check the gas prices.. check the oil stock prices... check the oil profits.... check the defense contractor profits....

guaranteed, everything is working as planned.

Do you honestly think that this is the first time in the history of our country that has happened.

The Pentagon provided military analysts to networks. I am quite sure the networks were aware that these people were coming from the Pentagon. Logic would dictate that is the Pentagon introduced you to an individual then said person would remain in contact with the Pentagon. A four star General, after 40 years in the service, is an extremely prized asset for any defense contractor and most of them enter into that role or as a lobbyist for special defense interest groups. Saying that these 75 "special pentagon agents" are something out of the ordinary is silly.

Saying that there was some secret propaganda machine at work seems a little tinfoil hat to me. Todays media is a biased, cash backed, forced opinion mess. Everything they put out has a hidden agenda.

If you think the military "protects free-speech" then you are extremely naive. I'm no damn hippie although I do live in the Bay Area and many of us in California have seen riot police and the military suppress free-speech through violence and police state on many occasions. America never wages war to protect free speech - they use the police and military to censor it in the homeland... I mean come on this is just common knowledge at this point in time. Did you guys not see the recent expose on the military psyops campaign that took place and was supported by all of the mainstream news media outlets? They aren't here to protect your free speech you so adamantly speak of.

Code Pink sucks and are usually really annoying (they did pie a KRON 4 newscaster once and thought that was hilarious) but so does the military industrial complex and I think that is essentially what they are protesting. The only reason I would support the military is that for many of the less fortunate it is their only way to better skills and education. Obviously, this needs to STOP. This country doesn't need to be spending most of the tax money on military to wage war so defense contractors can run away with fortunes ; we need that money going into education fucking NOW.

1981 - 1985 - Work progresses on the 'Portal' project. Several high ranking Fatah personnel choke to death on lamb chunks despite the intervention of their bodyguards.

1986 - Word reaches Aperture management that another defense contractor called Black Mesa is working on a similar portal technology. In response to this news, Aperture begins developing the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk operating system.

1996 - After a decade spent bringing the disk operating parts of GLaDOS to a state of more or less basic functionality, work begins on the Genetic Lifeform component.

Several Years Later - The untested AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day.

In many ways, the initial test goes well...

[END]

What was vetoed; $478.54 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services, including $29.65 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $400.98 billion for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

article about the veto of HR 3043 here; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/washington/14bush.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1195146411-VoigM1W9YTXlkrTbKxhUzg


The same day he vetoed this bill he signed the Defense Department's appropriations bill into law.

Which was $459 billion, including $73 billion in Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, an increase of $1.6 billion over this year. (search HR 5631 for details)

Good time to be a defense contractor!... not so good in health sciences, though.

This is of particular interest to me, as the defense contractor the hacker used to gain telephone access happens to be where I work. Lucky for him I wasn’t yet employed there (not on MY watch you don’t!)

mmm, phallic.
I'm so turned on, I just want to turn over billions to defense contractors.

Funny-the homepage for HAARP has gone through many iterations, these poor Raytheon guys keep having to change their stories, while sticking to the original framework of their public affairs campaign......"We are the largest defense contractor on the planet, studying the aurora! RIGHT??!

what is HAARP, do we know??? No-we know what the Department of the Navy(all their "experts") and, Raytheon-(largest defense contractor in the world) says, but like any other subject or this nature, the masses are forty years late in their own bullshit, and ill-equipped to clarify......

This fucking thing pumps gigawatts of microwaves, into the ionosphere, to, what they told the curious in the beginning, "Study the Aurora Borealis".....give me a fucking break...that is straight outta area 51 swamp-gas shit!!!

Now.....the technology is based on a lotta' Tesla's ideas...what happened to Tesla when he did not want to play ball with the "visionaries" who wanted to give him the most money??????...He said, in essence...."Fuck the Military"


....read his bio, and see the process of the discrediting, and subsequent humiliating, end.....

and hey buggy, I like Dean Stockwell.....Kim and Ben.....two greatest roles.....

and, is'nt Wikepedia some blog-based consortium of purple monkey dishwasher, esp., one would suspect, on subjects with sensitive military applications????

qm has an autotype function that magically inserts the GOP talking point of the day. But Autotype has not yet blamed Clinton. Must be a bug.

So I'll try specifics with the autotype program. qm - Do you support the idea of partitioning Iraq (advanced by the Shiites in the current Iraqi government) or are you more in line with the new Baker plan for withdrawal (cutting and walking). Or do you just prefer the current Cheney program (war and chaos without end so the defense contractors get theirs)?

Personally, the idea of partition is slowly growing on me, even though the Turks will be furious at the prospect of a Kurdish state.