Someone obvioulsy has been ignoring NBC, CBS, ABC, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, innumerable other newspapers too numerous to name them all, CNN… Shall I go on?

You ask where the left-world-view is located, try opening your eyes. You might even notice the only so-called right-world-view (which is actually a lot closer to true balanced than right-ist) is FNC.

The entire book is based on two premises:

1) The ends justify the means – example = if you want to get your neighbor to give up his SUV to stop global warming, its okay to mention to some fanatic kid who loves to play with matches and gasoline that your neighbor works for security for the IMF / World Bank and was bragging about beating up 3 protesters in Seattle.

2) Every one and every nation who has achieved wealth has abused it and it is someone else turn to be on top and for those who were on top to be forced into the lives of and service to the former poor people and nations.

Pork dollars, then, not only cause the contracts that are put out for the pork to be poorly run, but for committed projects to suffer problems as well. That is only the beginning of the fun in DoD, and yet this exact, same problem is replicated wherever there are pork dollars spent. The reason DoD gets pinged is it gets so much pork. Fiscal responsibility, then, would require denouncing ALL pork expenditures as they take away from the legitimate job of government employees to satisfy pet projects of Congress. That is a corrupting influence when government dollars get less than due diligent oversight, go to contractors in bed with Congresscritters, and the money then cycles out of the public coffers, wastefully, and into the cronies of politicians who kick some of that right back to the politician.

DoD also has a problem with large scale projects, and the Navy is a large abuser of this, but all services have it to a degree: Request For Changes in contracts. RFCs are the open season for contractors to request more money to run a contract because the government wants to change it, thus changing the level of effort for the contract. If it is Thursday it must be an RFC from the Navy! That is how you move from a $30 billion vessel to a $200 billion vessel in ‘wasteful’ spending: the contracts keep getting changed. Indeed contractors will ‘low-ball’ contracts with certain parts of the government and the very first thing they do on award is hand over a package of proposed RFC from the contractor side to remedy the problems in the contract from the government side. Amazing, no?

Mind you the Federal Acquisition Regulation and Defense FAR will take up two 3′ bookshelves, has monthly changes and addenda… which everyone involved must know. Meaning the Contracting Officer, their representatives and, of course, the contractor. Changing regulations and bureaucracy then require additional cost overhead, just as a part of doing business.

Now if you really want waste/fraud/abuse, how about an Education Dept. that, in all of its years of hanging around, hasn’t changed the one statistic that shocked America in 1958 when poor Johnny couldn’t read: the literacy rate for school age children. That has remained rock solide since then to this very day and ALL the spending at Education hasn’t changed it one iota. Sounds like a massive CF to me, where our parents got less money per student and learned to read just as well as children do today. That goes all the way back to one-room schoolhouses at the turn of the century, apparently. This is a problem that money is not fixing.

Dept. of Agriculture hands out billions in subsidies to large agri-business… why do they need support being such large businesses and all? Can’t they figure out how to farm with their billions in profits?

Since the stand up of the Dept. of Energy we have had multiple energy crises, increasing energy cost and no real breakthroughs. That doesn’t sound so hot to me.

So while you ping DoD, realize that the problems there are endemic to the whole of government and noticeable only due to the scale of DoD itself. We have some non-functioning parts of government that are NOT provided for in the Constitution and should really be axed from the federal venue. I’m with you on that, I really am. Plus all those regulations need to be pared down a bit… a chainsaw would do nicely.

So how about a 10 year sunset for every law, regulation and every Deptartment outside of those mandated by the Constitution? All of it, put up for re-vote on the last digit year it was signed into law. Including the Public Law where Congress last set its own size in 1911… that would by default go to the maximum allowed in the Constitution if Congress couldn’t find a way to work things. I’m all for that, really… we don’t have enough politicians to keep each other in check right now. Too much money for too few politicians.

That isn’t ‘conservative’ apparently. That is federalism under a representative democracy where government must justify what it does with our money and not get a free pass on a continual basis. In theory liberals would love this… until you start doing the math on the 1:30,000 bit. Apparently representative democracy, when properly practiced, isn’t supposed to be fast, efficient or neat, but representative and highly so. So lets hear it from Congress on exactly WHY the American people don’t need more representatives Upon the Hill and why we need very limited representative democracy to run the Republic. That should prove very entertaining to listen to conservatives and liberal argue about why that wouldn’t work… as the clock ticks… and expose the rift between the people and their government. That doesn’t start at DoD, but in Congress.

You confirmed the man’s thesis within the first lines you scribed. The rest of your long winded self indulgence(s) does little to endear and appears only to allow yourself the luxury “to talk only to hear your own head rattle.”

Chinese Navy?

You can’t dismiss Naval Aviation or what naval air power means to a marine on the ground or control of the sea lanes or force projection or anything like that and still say you favor a strong military. Sorry dude, I call BS.

As far as the USS Cole goes; Adapt, Overcome, and Improvise. So I say; let’s get the 22 and build another flattop to replace the two going out of commission shall we?

As far as the group of retired generals & admirals go? Well isn’t that just a testament to the free flow of ideas and concepts they enjoyed throughout their military careers? Good on ‘um, I say! I remember Adm. William J. Crowe once told the nation during the Clinton campaign that the M-1 tank was outdated by the tank killing Apache helicopter and that it should be scraped. Three wars later; wadda you think? But he was politicized don’t you see. Or stupid.

Hey? Is he on that list of yours?