WASHINGTON (AP) – Weary after a year of partisan bickering, lawmakers tried Monday to wrap up a sprawling $1 trillion-plus spending bill that chips away at military and environmental spending but denies conservatives many of the policy changes they wanted on social issues, government regulations and health care.

The measure implements this summer’s hard-fought budget pact between President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. That deal essentially freezes agency budgets, on average, at levels for the recently-completed budget year that were approved back in April.

Drafted behind closed doors, the proposed bill would pay for the war in Afghanistan but give the Pentagon just a 1 percent boost in annual spending, while the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would be cut by 3.5 percent.

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9/11…A tragic day when Islamic terrorists from Al Qaeda hijacked commercial jets and used them to destroy the WTC, hit the Pentagon and crashed another hijacked plane in Shanksville, PA. 3,000 innocent lives, Americans and foreigners of all sizes, colors, languages, religions, were killed that day. All Americans were shocked, mortified, caught completely off guard. Around the world, some mourned, others cheered.

9/11…We all remember what it is and what happened, and we vowed to never forget it. But the true meaning of NEVER FORGET is not to forget what 9/11 means, to our nation and to free people around the world and to never forget our mission. I have never actually tried to put together “what it means” in its totality and scope because the far reaching impact it had on my life and where I was in my life at the time.  I liken it to being asked “What was BUDS like?” or “What’s it like to be a Navy SEAL?”

These questions are just unanswerable in a sitting.  They will usually elicit a response of “Really?” or “You will have to come up with some better questions than that.”  My quick and ready answer is the first line of a Dickens book “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  Then I just walk away.

9/11…It ripped me to the core — being that I grew up not forty miles away in — Upstate New Jersey and had some people that I knew in there as most of us in the area did.  Plus, growing up in New Jersey, you were used to seeing New York City on the horizon when we would climb to the top of the Mountain behind my house.  I used to visit my grandparents and cousins that lived out on Remsen and we would see the towers as we would go by on the GWB past Yankee Stadium.  We would sometimes go into the city and go to the towers to ride in the elevators and jump when it got to the top and you would almost slam into the ceiling or to feel almost weightless as you would plummet so fast.  Those buildings were HUGE!!! You may have seen them on TV but until you have seen them up close and personal you don’t get the full scope of what happened there.

About 4 days before 9/11, in 2001, I was a young Navy SEAL and had just graduated from SQT, which is the last hurdle to get through before reporting to your assigned Team or Platoon.  I was happy and excited to be a Frogman and there wasn’t a care in the world for me. Like firemen, you don’t wish for people to get into accidents or for their houses to get burnt down but you want to get out there and play in the big game being that you are finally in the Big Leagues.  I wanted to test my skills somewhere in the world and there really wasn’t much going on in the world.  I wanted something to happen in the world so the SEALs can go save somebody or kill some bad guys….. I remember thinking that my generation had nothing to show other than for the advent of the computer and video games, and this was about two before 9/11.  Little did I know the Horror that awaited a nation……. MY NATION!

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Like the recent east coast earthquake, the Budget Control Act of 2011 left Washington shaken and completely confused, the epicenter being the Department of Defense.

While some are saying that the super committee will be able to reach a deal and cut the additional $1.5 trillion (half from defense), others are not so confident there will be any agreement, resulting in automatic caps for the next nine years.  Either way, defense spending will make or break a super committee budget deal.

Truthfully, Congress has a better chance of willfully trimming the budget at the super committee stage because they have more tools to orchestrate a reduction. Even if they deadlock, they’ll push through artificial savings mechanisms, anything to merit a Mission Accomplished banner. Medicare doc fixes are an example of such “solutions”. Though Congress’s intention was to curb Medicare spending, they came up with an unworkable formula that has now resulted in temporary increases and extensions of existing physician reimbursement rates, all in an attempt to circumvent a long-term solution. Applying this to what Congress may do with defense spending, a successful deal may be nothing more than a tacit convention of today’s culture on Capitol Hill, do anything to avoid Armageddon. And some do consider the trigger provision of the bill to be deadly. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta even called it the “doomsday mechanism.”

Under sequestration, or the trigger, defense cuts are still a variable certainty. We simply do not know how bad it is. It all boils down to the language of the bill. Here’s why:

1.The bill does not organize any of its spending requirements against any baseline.

2.Positive numbers (discretionary spending caps) without context forces you to make arbitrary assumptions.

3.No analyst can come up with a number that is reasonable/unreasonable.

The question on everyone’s mind: What on earth do we base these numbers against?

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by New York Times’ best selling author Brad Thor to discuss his newest thriller Full Black, how he develops material for his books, the importance of highlighting the work of the fearless patriots in America’s Special Forces, and the upcoming Warner Bros. film adaptations of his blockbuster novels.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

On Tuesday night, March 22^nd, two planes landed at Washington, DC’s Reagan National airport (DCA) without proper tower clearance.  As it happened, the air traffic controller, a career-veteran supervisor with decades of experience, had fallen asleep.  Despite radio hails and phone calls, the controller couldn’t be roused from his slumber, and the planes landed (without incident).

Ironically, earlier that day, NATCA, the air traffic controllers’ union, had started its annual safety conference.  Their reaction was predictable:  what is needed in the tower are more (presumably unionized) employees—someone whose job would be, one supposes, to keep the other person awake for the half-dozen flights that land at DCA between midnight and 6am.

If keeping tower staff awake is our primary concern, a $10 alarm clock, set to go off at regular intervals, would suffice just fine in this regard, and we can forego the tens of thousands of dollars a year in salary and benefits for the second man.  We could also co-locate other non-tower flight operations to the tower for the overnight shift.  But to focus on the number of overnight controllers or why people are falling asleep on the job ignores the bigger, and more important, picture.  This event underscores a deeper problem—one of security, and not safety.

In the days following this incident, a recording surfaced of a fellow air traffic controller operating in Warrenton, VA and in regular communication with the flights into DCA.  In that recording, Warrenton blithely tells the pilots of the plane that he has tried calling the tower at DCA to no avail.  And that’s it.

Considering that the airspace surrounding DCA is considered to have the highest security priority in the nation, encompassing as it does the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon, the CIA, and just about every other essential federal agency.  This is the reason DCA was shut down immediately following the September 11^th attacks, and why the airspace remains among the tightest restrictions in the nation.

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Anyone who claims that defense contract negotiations are uninteresting has yet to discover the battle brewing over who gets to build the next Air Force tanker.

American aerospace giant Boeing and European mega-corporation Airbus are locked in a war over who gets to deliver $35 billion worth of refueling planes to the Defense Department to replace about 80% of the Air Force’s refueling fleet – planes that average almost 50 years old, according to the Lexington Institute.

Just a few short weeks ago, Boeing and Airbus officially submitted bids to manufacture the tanker, and now both will compete to see who can create 179 tankers for less cash, who’s plane will be ready in time and who hits closer to the mark on meeting the Pentagon’s needs. Right now the momentum seems to be in Boeing’s favor, but the stakes are high.

From the Wall Street Journal:

For Boeing, the fight is to defend its home market and an area of expertise—tanker planes—that it once dominated. Boeing in 2001 beat Airbus to supply Japan with four 767 tankers. They are now in operation but differ substantially from what Boeing has offered the Pentagon…

For EADS, a U.S. win would cement its position as the new world leader in tankers. Since 2004, it has won orders for 28 tankers from Australia, the U.K., Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The Airbus design has also faced some delays in development.

Airbus has a version of the needed tanker that they will deliver to Australian forces this week, which they say will be about 90% identical to the version they want to deliver to the Pentagon. Boeing doesn’t have a version of the tanker in production, but they say they’re more willing to wait to develop the tanker so that it could be better in line with the Pentagon’s immediate needs, though it will be based on Boeing 767 plane.

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Over the past decade or so, there’s been a movement in our schools to make every kid a winner.  In gym class, in sports events, in spelling bees, in tests of every kind, every child was often given an award or citation to cushion their fragile self-esteem.  Competition was eliminated and “winning” was downgraded to a mere technicality.  If you came in second, you still won!  No losers here, kids.  You’re all equally mediocre.

This politically correct virus has now spread dangerously into the U.S. military.  The armed forces exist for this reason: if called upon, to kill the enemy.  The military also exists to deter the enemy so that lethal force is not needed.  But if necessary, our troops are trained and ready to wipe out our enemies before they can wipe us out.

Now, thanks to same Pentagon social engineers who brought us the ideas of gays serving openly in the military and women on submarines, the military is considering a “courageous restraint” award.  What on God’s green earth is THAT, you ask?  Good question.  Apparently, you will now be able to win a medal for “holding your fire” and avoiding civilian casualties.  Implicit in this utter ridiculousness is that our troops do not NOW show “courageous restraint,” do not NOW “hold their fire” until absolutely necessary, and do not NOW avoid civilian casualties.  This is an insult to the fine and selfless men and women in uniform who give up their lives—in some cases,
literally—to prosecute a war and defend the American people.

Military awards are bestowed for uncommon valor in combat.  They should not be given for doing what the good and decent American armed forces are trained to do anyway: use force judiciously.

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It’s highly unusual for The Wall Street Journal to be gulled into ignoring the most important part of an issue in favor of chasing a rabbit down a random trail. But it has apparently fallen prey to what is at stake in the Air Force’s acquisition of a tanker aircraft to replace the Eisenhower-era KC-135s, which have flown far past their useful life.   The Journal, like too many others, apparently believes it’s a question of protectionism versus open competition.

A Thursday Wall Street Journal editorial rightly bashes Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wa) for his attempt to bully US defense contractors out of partnering with EADS, the European Aerospace and Defense Systems company which is still trying to sell its Airbus 330 to the US Air Force as a replacement for the KC-135s.

There is no more urgently-needed new aircraft for all our armed services.  As then Air Force Chief of Staff John Jumper told me in a 2005 interview, “We are a global air and space power because of these tankers.  He added, “The first thing that happened in any contingency is that you put the ‘tanker bridge’ up there. We deploy tankers to places such as Spain, Hawaii, Guam and their sole purpose is to get large numbers halfway across the world without stopping.”

In short, no tankers, no superpower.  And the aged KC-135s are no longer capable of meeting the mission requirements imposed by Iraq, Afghanistan and our other international defense needs.

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They knew. Two years before the Fort Hood jihad massacre, the Army knew of jihadis in its ranks — and did nothing.

Investigative reporter Bill Gertz has revealed: “Almost two years before the deadly Fort Hood shooting by a radicalized Muslim officer, the U.S. Army was explicitly warned that jihadism — Islamic holy war — was a serious problem and threat to personnel in the U.S., according to participants at a major Army-sponsored conference.”

Over 350 Army officials involved in counterterror efforts attended this February 2008 conference. One of the speakers, Lt. Colonel Joseph Myers, explains the topic of his lecture: “I noted that because of our lack of understanding of Islamic doctrines, Islamic Jihad and my view that our counterintelligence function is broken, outdated and being usurped in some cases by public affairs and equal opportunity officials, we were going to get soldiers killed in America, on our own bases for that professional ignorance.”

And that’s just what happened at Fort Hood.

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THE STORY ANN COULTER SAID SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING FOR EVERY BUREAUCRAT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Many of the people mentioned still work at the Department of Defense. They are civil service employees who are almost impossible to fire, demote, or shift to other jobs. In my book, SPEECH-LESS: Tales of a White House Survivor, I show how nameless big government bureaucracies can treat America’s heroes.

The Pentagon’s press operation was run by a very large staff of civil servants and military personnel.  Maybe twenty or thirty public affairs specialists sat among a maze of carrels while the director of the room sat in a glass cage and watched over them.  It was reminiscent of a secretarial pool from the 1950s or ‘60s, without the Smith-Corona typewriters. I sometimes expected to see Lucille Ball walk in with a steno pad looking for Mr. Mooney. 

Most of the press officers were probably Democrats, but the problem was not that they were partisans. The problem was that those who wanted to help were given no direction and the rest were mostly inert. Many would come in around 8:30 or 9 and breeze out by 4:59 pm.  Nothing would prevent their on-time departure – not some major crisis abroad, not even a war.  At night, that giant room was so deserted that tumbleweeds blew by desks. A sizable number of them lacked any sense of urgency or interest in what the administration was doing.  One Pentagon reporter compared prying information from them to going on an Easter egg hunt..  Sometimes you’d want to put a mirror under their noses to see if they were breathing.

Forget about their being proactive.  They rarely, if ever, came up with an interesting new story to pitch to a reporter.  Their job was to wait for the phone to ring and hold morale-building events.  There was almost always a party going on with cakes and cookies and people telling jokes and giving each other awards.  There was an annual chili cook-off. If ever you needed a sugar fix, you could find something almost any day in the press room….

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Free golf carts available from federal stimulus program

Annual U.S. federal budget deficit reaches an all time high of $1.42 trillion in 2009; Government spending jumped to more than $3.5 trillion, increasing over 18% in one year

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan

As AIDS patients die in the streets of our nation’s capital, millions of dollars in federal AIDS funds misspent by the city on nepotism, ghost employees, and executive travel and pay

No punishment for National Park Service employee, paid $145,000-a-year, who used his government computer to view thousands of sexually explicit images?

National Science Foundation pays to develop a reverse karaoke application for iPhone

As Florida’s jobless rate reaches 11 percent…

… More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants go to Florida cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow

October 6, 2009

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) today released the following statement after the Senate rejected Coburn amendments that would have forced Congress to shift earmark funds back toward vital operations and maintenance. By a vote of 25 to 73, the Senate rejected an amendment offered by Dr. Coburn that would have restored to the troops $165 million earmarked within the Defense appropriations bill’s maintenance and operations accounts for congressional earmarks.

“In a time of war it is unconscionable for members of Congress to divert funds from vital operations to less-than-vital parochial pork projects. I regret the Senate voted today to protect their pet projects at the expense of our troops,” Dr. Coburn said.

The Pentagon has also expressed concern over the excessive amount of earmarks Congress has requested:

“Every dollar that we are forced to spend on things which we do not need requires us to take money from things which we do need. And the people who lose in that trade-off are our troops and the taxpayers,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman. (more…)

Even for those not paying very close attention to the news in recent months, this headline from today’s “Climate Wire” may strike you as a tad incongruent:

MILITARY: Coastlines plumbed for ancient data in Pentagon climate study

Possibly the Pentagon’s advice on this matter will find favor in the White House.

The hook for the $5.5 million boondoggle is “how rising seas and strengthening storms could affect coastal bases, perhaps causing facilities to be abandoned or moved over the next century.” Of course, the idea of shrieking press releases (and headlines soon thereafter) of a “Pentagon study predicts inundation” never entered anyone’s mind and are nothing we should look forward to, if history is any guide.

Yet, outside of certain hysterical quarters, sea level rise is not that great a mystery: it rises between coolings, particularly glaciations (ice ages) which we fortunately find ourselves in between. It does so at a fairly constant rate of about 8 inches per century. That remained true following the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid 19^th century until today, with no statistical change in the pace since then (unless you count the most recent years; read on). Then it falls. When things cool, as has been the case in recent years, sea level rise plateaus and even reverses depending on how great the cooling. Indeed, the satellites we already pay so much for – and which, like those measuring the (cooling) atmospheric temperatures, are being ignored – tell us that sea level rise peaked in 2005 (wow, this guy works fast!).

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Well, not yet, but this is certainly encouraging. On Tuesday, we brought you the story of Sen. Bennett’s request to carve out $5 million from vital maintainance funds to provide ‘digital scrapbooks’ to National Guardsmen. Big Government was able to shine a spotlight on an earmark buried deep inside a Committee Report to the Defense Appropriations bill. On Thursday, CNN picked up our story and confronted Sen. Bennett on the Senate steps to ask about the ’scrapbook earmark’.

Watch the whole wonderful thing.

An amendment will be offered Tuesday to strip out this and several other earmarks. Capitol Confidential is getting results.

Today’s edition of Sen. Coburn’s Pork Report identifies at least $108.4 million in wasteful Washington Spending.

Despite being in good condition, Hollywood’s Sunset Strip will get a $7 million face lift with federal stimulus funds

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from government computers, grew sixfold last year at the National Science Foundation; The problems were so pervasive, the agency’s inspector general had to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars

Senior government executives earned higher raises and bonuses last year

Defense appropriations bill steers over $100 million to campaign donors for pork projects not wanted by the Pentagon

Pork Rx; Federal government would pay 100% of the cost of Medicaid expansion in the Senate Majority Leader’s state under new health care bill

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