Reading the district newspapers this morning, we come across this lead from publisher Larry Dobson's column in the Byron Review:
I kicked around
the idea of doing a special April Fools edition of the newspapers this
week, since the Byron Review actually comes out on April 1 and the
Dodge Center Star Record and Hayfield Herald are distributed the next
day. I played around with a few ideas like, "Escaped bear moonstruck by
statue at Byron High School forces school closing," "Homesick Dutchman
says Dodge Center windmills remind him of home," and "Oslo runestone
leads archeologists to Norse treasure buried in Hayfield." I had
collected photos and drawings for Heather, our graphic design genius,
to doctor up in Photoshop as illustrations of my absurd and ludicrous
ideas. Everything was progressing nicely until I started reading last
week's national and international news and discovered nothing I could
make up, dream up or imagine could top the absurd and ludicrous stories
coming from the Bush Administration!
Dobson cites stories like Supplier Under Scrutiny on Arms for Afghans:
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight,
the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling
company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed
masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as
nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an
unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions
to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40
years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of
the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and
Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging
stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the
State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen
and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal
arms trafficking. . . .
. . .This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The
Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal
contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that
Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.
Mr. Diveroli, reached by telephone, said he was unaware of the
action. The Army planned to notify his company by certified mail on
Thursday, according to internal correspondence provided by a military
official.
But problems with the ammunition were evident last fall in places
like Nawa, Afghanistan, an outpost near the Pakistani border, where an
Afghan lieutenant colonel surveyed the rifle cartridges on his police
station’s dirty floor. Soon after arriving there, the cardboard boxes
had split open and their contents spilled out, revealing ammunition
manufactured in China in 1966.
“This is what they give us for the fighting,” said the colonel,
Amanuddin, who like many Afghans has only one name. “It makes us
worried, because too much of it is junk.” Ammunition as it ages over
decades often becomes less powerful, reliable and accurate.
AEY is one of many previously unknown defense companies to have
thrived since 2003, when the Pentagon began dispensing billions of
dollars to train and equip indigenous forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Its rise from obscurity once seemed to make it a successful example of
the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral
elements of war-fighting strategy. . . .
Dobson points out:
No one knows
how many of our Afghan allies died as a result of depending on this
dangerous and unreliable ammunition. American soldiers may also have
died as a result of failure of this ammunition in combat situations,
whether they were using it themselves or it was being used by Afghan
troops with them.
We know American soldiers who have been deployed to Afghanistan. That fact makes this personal, unlike the abstract conservative ideology which fuels the "the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral
elements of war-fighting strategy."
This isn't the first time we've learned about the notion of not getting the very best to soldiers in the combat zone. Friends deployed to Iraq have shown us pictures of Hummers outfitted with "Hillbilly" up armor improvised in attempts to protect the vehicles from IEDs.
While the marketplace may dictate nickle-and-diming in order to secure profit, securing a war zone probably should be driven by precepts from military science, not ideological constructs about the purity of the marketplace.
Fortunately, the Onion Presidency is drawing to a close. Let's hope that the headlines written by the humor magazine's editors to satirize the next administration never resemble--or surpass--the tragic classic from January 17, 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'.
We read another echo of that sadly enduring story in the Mankato Free Press's editorial pages today. The Onion contained this nugget:
The speech was met with overwhelming approval from Republican leaders.
"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to
a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters.
"Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression,
deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of
vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. . . .
And today's MFP on funding one of those programs under Hastert's watch:
The 2005 Deficit
Reduction Act has finally been interpreted to mean Medicaid funding
will no longer be used in some cases of child protection. A recent
ruling by the federal Department of Human Services determined that
child welfare case workers salaries will no longer be paid through the
Medicaid program. The figures are significant. Blue Earth County spent
$450,575 on case managers in 2007.
Fortunately for children in dangerous
family situations, the funding will be made up by counties and to some
extent the state of Minnesota. That’s because even though the federal
government no longer provides the money for the services, it mandates
that they be provided.
The federal, state and county governments
work together on funding a number of social services, but the latest
shift in cost seems to be particularly onerous. Sens. Norm Coleman and
Amy Klobuchar are urging the federal government to retract the rule
that put counties in the bind of paying for these crucial services.
Congressman Tim Walz has authored a bill that would delay the rule a
year, hoping a more sympathetic president will do away with the rule
altogether.
But for now, the situation is one that may
begin to play itself out over and over again. As Congress and the
president continue to enable a federal spending system that, according
to the Comptroller of the Currency, is not sustainable, these kinds of
cost shifting will become more prevalent.
At some point, elected federal leaders will
have to decide which spending is essential, and which is there simply
to appease an interest group. They will have to decide if financial
incentives to create jobs which may or may not come about are more
important than helping protect children in abusive situations. They
will have to decide whether such federal mandates should be funded by a
local source, or whether they should eliminate the mandate.
There will be in the near future thousands
of such little decisions that must be made, especially if we want tax
rates to remain stable. That in itself will be a difficult task, given
the growth in spending for the programs like Medicare that we have
already said we will fund.
Cutting taxes also doesn’t seem to have “grown” us out of the spending dilemma we face.
Now why would that be? The MFP editors seem unwilling to consider that perhaps some of the tax cuts themselves were enacted to appease special interests. Looking only at spending, without reviewing revenue options, sets up a false dilemma. Not that all tax cuts should be rescinded,f ees increased, no any unnecessary spending maintained, but a wider mix can be kept on the table in budget discussions.
Those who champion an ideological silver bullet over ammunition that can actually be fired might need to think again.
Note to readers: The opinion developed above, like any on this site, is solely that of Bluestem Prairie and should not be construed to represent policies advocated by Congressman Walz (we know you want to, Brian Davis). Walz is more fiscally conservative than we are.
Update: We add an item from CQPolitics to the mix: Transportation
Issues on Campaign Back Burner. Apparently, talk about rebuilding the infrastructure doesn't play well on the presidential campaign trail, since we have to figure out a way to pay for it. And who wants to hear about that?:
The 12-member National Surface
Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission released a report on
Jan. 15 that said the federal government needed to spend $225 billion a
year in infrastructure for a half-century to build the kind of
transportation system the nation needs to stay competitive, but it’s
often considered political suicide to champion spending money.
The article ends:
Transportation experts feel fairly
certain they can count on Obama and Clinton even if they don’t discuss
transportation on the stump. They are worried about McCain, one of a
handful of senators who voted against final passage of a highway bill
in 2005. He maintains a hard line against Amtrak and resists federal
spending, they said.
McCain’s campaign did not return calls for comment.
“Both
Obama and Clinton have at least talked about the need to reinvest in
America. I don’t think they go nearly far enough, but they have clearly
showed some commitment to the issue,” Wytkind said. “If McCain is
elected it will be George W. Bush all over again, maybe even worse. I defy you to find anyone with a worse record.”
The article mentions that Dwight Eisenhower campaigned on building the Interstate system. Now the politic landscape seems littered with people who consider I35 to either be God's holy way or the demon road of NAFTA. Some mornings we're convinced that America's Finest News Source has simply taken over politcal discourse in this country.
