Article on CBS re their Nov 1st hit piece: Did they say anything about Kerry voting against the measure to provide equipment to the military....? Here's an article on CBS, but not the transcript of the clip from CBS......
cbsnews.com
Buried in the middle to end of the article:
>>>>>>>>>>Winslow Wheeler, a long time Capitol Hill staffer who spent years writing and reviewing defense appropriations bills, thinks he knows one reason why those shortages exist, after looking at the current Defense budget. Army accounts that pay for training, maintenance and repairs are being raided by Congress to pay for pork-barrel spending.
Wheeler says $2.8 billion that was earmarked for operations and maintenance to support U.S. troops has been used to "pay the pork bill."
Wheeler, who has written a book called "The Wastrels of Defense," says congressmen routinely hide billions of dollars in pet projects in the defense bill.
And buried in the back of this one, Wheeler found a biathlon jogging track in Alaska, a brown tree snake eradication program in Hawaii, a parade ground maintenance contract for a military base that closed years ago, and money for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration.
By law, these projects can't be cut, so Pentagon bookkeepers will have to dip into operations and maintenance accounts to pay for them.
"They do all kinds of things that adds up to: 'We're basically eating our own young to support the war,'" he says.
According to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a member of the Armed Services Committee who speaks out against pork-barrel spending, there is a total of $8.9 billion of pork in this year's defense bill, which would go a long way toward upgrading all the equipment used by the National Guard.
"I don't think that this war has truly come home to the Congress of the United States," McCain says. "This is the first time in history that we've cut taxes during a war. So I think that a lot of members of Congress feel that this is just sort of a business-as-usual situation."
"The least sexy items are the mundane - food, repair items, maintenance – there's no big contract there," says McCain. "And so there's a tendency that those mundane but vital aspects of war fighting are cut and routinely underfunded." <<<<<<<<<
And at the very end:
>>>This weekend, Acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee wrote to 60 Minutes saying, "The Army has made great strides in improving the capabilities of all units deploying to Iraq as the nature of the conflict has changed." He noted the president approved spending $840 million to improve the armor on Humvees in Iraq.<<<<< |
