Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
Matt Yglesias ponders a Ryan Avent post that is apropos of that Chris Hayes quote below. Somewhere, off in the distance, Kevin Bacon barked.
At any rate, Avent looks at that ~$650B (again, that doesn’t even include Afghanistan and Iraq) expenditure and wonders:
With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures?
[…]
What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.
Which I think is absolutely right. Both Yglesias and Avent toss this chart into the mix:
The nut? Yglesias provides:
…if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national [High Speed Rail] network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.
[…]
a Chinese official [reportedly told] him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China”
Who can argue with that last statement? We’re pissing it away. And they know it. That’s the reason they buy up our debt: to help us piss away Our Current Advantage (such as it is). All the F22s ever built aren’t going to be worth a damn in 20 years when we can’t afford to gas them up, much less use them on our primary creditor. The paper lion indeed.
But, by all means: defense spending is inviolable. It’s utterly remarkable that Obama (the do-nothing President, natch) managed to cut as many idiotic spending programs from that budget as he did. Amtrak? Now there’s a program that needs to turn a massive profit while serving disinterested and actively hostile Member districts. It’s just a needless sap on federal coffers, after all, sucking up nearly $490 MILLION DOLLARS in FY2008. That sort of spending is clearly unsustainable for a democracy.
Boehner Then:
“[T]here is a clear distinction between saying you support the troops and backing up those claims with genuine action. [Obama] once said ‘we shouldn’t play chicken with our troops’ when it comes to funding our troops in harm’s way, and [Hillary Clinton] urged General Petraeus at the start of the surge to request ‘every possible piece of equipment and resource necessary’ to keep our troops safe. These words turned into little more than empty rhetoric when both proceeded to vote against funding our troops last year [over policy disagreements subsidiary to the actual troop funding part of the bill].”
Boehner Now:
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) are voting against the House/Senate fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill – because it contains hate crimes provisions designed to protect gays and lesbians. Boehner, speaking at his weekly press conference Thursday, said the inclusion of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in the defense bill was “an abuse of power” by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that sought to punish offenders for what they thought – and not what they did. He accused the speaker of pursuing her social agenda “on the backs” of the troops.
Boehner’s spokesman said “The record on supporting our troops is clear,”
Indeed it is. Indeed it is. John Boehner does not support the troops. He’s found cause to vote against the previous Afghanistan/Iraq appropriation (first link) and now the Defense authorization. He’s two for two. Whose rhetoric is empty now?
Lemkin 