Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Not all heroes wear capes.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Everybody saw this coming.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

I really should read my own blog.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Consistently wrong since 2002

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

In my day, never was longer.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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35Comments

  1. 1.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    So am I. She’s right more often than she’s wrong, puts in the work, and she’s light years ahead of the likes of people like Nina Turner. Overall, I consider a net positive for the Democratic Party

  4. 4.

    Splitting Image

    Absolutely 100% required listening from @AOC. Why in the world is our defense budget going UP while we’re involved in FEWER wars?

    She’s not wrong to ask the question, but C. Northcote Parkinson observed back in the 1950s that the budget would probably go up every year if the country had no military at all.

  5. 5.

    Cameron

    Why does the defense budget go up with fewer wars?  What do wars have to do with the defense budget?  It’s for paying the contractors, silly.

  7. 7.

    Captain C

    @Cameron: It’s inefficient welfare concentrated in too few hands, but more than enough Congressional districts to make it very difficult to whittle away.

  10. 10.

    WaterGirl

    @Splitting Image: did you watch the video? She makes the point that we just got out of a 20 year war and we aren’t funding things like child care and health care and other things that are needed. She was not asking a rhetorical question or a question with no larger purpose around it.

  11. 11.

    WaterGirl

    @Cameron: I really liked her point about the big flurry of billions of dollars in year end money that has to be spent on contractors because if they don’t spend the funds this year, those funds won’t be in the budget next year. Whether they need them or not.

  12. 12.

    Arclite

    The rise of China as a peer military power, throwing its weight around to intimidate its neighbors, annex their territory, and claim entire oceans for itself in violation of UNCLOS to which it is a signatory?  Russia annexing and threatening to annex its neighbors’ territory?  Defense spending today is half (3.5%) of its high during the Cold War (7%), as a percent of GDP. Now that authoritarian rivals like China and Russia are increasing their own military spending and showing they’re not afraid to use it for territorial gain, it makes sense that we would increase our own.

    And for the record, I love AOC and her takes on most things. She’s smart and thoughtful.

  13. 13.

    Another Scott

    Good sound-bites, but a bigger problem is that the Pentagon is so huge and so complex that it is extremely difficult to manage even by people of good faith.  And Congress often makes it worse.

    For example, her point about the rush to spend end of FY money is true, but it’s a reflection of the problems with annual federal budgets.  Budgets are late, the money gets to the agencies late, planning gets messed up, money has to be juggled (some has to be carried over from the previous year in some circumstances just to keep paying salaries), orders get delayed, projects get delayed, prices change as a result of the delays, then there’s a rush to make up the spending timelines (there are rules about how and when money has to be spent on projects, etc.).  When a year’s worth of work has to be done but the money arrives 3 months (or more) late, it’s a mess.

    Or so I’ve heard…

    Plus, the Pentagon is spread too thin – we all remember the stories of the Navy ships colliding because they’re understaffed and overworked.  The Congress has given them too many jobs to do.

    I’m reminded of a story about the US trying to get electricity working again in Iraq:

    In the vicinity of the Quds complex, I notice several towering flare stacks across the street from the power plant, at an oil field called East Baghdad. Atop one of the stacks, an enormous orange flame indicates that natural gas pouring out of the oil deposits is being burned off steadily to keep it from exploding. Such flaring goes on continually all over Iraq. It is so widespread in the huge southern oil fields west of Basra that it actually fills the night sky with light.

    The flaring is notable because if all that gas were captured, pressurized, and distributed rather than being burned off, it could be used to meet more than half of Iraq’s demand for electricity. At the moment, Iraq is flaring more than 28 million cubic meters of gas a day. It’s enough to fire at least 4000 MW of electricity.

    The gas is sorely needed. Most of the generating units installed or refurbished so far during reconstruction—40 out of a total of about 57—are based on combustion turbines. They run optimally only when being fueled by natural gas, which few of them are at the moment. The rest are running on diesel fuel or heavy derivatives of crude oil left over after the more desirable fuel grades are separated out in refining.

    Those more desirable grades of crude are shipped out of Iraq, to bring desperately needed revenues into the country. And the Ministry of Electricity pays the Ministry of Oil only a small fraction of the world-market price for the fuels it needs to generate electricity. Thus, the Electricity Ministry must be content with whatever it can get, and generally what it gets are fuels that few other utilities in the world would be willing to burn.

    “The fuel situation is a mess,” says Keith W. Crane, senior economist at the Rand Corp.’s Washington office. He was an advisor to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the civil administrator of Iraq after the war. “There are no prices, no incentives, nothing.”

    Diesel fuel, which isn’t produced in sufficient quantities in Iraq, is trucked to the generating plants from Turkey at great cost. But that obstacle is nothing compared with the problems of the heavy fuels, including something called Bunker C, which powers a lot of Iraq’s generating plants. Even under the best circumstances, a PCO generation specialist in Iraq tells me, a combustion turbine running on crude oil or diesel fuel requires two or three times as much maintenance as one running on natural gas. And present-day Iraq isn’t an example of the best circumstances.

    Before these heavy fuels can be burned in a combustion turbine, they have to be treated with a substance called an inhibitor to mitigate the effects of elements like vanadium that would damage the turbine blades. The inhibitor binds the vanadium to magnesium, to keep the vanadium from corroding the blades. Unfortunately, the resulting compounds are deposited on the turbine blades. So the units have to be taken out of service every week to have their blades cleaned.

    “To buy inhibitor, in dollars per liter, is more expensive than crude,” one engineer tells me. “Last summer,” he goes on, “we bought all the inhibitor on the shelf in the world for a four-month supply in Iraq. Let me put it in simple terms: nobody’s dumb enough to do what we’re doing.”

    Iraq’s 110 combustion turbines alone could in theory generate well over 4000 MW if they were being fueled by natural gas. So far, though, the actual output of these combustion turbine generators hasn’t come close to half of that figure. At Quds, I begin to understand why.

    Complex systems are complex, and they aren’t easily or cheaply fixed without working on the whole system…

    Lots of changes are needed at the Pentagon and in the way Congress does things.  Lots.  It will probably cost more, rather than less, money to fix them – at least for a time.  Ending contracts costs money.  Closing bases costs money.  Buying people out or laying them off costs money. Hiring people to handle new or expanded processes costs money. Etc.

    Arbitrary “easy” 10% budget cuts aren’t the way to go.

    But it’s always good to think about what the Pentagon is doing and what it should be doing going forward, and people need to be willing to have those conversations about what the Pentagon should be doing, the real implications, and the real costs.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  16. 16.

    Splitting Image

    @WaterGirl:

    She makes the point that we just got out of a 20 year war and we aren’t funding things like child care and health care and other things that are needed. She was not asking a rhetorical question or a question with no larger purpose around it.

    The party that started the war also enacted a tax cut that they  justified by pointing out that it would specifically prevent the government from funding things like child care and health care. Spending as much money as they did on the war with no apparent benefit to either the U.S. or Afghanistan was justifiable (to a Republican) for the same reason.

    The problem with the U.S. right now isn’t that too much money is being tied up in the defense budget. It’s that over 70 million  voters in this country are actively opposed to spending money on services that AOC wants and the country needs. The defense department is just one of the sinks they throw money into rather than let it get spent where it would help people.

  18. 18.

    Ruckus

    The defense budget pays military salaries, equipment upkeep, replacement equipment, training, base costs, and daily operations.

    The current budget is $705 billion with a $10 billion increase asked for. Is any of this to pay for the leaving Afghanistan, planes/fuel to get 125,000 people moved, a not previously budgeted cost?

    Here is a breakdown of the DOD budget.

    I’m not saying it shouldn’t be smaller, but how much is too much? How much is not enough?

    What we spend is approx 11% of the federal budget. Equipment does wear out and there is a need for replacement, some of our equipment is decades old, should it be replaced? I understand that the Navy is trying to get 50 yrs of life out of ships that used to need to be replaced in 25 yrs. Planes are only good for so many hours before they need to be replaced.

    To me the biggest issue that we spend a lot of money and have been for a long time with wars every so many years that in hindsight (and a lot of foresight as well) completely without need/merit, in the quest to be considered the big swinging dick country. I think we’ve already won that award. Several times over.

  20. 20.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    @Ruckus: ​
     

    The current budget is $705 billion with a $10 billion increase asked for.

    So when adjusted for inflation, which was 1.2% in 2020 and 3.53% for the first 8 months of 2021, the budget is being cut.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    @Ruckus: The House-passed CR has money for the costs of Afghan resettlement, etc., FederalNewsNetwork:

    […]

    The CR includes $28.6 billion in additional disaster relief funding, as well as $6.3 billion to support resettlement efforts for Afghan evacuees, priorities for both the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of lawmakers whose home states have been impacted by recent hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters.

    […]

    Like past continuing resolutions, the measure sustains some expiring programs and allows agencies to maintain current operations to avoid employee furloughs.

    It would also reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program, allow DoD to continue certain military construction projects and extend the authority for members of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps to carry over unused annual leave for another year.

    The continuing resolution sets aside $250 million in funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process additional refugee applications and address an existing backlog of pending cases.

    It allows the Department of Veterans Affairs to transfer existing funds for the purposes of handling an anticipated increase in disability claims. VA established three new presumptive conditions associated with Agent Orange for veterans who served in southwest Asia and other areas, and without additional capacity and staff, the Biden administration has said the department could face delays with these new claims.

    Several federal agencies would receive additional funding to repair damaged facilities from recent natural disasters. NASA, for example, would get $321.4 million to repair damaged facilities and equipment from Hurricanes Zeta and Ida, while the Navy and Air Force would see millions of dollars for similar purposes.

    The Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense and State would receive the majority of the extra funding to continue the Afghan evacuee resettlement program, an effort known as Operation Allies Welcome.

    […]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  23. 23.

    Jacel

    @Splitting Image: Also, that party (R)  kept the money being spent on multiple wars they created out of the official budget, year after year, only funding those massive expenses as unanticipated emergencies off the books, year after year. Yay for Obama for ending that budgetary fiction, if not from disengaging out of those military fronts.

  24. 24.

    Another Scott

    @David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: (I misread your comment, but I’ll keep this anyway.)

    Comparing % of the budget can be misleading.  Medical costs paid by the federal government were much lower in the 1960s.  The manpower in the services was much higher in the 1960s as well.  It can be tricky to do the comparisons in ways that aren’t terribly slanted.

    We spend more than the “2% of GDP” that we want NATO countries to spend on defense.  Our GDP (current dollars) is around $22.7T a year, so 2% for us would be around $455B/y.  But no other country has the blue-water Navy or the rest of the expensive nuclear triad that we do, and many argue (rightly or wrongly) that that umbrella has kept Europe and the rest of the modern world from blowing itself up again in a world war, so it’s been a huge bargain…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  25. 25.

    Ruckus

    @David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:

    Interesting take. I’m not sure that’s how it works but it does sound like it’s possible.

    @Another Scott:

    I don’t see, in a very quick read where funds for the actual evacuation, airplanes, pilots, fuel came from. Were all those aircraft military? For sure some of them were, didn’t the first one or two have a few more passengers than normally would fit comfortably? More like a few hundred of your newest best friends? That couldn’t have been cheap, I can’t imagine the hourly fuel consumption of a C5 or a C17.

  26. 26.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    @Ruckus:  Example: If you freeze Social Security today and come back 10 years from now, the monthly checks would be the same, but you’d have less purchasing power. It would be correct to say Social Security was cut because it didn’t keep up with the rise in inflation.

  27. 27.

    Another Scott

    @Ruckus:  I haven’t seen any specific number. I assume the Pentagon always has contingency funds available, or can get them from other parts of the government. Or, they just say “GO! We’ll figure out how to pay for it later!!”.

    TaskAndPurpose:

    It was the largest non-combatant evacuation (NEO) in U.S. military history. But such an achievement comes at a cost, and some of that was borne by the Air Force crews constantly flying in and out of danger. Two C-17 Globemaster III cargo jet pilots who participated in the evacuation told Task & Purpose they were exhausted, but glad to have accomplished their mission at a time when the U.S. and its allies needed them most.

    “Yeah, the C-17 community is burned out, never been ran this hard,” said one pilot who spoke on the condition of anonymity since he was not cleared to speak with the press. “Jets broken everywhere. But we got a lot of folks out. Hopefully, they can find better lives in the U.S. Maybe the silver lining to this whole thing.”

    […]

    But even once you are airborne, there’s another problem: hundreds of people on board and only one toilet.

    At the end of the airlift the “smell was not great,” the pilot said. “Most jets only had one bathroom so some people used the cargo floor. I don’t blame them. Terrible set up.”

    If you think the smell is bad, just remember that C-17 and other Air Force pilots and loadmasters had to bear with it flight after flight throughout the mission. Air Mobility Command spokesperson Capt. Christopher Herbert told Task & Purpose it committed more than 230 aircraft to the effort, including C-17s, C-5 Galaxies, KC-10, KC-135 and KC-46 tankers, and C-130 turboprop transports.

    “At one point, more than half the fleet of 222 C-17s were committed to this operation, with approximately 80 forward deployed into the EUCOM and CENTCOM” areas of responsibility, Herbert said.

    More than 400 aircrew members from active duty, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve units supported the operation, which flew 332 sorties out of Kabul alone since Aug. 15, Herbert added.

    “In terms of scale, this was an all-hands-on-deck operation,” he said, and his top commander was proud of the results.

    […]

    “Jets aren’t in great shape,” the first pilot explained. “We flew with overworn tires, offline generators, low oxygen. Just not enough manpower to keep up. Will probably take a year for maintenance to catch up on repairs and cleaning. Never seen anything like this.”

    […]

    Undoubtedly the FY22 defense appropriations bill will try to cover at least some of the costs of the evacuation.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  28. 28.

    cain

    @Arclite: ​
     
    I would say that we have a lot of soft power that we can do. The world has been fucked up by both the British Empire and the Cold War. Enough is enough.

    If we want to fight these rivals off, we need to fix our own house. We need to have a proper purposeful foreign policy that can help change the map. Be more kind, be more giving. It goes a long way.
    China is getting a lot of influence especially in 3rd world countries or continents like Africa by helping in infrastructure. We need to do the same. Invest but also hold the line on corruption.

  29. 29.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Saying you want to lop 10% off the Defense budget is sort of the leftist equivalent of saying that $3.5 trillion is too high.  There are things in the Defense budget that should be cut out completely, things that should be trimmed, and things that should be increased.  Tossing round numbers about with nothing attached is just a form of virtue signaling to a target audience.  That being said, we sure as fuck should be funding things like childcare, healthcare, etc.  The rhetorical point is valid; as a practical measure, it is not.

  30. 30.

    cain

    @Splitting Image: ​
     
    Because they are so afraid of “socialism” that they don’t want to spend the money for whatever historical bullshit. Spending on military is always a win because defense always makes sense and is a role in govt that really honestly nobody sees can be done by private contractors.

  31. 31.

    cain

    @eddie blake: ​
     
    Her complaints are still apt – why fund stupid shit from the past era? Fund and invest in modernizing our navy. We used to be pretty fucking good at doing that kind of shit. We have been resting on our laurels this entire time because the GOP and their media enablers believes the mediocrity is just fine.

  32. 32.

    eddie blake

    @cain: i agree. i’m all for modernizing and upfunding the navy. they’re gonna need it. hell, they need it now. while the rest of the services have been focused on the middle east and flush with cash due to the forever wars, the navy’s gotten the short end of the stick.

  33. 33.

    Ruckus

    I see a lot of good ideas, and even better none of them are about just blind cutting everywhere.

    We do need good defense.

    We do need to be able to help people as well as defend ourselves.

    We need to figure out how to control firearms.

    We need to figure out how to not have anywhere near as many poor people.

    We need to tax the uber wealthy far more realistically, no one needs to be able to build a space shot for their vanity bullshit or to reconstruct a bad political party into a worse one.

    We need to figure out how to get almost half our population to have a modicum of understanding of the word betterment and who actually is this country.

    We need to figure out ways to drastically reduce racism and misogyny.

    We need to do better as humans.

    We need to get more people to understand the environment and how to apply fixes from many angles.

    We need to figure out how to better educate our citizens. The post/comments about writing language, and so on the other day was good.

    We actually need to live up to the concepts that this country was supposedly founded on, not the ones that the wealthy have used to further enrich themselves at the expense of the masses.

    Just a start. (I’m basically retired and have a few free moments to ponder stuff.

  34. 34.

    Gvg

    End the debt ceiling crap. Fighting over the budget twice instead of once has been detrimental and caused only harm. Once something is passed by a law and funded in the budget, it should be done. Cuts are specific and get decided each year in the budget. The Constitution says we pay our debts, therefore it shouldn’t be allowed to even debate defaulting. Having that second chance to argue in a setup that only allows hostage taking by morons who don’t understand how the economy works, provides only bad outcomes.
    We didn’t used to have this nonsense. For decades though it got raised with no drama. Then it became a weapon of know nothing terrorists. It has never had value. Repeal that law.

  35. 35.

    JML

    @Another Scott: 

    Pentagon will use cash from the budget to pay for these kinds of operational costs with an expectation that a supplemental bill of some kind will make them whole again. This is how you hide the real costs of a war by never actually budgeting for it and handling those operational costs off-book.

    (I was still working for Army Budget when Afghanistan started and Iraq II started and they didn’t budget dollar 1 for either of them, always paid for using cash flow-reimbursement via supplemental. It was a fucking nightmare every year)

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