Eideard

I’m here to sign the checks
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The United States should give up the capability to fight two major ground wars simultaneously, according to a Pentagon review that will be presented this week, [said the inevitable unnamed] U.S. official.

Chris Lawrence plays into the Pentagon PR boys just like Wolf always did. The only difference is he won’t receive the Marvin Kalb Award for undercover service to the Mossad.

The review will be publicly outlined by President Barack Obama, the White House announced. The president will join Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday at the Pentagon to discuss the military posture vision.

The official [same guy, I guess], who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the strategic review presents priorities to guide the military into the future, but “they are proposals, not all of them set in stone.”

The review sets forth potentially big changes in U.S. strategy, including, the official said, removing up to 4,000 troops from Europe and downsizing the overall ground forces even further. The 2012 budget request already called for cuts of 27,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines in the next four years, and those numbers could increase.

The military would not maintain its ability to wage two large conflicts at the same time, such as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official said. But the United States would still be able to deploy troops and equipment to “deter a second adversary” while engaged in a major ground conflict.

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Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Tuesday he would resign after suffering a humiliating setback in parliament that showed a party revolt had stripped him of a majority.

Berlusconi confirmed a statement from President Giorgio Napolitano that he would step down as soon as parliament passed urgent budget reforms demanded by European leaders after Italy was sucked into epicenter of the euro zone debt crisis.

The votes in both houses of parliament are likely this month and they would spell the end of a 17-year dominance of Italy by the flamboyant billionaire media magnate…An ill-bred creep is more like it.

Berlusconi’s government won a key budget vote after the opposition abstained on Tuesday but failed to secure a majority, obtaining only 308 votes in the 630-seat lower house, eight short of the 316 needed to be sure of passing legislation.

Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, said Italy ran a real risk of losing access to financial markets after political uncertainty pushed yields on government bonds toward a red line of 7 percent…

Berlusconi has been on the ropes for weeks, beset by a string of sex and legal scandals, political defeats and, most crucially, a loss of confidence on international markets.

But the 75-year-old, who has dominated Italian politics for most of the past two decades, had steadfastly refused to step down until Tuesday’s vote and battled until the last to win over rebels in his PDL party.

The vote showed he had failed to stem the revolt and Berlusconi’s bitterness was revealed by a photographer who caught the words “8 traitors” jotted down on his notepad in parliament after the result was read out by the speaker.

The news that Berlusconi had finally agreed to resign came after European markets closed but the euro jumped against the dollar and U.S. stocks edged up…

There is no agreement among political parties on either a national unity or technocratic government and Napolitano’s consultations may be difficult.

Berlusconi is now following his statements about resignation with “amendment A, section2″ stacks of provisos which must meet his approval before he will actually resign.

Since he can’t be trusted out of sight of fourteen carabinieri with video cameras, I wouldn’t count on Italy being rid of his foolishness any time soon.

The privacy curtains that separate care spaces in hospitals and clinics are frequently contaminated with potentially dangerous bacteria, researchers said in Chicago this week.

To avoid spreading those bugs, health care providers should make sure to wash their hands after routine contact with the curtains and before interacting with patients, Dr. Michael Ohl…said at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

“There is growing recognition that the hospital environment plays an important role in the transmission of infections in the health care setting and it’s clear that these (privacy curtains) are potentially important sites of contamination because they are frequently touched by patients and providers,” Dr. Ohl told Reuters Health.

Health care providers often touch these curtains after they have washed their hands and then proceed to touch the patient. Further, these curtains often hang for a long time and are difficult to disinfect…

Tests detected Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, including the especially dangerous methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), as well as various species of Enterococci — gut bacteria — some resistant to the newer antibiotic vancomycin.

The researchers used additional tests to identify specific vancomycin and methicillin-resistant strains to see whether the same strains were circulating and contaminating the curtains over and over.

The study found significant contamination that occurred very rapidly after new curtains were placed…

“The vast majority of curtains showed contamination with potentially significant bacteria within a week of first being hung, and many were hanging for longer than three or four weeks,” Dr. Ohl noted.

“We need to think about strategies to reduce the potential transfer of bacteria from curtains to patients,” he added. “The most intuitive, common sense strategy is (for health care workers) to wash hands after pulling the curtain and before seeing the patient. There are other strategies, such as more frequent disinfecting, but this would involve more use of disinfectant chemicals, and then there is the possibility of using microbial resistant fabrics. But handwashing is by far the most practical, and the cheapest intervention.”

How about reinstating the traditional hospital laundry? That’s gone by the boards in many hospitals. Outsourcing to save money and keep the beancounters on the board of directors happy.

Hospitals are supposed to be about healthcare, right?

Prince Eric of Richmond
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As rescuers raced Tuesday to free people trapped by floodwaters caused by Hurricane Irene, Washington politicians bickered over how to pay for it.

The same budget arguments that nearly brought the first government default in history earlier this month now raise questions about whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency will have enough money to deal with Irene’s aftermath…

With conservative House Republicans calling for spending cuts to offset any increase in emergency funds — a condition opposed by many Democrats — the ability of Congress to act quickly on the issue remains uncertain.

“The notion that we would hold this up until Republicans can prompt another budget fight and figure out what they want to cut, what they want to offset in the budget, and to pit one section of the country against the other and to delay this and create this uncertainty, it’s just the latest chapter and I think one of the most unsavory ones of our budget wars,” said Rep. David Price, D-North Carolina.

Irene first made landfall on the U.S. mainland in North Carolina, devastating some coastal areas. Price said GOP efforts led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of neighboring Virginia to offset additional emergency funds amount to “an untenable position and one that simply is unresponsive and insensitive to the kind of situation we face…”

Even the White House got involved in the fracas, with Press Secretary Jay Carney telling reporters Tuesday that he wished Cantor and other conservative Republicans had the same commitment to spending offsets “when they ran up unprecedented bills and never paid for them” during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Cantor and his fellow royal Republicans never address the question of need when confronted. They only answer questions with one question, the only one that counts to Republican elitists: cost and budget?

Cantor’s loyalty to corporate accountants assures him a place in infamy. That’s truly saying something in the history of Congressional scum.

 
On Tuesday, 24 February 2009, two days before Obama presented a proposed budget to Congress, Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and other House Democrats called on the Obama administration to reduce military spending, setting up a potential clash between House liberals and the White House. At a White House summit on fiscal responsibility the day before, Obama had cast doubt on the future of an $11.2 billion project to upgrade the fleet of presidential helicopters. But Obama has shown no indication that he plans to reduce, or even freeze, overall defense spending, which will be around $650 billion this fiscal year.

Frank says that’s a mistake. “To accomplish his goals of expanding health care and other important quality of life services without ballooning the deficit,” Frank noted, Obama has no choice but to decrease military spending. He said that spending excessive amounts of money on the defense budget “precludes” the Obama administration from addressing other priorities: “If we do not get military spending under control, we will not be able to respond to important domestic needs.”

Acknowledging that Obama does plan to save hundreds of billions of dollars by withdrawing from Iraq, Frank said the President must go further and take big whacks at big-ticket military projects. He pointed to programs like the Air Force’s F-22 fighter, the Osprey troop transport, and missile defense as expensive, unnecessary Cold War-era boondoggles. He singled out missile defense in Eastern Europe as a particularly wasteful use of American taxpayers’ money. “I will confess that I am not a regular reader of Iranian-issued fatwahs,” Frank quipped. “And probably one of the ones I missed was the one where they threatened devastation against Prague. We plan to spend several billion dollars to protect the Czech Republic against Iran. That’s either a great waste of money or a very belated way to make up for Munich…”

But don’t look to Congress to reduce military spending on its own, Frank said: “Left entirely on our own, the Congress will not do the cuts in the military budget that ought to be there.” Military spending cuts will only come, he said, if there’s grassroots pressure for them…

Overdue. We can cut over 20% of the military budget just by bringing our troops home from the 175 countries where they are stationed. At a minimum, the cost of maintaining someone in the military is doubled when they are stationed outside the continental US.

Go to www.congress.org and email your Congress-critter and President Obama. Tell ‘em to Bring the Troops Home Now!

Legislators seeking to rein in government spending have put the troubled James Webb Space Telescope up for cancellation, saying the successor to NASA’s Hubble observatory is haunted by poor management and out-of-control costs…

Developed as the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. With a 21.3-foot-diameter primary mirror, the telescope is designed to peer back in time almost to the Big Bang, giving astronomers a glimpse of infant galaxies as the universe cooled after its formation.

The proposal to terminate JWST came from the House Appropriations Committee’s panel overseeing NASA. The committee released their 2012 spending bill Wednesday, calling for more than $1.6 billion in cuts to NASA’s budget from this year’s levels…

“The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management,” lawmakers said in a press release…

The independent review team concluded JWST was making steady technical progress despite the budget issues. About three-fourths of the telescope’s hardware is already in production, according to Northrop Grumman Corp., JWST’s prime contractor…

Scientists are also finishing work on JWST’s four research instruments designed to peer deep into the cosmos and unravel how the infant universe formed and evolved.

Given that a significant portion of the House of Representatives believes that those little twinkling lights out there in space are reflections from angel’s halos – I don’t hold out much hope for anything to do with NASA or space research. Republicans and Blue Dog cowards will gnaw away at space programs as part of their jihad against science.

Tie that with the clusterfrack of voodoo economics that is the spine for Kool Aid Party ideology – and the solution for an oft mismanaged bureacracy and sloppy cost estimates ends up being termination of spending altogether on non-military aeronautics.

They won’t make any money selling off their sidewalks

A small Texas town has shut down its entire police department.

Facing dramatic budget cuts, the city’s efforts to control costs in Alto sent the police force home June 15, and law enforcement is now on hold. Former police chief Charles Barron and four ex-officers secured the evidence room, changed the passwords on their computers and locked the department’s doors, preparing for a closure that will last at least six months…

“There have been accusations that the police department is not generating enough revenue,” Barron said. “Well, police departments are not revenue generators…”

Now, county sheriff’s deputies will handle calls in Alto, but that means police response times that were less than 3 minutes are now up to 15 minutes, and deputies are spread thin, according to CBS News. Twenty-five deputies and reservists will oversee a 1,000 square mile county.

Alto residents are sending around a petition to try to get their police force back.

Sounds like a typical Texas Republican solution to me. Dollars and [NO] sense govern budget considerations and the greenbacks rule. The lowest possible priority is the needs of the people.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

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If a company’s financial reporting were so bad that its auditor had pointed out significant weaknesses in its accounting for seven years running, the Securities and Exchange Commission would most likely be all over it.

But what if the company were the S.E.C. itself?

Since the commission began producing audited statements in 2004, the Government Accountability Office has faulted its reporting almost every year. Last November, the G.A.O. said that the commission’s books were in such disarray that it had failed at some of the agency’s most fundamental tasks: accurately tracking income from fines, filing fees and the return of ill-gotten profits…

The auditor did not accuse the S.E.C. of cooking its books, and the mistakes were corrected before its latest financial statements were completed. But the fact that basic accounting continually bedevils the agency responsible for guaranteeing the soundness of American financial markets could prove especially awkward just as the S.E.C. is saying it desperately needs money to increase its regulatory power.

Like the rest of the federal government, the S.E.C. is operating without an increase in its budget, which was $1.1 billion last year. With President Obama talking about extending the freeze and lawmakers continuing their criticism of its embarrassing performance before the financial crisis, the agency’s prospects for more money appear bleak.

That has ominous implications for investors. The S.E.C.’s technology systems, for example, lack the ability to perform sophisticated analysis of large batches of financial material. As a result, a Congressional report says, S.E.C. analysts sometimes resort to printouts, calculators and pencils. While investigating the “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, S.E.C. computers were so strained by the crush of data from just one day of trading that it took three months to figure out what had happened…

Still, by several measures, the S.E.C. is far from starved for money. Its $1.1 billion budget in 2010 was 15 percent higher than the $960 million it received the year before — and nearly triple its $377 million budget in 2000…

Mary Schapiro, Obama’s appointee as chairwoman, receives kudos like. “She’s done an awful lot that people should be proud of and optimistic about,” said Annette L. Nazareth…a former S.E.C. commissioner and division director.

Under George W., the budget tripled while investigators spent time trolling for porn on the Web. Now that the commission looks threatening to Wall Street financiers, actually files suit against illegal profiteers, you know that Congress will try to clamp down.

Reduce the size of the military rather than reduce pay for noncombat members of the military. Impose a millionaire’s tax rather than cut deductions for high-income households. Cap the growth of Medicare spending rather than raise the eligibility age.

These were among the choices made by readers who completed the online you-fix-the-deficit puzzle that accompanied a Week in Review article last Sunday. Since the puzzle went online, there have been more than one million page views, and more than 11,000 posted Twitter messages about the puzzle, most including their own solution. The Times analyzed those solutions, each of which cut at least $1.345 trillion from the 2030 deficit, to get a sense of readers’ choices…

The single least popular choice was allowing the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on income below $250,000 a year. Fewer than 10 percent of the solutions included that option. But when it came to tax cuts for incomes above $250,000, people’s opinions appeared to diverge according to their political views. Those who preferred spending cuts — a conservative group, in all likelihood — generally wanted this tax cut to remain in place. Among those who closed the deficit mostly with tax increases — probably a liberal group — the expiration was the single most selected policy.

The most popular option among all respondents? Reducing the military to less than its size before the Iraq war — included in about 80 percent of the solutions posted to Twitter. But cutting pay and benefits for the military was a choice of only 40 percent.

Given that Twitter users skew young, one arguable surprise was the reluctance to raise the eligibility age for Social Security (above 67, as is now scheduled) or Medicare (above 65). The four options that would have increased those ages, to either 68 or 70, were all among the 10 least popular. Making other changes to those programs — like reducing Social Security benefits for high earners and capping Medicare growth by cracking down on high-cost hospitals and doctors — received more support.

The puzzle remains online, and version 2.0 may lie in the future. Comments continue to be welcome. Given how far Congress seems from enacting any deficit-reducing proposal, this debate will probably be around for a long time.

At a minimum, the cost to American taxpayers to support members of the armed services is cut in half when they’re inside our borders instead of stationed in some other nation. The real number is probably more like a two-thirds’ saving. If – as our governments have continually prated – they are for our national defense, then, bring them all back home where they belong.

The excuses our Congress-critters make for kissing the wealthiest butts in the world should have worn thin a century ago. The promises of job creation are a crock. They have never come through. They don’t build factories or businesses with it. They sit on it.

The U.S. Navy’s $25 billion coastal warship program may face further cost overruns given ongoing design changes and delays in the equipment needed to reconfigure each ship for various missions, a new congressional report said.

“Recurring cost growth and schedule delays have jeopardized the Navy’s ability to deliver promised LCS capabilities,” the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, said in a report released on Tuesday.

The report provided more bad news for the Navy’s new class of warships, which are designed for a variety of different missions like chasing down pirates, attacking enemy submarines and sweeping for mines in shallow coastal waters.

With a mother ship at hand, you can chase down any pirates in the world with a boat that costs less than $250K. Sailors and marines on board, decent firepower and electronics, all you need. The same holds true for most minesweeping. The logistics of developing a submarine fleet capable of sneaking up on the USA even in the middle of the sort of Cold War paranoia that infects our D.C. chickenhawks – is something even the FBI might notice.

The Navy plans to buy 55 of the ships overall, a key part of its plan to increase the number of ships in the fleet to 313 over time, but costs have more than doubled in recent years.

Last week, the Navy said it would miss its summer target for awarding a multibillion contract for 10 new LCS ships, but still expected to reach a decision before the end of the year…

The Navy has already accepted a first ship of each design, and each team is working on a second ship, but all four ships faced technical, design and building issues, the report said.

RTFA even if you’re a True Believer.

I think we’re following the Brits down the same primrose path that followed the self-destruction of their empire – on sea more than anywhere else. We’re pouring taxpayer dollars into a large wet hole called the Seven Seas.