And, for those who may not know -- CNN.com has a page up for tsunami relief aid which contains links to the web pages of several dozen international charities/relief organizations. Easy way to check them out, make a choice, and make an electronic donation.

S_A_M

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Okay, please square this with the billions spent in Iraq. Extra credit if you can show the benefit to the US taxpayers who have died in the conflict.

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That is a great, but purely academic idea. Perhaps it would work if we made the number much, much, larger and therefore gave those that have to give up power a real incentive. However, that I think defeats your purpose (i.e., to save costs).

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I am not a pure libertarian. I also think, in the long run, we are helping them.

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Let me guess. You were one of those people that didn't see the benefit to US tax payors in putting pershing missles in Germany, right?

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If we did that Ross Perot would hire up some mercinaries and go take over Kuwait.

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Nope. But I'm also not one of those people that are too doctrinaire to see the absolute necessity of the world's greatest power providing relief to a region that has large portion of the world's population in the wake of the greatest natural disaster since the Flood.

Or is there no benefit in a national conscience?

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2 points.

1. I think several good arguments can be made that US disaster relief does serve the interest of the US tax payor. My point was that I think the question needs to be asked before our government spends $1 dollar on foreign aid, let alone $350 million.

2. I would be curious to see how much money individuals in this country pony up for private relief aid. I would bet that it will be greater than the donations of most other nations.

According to CNN, Sweden's fatalities from the tsunami may be -- proportionate to its population -- greater than Indonesia's and behind only Sri Lanka.

Such is God's will.

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I think that if the sheer overwhelming nature of the destruction and loss doesn't speak for itself then I sincerely wonder what would.

That may or may not be true. However, we don't ask how much private support there is for the military occupation of Iraq. Between Iraq and Southeast Asia, I have no trouble seeing which is a more positive use of taxpayer's dollars.

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Positive to who?

Who says there are no more true philosophers?

Too much choice
 

Translation: "Mission Accomplished"

Translation: "Yeehaw, Yasser's dead!!"

Ad(The administration, and Rumsfeld in particular, had exactly what to do with elections in Palestine?)der

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If you have to ask....

What do you mean other people's money? From your point of view, we "rich" lawyers pay more than our fair share of taxes. It's my money.

Ad(already given privately as well)der

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You may have seen the Administration's own reports suggesting that our abysmal relationships with the Muslim world have retarded our successes in Iraq, notwithstanding our demonstrated ability to turn Fallujah into bumpy glass.

From that view, I'd think that our decision to offer a couple of governmental dollars to alleviate some honest-to-God thirst, hunger and other needs and help prevent the further loss of vast numbers of lives in Southeast Asia would redound to the benefit of even the most libertarian of Americans, at least as much on a dollar-for-dollar basis as those spent to quench the Iraqi's virtual thirst for democracy.

If it's your argument that contributing the first governmental dollar to this cause is unwise or unjustified, then say so. Pussy-footing around with a procedural point simply for the sake of procedure where (a) we don't remember you raising it before we initiated other campaigns to spend a couple hundred billion dollars in foreign lands, and (b) you may agree with the answer that everyone else suggests here anyway, adds little to the discussion and simply pisses people off.

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How do you know there's adequate controls so that 75 or 80% of the money isn't stolen or wasted. It's better to do nothing than write a check for over $225 million to the local robber barrons and royals.

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Right. So that brings us back to my original question. Is spending tax payor money for the benefit of non-tax payors a proper use of funds?

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I never said otherwise. In fact, I said there are several good arguments to this effect.

My point is that I think it's useful to ask the question, because others on this board don't seem to think it should be ask. The view seems to be that its the Gs money now so shut the fuck up.

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A lot of conservatives think foreign aid should be unconstitutional. But given that things like the foreign assistance act of 1961 have been around for a while, that battle was lost long before your time.

Regardless, I believe foreign aid AND war/military action is bad policy except to the extent the spending/action directly benefits US citizens. Judged on that basis, I think humanitarian aid to India is OK so long as some paranoid bastard is watching the money like a hawk so it's not ripped off by corrupt locals or pissed away by pie in the sky lefties. (By the same standard, the Iraq war was unjustifiable.)

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I thought we were working off the theory that big giveaways to the rich are the best way to help the economy.

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Oh no, club. You misunderstand.

We ALL know by now that "It's not the Government's money, it's the people's money." Bush won two elections telling us this.

That may be why the G thought it was better to send a bunch of that money back to the people rather than spending enough of it to properly armor all the vehicles we planned to use in an urban-combat, occupation & counter-insurgency war zone before deploying them.

I'm still puzzling over that point, though, and I'd bet that there are at least several thousand U.S. taxpayers (plus family members), who might disagree.

S_A_M

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Do you have evidence that there are approved plans for a better armored vehicle, and that the Pentagon didn't move to get them, given the strictures of Government procurement law?

No.

Oh. So are you saying the Pentagon should bypass procurement requirements- or are you just throwing up outside your mouth here?

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Bush has set up his own coalition to ensure that the aid is efficiently delivered, so you can rest easy.

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Hank, the "It's a matter of physics" argument was debunked the day after Rummy made it. The issue wasn't not procuring "a better armored vehicle," but rather not procuring as many armored ones as were available and needed.

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What a pity. The oldskool Hank would actually google something before talking shit. Looks like Hank version 2005.0 is still curled 'round the holiday egg nog. I'm no military expert, Hank, but two minutes on Google turns up a number of things.

The Boston Globe tells us that much of this fuckup derives from affirmative decisions that Army officials made to sole source this stuff.

• Such complaints have put heat on the Army to explain itself, in the wake of Rumsfeld's Dec. 8 statement that the work was going as fast as possible.
  
  Yet Army officials say they don't need the help. Instead they have set up a $4.1 billion armor industry that's a mix of federal weapons depots and a few big privately owned factories.
  
  ***
  
  The starting point in the debate, Ludes and Motsek agree, are two key decisions Army officials made in mid-2003 and stuck with since. The first was a decision to keep orders within a network of current suppliers rather than bring new contractors into the mix.
  
  This is known as "sole-sourcing," and led to a massive boost of orders for a few companies, notably Armor Holdings Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla.
  
  The company's O'Gara-Hess unit produces what are known as "up-armored" Humvees, which add more than a ton of bulletproof windows and steel plating to the basic Humvee made by AM General LLC of South Bend, Ind. Before the war began, O'Gara-Hess was making 30 up-armored Humvees a month, mostly for military policing duties and scouting. As of December it had vastly expanded its factory near Cincinnati and was producing 450 of the trucks per month. In all there were 5,910 in Iraq by mid-December, approaching the total of 8,105 that commanders want.
  
  New suppliers might have set up additional large factories to armor Humvees too, but the Army passed. For one thing, the service hasn't purchased from O'Gara-Hess the design data that would make it easier for another contractor to set up a factory. Smaller companies are left with the business of supplying components, not complete vehicles.
  
  "For better or worse, it has made it more difficult for the Army to go to alternate sources," said Marc A. King, vice president for armor operations of Ceradyne Inc. of Costa Mesa, Calif., which supplies ceramic body armor plates and some kits for vehicles.

If your ramble really was asking a question about upgrading to something else, you could look at the Stryker, a new armored vehicle that the Army wanted to rush into production but which apparently sucks:

• May 10 issue - Tom Christie was worried. It was the fall of 2003, and the Pentagon's chief weapons tester had noted problems with the Army's pride and joy, the new Stryker Armored Vehicle. The $4 billion program was seen as the vanguard of the lighter, high-speed Army of the future. But even with new add-on armor, the Stryker "did not meet Army requirements" against rocket-propelled grenades in tests, Christie wrote in his 2003 annual report. Now the Pentagon was about to deploy the first 300 Strykers to Iraq while an insurgency raged.
  
  So Christie did something unusual: he sent a classified letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office urging the military to be very cautious about where in Iraq it deployed the Stryker. The response? "I was slapped down," says the straight-talking Christie. "It was: 'What are we supposed to do with this [letter]? ... Are you trying to embarrass somebody?' "
  
  There may be embarrassment to come. Six months after that exchange, the fighting in Iraq has called into question not only the Stryker's effectiveness but the Army's shift toward a lighter, faster infantry. With a record 138 U.S. soldiers dead in April, some inside the Pentagon are asking why the Army spent billions on new wheeled vehicles like the Stryker when commanders in the field are crying out for old-style treaded vehicles—tanks and personnel carriers—that are better protected and armed.
  
  Many soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq were traveling in thin-skinned Humvees, which ride on rubber tires like the Stryker. Meanwhile, thousands of M113 armored personnel carriers, which are treaded and better armed, sit in mothballs around the world, even next door in Kuwait. That reflects an Army bias that has been prevalent since 1999, when the then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki—who was frustrated by slow-moving U.S. armor in the Balkans—declared his preference for wheels.

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Beyond the word "might" do you see problems here? The Army doesn't own the designs which mean likely patent infringement problems for the alternative source. And Gattigap- do you have any contact with the real world? Have you ever seen how long it takes to get an assembly line running, let alone setting up a whole new factory?

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Since when is this issue a matter of not enough money?

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The issue was not patent infringement or problems getting an assembly line running. The issue was bad planning from the outset.

Two days after Rummy was confronted in Kuwait, the Army increased orders for armored Humvees by 100/month. It was never a matter of physics, or a matter of patent rights.

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The story says only that the Army didn't buy the designs. Doesn't mean that it couldn't then, or for that matter still can.

Yeah. Note that the meaningful decisions occured in 2003. FWIW, there was a story I linked to some time ago that compared the US's ability to move mountains during times of war to build and supply equipment and materiel, and we've simply not done that here. Certainly the red tape is thick, but if the President wanted to Lead in this area, let's not pretend it can't be done.

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To drive your point home, the President's top advisors were leading in this area - and led us directly to a policy of NOT prioritizing armoring the vehicles.

A big reason for the delay in starting production is that heavy armor was never supposed to be needed - remember, the Rumsfeld doctrine focuses on deploying light rapid force to overwhelm the enemy, and see how successful we were in "winning" the war so quickly thanks to the Rumsfeld doctrine? Remember how quickly it was "mission accomplished"? So when we were planning the invasion we weren't planning to provide heavy armor because that was what our civilian leaders said would work best.

Goddamn stupid Rumsfeld doctrine. The man should be driven around Iraq in an unarmored vehicle between now and the elections, looking both ways and waving at everyone he sees. This moron and his neocon suck-ups have cost a lot of soldiers their lives.

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Depends on how bad you need it, I suppose.

http://www.wwiivehicles.com/html/tab...n_figures.html

eta: "The first Liberty ship commissioned, prior to Pearl Harbor, took 244 days to build. Henry J. Kaiser, whose shipyards built one-third of all America's ships in World War II, cut that to 72 days in May of 1942. By August of that year, construction time was down to 46 days. As publicity stunt, one of his shipyards built a ship fron scratch in five days. "

http://ks.essortment.com/libertyshipsme_pbv.htm

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I disagree with your basic premise. The money is being spent for the benefit of taxpayers. If you truly belienve that we gain more by taking lives than saving them, then there is nothing to discuss. On the other hand, if you believe that one of the basic tenets of a civilzed society is the preservation of life, then disaster relief is by definition a more defensible use of taxpayer dollars than spending to overthrow a government, occupy a country and change its social and political system at a huge cost in both American and foreign lives.

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Perhaps it's only because of your twisted worldview that you believe what you say. Many people haven't asked the question because the answer is self-evident.

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Good, you're back! Quickly now- Google how many pages there were of FAR in 1942 and then again by 2000.

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I will when you google this for me: Did Rumsfeld blame his failure to adequately equip our troops on red tape?

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He's not a buck passer. But who's at fault?

I would guess the blame would go back to budgets 10 years or so ago. A pair of Mass. Senators were cutting defense spending like madmen.

That's enough hints- now go Google!

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Funny. Knee-jerk liberals like Bill Kristol disagree.

• Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld. Begin with the rest of his answer to Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard:
  
  "Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe--it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip."
  
  So the Army is in charge. "They" are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the same building: "I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. . . . And that is what the Army has been working on." Not "that is what we have been working on." Rather, "that is what the Army has been working on." The buck stops with the Army.

What's This About?
 

Since you're googling, I wonder what sort of defense programs the Sens. from Mass. wanted to decrease funding on. I wonder if armor for humvees was on their agenda, or if they were more concerned with cutting back on expensive, irrelevant systems designed for the cold war. But all this really distracts from our main point of discussion here - Rumsfeld's callous disregard for the lives of American soldiers. Explain why the humvees didn't have armor again?