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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.