If You’re An American Taxpayer, Here Are Your Most Recent Defense Purchases

Published August 1, 2012 | By Iowadawg

After a week where the Department of Defense didn’t do very much at all — the DoD spent a measly $1.8 billion the last time we checked in on them — the Pentagon is back in business, spending $7.5 billion last week and buying next-gen missiles, a new warship, and many other buys.

If you want to find out how to burn through $7.5 billion in a week, read on. We found the biggest and most significant contracts inked last week.

America — enjoy your recent purchases:

$1.5 Billion to Huntington Ingalls for a brand new warship

Huntington Ingalls just got the greenlight to build the next Landing Platform Dock ship for the Navy. The ships are 684 feet long and displace 25,000 tons.

They carry up to 800 troops and air cushion landing ships, as well as helicopters and vertical take off and landing aircraft. They cost around $1.5 billion to build. So far, eleven have entered service.

The LPD ships are part of the Navy’s transition process. They aim to support Marine Expeditionary Units, and are smaller in size and more amphibious in tactics than traditional cruisers.

Read it all HERE.

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Want to Live in a Chevy Volt Village?

Even if you have no desire to live in a Chevy Volt “community,” you’re paying for it. Chevy Volt sales are pathetically low so the company is partnering with the liberal city of Austin, Texas to build a green test community. They might have to gather all the Chevy Volts ever sold to fill this place up.

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Exclusive Pics: The Navy’s Unmanned, Autonomous ‘UFO’

NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, Maryland — If you saw it in person, you’d probably think it was a UFO, too.

That’s what happened when the Navy trucked its batwing-shaped drone of the future from California to its new testing bed here in Maryland. Across the country, 911 switchboards lit up with reports that mysterious trucks were hauling a spaceship. In truth, it was a demonstration model for something the Navy desperately wants: to launch an armed, spying, stealthy drone from an aircraft carrier, one of the hardest maneuvers in aviation, conducted with the click of a mouse. But up close, you can see why people freaked out.

MORE.

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Austerity and Debt Realism by Kenneth Rogoff

CAMBRIDGE – Many, if not all, of the world’s most pressing macroeconomic problems relate to the massive overhang of all forms of debt. In Europe, a toxic combination of public, bank, and external debt in the periphery threatens to unhinge the eurozone. Across the Atlantic, a standoff between the Democrats, the Tea Party, and old-school Republicans has produced extraordinary uncertainty about how the United States will close its 8%-of-GDP government deficit over the long term. Japan, meanwhile is running a 10%-of-GDP budget deficit, even as growing cohorts of new retirees turn from buying Japanese bonds to selling them.

Aside from wringing their hands, what should governments be doing? One extreme is the simplistic Keynesian remedy that assumes that government deficits don’t matter when the economy is in deep recession; indeed, the bigger the better. At the opposite extreme are the debt-ceiling absolutists who want governments to start balancing their budgets tomorrow (if not yesterday). Both are dangerously facile.

The debt-ceiling absolutists grossly underestimate the massive adjustment costs of a self-imposed “sudden stop” in debt finance. Such costs are precisely why impecunious countries such as Greece face massive social and economic displacement when financial markets lose confidence and capital flows suddenly dry up.

From HERE.

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Museum of the American Revolution Opening in 2015

Washington’s tent among stunning artifacts in first ever museum dedicated to American Revolution

A priceless collection of American Revolutionary war treasures has been waiting patiently for more than a century for a permanent place to call home.

Currently held in a secret, nondescript building in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the carefully kept collection will take up residence when the Museum of the American Revolution opens in the City of Brotherly Love’s historic district.

Like an American version of the U.K’s Royal Crown Jewels, the collection contains Founding Father George Washington’s original tent, which has been compared to an outdoor Oval Office.

General Washington’s original sleeping and office tent, parts of which appear in this early 20th century photograph, was carefully preserved by generations following the deaths of George and Martha Washington

Carefully stacked on shelves, hanging on walls and spread out on tables in a large climate-controlled room are thousands of artifacts from the Revolutionary War.They will remain under wraps in their anonymous location until late 2015, when The Museum of the American Revolution opens in Philadelphia’s historic district.

‘We’re still finding things,’ curator R. Scott Stephenson said during a recent behind-the-scenes tour of the Colonial-era cache.He recently discovered, as one example, five law books among the hundreds of storage boxes inscribed with the owner’s name: Patrick Henry. More digging unearthed estate and auction records verifying the books belonged to the Founding Father known for his ‘give me liberty or give me death’ speech, and not someone with the same name.

‘It’s not just inventorying; some of it literally is you find a piece and 6 months later, a year later, you find something else,’ Stephenson said, ‘and you triangulate and boom – it’s one plus one equals seven.’The collection was started by the Rev. W. Herbert Burk, an Episcopal minister and George Washington enthusiast who founded the Valley Forge Historical Society in the early 1900s.

That group is the predecessor of the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit and non-partisan group working to raise $150 million to build the 110,000-square-foot museum.

Earlier this month the Oneida Indian Nation announced a $10 million gift to the museum in honor of Oneidas who fought alongside the Continental Army against British forces.

[ MORE ]

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Culture Does Matter

Girl, 12, TASERED in Victoria’s Secret ‘for trying to stop police officer from arresting her mother’

Nanny State job-killers: The feds’ war on…Buckyballs! Almost bought a box of these in Gold. Maybe I should do so now?

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SNL alums Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey spoke about the current state of the comedy world and the fact that comedians are hesitant to target President Obama.

Go HERE for more

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TEXAS IS NOW A TWO PARTY STATE – THE RINO REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE TEA PARTY!

Ted Cruz wins! The battle to replace RINO Kay Bailout Hutchison is over! RINO darling David Dewhurst got his butt handed to him by the new power in Texas politics…the Tea Party! This will no doubt send shock waves through the frilly little panties of the RINO establishment in Texas. But the message is even bigger than AWD’s beloved Lone Star State….RINOs throughout America better FEAR THE TEA PARTY!

How long has AWD been saying that? For about three years! FEAR THE TEA PARTY! The Tea Party has grown from a group of unorganized patriots pissed at what was happening to America to a growing, well-organized, well-funded, motivated political machine mowing down liberals and RINOs in its path!

In Texas, the RINO establishment in the wussypants Republican party are seeing their grip on power slip away with every election. Several RINO state legislators bit the big one tonight. The state will move further to the side of fiscal sanity with new leaders to fight against the wussyboy Repub establishment in Austin. And Democrats? Yeah, right….this is Texas. Don’t waste my time.

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Harry Reid is either a liar or a lousy critical thinker.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) made political waves today by claiming that a Bain Capital investor told him that Mitt Romney didn’t pay any taxes for a 10-year period.

One of two things has happened: (1) Reid is simply making the whole thing up, in order to pressure Romney into releasing tax returns for years prior to 2010, or (2) Reid’s investor pal lied, and the Senator didn’t bother to conduct even a mild vetting before sharing the accusation with reporters. Either way, shame on gossipy gentleman from Nevada.

Let me make this crystal clear: Investors in private equity funds do not receive, nor are they entitled to request, personal tax returns for fund managers. Not just at Bain Capital, but everywhere. For example, ask the person managing your 401(k) for their personal tax returns. See how far you get.

What makes this particular claim even sillier, of course, is that Romney hasn’t even been managing Bain funds for the past 10 years (no matter when you believe he left the firm). He’s been a silent investor like Harvard and MIT. Think the guy managing private equity for Harvard can get the personal tax returns of the guy managing private equity for MIT? Yes, that’s another rhetorical question.

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SLEAZE: Harry Reid Says Romney’s Dead Father Is Embarrased By Him

Read that headline again and let it sink in.

Now imagine how you would feel if someone said your dead father considered you an embarrassment.

That’s the sort of slimy thing Harry Reid said today. He’s still going after Romney on the manufactured controversy over Romney’s taxes. Mind you, he has absolutely no proof for his accusations…

In a wide-ranging interview with The Huffington Post from his office on Capitol Hill, Reid saved some of his toughest words for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Romney couldn’t make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances.

“His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid said, in reference to George Romney’s standard-setting decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s.

Saying he had “no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy,” Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.

“Harry, he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years,” Reid recounted the person as saying.

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?

“You guys have said his wealth is $250 million,” Reid went on. “Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

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POLITICO – House Republicans are accusing the Obama White House — and the president’s reelection campaign manager Jim Messina — of purposefully skirting disclosure rules and negating the administration’s often-repeated claim to be “the most transparent administration in history.”

A House Energy and Commerce Committee report out Tuesday is stocked with emails sent from private addresses and meetings scheduled away from the building to avoid official record. Among these are several sent to a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist by Messina, then President Barack Obama’s then-deputy White House chief of staff, making promises about language for the health care reforms despite the resistance of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the measure.

“I will roll [P]elosi to get the 4 billion,” Messina wrote Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobbyist Jeffrey Forbes from his personal account just days before the Affordable Care Act cleared Congress in March 2010. “As you may have heard I am literally rolling over the house. But there just isn’t 8-10 billion.”

The note related to the official business regarding an agreement reached by the Senate Finance Committee and PhRMA on the president’s health care law. Pelosi’s office referred to previous statements in which she declined to address the deal between the administration and PhRMA.

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Other emails released on Tuesday show Jeff Smith, a senior adviser to the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, offering to meet with Jim Kirkland, an executive from the GPS industry, off the White House grounds. LightSquared clashed with the GPS industry for years as it tried to get approval to use frequencies near those used by GPS. Republicans have alleged that contracts for LightSquared, which was backed by several major Democratic donors, had received preferential treatment from the White House.

“Jim – coffee at Caribou Coffee – across the corner from the WH – would work at 11:30 a.m. on Friday…plus getting you through the new WH security rules these days almost takes an act of Congress almost (and you know how well that’s going these days),” Smith wrote. “[P]lus you’d appear on an official WH Visitor List which is maybe not want [sic] you want at this stage …”

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said in a statement accompanying the report that he isn’t alleging illegal activity — just that the administration’s actions has fallen far short of its transparency promises.

“What we have learned from our many investigations is that, time and again, the Obama administration’s actions have failed to match the president’s lofty rhetoric on transparency,” Stearns said.

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