To be added to the Murtha Watch ping list please notify myself or RedRover.
Posted on 03/15/2008 5:37:09 PM PDT by smoothsailing
Good article. Boeing was acting in bad faith. Ripping off the taxpayers. Shame on them.
btt
Airbus hasnt acted in good faith ever..
Bid rigging is SOP.. Socialism is a rotten barrel.. ripped off by your countrymen or
ripped off by a foreigner.. I'll take the thief I'm related to..
Well, here’s one thing I certainly WILL agree with McCain about. I’ve personally witnessed how DoD contracts are manipulated, usually with Congressional help. Always said that if the taxpayers really knew how much of this goes on, Washington would be facing an armed rebellion.
If McCain DOES win the Presidency, I hope he gets well and truly stuck into cleaning up the fraud and backscratching that goes on, and blows the whistle on the Murthas in Congress. Maybe he’ll cut a deal with Conservatives for support in this crusade, which is LONG overdue, and signs up to prevent our country be over-run with illegal aliens. Would be a win-win for all of us.
BTW it’s quite amazing to see how many DoD contractors have set up offices in Murtha’s district. Given that Johnstown PA is the place you would stick it if the Earth needed an enema, I can’t imagine anybody going there voluntarily.
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On March 5, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense panel, John Murtha, summoned Air Force officials to explain their decision to award the contract to Airbus. The hearing was a circus of accusations and I-told-you-so's, with mostly Democratic lawmakers lecturing top Air Force officials on how they should have reached their decision. Through it all, the service's top acquisition official, Sue Payton, stuck to her guns, repeatedly telling the bitter lawmakers she had adhered strictly to contracting laws and that, in the end, the Northrop Grumman/EADS team had "brought their A-game."
It was Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who lathered on the criticism of McCain, blaming him for outsourcing American defense business, delaying the Air Force's tanker replacement, and costing the United States a purported 40,000 jobs.
"Because of the individual in the other body stopping what the Air Force and this committee agreed to is [sic] costing billions of dollars, and we're at a point where we don't know how long it's going to take to get these [KC-135s] out of the air," Murtha whined, blaming McCain instead of the Air Force or Boeing for the entire fiasco.
As a rule of thumb, whichever side Murtha is on is going to be the wrong side.
To be added to the Murtha Watch ping list please notify myself or RedRover.
Living in KS, I get only the Boeing side of this. (big factory in Wichita)The KS pols are really throwing the bull. However, from the national media, it looks like Boenig screwed itself with crooked business practices and no-bid contracts.
LOL! The whole pig!
That doesn’t matter to the so called conservative republicans who know treat defense spending as public works program.
Lockheed Martin has a plant in Johnstown (and another one close by in Clarksburg WVA). There were worries a couple of years ago that the end of the C130 would shut the plant down.
“China now has a role in all current Boeing models,” he added.”
Oh yeah, we should really take seriously all this whining about exported jobs on Boeing’s behalf.
“According to Burns, Boeing currently has 170 direct Boeing employees in China and 3,000 people working in Boeing joint ventures.”
Boeing is a leader in exporting high tech and high paying US jobs.
http://forums.industryweek.com/showthread.php?t=1331
That’s the way it is here in WA, the media plays everything in Boeings favor. The union at Boeing in Seattle absolutely went nuts when this was announced.
I don’t know the particulars as yet but like another poster stated, if Murtha is against the awarded contract I tend to think it might be on the up and up.
It's worse than that, Ma.
Murtha is doing this to pressure SECNAV Winter, that's the understory about all this.
If Murtha thinks something is wrong with the deal, it must be ok. Whatever he is for, I am against and vice versa.
I'm disappointed that the truth seekers at the Weekly Standard didn't mention the role of Linda Daschle (ex-Senator's wife and overpaid college-dropout lobbyist for the well-connected law dogs at Baker, Donelson) in this stinking Boeing deal that only an amoral crook like John Murtha could love.
I am bothered, though, by the behavior of congress in this. It takes little more than a contract and a calculator to figure out what the planes will actually cost. X payments of Y dollars. XY = how much money the planes will cost. Divide that by the number of planes and you know what you are about to pay for each one. If this is more than the planes cost, it is easy to see how much more, and if the financing is worthwhile. Pilots seem to like the Airbus plane, and the cost is good, but this whole thing stinks.
Was it really neccessary to prosecute people for offering a selling price, even if it was high? Boeing is a business, not a charity. If the offer was not good, congress could have easily said so.
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