Tony Blankley speaks to this phenomenon and does not think the “sensible” Obama will emerge. He cautions:

But of course, throughout history when dangerous, radical men have offered themselves up for leadership, their moderate supporters have rationalized their early support by hoping that the dangerous man is really a sensible man like them and doesn’t believe some of those wild things he has said to his more fervent followers.

But as the campaign clock ticks down to its last days and hours, prudent people have to consider the possibility that beneath that easy manner and calming voice is the pulsating heart of a genuine man of the radical left.

It a frightening possibility. But just as frightening, in a way, is the fact that we have reached the point of nearly electing this man and we still don’t know. Say what you will about almost any other politician you can think of, Right or Left, there is no one else in prominent national life who has this character of essential unknowability and possible extremism.

That is just one more reason to avoid voting for Obama—unless, of course, you’re a far Leftist, and that sort of change is just what you’ve been hoping for all these years.

Neo-Con has a great article on just this.

http://neoneocon.com/2008/10/29/will-the-real-obama-please-stand-up/

Kerry complained that Bush resisted creation of the Department of Homeland Security and has failed to provide firefighters and other first responders with enough financial resources.

-reported during the 2004 election.

Remember how he was lambasted in the press for this?

but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home

Say WHAT?- Mike

Scary, isnt it? The Army Times article also mentioned that the military might be used in cases of civil unrest or crowd control.

In April, 2007, the American Conservative pointed to “The Defense Authorization Act of 2006,” which paves the way for president to declare martial law (“even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly. . . “)

You might find this interesting:

Working for the Clampdown

What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2007/apr/23/00026/

Have you read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses?” Or paid attention to military spending while the GOP ruled the roost in 6 out of 8 years?

But Johnson sees it as a bi-partisan problem, and says that neither party is likely to buck the system.

From another recent post:

“Bringing the opposition party to power, however, is not in itself likely to restore the American republic to good working order. It is almost inconceivable that any president could stand up to the overwhelming pressures of the military-industrial complex, as well as the extra-constitutional powers of the 16 intelligence agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the entrenched interests they represent. The subversive influence of the imperial presidency (and vice presidency), the vast expansion of official secrecy and of the police and spying powers of the state, the institution of a second Defense Department in the form of the Department of Homeland Security, and the irrational commitments of American imperialism (761 active military bases in 151 foreign countries as of 2008) will not easily be rolled back by the normal workings of the political system.”

“Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicised) basic budget total and double it””

Since the policy has long been to hide the defense budget, the comparison stands. Let’s assume that the military budget has always been twice what is stated, so the average for the last 45 years was 11 percent of gdp. The budget in 2007 woud be 8%, still below historical averages.

“The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. ”

I hope all those sales get credited to the defense department budget.

In the last 45 years, Democrats, who control the nation’s purse strings, have controlled one or both houses of Congress, during the time when all these shennaigans that Chalmers laments occurred.

but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home

Say WHAT?

I have no idea about the extravagant claim of suspension of Posse Comitatus, but this story I’ve been saving for awhile *does* concern me. Just one guy’s opinion, but it does concern me.

———-

Army Taps Brigade for Homeland Defense

For the first time, the U.S. Army has designated an active-duty unit stationed at
home to serve as a federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which has spent 35 of the past 60 months in Iraq, began its new assignment on Oct. 1.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home, the
Army Times reports. “In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.

“But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts.”

Soldiers with the 1st Brigade Combat Team will be stationed and trained at Fort
Stewart, Ga. When its 12-month mission is completed, another yet unnamed active-duty brigade is expected to take over the mission, which will be a permanent one, according to the Army Times.

The unit could be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control, or to
deal with the chaos following an earthquake or a chemical, biological, radiological,
or nuclear attack.

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Col. Roger Cloutier, the
brigade’s commander.

“We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission
is to take care of citizens at home.”

———-

First it is humanitarian missions to “help out” the poor survivors of a tsunami, then the next thing you know, our military troops are put into action IN FORCE, within our own borders, to “police” our own citizenry? Not exactly a conservative position. I instinctively rebel against this.

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this” ??? I could care less about “noble”, myself.

Because I believe that both political parties were sold out to corporate interests long ago.
Did you see the report on 60 Minutes this week re: the financial crisis?
I highly recommend it.
Also, from From Aug, 2008, before the Sept. 15 crash:
Candidates for Sale
What do Obama and McCain have in common? The same big donors, who will expect to have their way no matter who wins.

I would agree that special interests have ‘invested’ in both political parties, but that doesn’t change the differing ideologies the candidates are bringing to the table.

However, you did not answer the second question (with its semi-rhetorical followup):

How is the blatant redistribution of wealth, either through the courts or the legislative process, not Marxism? Isn’t it still the government trying to ensure equality of economic result without regard to individual effort or contribution?

This doesn’t include all the hidden costs.

Also from Chalmers Johnson:

The economic disaster that is military keynesianism
Why the US has really gone broke

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life

“. . . It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush’s two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyse this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defence spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: “A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon’s (always well publicised) basic budget total and double it” (1). Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defence budget is “black”,” meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand — including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defence, and the military-industrial complex — but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalised either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defence budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative (2) and Fred Kaplan, defence correspondent for Slate.org (3). They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the “supplemental” budget to fight the global war on terrorism — that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional “allowance” (a new term in defence budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the US military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched US military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism
Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defence budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world’s richest political entity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU’s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US. Moreover, China’s 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world’s fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we’re doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the US and enjoys the world’s second highest current account balance (China is number one). The US is number 163 — last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the UK that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

It’s not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached _$9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the “debt ceiling” to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defence expenditures.

The top spenders
The world’s top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are:

Rank Country Military budget
1. United States (FY 2008 budget) $623bn
2. China (2004) $65bn
3. Russia $50bn
4. France (2005) $45bn
5. United Kingdom $42.8bn
6. Japan (2007) $41.75bn
7. Germany (2003) $35.1bn
8. Italy (2003) $28.2bn
9. South Korea (2003) $21.1bn
10. India (2005 est.) $19bn
World total military expenditures (2004 est) $1,100bn
World total (minus the US) $500bn

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration’s policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism — the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilisation, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR’s European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the US pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living” (4).

With this understanding, US strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience” — the military-industrial complex.

By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in US manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.. . .

Our short tenure as the world’s lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: “Again and again it has always been the world’s leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It’s no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world’s leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world’s leading lending country. In fact we are now the world’s biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone” (8).

Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the US urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defence budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defence budget as a Keynesian jobs programme.

If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

for full article: http://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military

This distortion that the military budget comes at the expense of other federal spending is nonsense.

Since 1962, the national defense spending as a percentage of GDP has averaged 5.5%. In 2007 it was 4%, well below the 9.5% at the height of the Vietnam War.

http://www.heritage.org/research/features/BudgetChartBook/fed-rev-spend-2008-boc-S7-Despite-War-Costs-Defense.html