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http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/11/retired-four-st.html
Retired Four-Stars Leading Candidates for Obama's National Security Team
[...] Admiral Dennis C. Blair (Ret.), former Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Pacific Command and a 6th-generation naval officer, has emerged as the top candidate to be President-elect Obama's Director of National Intelligence. He recently met in Chicago with the president-elect.
[...] Blair was an Oxford classmate of former president Bill Clinton, and was a classmate at the Naval Academy of Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.
- - -- Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz, November 20, 2008
* * * * *
Matt Taibbi:
http://rollingstone.com/politics/story/11729724
THE LOW POST: Your Tax Dollars at Work
In Washington, another tale of waste and fraud unpunished
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Sep 19, 2006 9:15 AM[...] The name of Dennis C. Blair became somewhat infamous on the Hill this summer when he became wrapped up in a minor controversy surrounding appropriations for the F-22 Raptor jet fighter. Blair, a former Navy admiral who once headed the U.S. Pacific Command, was until last week the president of the IDA, a federally funded nonprofit research center which provides the government with "independent" analyses of weapons programs and defense legislation.
[...] Blair's IDA did as ordered, ultimately issuing a report showing that the MYP, by allowing suppliers to sell to the government at reduced bulk rates, would save the government a quarter of a billion dollars. This contradicted the findings of both the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, which blasted the procurement as an indefensibly stupid waste of money, but the IDA's "congressionally mandated independent study" (as Chambliss called it) was the one legislators chose to listen to.
[...] Moreover, it subsequently came out that Blair himself sat on the board of EDO, a subcontractor on the F-22 project.
[...] Blair last week resigned voluntarily -- quietly, with only the Post noticing [...]
[...] Blair's resignation was a de facto admission that a key study supporting one of the largest defense procurements in history was seriously compromised [...]
The ongoing bureaucratic drama surrounding procurement for this project is a kind of fairy tale for the system of legalized corruption in this country, in which taxpayer money is basically stolen and shot into space by an open conspiracy of legislators, defense contractors and Pentagon officials, colloquially known as the "Iron Triangle." The F-22 project is particularly offensive since its cost -- $65 billion -- mirrors very closely the $50 billion in "emergency" cuts to social programs Congress made last year, ostensibly to help pay for Katrina reconstruction.
[...] So what programs was Congress protecting, when it decided last year to take money away from single mothers, teachers, Medicaid and student loans? Ladies and gentlemen, we give you . . . the Raptor.
The F-22 is a symbol of everything that is wrong and stupid and corrupt about the United States government. Often called "the Maserati of fighter planes," the successor aircraft to the F-15 is a defense contractor's wet dream, a preposterously expensive and extravagantly useless hunk of hi-tech metal rigged with every conceivable luxury bell and whistle, a plane whose brochure comes riddled with the kind of hot and steamy selling points that pitches tents in industrial parks all over the country -- Mach 2 cruising speed, stealth skin, the most advanced avionics and software package ever invented.
But there are three basic problems with the F-22.
[...]
So to recap: a weapon that was designed to fight an enemy that no longer exists, which may be a spectacular design failure, and which costs up to ten times as much as the last generation's still-excellent and still-superior weapon, is to be mass-produced by a government steeped in a budget crisis of its own making, at a time when vital social services are being slashed. The funding bill for this plane was endorsed by a research group whose president is a board member of a subcontractor and was passed by a Congress heavily subsidized by the F-22's chief contractors.
[...]
- - Matt Taibbi
