f-22

Ben Smith finds some news in Sarah Palin’s all-over-the-place Hong Kong speech.
Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power. Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future [...]

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein hits the nail on the head today regarding the toughest hurdle Democrats face in passing health reform this year: Namely, the inertial force of the medical-industrial complex that’s been built up around the inefficient health system that’s in place.
The central problem in health-care reform is that good policy and good [...]

Just as it did with the Senate’s defense authorization bill, the White House released a statement warning the House Appropriations Committee against placing any money for the F-22 fighter jet — which the Senate killed — into its companion legislation:
The Administration strongly objects to $369 million in unrequested advanced procurement funding provided for 12 F-22 [...]

Much as I agree with Andrew Exum that this Washington Post post-mortem tick tock on the killing of the F-22 is worth reading, this paragraph seems a bit, well, incomplete:
[Defense Secretary Robert Gates] bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35 jet if the contracting giant lobbied to build [...]

People have been tweeting at me to provide a roll call for yesterday’s OMG-worth vote to kill the F-22, so here’s one. As it appeared yesterday, the vote was relatively nonpartisan: while the 58-40 tally to end funding for the fighter jet was carried by the Democrats, 15 Republicans joined the successful effort. The votes [...]

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), out for more than two months after suffering a series of infections, was back on Capitol Hill Tuesday to cast a vote in favor of continuing production of the F-22 fighter jet.
The 91-year-old, along with 39 others, lost the vote. But in a statement issued by his office, he said it [...]

Here’s Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) statement on today’s passage of his amendment to strip F-22 funding from the defense authorization:
Today’s vote is a significant victory for our men and women in uniform, for the taxpayers and for reforming the way we do business in Washington. The Senate faced a simple question today: If not now, [...]

I asked Rob Fuller, Lockheed Martin’s chief spokesman for the F-22 jet that it manufactures, what his reaction was to the Senate’s vote to strip funding for the F-22 from the defense authorization. And since the House’s companion bill has F-22 money in it, will Lockheed lobby to keep the funding in a conference bill? [...]

Just-released remarks from the Rose Garden on the Senate’s decision to strip funding for the F-22 fighter jet:
I want to say a few words about a very important vote that just took place in Congress.
Long before I took this office, I argued that meeting our greatest challenges would require not only changing policies in Washington, [...]

I asked Geoff Morrell, spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for a reaction to Gates’ victory in the Senate over the F-22 just now. Morrell:
“Secretary Gates appreciates the careful consideration Senators have given to  this matter of national security and he applauds their bipartisan support to  complete the F-22 program at 187 planes. He understands [...]