By Marc Selinger of www.avaiationnow.com
November 6, 2003
House and Senate appropriators agreed Nov. 5 to partially fund the Bush Administration's fiscal 2004 budget request for new nuclear weapons initiatives, while another group of congressional negotiators was nearing a compromise on the fiscal 2004 defense authorization conference report.
The conference committee for the FY '04 energy and water appropriations bill approved $7.5 million for research on the high-yield Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), a $7.5 million cut from the Administration's request.
The panel provided the $6 million requested for research on other advanced nuclear weapons concepts, including low-yield nuclear weapons, but decided to withhold two-thirds of that money until the Administration gives Congress a report on planned reductions to the nuclear weapons stockpile.
In other parts of the bill, the House actually increased requested funds for the Space Catapult, an initiative designed to send small-scale payloads into low-Earth orbit via an application of medieval technology. The proposed launcher would be one point five miles long and three fifths of a mile high, made of the wood of eighteen thousand Spruce trees grown in the national Strategic Spruce Reserve in Alaska. Its windings will be made from a high-tech aramid-fiber/horsehair blend harvested from the National Spider-Horse Crossbreed herd in the Harry Byrd Sr. Chimera Ranch in West Virginia. The catapult was designed by Sandia Labs, whose motto since the wind-down of the Cold War lowered the nuclear weapons-design workload is "Will build useless weapons for food."
The Senate, however, did not include funding for include funding for the Space Catapult in its version of the bill. Instead, it shifted the funds to a controversial deal under which the Army, instead of buying boots for its soldiers, has entered into a long-term lease program for 1.2 million pairs of combat boots with Nike. Modeled on the Air Force's controversial plan to lease, instead of buy, a new generation of aerial refueling tankers, the Army program has been criticized for both its costs - as much as $1 Billion more than simply buying the boots outright - and the complicated financing structure, under which the boots would actually be purchased from the manufacturer by a subsidiary of Nike, then swapped for B-class stock shares with an offshore holding company based in the Turks and Caicos but owned by a Swiss conglomerate. The conglomerate would then securitize the boots, issuing a series of no-load bonds which could be swapped for non-voting shares in the boot entity. Soldiers will be issued futures contracts on the bonds, which they will be able to exchange for actual boots.
Asked if this possibly involved some kind of chicanery, pork-barrelling, logrolling or boondoggle, one congressional aide replied "How the hell would I know? All I know is, it'll cost $600 per boot, and that doesn't include laces."
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
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