The amount we spend on the DoD is beyond obscene, but the 2019 NDAA was full of inducements like a 2.6% pay rise for soldiers, increased health care spending, housing allowances, funding for child protective and spousal abuse services, and so on. It was also full of pork in key states. I don’t know what was going on in the minds of Brown and Klobuchar, but my senators are not especially militaristic, and justified their support on the basis of these other provisions.
(In fact, Biden is traveling down a road that he’s been down before, and I think based on past performance he’ll not be a viable candidate by the end of the first few primaries.)
Hmm. Their core reporting team will lean right, but not at the cost of journalism. They’ve been surprising me in the last year with solid critical reporting on Doug Ford and Andrew Scheer. They do have a few other writers, columnists, that are much less so.
For outright Conservative operatives, the Toronto Sun or anything owned by Postmedia.
Rebel Media is the Canadian Brietbart/Steve Bannon of the Conservative Party. Ontario Proud/Canada Proud is the Cambridge Analytica wanna-be.
The Post Millennial would be … Big League Politics?
Yes. Obviously there is no way to do that cost-neutral on a meagre ~$860 billion budget.
Fun fact: the official title of the NDAA 2019 is
“The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019”,
but Trump signed it anyway.
Just explaining the reasoning used by Democrats when they vote for this. For example, here in Hawaii we famously had a Korean missile scare; the bill included funding to fix our wonky alert system.
Nowadays the NDAA is one of the only regular bills that can be expected to pass in some form, so one of the only ways a senator can get some new program through. As a result you get hundreds of little additions to the bill, and senators vote for it based of the provisions at the margins. It is a terrible approach to government, but it has been going on for years. Even Bernie has voted for NDAAs on the basis of getting something he deemed important approved.
I get where you’re coming from. It’s just that I think this is not so much an explanation as a rationalisation of something that badly needs to be fixed.
The way I hear it put is that news section of The Wall Street Journal has what businessmen need to hear while the op-ed page has what they want to hear.
