Manchin and Tea Party Agree: AUDIT THE PENTAGON!

When it comes to talking about Big Government by the republican establishment "defense spending" and the Pentagon have largely gotten a pass.  Neither have the democrats been bold enough to take any serious action despite the enormous and blatant overspending and fiscal mismanagement of one of the largest budget eaters of U.S. taxpayers.   The Pentagon has not passed an audit in over 20 years!  Finally, someone is doing something about it and in a non-partisan fashion.

Think there is any extravagance or waste in this government spending?

Listen to former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld himself and other former Pentagon officials below.

So the first week of August 2012 Senators Coburn (R-OK) and Manchin (D-WV) introduced the AUDIT THE PENTAGON ACT on the Senate floor.  The Gazette had a good article about it.  Here is a snip from the WashingtonExaminer.com:

Why we must audit the Pentagon--Senator Tom Coburn

   "Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and I recently introduced the Audit the Pentagon Act (S. 3487), which creates new incentives and enforcement mechanisms to force the Pentagon to pass an audit. Joining as us original co-sponsors were Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ron Johnson, R-Wis., John Cornyn, R-Texas, Scott Brown R-Mass., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

Auditing the Pentagon is critically important not just because it is the law but also because our ignorance of how we spend defense dollars undermines our national security. When the Pentagon can't tell Congress -- or itself -- how it is spending money, high-priority defense programs face cuts along with low-priority programs...

So this is a bipartisan bill and an issue that constitutional conservatives and the Tea Party movement has been pushing for to drastically reduce the size and scope of Big Government.  The republican establishment traditionally avoids this as politically incorrect and unpatriotic, as if the Pentagon can do no wrong. 

Senator Rand Paul has said he plans to bring this to attention of the GOP Convention Tuesday night during his prime time address.  He says it's time to push AUDIT THE PENTAGON as much as AUDIT THE FED has had attention previously, per this Yahoo news article:

"Because we've talked about audit the Fed so much, we're now talking about audit the Pentagon," Paul told the crowd.  

 "...And one of the messages that I will give to them is that Republicans need to acknowledge that not every dollar is well spent or sacred in the military and we have to look for ways to make every department accountable."

This is great, especially because it's bipartisan!  Big Government must be held accountable and its abuses exposed in order for it to be appropriately and proportionally dismantled and reduced to its Constitutional and simple Federal form, instead of giving it free reign to roam at will and constantly feeding this giant Behemoth of Central government whatever it demands which makes it almost impossible to tame.

Sen. Rand Paul will speak at the convention between 7 and 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, according to an updated schedule made public Sunday.   You can watch it LIVE on the web through C-SPAN here.

Tell your Congressmen to support the bipartisan AUDIT THE PENTAGON ACT immediately.  And let's see how Rand Paul addresses this (as he has before in the Senate) at the GOP Convention. 

See also:  Rand Paul addresses Senate on Fiscal Crisis, "Out of Control" Spending, Balanced Budget

Romney--Paul Ryan: A Return to Bush's Big Government?

Per former FOX commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano (who can hardly be called a liberal), Tea Party conservatives and Constitutionalists should not be very happy about Paul Ryan as Romney's VP, especially if they look at his Big Government voting record.  Napolitano, like us, is discouraged by the naive enthusiasm and another choice between the "lesser of two evils" for President and Vice President.   It's time to take a closer look.  Ignorance is not bliss.

The neocons and the RINO establishment are trying to hoodwink the Tea Party by painting Ryan in another image and pretending that Romney would even adopt Ryan's fiscal conservatism.  The truth is that Ryan himself has no record of fiscal conservatism or limited government either!  False images must be dashed for the truth to be told.  This is a wake-up call!

Is this the best the Republican Establishment has to offer us?  It is self-evident what the principles of the Republican Establishment then really are.  The Constitution and limited government are clearly not their ideals nor in their RINO game plan.

It is also irrational to sum up America as "an idea", as Paul Ryan attempts.  Nations have histories and power struggles.  The initial American "idea" was overthrown 150 years ago now, when the Federal government in Washington, which originally was very limited by the sovereign states, usurped power and became a Centralized Power and even went to war against the very States who had formed it.  THAT was the end of limited and a Constitutionally restrained Federal government, and under the first radical Republican, Lincoln.  But don't expect any real assessment of American history from any political candidate.  That would be politically incorrect and career suicide.

But don't miss this article by former host of FOX's Freedom Watch, Andrew Napolitano:

Romney and Ryan Would Return Us to the Bush Years

Last week, Gov. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, blasted Obama for borrowing more than one trillion dollars in just the past year. He must have forgotten to look at the voting record of his designated running mate, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.  Ryan voted for nearly every request to raise the debt ceiling during his 14 years in Congress. He voted for TARP, the GM bailout and most of the recent stimulus giveaways. He also voted to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on a credit card, which added another trillion dollars to the government's debt. And he voted to assault the Constitution by supporting the Patriot Act and its extensions, as well as Obama's unconstitutional proposal to use the military to arrest Americans on American soil and detain those arrested indefinitely.

...we have a rough idea of what Romney-Ryan would bring us: more of the Bush-era big government. In other words, Ryan is just another big-government Republican holding himself out as a fiscal conservative.

See also:  Judge Napolitano on ObamaCare and the 2012 Election Choices