1. It is time to get politics BACK into the decision-making on base closures.
2. We are at war and that is a strange time to be slashing bases or anything military.
3. Did I hear correctly that this fiasco is going to save a big $48 billion OVER 10 years (possibly offset by the associated expenses????) in an era that starts with $2.7 trillion annual budgets????? Gicve the boy a penny!
4. Insignificant as are the microscopic savings in the context of the fedbudget, the savings will devstate the host communities.
5. As most college and university campuses are sites for the development of leftist cancers in their host communities (Oh, isn't he being MEAN! Colleges bring us culture (!!!!) and music (that no one would be caught dead supporting in the free market place so e have to be taxed to extertain our cancerous elites) and drama (see last parentheses, and teach-ins and lots of folks with too much time on their hands and too little ability to detect truth, so military bases and installations tend to move a community in the, ummmm, right direction. Give me the chance and I will kill $4.8 billion a year in useless fedsubsidies to a few thousand Karl Marx Snobocracy Universities before breakfast each morning for the next month and then go to work on the rest of the bloated fedbudget's socialist schemes (you know, $100 million for a one year-study of the sex life of marble statues, $10 million for Alexander Calder to hang together and paint orange three tons of steel pipes and girders into some sort of phallic imagery that he calls art and stick it in public spaces where we cannot even ignore his rustpiles, Anfre Serrano's "Piss Christ", the anal photography of the late and unlamented Robert Mapplethorpe, National Public Radio/all of it, National Public Television/all of it including Barney the brain dead non-competitive dinosaur, et al.).
6. Create a National Endowment for the Preservation and Increase of Military Bases and Military Jobs and Military Hardware and for the vigorous use of those bases and personnel whenever and wherever the opportunity arises. Call it something traditional---the department of WAR.
7. Today (in wartime, no less) we spend about $400 billion per year on the military (allegedly) including vast sums for impact aid to local public miseducation districts in the vicinity of bases. The budget is about $2.7 trillion. We now spend a bit more than 15% of our budget on matters military which are among the few constitutional expenditures of the Leviathan federal government. Reality Check: John F. Kennedy's last budget spent SIXTY PER CENT OF ITS EXPENDITURES on military and he was scrapping battleships in progress (llinois and Kentucky): $60 billion of $100 billion. As Casey Stengel used to say, you could look it up.
8. Let's compromise. Return the fedbudget to a mere $1 trillion, spend 50% on the military, cut taxes accordingly, create a ten-year plan for social service closings instead of base closings and get back in the business of being America.
9. Pull out of GATT and WTO and raise tariff barriers.
10. AND, oh yes, DO NOT CLOSE THE UNITED STATES SUBMARINE BASE at Groton, Connecticut or Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. The sub base is the only remaining outpost of America in Connecticut, is vital to our national security in that it is the ultimate veto over Islamofascism or any other enemy of the USA, is sacred land/water, and if it is ever nuked only Rhode Island suffers from fallout. Let Lieberman "save" the sub base in exchange for ten votes to be cast first (Constitutional option, judges, Bolton, etc.). If John Thune got elected over Daschle on the promise of saving Ellsworth Air Force Base (has anyone in DC noticed the razor thin-magins in South Dakota elections to the House and Senate?????), by darn, Ellsworth Air Force must be saved and a point should be made of persuading South Dakota that Senator Timothy Johnson and that Socialistfem Congresscritter Hirseth had absolutely NADA to do with the save but that Thune and Governor Mounds made ALL THE DIFFERENCE in spite of them.
11. Feel free to suggest additional "political" options but the sub base and Ellsworth are non-negotiable. I would like to see a chemical warfare testing ground and base established at Hyannis Port and another in Cambridge.
We should have no more bases than necessary for the defense of our nation. The point of the military is, after all, to provide defense, not jobs or make-work in certain communities. I don't know all the pros and cons of Groton versus Norfolk, but do we really need both?
I did look it up. Both the Illinois and Kentucky were sold for scrap in 1958, JFK had nothing to do with either.