[DJ Taylor]

"...$18.1 million for a bachelor enlisted quarters at Camp Pendleton in California..."

I wonder if Marines are still living in the same squad bay I lived in at Camp Margarita in 1959? If they are, it just might be time to upgrade their quarters.

[Army MP Retired]

Indisputably true DJ - but, the point, I think, as Owen pointed out - what in the name of blazes does a BEQ at Camp Pendleton have to do with Veteran's benefits??? The media is spinning this to make it look like we're taking from Vet's.

[George W. Bush]

I wonder if Marines are still living in the same squad bay I lived in at Camp Margarita in 1959? If they are, it just might be time to upgrade their quarters.

If so, then you're right. But that is not emergency spending. That is part of the regular budget. This is just a way to sneak a lot of pork into the regular budget and then come back and add other routine expenditures into the 'emergency' budget.

In short, these are the same tricks the Gingrich congress came up against over and over. It's a shabby Dim budget trick. It is willfully dishonest.

It's not an emergency. And Rumsfeld's forward-deployment agenda indicates that building up our stateside bases isn't the direction he wants to go.

[Wristpin]

"I wonder if Marines are still living in the same squad bay I lived in at Camp Margarita in 1959? If they are, it just might be time to upgrade their quarters."

Don't know...but this bringing home the bacon earmarking has to stop. Obviously the brass at MCHQ didn't feel it was a high enough priority to bump other requirements and make it into the budget. I'll defer to the requirements people instead of a pork sucking politician inserting requirements that never made it through the chop chain.