Wampum

The 10:30 event won't be webcast, and the only detail remotely interesting detail from the briefing will be if Gannon/Guckert gets in, and what questions he's fed. Its the list that counts, not the momentary rhetoric any of the actors, costumed in civies or stripes.

Today is a "big picture" day. Not a cacophany of local economic polaroids, but the policy expressed in the fullest of mature reflection.

09:15 Congress has received the list: pdf version and html version.

Senator Kennedy has an oped piece in today's USAToday. link.

Walter Reed is going to steal the sunlight from all the beds in Christendom, since care to vets actually has no military value, and Boston, New York, Philidelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake, San Francisco and Los Angeles were obviously poor choices to site a hospital.

The Portsmouth Yard is on the CLOSE list, 201 uniformed and 4,032 civilian jobs lost. The Brunswick NAS is on the REALIGN list, 2,317 uniformed and 61 civilian jobs lost. Groton too. 7,098 uniformed and 952 civilian jobs lost.

I was impressed by Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who (a) is up front that "military value" is in the eye of the beholder [subtext, every Congressman or Congresswoman is as gifted as Don Rumsfeld, who doesn't have a monopoly on that], and (b) undersea warfare based in New England has primary military value, and (c) "jointness" means Navy/Marines, and is operationally specific, not everybody playing for Army. There's a guy I could work with, if he could work with a Berkeley Commie. The 28 pages is just the butcher's bill, there are 12 volumes to digest by someone's staffers, and the cognitive dissonance of planning 20 years out, for a "War on Terror" that, apparently is scheduled to last most, or all, and perhaps more, of those 20 years, doesn't seem to have started resonating yet.

Not a single woman working the Pentagon got called, on either side of the podium. Now to read the butcher's bill.

Google key: BRAC list