Photo: AP and Reuters

PARIS — Tourists travelling to Omaha Beach to pay their respects to the 9,387 military dead at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial will find it closed, a victim of the U.S. government’s partial shutdown.

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George Washington’s Home

This government shut down thing is getting very strange very quickly don’t you think?  TheMount Vernon home of this nation’s very first president, George Washington, has been a privately owned property for the last 150 years.  It is open to the public, operating entirely on private donations.  This week, FEDS stormed access areas to the property and CLOSED IT OFF to the public.

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Obama Tells Vets No Memorial, Opens Muslim Museum

While the pentagon lays off 400,000 people, and the government furloughs a total of roughly 800,000 people because President Obama will not allow the government to be funded without his signature legislation nightmare called Obamacare, he lines up for yet another press conference. In that press conference he doesn’t talk about jobs, or the people he just laid off. He doesn’t talk about the fact that millions of VA cases that he has yet to process are now in the dust bins waiting on the government to be funded. He doesn’t talk about the thousands if not millions of Social Security people waiting to retire or their cases heard as they inform the public that they can’t even fix the paperwork due to the government shutdown. He did say that he was using his own personal money to fund the International Muslim Museum.

National Report records the words of President Obama at that press conference:

National Report records the words of President Obama at that press conference:

During this shutdown, people will have to deal with some of their favorite parks and museums being closed,” Obama told reporters. “Just keep in mind, they will always be there. The Grand Canyon and the Smithsonian are not going anywhere.” Obama continued, “The International Museum of Muslim Cultures is sacred. That is why I have taken it upon myself to use my own personal funds to re-open this historic piece of American culture.” – See more at: http://nationalreport.net/obama-uses-money-open-muslim-museum-amid-government-shutdown/#sthash.DlrhPkiC.dpuf

Pentagon Treats Shutdown Like Christmas: $5 Billion Spent On Shutdown Eve

By the end of Monday, September 30, 2013, the United States was knowing the government was shutting down. For some branches like the US Pentagon, they seem to think that it was an invitation that “Christmas came early”. On the very eve of the government shutdown, while furloughing 400,000 federal workers, the US Pentagon bilked spending for all it was worth signing and spending over $5 billion of the taxpayers money.

That same day, the Pentagon told 400,000 federal employees that they would have to take days off and loose pay because their jobs were non-essential. The Veteran Affairs Commission (VA) sent out letters to millions of American Veterans that although their case was not decided, they would have to wait for their benefits even longer.  Social Security told all their cases of legitimate US tax payers that have paid into the system that they will not be deciding any new cases or any appeals while this “shutdown” is in affect. Millions of backlogged cases were told that there was nothing that the United States Government would do for you, despite starving, while the government can not agree on the Affordable Health Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

To other government branches it seems while half their employees were being laid off of work, they were treating the Government Shutdown like Christmas Eve. The Pentagon was no exception. With spending being public knowledge when it comes to contracts, National Security reports:

All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month.

Here are some of the more interesting purchases from Monday’s dollar-dump.

First up: the Defense Logistics Agency, the Pentagon branch that provides the armed services with things like fuel and spare parts. DLA has the honor of dropping the most cash in one contract last night with the $2.5 billion award it gave to aircraft engine-maker Pratt & Whitney for “various weapons system spare parts” used by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Other highlights of DLA’s last-minute spree included: $65 million for military helmets from BAE Systems, $24 million for “traveling wave tubes” to amplify radio signals from Thales, $17 million for liquid nitrogen, $15 million for helium and $19 million on cots. Yes, cots.

Then came the Navy. The sea service spent hundreds of millions of dollars on 31 contracts buying everything from high-tech Finnish hand grenades to janitorial services.

The service’s biggest contracts were aimed at protecting ships from underwater attack. It gave Lockheed Martin a total of $139 million for sonar that allows Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to detect submarines and underwater mines. The Navy is also buying $40 million worth of hand grenades made in Vihtavuori, Finland, that allow “users to choose the level of blast needed for the situation.” Another $18 million is going to Phoenix International Holdings to operate a robot submarine called the Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System that can save people from disabled subs sitting up to 2,000 feet underwater.

Not everything the Navy spent its end of year cash on was high tech, however. The service also gave $64 million contract to build a new fuel pier in Point Loma, Calif. It also added $9 million onto an existing $138 million contract for janitors at Navy medical centers in San Diego.

The Air Force, traditionally DOD’s biggest spender, was relatively restrained; it dished out only 17 contracts. One of the big themes of the Air Force’s spend was spying. The service spent cash on everything from spy satellites to drones to planes that can be used to hunt drug dealers.

The air service gave General Atomics $49 million to help France buy 16 MQ-9 Reaper drones. It also dished out $64 million to Lockheed for help operating spy satellites that are equipped with infrared cameras. Another $9 million went to URS Corp. for maintenance work on the Air National Guard’s fleet of RC-26B spy planes that help domestic law enforcement agencies catch drug dealers. Johns Hopkins University got $7 million from the Air Force Research Lab to develop software that can monitor raw communications signals and images collected around the world to detect significant “events” in real time. $8 million is going to a company called McCrone Associates to analyze particles in order to ensure someone is complying international ban on nuclear weapons tests. It doesn’t say who that someone is or what type of particles are being analyzed.

The service also spent $9 million on a new gym at the Air Force Academy that includes areas for CrossFit training, space for the academy’s Triathlon Club and a “television studio.”

The Army only had a couple of relatively large contracts last night. The first was a $600 million award spread out between nine companies to develop alternative energy projects for the Army Corps of Engineers. The ground service also spent $200 million on for Interceptor-brand body armor made by Federal Prisons Industries for sales to other countries. In addition to these deals, the service gave out plenty of relatively small contracts — and relatively is an important word here — for everything from renovations on a reserve center in New Jersey to the purchase of 60 Mercedes Benz trucks for African countries.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) gave Raytheon $230 million to support operation of the massive, sea-going X-band radar station that MDA uses to detect ballistic missile launches in Asia. MDA also gave Trex Enterprises $6 million for telescope mirrors that are impervious to changes in temperature.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon’s arm responsible for defeating threats posed by weapons of mass destruction, gave Johns Hopkins University $9 million for research into detecting “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive material.”

Finally, U.S. Special Operations Command got in on the spending last night, giving out one $49 million contract to Boeing for development work on an upgraded version of the Army’s MH-6 Little Bird chopper.

So for the over one half of federal employees that are out of a job or trying to figure out where the next meal comes from, here is where your salary was spent.

 

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