Possumblog

I assume there isn't a single no-bid company with an arrangement with the current congress?

Well, it's not wrong if the Democrats do it.

In seriousness, I usually have a hard time with any sort of public money being spent without some sort of process to make sure we don't spend more than we have to, but having some passing familiarity with federal regulations and the way in which these things get done, it can be a VERY long time from when the need is identified until a contract can be awarded. In the case of military necessity, there is usually not enough time to do all that in time to have support services in place when and where you need them. This pretty much leaves it up to hiring whoever you can, and like it or not, Halliburton and Kellogg Brown and Root are one of the few companies able to provide the necessary service and support functions anywhere on the globe on nearly a moment's notice. Your local guy with a sandwich truck or contractor in a pickup simply cannot provide this. If there is sufficient time to define the scope of work and benchmarks and to allow other companies to do a joint venture to compete against folks like Halliburton, it might be worth it to have a competitive bid. But for the ever-shifting atmosphere in a war zone, sometimes it's simply not possible to operate as effeciently as we should.

Same thing with the waste that follows FEMA around. The Democrats complain if safeguards are put in place to keep fraud down (HOW DARE YOU DENY THESE PEOPLE THEIR ENTITLEMENT!!), then complain if too much is paid out because there are no safeguards to prevent fraud (HOW DARE YOU LET THESE PEOPLE FLIM-FLAM YOU!). In the end, due to the nature of what's being done, there is going to be waste, and sometimes a lot of it.

Refusing to recognize this state of affairs, and rather than arriving at an equitable (although probably imperfect) solution that works well enough for such contingencies, we instead have far too many politicians who salivate at the prospect of beating up on evil corporations.

Seems that someone got tired of the constant beatings.

Halliburton is a services company that happens to work with the oil industry (amongst others). They don't actually drill. They started in Texas since there used to be a large amount of oil drilling. They decided for business reasons to relocate to the Mideast.

It shouldn't be surprising that the libs will beat this dead horse. Halliburton = Cheney = evil. It's the same people who think the world would be better with Cheney dead, and were disappointed last week. The same people who are NIMBY when it comes to finding and drilling for oil in Alaska or offshore (west coast) and complain about the price of gas going up due to a big oil conspiracy.

You want to see fraud, look up some of the former Iraqi officials who were put in charge after the invasion, and have since relocated to Europe with million$$ bank accounts. You also have the Hilly fraud, of how she voted for the war but now doesn't like how it turned out, especially since she was "deliberately" lied to. Not that she's ever done something like that ...

Sure, but I mean since it was Bill who was talking up Saddam's arsenal of WMDs back in the late '90s, we have to give HIM a pass.