Gov. M. Jodi Rell is angry because an F-18 fighter jet flew too low last week, scaring some people who live near Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks.

 

One just wishes that Gov. Rell would get this angry that F-18s fly too low and drop munitions every day, killing people who live in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

This accidental F-18 fly-by inspired Rell to pen a nastygram to Navy Cmdr. J.J. Cummings at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, home of the offending fighter jet, according to an August 29, 2009 report in the Hartford Courant by Christine Dempsey and David Owens.

 

"Witnesses say the jet flew about 100 feet over treetops and performed twisting maneuvers," Rell wrote. "All of this occurred above densely-populated neighborhoods and below radar levels. This represents an incredibly perilous disregard for the safety of our citizens and is absolutely unacceptable."

 

While Governor Rell scolds and wags her finger like an angry, protective Grandma at the Navy, she enthusiastically supports and enjoys the support of the war machine in other quarters.

 

Her act is starting to wear thin. She welcomed the waste of taxpayer dollars that was the supersonic fighter jet flyover at her inaugural parade. I remember the A-10 Warthog that tipped its wing over the Hartford Police Station on its way to the parade route on January 3, 2007.

 

More importantly than the symbolic gesture of a fly-over for the Connecticut National Guard's Commander-in-Chief, Gov. Rell consistently allocates millions of dollars annually for the Connecticut Military Department.

 

In 2010 alone, Connecticut taxpayers will fork over up to $60 million to fund the Connecticut Military Department.

 

The Military Department's budget hides in the Regulation and Protection section of the Governor’s proposed operating budget. Right there on page 58, the Governor's budget defines the Military Department as the Connecticut Army National Guard, Air National Guard and the State Militia.

 

"The state mission is to provide trained and disciplined forces for domestic emergencies or as otherwise required by law," the budget says. "The federal mission is to maintain properly trained and equipped units available for prompt mobilization for war or national emergencies."

 

The Military Department will receive at the minimum $7.5 million in taxpayer loot for military personnel and other expenses, most likely hardware to deploy or prepare to deploy more than 900 National Guardsmen in the Global War on Terror.

 

Rell's budget proposal – the one where this information was drawn from - was last modified on February 4, 2009. Since President Obama did not issue his diktat renaming the GWOT the "Overseas Contingency Operation" until March 24, 2009, the Rell Administration is not actively slighting the President.

 

If it was, Connecticut wouldn't receive an additional $14.5 million in federal grants. Some of that money, like $1.1 million, will pay for the Connecticut National Guard to run a Counter Drug Program.

 

So in cash funding alone, the taxpayers bear an annual burden of $21 million for the Connecticut Military Department.

 

The Rell 2010 budget brags of more than $50 million for the construction of two new complexes at Camp Rell, the military base named after her in East Lyme.

 

Governor Rell did not even show up for the groundbreaking of the new $18 million National Guard Readiness Center at Camp Rell in October 2008. Camp Rell will also begin construction on a new $32 million Regimental Training Institute Academy starting in 2009.

 

About $71 million for war boggles the mind - $50 million in capital improvements to one state run military base; $21 million for annual activities.

 

For perspective, in this latest round of budget cuts that led to the passage of the state budget Monday night, Gov. Rell requested $520 million in cuts, much of which falls on the shoulders of the poor. The Democrats in the state assembly came up with some $400 million in cuts.

 

One would hope that a kindly grandmother like Rell would feel compassion not just for the poor in her state, but for the soldiers who return from war zones half the men they used to be, and most importantly, for the people overseas we pay to kill.

 

I don't expect Rell to see the hypocrisy inherent in saying that F-18s flying overhead are unsafe for people who live in America, but the F-18s and their supersonic fighter ilk flying overhead are not unsafe for people who live in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Thus, if safety were Governor Rell's concern, she should be as incensed about the 101,995 sorties that the U.S. military flew in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2004 through 2007 as she is about the F-18 that buzzed Bradley, scaring the beejeezus out of the neighbors.

 

Who knows what the body count is for those 69 sorties a day? We don't do body counts, the masters of war say.

 

But figure those grisly numbers of air missions are increasing through the present, as they nearly doubled from 2004 to 2007, according to a December 2007 report “US Airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan: 2004-2007” by Anthony H. Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC think tank.

 

Cordesman, an ABC News correspondent and a Republican Beltway regular in the Senate and Department of Defense, made clear that only a small percentage of those sorties – about 7,000 - used heavy ammunition. Cordesman does not count the number of sorties that employed 20mm or 30mm cannons (with depleted uranium shells) or rockets.

 

The F-18 Super Hornet itself, the one that offended Gov. Rell, can fire more than 6,000 rounds per minute. Our troops call in air strikes from F-18s every day, somewhere in the world.

 

Yet that exercise of military might, used to intimidate and coerce civilians into submission to the American empire, does not bring Governor Rell to braying. It is this double standard that makes the Grandmother act so transparent.

 

Do your duty and oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now, Governor Rell.

 

$70 Million for the CT Military Department...(continued)