Word: backings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bill is traditionally paid for. Instead, Oberstar and House Appropriations Committee chairman Dave Obey have suggested a smaller, Band-Aid program of $100 billion drawn from general Treasury funds, though Oberstar has also suggested using some of the leftover bank-bailout money. He still hasn't heard anything back on either proposal. "It's like shouting out into outer space - nothing's coming back from the other side of the Hill, nothing's coming back from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue," he laments...
...treat everything as a potential jobs bill. "The appropriations bills can also be looked at as jobs bills," says a Senate Democratic leadership aide. "There's money in them for projects that will create jobs." Indeed, if tradition holds, many of these jobs provisions will get loaded on the back of the annual defense appropriations bill - typically the last bill passed in the year. After all, almost no member of Congress is willing to vote against funding the troops, even if some of that money finds its way back to help civilians at home...
...sending in 30,000 more troops only to start withdrawing them in July 2011, less than a year after they all arrive. The troops - as many as were involved in the Iraq surge, though in a much smaller war - are being sent to stun the enemy, to turn back recent Taliban advances, especially in Kandahar province, the heartland of the insurgency. But why limit the force of the blow by announcing the date you will begin the withdrawal? "Why wouldn't they wait you out?" asked David Ignatius of the Washington Post...
...supertanker. A good part of the reason the troops were sent to Helmand instead of Kandahar, even though it violated the prevailing counterinsurgency strategy, was that the fortifications already had been built in Helmand; it seemed too late to turn the supertanker around. Obama kept sending plans back to the Pentagon, seeking a faster launch for his "extended surge." The military still isn't entirely sure that it'll be able to move 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by August. "We'll push in every way possible to get the forces on the ground ASAP," a senior military official told...
China is moving to take back one of its own - even if it is legend. Mulan is the Middle Kingdom's gender-bending heroine, its Joan of Arc. The character from folktale is a daughter who disguises herself as a male soldier to take her father's place in the conscription army. The problem for the Chinese is that, since 1998, the definitive version of the story has been Disney...