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Chambliss warns against military budget sequestration
total military cuts with sequestration 970 billion
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., discusses the effects of sequestration with community leaders Monday in Hinesville. - photo by Randy C.Murray

Fort Stewart and Hinesville stand to lose 7,000 defense-related jobs if sequestration takes effect Jan. 2, 2013, warned Georgia’s senior U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss on Monday during a visit to the MidCoast Regional Airport.
“Let’s make no mistake about it,” Chambliss, a Republican originally from Darien, told community leaders before explaining the difference between discretionary spending and mandatory spending. “Our country is in real fiscal trouble. We spend too much money at the Defense Department, just as we spend too much money at the Agricultural Department and every other department. (But) the consequences (of sequestration) on (military) communities will have just as significant an impact as it will have on the military.”
The sequester is a $1.2 trillion package of defense and entitlement cuts that will kick in if Congress doesn’t develop a debt reduction package of its own.
Liberty County Chamber of Commerce CEO Leah Poole welcomed guests then turned the program over to retired Maj. Gen. David Bockel, executive director of the Georgia Military Affairs Coordinating Committee.
Bockel, a Vietnam veteran, said he remembered watching the “hollowing out” of the military after that war and warned against letting that happen again. He then introduced Hinesville Mayor Jim Thomas, who also is a Vietnam veteran.
Thomas called Chambliss a statesman, a term he said he doesn’t use loosely, noting that the senator had worked with other members of Congress to find bipartisan solutions to the nation’s budget problems.
Chambliss explained that more than one-third — $492 billion — of the mandatory sequestration cuts would be made to defense spending. These cuts would come on top of $487 billion in cuts already proposed in the president’s budget, he said.
He quoted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who described the effects of sequestration on national defense as “devastating.” In addition to the 80,000 fewer soldiers and 20,000 fewer Marines already proposed, sequestration would reduce ground forces to levels not seen since 1940, Panetta said in a November 2011 letter to Congress.
“Georgia is fifth in the nation in military population,” Chambliss said. “The impact of sequestration on Fort Stewart and Hinesville would be a loss of 7,000 jobs.”
Read more in the Aug. 22 edition of the News.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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