UPDATED: Via Mercury News: “The Republican-controlled House voted Wednesday to cancel $450 million for an alternative engine being developed for the F-35 fighter jet. The vote backed Barack Obama’s administration and the Pentagon in saying that the GE Aviation-Rolls Royce joint project can be sacrificed in the effort to rein in the federal deficit.”
“[GE Aviation spokesman Rick]Â Kennedy said the workers will keep going on the project.”
“They will continue to until we get this resolved. It’s a setback, but it’s not over,” Kennedy said. “We will take this fight to the Senate.”
So, it’s over, Boehner lost, and yet the battle may continue on into the Senate. Why? See what Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen said yesterday about Boehner’s Ohio earmark deal:
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John Boehner, the Speaker of the House who promised the American people he would focus on jobs, and who seems to think the being a Congressman is a part-time job, has railed against earmarks and spending, and vowed to cut both. But it seems that Mr. Boehner’s state of Ohio may be getting an initial payment of almost half a billion dollars — in the form of an earmark attached to a GOP bill to cut spending– that would pay U.K.-owned Rolls Royce and General Electric for research on an engine for the Department of Defense that it neither wants nor needs.
Read: “John Boehner’s Part Time Job: Speaker Of The House“
Scott Lilly of The Center for American Progress explains that the bill “would shred, among other things, the social safety net in hard-pressed localities across America with reductions in nutrition programs for infants and pregnant mothers.”
But this GOP bill does not affect only mothers and infants, but entire families. Lilly says the bill “would cut federal support to keep destitute families from having their heat and electricity cut off during one of the coldest winters in recent memory.”
“It’s the Rolls Royce of” is the phrase used to describe the “best of the best,” the “elite” of something,  and the “most-expensive.” How is it possible that our tax dollars could be spent, in an earmark no less, on literally the “Rolls Royce of engines” — a Rolls Royce engine — instead of on food and heat for mothers and their infants?
Ask John Boehner, who believes the government’s role isn’t to care for the needy, and that people can just go out and get a job, work hard, and take care of their families, despite the fact that unemployment is well-over 9%, that John Boehner’s House hasn’t produced one bill that would increase jobs, and that, ironically, John Boehner “is not a hard worker.” He just thinks others should be, and if his policies take jobs away from folks, to quote John Boehner, “so be it!”