THOSE BOEING WELFARE QUEENS: more on how You, Too, can get prime welfare support from the White House if you are a huge corporation.

Mitch Daniels, then President Bush's budget director and now the Republican candidate for Indiana governor, thought the tanker deal violated government accounting rules.

"The central problem was that the tankers were not on [the] Defense Department's wish list until somebody [at Boeing] came up with this idea," an administration source said.

Faced with Daniels' objections, Boeing did what only a handful of American businesses can do: It went over Daniels' head and straight to Bush. Through a series of meetings among the president and his staff and key members of Congress--including House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.)--Boeing applied enough pressure at the top to push its contract through in May.

[...]

Under the lease plan, the number of planes involved grew to 100, and the cost also grew. While leases would be cheaper for the government at first, they would be costlier in the long run.

"Throughout the uniformed AF [Air Force], the realization exists that leasing is considerably more costly to the AF and the taxpayer," said a Sept. 30, 2001, e-mail from Boeing executive John Sams Jr.

[...]

It was Daniels who issued the White House response.

"We have grave reservations about leasing these aircraft," Daniels wrote to Dicks on Dec. 12, 2001. "Our analysis shows that over the long term a lease-purchase program would be much more expensive than direct purchase of the same aircraft."

Boeing and the Air Force redirected their main lobbying effort at Congress, but Daniels continued his protests. In an April 2002 letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)--then one of the few vocal opponents of the lease--Daniels outlined a series of objections. In his view the lease, which he said had grown to nearly $150 million per plane, ran afoul of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990.

That law, he wrote, requires agencies to "fund the full cost of purchase, lease purchases and capital leases up front in the first year of the transaction."

A push to Bush in '02

By early autumn 2002, only Daniels stood in the way of the lease plan being accepted by the White House. That's when Boeing turned to Bush for help.

[...]

As 2003 began, Daniels and his staff at the White House Office of Management and Budget continued to object, but the momentum had shifted. Once Bush had agreed with the need for the tankers, the question wasn't whether to lease more tankers, but at what price.

End result to date: resignation of Boeing chairman, firings of officials involved, corruption investigations, and The Deal Goes Through. Pork Uber Alles.

Read The Rest for more details as this story, which I've continued to blog, goes on.