Listen to the ad by clicking play arrow below:

Beginning Wednesday, a radio ad will air in the St. Petersburg, Florida district of a member of Congress who took more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from defense contractors and repeatedly did their bidding in a House defense subcommittee and on the House floor.

The ad features Mike Burns – a former US Air Force pilot and POW who spent years in the same ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison camp as Senator McCain – who calls on Congressman C.W. Bill Young to reject his campaign contributors and vote to end the F-22 Raptor fighter.

“This is one of the most worthless and unnecessary programs and we’ve spent 30 years dumping money into it,” Burns says in the ad, “I’m asking Congressman Young to vote against [the F-22]. Be a lion, not a gopher for Lockheed Martin.”

Congressman Young is one of a handful of Representatives who write the FY10 Defense Appropriations bill, which includes the F-22. He is also one of those appropriators that is the focus of a new report by USAction/TrueMajority that profiles the web of connections between powerful weapons manufacturers and House appropriators. The report, Putting the Pork out to Pasture, can be viewed at http://truesecurity.usaction.org/node/2

The Washington Post
By R. Jeffrey Smith: July 21, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR200907...

The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation's premier fighter jet program, embracing by a 58-40 vote margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that the F22 is no longer needed for the nation's defense and a costly drag on the Pentagon's budget in an era of small wars and growing counter-insurgency efforts.

Putting the Pork Out to Pasture:
Why We Must Preserve the Obama-Gates Defense Cuts, Spend
Tax Dollars More Wisely and Invest in America’s Future

A Special Report from USAction | TrueMajority.org | Common Cause

The Obama-Gates Military Budget Cuts Deserve Support

As President Obama stated in his Inaugural Address, “[t]he question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works … Where the answer is no, programs will end.” The President and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made good on this promise when they proposed targeted military budget cuts that do away with several expensive weapons programs that are no longer needed or never worked in the first place.