Bernie Sanders Comes Through Again For Vets As Deal Reached To Reform the VA

By: Jason Easley 

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders has delivered for our veterans. Sen. (I-VT) will be unveiling compromise legislation with House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller that will fund and reform the VA.

According to The Hill:

Leaders in the House and Senate have reached a deal on legislation to reform the Veterans Affairs (VA) Department and are poised to unveil it on Monday.

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told The Hill in an email that an agreement has been reached that will “deal with both the short-term and long-term needs of the VA.”

The VA bill appeared in doubt last week as Sanders and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) — the chairmen of the two Veterans Affairs’ committees — butted heads over rival proposals. But they kept talking over the weekend, and on Sunday suggested a deal was at hand.

Sen. Sanders is often thought of as a fighter and voice of the left. He took Republicans to task after they killed his VA bill earlier this year that looked prophetic after the scandal at the Veterans Administration broke. He has never backed away from calling out the hypocrisy behind the Republican willingness to send men and women to war, and their refusal to fund the care that the troops are entitled to when they come home.

Sanders has been willing to compromise in order to help the nation’s vets. In June, he worked with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to get a veterans healthcare bill passed in the Senate. On Monday, he will announce compromise legislation with his House counterparts that will give vets access to the healthcare that they need.

Bernie Sanders is showing congressional Republicans how Congress is supposed to function. The legislation process is not a zero-sum game. It isn’t supposed to be made up of winners and losers. The legislative process is based on compromise. Our members of Congress are supposed to give a little and meet in the middle in order to do what is right for the American people.
 

By never giving up, and always working hard, Sen. Sanders has delivered for our veterans. Bernie Sanders deserves to be praised for being a fighter, but deserves greater praise for doing his job in the way that it is supposed to be done.

Philly VA benefits center is in stunning disarray

VA's Philadelphia Regional Office , on Wissahickon Avenue. The VA inspector general said investigators found manipulated claims, duplicate payments. ANDREW THAYER / Staff Photographer

By Tricia L. Nadolny,  Inquirer Staff Writer

Inspectors surveying Philadelphia's Veterans Affairs benefits center in June found two stunning signs of disarray: mail bins brimming with claims dating to 2011 and other benefits that had been paid twice.

More alarming, the team from the VA Office of Inspector General found evidence that staff tasked with managing pensions for the eastern United States were manipulating dates to make old claims appear new, according to a report obtained by The Inquirer.

The findings are the first clear evidence that the city's VA system is not immune from controversies that have plagued other centers and sparked a growing scandal over delayed care and services affecting veterans nationwide.

Two whistle-blowers who work at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Regional Office, where the offenses were discovered, described the process the same: "cooking the books."

"They're hiding the real numbers from the people and saying, 'We're catching up to the backlog,' " said Ryan Cease, 31, who has worked at the Germantown facility for about five years. "But they're not. They're just hiding it."

The inspector general's review was released by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs ahead of a Monday night hearing in Washington at which it will be presented.

Separate from the ongoing probe into appointment-setting practices at the VA Medical Center in University City, the report focuses on the VA Regional Office on Wissahickon Avenue, which oversees the administration of benefits to 825,000 veterans in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware. The site also houses a Pension Management Center, one of three nationwide, that services more than a dozen states and Puerto Rico.

In a statement released jointly, the Philadelphia and national VA offices said they have taken immediate actions to correct the practices in Philadelphia. The national office added that it is conducting on-site reviews at other regional offices where potentially similar issues have been identified.

The Inspector General's Office declined to discuss the review in Philadelphia, saying any public comments will be made at Monday's hearing.

Tip received
The probe at the city's regional office was sparked June 18, when the inspector general received a tip from a whistle-blower, according to the report.

A team visited the site the next day.

There, they found employees were manipulating dates through the misapplication of a May 2013 VA memo that allows claims overlooked in veterans' files to be marked with the date on which they were found, known as the "discovered date."

The clearance - which the VA gave a few months after it laid out an aggressive plan to eliminate its crushing backlog by the end of 2015 - was meant for rare occasions.

But staff at the Philadelphia regional office's Pension Management Center have used the clearance to mark the discovered date on claims that didn't fit the criteria, the inspector general found. The action made claims look as though they were newer than they were, the report said. The inspectors, whose investigation is ongoing, found 30 occurrences on the June visit.

Kristen Ruell, a lawyer and a whistle-blower from the Philadelphia office who is scheduled to testify at Monday's hearing, said the discovered-date loophole is widely used and has been since it was instituted.

She said managers first instructed those processing claims to use the discovered date for claims a year or older. As the 2015 deadline nears, that has changed, and more recently staff members were told to use it on claims as little as six weeks old, she said.

"They basically use this as a free ticket, like the golden ticket, to make their old stuff new," said Ruell, 39, who has worked at the center for about seven years.

When the VA instituted the discovered date in 2013, it said each use had to be accompanied by an explanation and approved by a top administrator, after which notice would be sent to a higher office. In each of the 30 cases found in Philadelphia, explanations were not given. But the center's assistant director still signed off on the change, the report found. Notices were never sent.

In a statement, the VA said the inspector general had discovered "confusion and misapplication" of the policy at the Philadelphia regional office and said that the discovered-date practice has since been suspended nationwide.

Regional offices found to have an unusual number of applications of the policy have been referred to the inspector general for review, and any cases impacted by the lapse will be identified and corrected, the agency said.

Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said any employee found to have "intentionally misused this policy will be held accountable," according to the statement.

Other allegations
The VA Inspector General's Office said its probe also must address other allegations at the Philadelphia regional office. They include:

Staff "cherry picking" easy claims and processing them out of order to inflate performance.

Staff not addressing more than 32,000 electronic inquiries from veterans regarding the status of their claims.

Staff hiding mail.

Staff shredding military and returned mail that couldn't be delivered.

Managers being aware of duplicate payments being made to veterans and directing staff to write off the overpayments.

The agency said the regional office is providing additional guidance and training to address the duplicate payments.

It also said the 68 mail bins of papers dating to 2011 were sorted, and all the documents were found to be associated with completed claims and are now being electronically scanned. The inspector general said the old mail, which included both claims and supporting documents, was of concern because decisions on claims could have been made without all the necessary information.

The VA, in its statement, said the office is also being investigated on allegations that staff members have faced retaliation for speaking with the inspectors.

Ruell said the inspectors visited the site in June after she told a friend and former employee from the center about her concerns, and he notified the inspector general.

It's not the first time Ruell and Cease have gone up against their employer. In 2012, both spoke to the New York Times about finding duplicate records that were leading to duplicate payments.

Ruell said the practice of doctoring claim dates stems from staff being rated on performance through a point system and expected to process claims "perfect and fast."

"It's like a system designed to fail," she said. "So it breeds a lot of issues where people are trying to play tricks to look good for Washington."

As new controversy at the Philadelphia regional office comes to light, details of the ongoing review of the city's VA hospital are still being tightly guarded. The facility, the regional hub for more than 57,000 veterans, and a clinic it runs in Horsham, were flagged to receive added scrutiny in a nationwide VA audit released last month.

That review of 731 sites across the country found some employees have used alternate lists or changed dates to hide delays in service. Administrators at the hospital have said they do not expect willful manipulation of data to be found and suggested faulty bookkeeping might be to blame.

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

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You've Been Drafted and You Don’t Even Know It

On the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Brian Williams led off NBC Nightly News this way: “On our broadcast tonight, the salute to the warriors who stormed the beaches here in Normandy...”

It’s such a commonplace of our American world, that word “warriors” for those in the U.S. military or, as is said time and again, our “wounded warriors” for those hurt in one of our many wars.  This time, however, because it was applied to the vets of World War II, my father’s war, it stopped me in my tracks. 

For just a moment, I couldn’t help imagining what my father would have said, had anyone called him -- or any of the air commandos in Burma for whom he was “operations officer” -- a warrior.  Though he’s been dead now for three decades, I don’t have a moment’s doubt that he would have thought it ridiculous. 

In World War I, America’s soldiers had been known as “doughboys.”  In World War II, they were regularly (and proudly) called “dogfaces” or G.I. (for “government issue”) Joes, and their citizen-soldier likenesses were reflected in the tough but bedraggled figures of Willy and Joe, Bill Mauldin’s much beloved wartime cartoon foot soldiers on the long slog to Berlin.

And that was fitting for a civilian military, a draft military.  It was down to earth.  It was how you described people who had left civilian life with every intention of returning to it as soon as humanly possible, who thought the military a grim necessity of a terrible moment in history and that war, a terrible but necessary way to go.  In those days, warriors would have been an alien term, the sort you associated with, say, Prussians.

My father volunteered just after the attack on Pearl Harbor and wasn’t demobilized until the war ended, but -- I remember it well in the years after -- while he took pride in his service, he maintained a typical and healthy American dislike (to put it politely) for what he called “the regular army” and George Washington would have called a “standing army.” 

He would have been amazed by the present American way of war and the propaganda universe we now live in when it comes to praising and elevating the U.S. military above the rest of society.  He would have found it inconceivable that a president’s wife would go on a popular TV show -- I’m talking about Michelle Obama on "Nashville" -- and mix it up with fictional characters to laud for the umpteenth time America’s warriors and their service to the nation.

In Vietnam, of course, the term still wasn’t warrior, it was “grunt.”  The elevation of the American soldier to the heavens of praise and bombast came significantly after the end of the citizen army, particularly with what retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore calls the new Fortress America mindset of the post-9/11 years and the ever more militarized world of constant war that went with it.

If only I could have picked up the phone, called my father, and heard the choice words he would have had for his newly elevated status as an American “warrior,” seven decades after Normandy.  But not being able to, on that D-Day anniversary I did the next best thing and called a 90-year-old friend, who was on a ship off one of those blood-soaked beaches as the invasion began. 

Thinking back those 70 years with a certain pride, he remembered that the thing the foot soldiers of World War II resented most was saluting or saying “sir” to officers.  No warriors they -- and no love for an eternal wartime either. 

Put another way, the farther we’ve come from our last great military victory, symbolized by the events of June 6, 1944, the more elevated the language for describing, or perhaps whitewashing, a new American way of war that, for pure failure, may have few matches. Tom

Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You -- He Already Has You
The Militarized Realities of Fortress America 

By William J. Astore

I spent four college years in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and then served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force.  In the military, especially in basic training, you have no privacy.  The government owns you.  You’re “government issue,” just another G.I., a number on a dogtag that has your blood type and religion in case you need a transfusion or last rites.  You get used to it.  That sacrifice of individual privacy and personal autonomy is the price you pay for joining the military.  Heck, I got a good career and a pension out of it, so don’t cry for me, America.

But this country has changed a lot since I joined ROTC in 1981, was fingerprinted, typed for blood, and otherwise poked and prodded. (I needed a medical waiver for myopia.) 

Nowadays, in Fortress America, every one of us is, in some sense, government issue in a surveillance state gone mad.

Unlike the recruiting poster of old, Uncle Sam doesn’t want you anymore -- he already has you.  You’ve been drafted into the American national security state.  That much is evident from Edward Snowden’s revelations. Your email?  It can be read.  Your phone calls?  Metadata about them is being gathered.  Your smartphone?  It’s a perfect tracking device if the government needs to find you.  Your computer?  Hackable and trackable.  Your server?  It’s at their service, not yours.

Many of the college students I’ve taught recently take such a loss of privacy for granted.  They have no idea what’s gone missing from their lives and so don’t value what they’ve lost or, if they fret about it at all, console themselves with magical thinking -- incantations like “I’ve done nothing wrong, so I’ve got nothing to hide.”  They have little sense of how capricious governments can be about the definition of “wrong.”

Consider us all recruits, more or less, in the new version of Fortress America, of an ever more militarized, securitized country.  Renting a movie?  Why not opt for the first Captain America and watch him vanquish the Nazis yet again, a reminder of the last war we truly won?  Did you head for a baseball park on Memorial Day?  What could be more American or more innocent?  So I hope you paid no attention to all those camouflaged caps and uniforms your favorite players were wearing in just another of an endless stream of tributes to our troops and veterans. 

Let’s hear no whining about militarized uniforms on America’s playing fields.  After all, don’t you know that America’s real pastime these last years has been war and lots of it?

Be a Good Trooper

Think of the irony.  The Vietnam War generated an unruly citizen’s army that reflected an unruly and increasingly rebellious citizenry.  That proved more than the U.S. military and our ruling elites could take.  So President Nixon ended the draft in 1973 and made America’s citizen-soldier ideal, an ideal that had persisted for two centuries, a thing of the past.  The “all-volunteer military,” the professionals, were recruited or otherwise enticed to do the job for us.  No muss, no fuss, and it’s been that way ever since.  Plenty of war, but no need to be a “warrior,” unless you sign on the dotted line.  It’s the new American way.
But it turned out that there was a fair amount of fine print in the agreement that freed Americans from those involuntary military obligations.  Part of the bargain was to “support the pros” (or rather “our troops”) unstintingly and the rest involved being pacified, keeping your peace, being a happy warrior in the new national security state that, particularly in the wake of 9/11, grew to enormous proportions on the taxpayer dollar.  Whether you like it or not, you’ve been drafted into that role, so join the line of recruits and take your proper place in the garrison state. 

If you’re bold, gaze out across the increasingly fortified and monitored borders we share with Canada and Mexico.  (Remember when you could cross those borders with no hassle, not even a passport or ID card?  I do.) 

Watch for those drones, home from the wars and already hovering in or soon to arrive in your local skies -- ostensibly to fight crime.  Pay due respect to your increasingly up-armored police forces with their automatic weapons, their special SWAT teams, and their converted MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles).  These vintage Iraqi Freedom vehicles are now military surplus given away or sold on the cheap to local police departments.  Be careful to observe their draconian orders for prison-like “lockdowns” of your neighborhood or city, essentially temporary declarations of martial law, all for your safety and security. 

Be a good trooper and do what you’re told.  Stay out of public areas when you’re ordered to do so.  Learn to salute smartly.  (It’s one of the first lessons I was taught as a military recruit.)  No, not that middle-finger salute, you aging hippie.  Render a proper one to those in authority.  You had best learn how.

Or perhaps you don’t even have to, since so much that we now do automatically is structured to render that salute for us.  Repeated singings of “God Bless America” at sporting events.  Repeated viewings of movies that glorify the military.  (Special Operations forces are a hot topic in American multiplexes these days from Act of Valor to Lone Survivor.)  Why not answer the call of duty by playing militarized video games like Call of Duty?  Indeed, when you do think of war, be sure to treat it as a sport, a movie, a game.

Surging in America 

I’ve been out of the military for nearly a decade, and yet I feel more militarized today than when I wore a uniform.  That feeling first came over me in 2007, during what was called the “Iraqi surge” -- the sending of another 30,000 U.S. troops into the quagmire that was our occupation of that country. It prompted my first article for TomDispatch.  I was appalled by the way our civilian commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, hid behind the beribboned chest of his appointed surge commander, General David Petraeus, to justify his administration’s devolving war of choice in Iraq.  It seemed like the eerie visual equivalent of turning traditional American military-civilian relationships upside down, of a president who had gone over to the military.  And it worked.  A cowed Congress meekly submitted to “King David” Petraeus and rushed to cheer his testimony in support of further American escalation in Iraq.

Since then, it’s become a sartorial necessity for our presidents to don military flight jackets whenever they address our “warfighters” as a sign both of their “support” and of the militarization of the imperial presidency.  (For comparison, try to imagine Matthew Brady taking a photo of “honest Abe” in the Civil War equivalent of a flight jacket!)  It is now de rigueur for presidents to praise American troops as “the finest military in world history” or, as President Obama typically said to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview from Normandy last week, “the greatest military in the world.” 

Even more hyperbolically, these same troops are celebrated across the country in the most vocal way possible as hardened “warriors” and benevolent freedom-bringers, simultaneously the goodest and the baddest of anyone on the planet -- and all without including any of the ugly, as in the ugliness of war and killing.  Perhaps that explains why I’ve seen military recruitment vans (sporting video game consoles) at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  Given that military service is so beneficent, why not get the country’s 12-year-old prospects hopped up on the prospect of joining the ranks?

Too few Americans see any problems in any of this, which shouldn’t surprise us.  After all, they’re already recruits themselves.  And if the prospect of all this does appall you, you can’t even burn your draft card in protest, so better to salute smartly and obey.  A good conduct medal will undoubtedly be coming your way soon.

It wasn’t always so.  I remember walking the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, in my freshly pressed ROTC uniform in 1981.  It was just six years after the Vietnam War ended in defeat and antiwar movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now were still fresh in people’s minds.  (First Blood and the Rambo “stab-in-the-back” myth wouldn’t come along for another year.)  I was aware of people looking at me not with hostility, but with a certain indifference mixed occasionally with barely disguised disdain.  It bothered me slightly, but even then I knew that a healthy distrust of large standing militaries was in the American grain.

No longer.  Today, service members, when appearing in uniform, are universally applauded and repetitiously lauded as heroes.

I’m not saying we should treat our troops with disdain, but as our history has shown us, genuflecting before them is not a healthy sign of respect.  Consider it a sign as well that we really are all government issue now.

Shedding a Militarized Mindset

If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider an old military officer’s manual I still have in my possession.  It’s vintage 1950, approved by that great American, General George C. Marshall, Jr., the man most responsible for our country’s victory in World War II.  It began with this reminder to the newly commissioned officer: “[O]n becoming an officer a man does not renounce any part of his fundamental character as an American citizen.  He has simply signed on for the post-graduate course where one learns how to exercise authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty.”  That may not be an easy thing to do, but the manual’s aim was to highlight the salutary tension between military authority and personal liberty that was the essence of the old citizen’s army.

It also reminded new officers that they were trustees of America’s liberty, quoting an unnamed admiral’s words on the subject: “The American philosophy places the individual above the state.  It distrusts personal power and coercion.  It denies the existence of indispensable men.  It asserts the supremacy of principle.”

Those words were a sound antidote to government-issue authoritarianism and militarism -- and they still are.  Together we all need to do our bit, not as G.I. Joes and Janes, but as Citizen Joes and Janes, to put personal liberty and constitutional principles first.  In the spirit of Ronald Reagan, who told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this [Berlin] wall,” isn’t it time to begin to tear down the walls of Fortress America and shed our militarized mindsets?  Future generations of citizens will thank us, if we have the courage to do so.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, edits the blog The Contrary Perspective.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me.

Copyright 2014 William J. Astore

How the Treatment of Bowe Bergdahl Will Destroy the Republican Party

By Trevor LaFauci

We are looking at an unprecedented time in our nation’s history.

With any nation that has a two-party system of government, it is inevitable that the party out of power will feel some kind of animosity toward the party in power. In fact, it is natural.

As the party not in power, it is your goal to convince your nation that the party in power is somehow and some way being detrimental to the country through their policy decisions. These decisions could be related to a nation’s safety and security, a nation’s economy, a nation’s immigration system, and a nation’s social issues just to name a few. As a new round of national elections approaches, it is the goal of the party not in power to convince the population at large that they can do better than the current political party in power.
For the Republican Party in the year 2014, they have taken this idea to levels not seen before at any time in American history.

The level of sheer vitriol spewed by the Republican Party this past week in the wake of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s release from the Taliban has proven that once and for all this is a political party that has jumped the shark to levels never seen before in this country.

Republicans have now attacked their last bastion of support in order to attempt to smear President Barack Obama: The military.

The institution that was once the pinnacle of Republican policy, one that would be supported no matter what. However, this past week has shown that even the military is fair game for the Republican Party as long as it can be used to attack Barack Obama and to try and discredit him and his administration.
To attack a military POW and his family is the new low for the Republican Party and it could very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Americans today are becoming more and more put off by the Republican Party. They did not agree with their decision to shut down the government in October of 2013. They do not agree with the Republican Party’s stance on gay marriage. They believe climate change is an issue worth addressing.

They believe in a woman’s right to choose. They believe that income inequality is an issue that needs to be addressed. They believe in raising the minimum wage. They believe in common sense gun control legislation.

And they sure as hell believe in respecting the men and women who wear the uniform.
For Republicans, this latest and greatest smear campaign is one that will leave a lasting impression. In their whipped up frenzy to produce a scandal and/or paint the president as someone who lacks foreign policy skill, Republicans have failed to realize the lasting repercussions of smearing an American soldier.

Despite the fact that there are concerns that Sergeant Bergdahl may have deserted his post, the fact remains he was an American soldier being held hostage by the Taliban. As proponents of the President have successfully argued, would you rather have an American soldier returned home to possibly face justice or would you rather have an American soldier being dealt justice by the Taliban?
For Republicans, that is a question they do not want to have to answer.
It also hasn’t helped Republicans that President Obama has been absolutely resolute in justifying his actions. For someone the right likes to portray as weak and indecisive, President Obama was extremely forceful and persuasive in his defense of everything he and his administration did to procure the release of Sergeant Bergdahl.

His powerful language and his unwavering commitment to returning an American soldier to be reunited with his family has been presidential and has shown those who opposed his decision to be weak and petty. As more and more Republicans flip-flop over their reasons for supporting then condemning the release of Sergeant Bergdahl, President Obama has continued to showcase himself as the only adult in the room by not playing politics with the life of an American soldier.
When all is said and done, we have to ask what do Republicans hope to accomplish with this smear campaign?
In the short run: Exactly that. A smear campaign to score cheap political points. However, just like the government shutdown, the Republican Party has used its blind hatred of our President to fail to see the forest through the trees. When the dust settles, history will look back on this time period and will absolutely rip apart the Republican Party for stooping so low as to attack an American soldier and his family.

The hypocrisy from the right has been staggering and people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham are being made to look like exactly what they are: Foolish, hypocritical, and unpatriotic.

In an effort to jump aboard this smear campaign, the Republican Party and their talking heads in the media have gone past the point of no return and have attacked an American serviceman and his family.

No matter what the outcome of this event is, there can be no denying the utter disrespect that the Republican Party has shown to a man in uniform. It is this watershed moment where the Republican Party’s utter hatred and disdain for our commander-in-chief finally reached a tipping point and led us to a conclusion we never thought possible six years ago:
The Republican Party has decided it will no longer be the party that unanimously supports the American military.

Maddow slams Republicans for complaining about VA scandal after passing budget cuts

By Arturo Garcia

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow argued on Wednesday that the problems currently surrounding the country’s Veterans Affairs (VA) department predated both President Barack Obama and department Secretary Eric Shinseki’s administrations, and were fueled in part by Republican budget cuts and inaction.

“There is a modern American dysmorphia when it comes to veterans,” she said. “We see things that aren’t really there. We tell ourselves that we’re doing things that we’re not really doing. We have a poetry in this country about our love and respect for veterans that is not matched by the prose of how veterans are actually treated.”

Maddow noted that in March 2003 — the same month the U.S. began its second war against Iraq — the GOP-led House of Representatives approved a budget cutting $14 billion from the VA’s budget. Two years later, Anthony Principi, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush, released a statement saying the department did not “require additional resources” despite the escalating cost of that conflict.

Lawmakers later had to approve an emergency $1.5 billion budget influx following reports that local VA facilities were instituting hiring freezes and lacking the ability to make necessary purchases.

Yet it’s Republicans who are now engaging in a coordinated effort, she said, to oust Shinseki amid an investigation into alleged record-keeping malfeasance in VA clinics in 26 cities.

“Not even the people who are clamoring for him to go — not even the people who are clamoring for the president to fire General Shinzeki — say they believe that that would solve the problem at the VA,” Maddow said. “I mean, whether or not you want Eric Shinzeki to keep his job, what would it take to fix the problem?”

Watch Maddow’s commentary, as aired on Wednesday, below.

2 Star General + 2 Foreign Women + Booze = He’s Fired

Fired 2-star general in charge of nuclear arsenal spent week drunk with ‘two hot women’

By Scott Kaufman
Saturday, December 21, 2013 15:10 EST

 

This morning, the Inspector General of the Air Force released its report on the dismissal of Major General Michael J. Carey, who had been in charge of overseeing the United State’s arsenal of intercontinental missiles.

His firing caused concern in conservative circles that the Obama administration was creating a “martial-law-ready military.” At the time, the Air Force would only reveal what he hadn’t been fired for, including sexual misconduct, adultery, or abusing illegal drugs.

Today’s report indicates that his dismissal was predicated on his behavior during a trip to Russia in July of 2013 for a “Military Cooperation Working Group Event.” The United States and Russian Federation (RF) were to conduct exercises demonstrating their ability to safely transport nuclear warheads.

According to the report, instead of leading the U.S. delegation, Carey spent the majority of the exercise intoxicated. He drank both on the plane to Zurich and in the Zurich airport. The next day, he had drinks at the Marriott, then left to have drinks at the Ritz Carlton, where he met “two foreign national women.”

After being late for the next day’s lunch, he made “comments regarding Syria and Mr. Eric Snowden that were not well received by the RF,” as well as “comments regarding lovely ladies that were concerning to some members of the delegation.” Witnesses claim he had significantly more to drink than his counterparts, and that he had loudly announced having met “two hot women” the night before.

When the delegation toured a monastery, Carey “was slurring his speech and continually interrupting the tour guide.” At Red Square, Carey “was lagging behind” and declaring that he “didn’t want to walk around Red Square.” Other members of the delegation described him “as pouting and sulking.”

The delegation left Red Square to attend dinner at La Cantina, during which “Carey was drinking alcohol and kept trying to get the band to let him play with them.” He then left the delegation and joined the “two hot women” from the previous evening, with whom he drank and danced with until approximately 3 a.m.

Carey was late for the initial briefing again the next morning, and was rude throughout it. He attempted to correct the translators, using “an American TV ad ‘Can you hear me now’ to make a point but it was not received well.”

When interviewed by the Inspector General’s office, Carey claims not to remember having behaved in this manner, to which the office responded that he “had a poor recall of significant events, perhaps due to his alcohol consumption, or was untruthful during the interview.”

In either case, the report concluded that Carey had violated Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman.
[Image via the U.S. Air Force]

Scott Kaufman

 

Scott Eric Kaufman is the proprietor of the AV Club's Internet Film School and, in addition to Raw Story, also writes for Lawyers, Guns & Money. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2008.

Your Weekly Address

Graham Offers Sanders Help 'Reforming' Tax Code in Exchange for Help 'Reforming Entitlements'

By Heather



I've generally been staying as far away as possible from CNN's new stinker of a show, which is the revival of Crossfire, but this Tuesday, the inclusion of Sen. Bernie Sanders as one of their panel members actually gave me a reason to sit through most of it.

Towards the end of the show, they spent some time arguing about the Senate filibuster rules and whether Republicans have been allowed to air their grievances over the Affordable Care Act or not, along with Ted Cruz and his stunt of a fake filibuster. Sen. Sanders took the opportunity to do what he does best, and advocate for working Americans out there, and the record income disparity and the fact that the Congress has done very little to get Americans back to work and rebuild our infrastructure.

So naturally, his fellow guest on the show, Sen. Lindsey Graham thought it was a perfect opportunity to make an offer to Sanders to "reform entitlements" in exchange for flattening the tax code. What a deal. Thankfully Sanders was there to remind the audience of just what Graham's "reforms" would mean for average Americans.

SANDERS: Let me just jump in and say I happen to think -- and by the way, Newt, when you were speaker, you ran a pretty tough ship there, as well, I recall.

But I happen to think that the rules in the Senate are pretty crazy. You or I could go down there and basically stop the entire United States government. One person could do that. Is that what democracy is about? I don't really think so.

But here's the point. Lindsey correctly says there are some bills that he thinks are not getting to the floor that might pass. Fair enough. But let me tell you something else. I happen to believe that the reason that Congress is now held in such contempt is the American people are hurting very badly. Middle class, in my view, is collapsing. Poverty numbers are at an all-time high, and the gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is growing wider.

JONES: And they blame Obama for that. Do you blame Obama for that?

SANDERS: No. I mean, it's a -- you know, it's a long-term trend.

JONES: Just checking. Just checking.

SANDERS: The bottom line is, what do the American people want, Lindsey? They want us to create jobs.

GRAHAM: Yes.

SANDERS: They want us to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure and create millions of jobs. They want us, in my view -- Newt, you quoted polls -- to raise the minimum wage substantially above where it is now. They want us to end these absurd loopholes that billionaires and corporations enjoy.

One out of four corporations doesn't pay a nickel in taxes. And Republicans are saying, "Oh, we have to cut 4 million people from Food Stamps."

GRAHAM: Bernie, if I -- if I was willing to flatten the tax code and take deductions away from the wealthy to pay down debt, would you reform entitlements by extending the age, based on the fact we're all living like Strom Thurmond?

SANDERS: Absolutely not. Not at a time where we have so much...

GRAHAM: That was a moment of bipartisanship that quickly passed.

SANDERS: Now let me ask you. Let me ask you.

GRAHAM: OK.

SANDERS: At a time when the top 1 percent own 38 percent of the wealth in America and the bottom 60 percent own all of 2.3 percent, will you work with me to ask the wealthy to start paying their fair share of taxes so we can deal with...?

GRAHAM: Here's what I will do. I will create a tax code that creates jobs for more Americans, because that's a good thing. But I would tell the wealthy people of this country, when it comes to Medicare, you're not going to get any more subsidies. When it comes to Social Security, you're going to have to take less, because we can't afford to give everybody what we promised.

If you will help me reform the tax code, I -- help me reform entitlements, I'll help you reform the tax code, because we're becoming Greece if we don't do this.

SANDERS: All right. But when you talk about reform entitlements, I understand.

GRAHAM: Yes.

SANDERS: Correct me if I'm wrong. You want to raise the entitlement age to Social Security?

GRAHAM: Over 30 years.

SANDERS: Over 30 years to 70 years.

GRAHAM: No. What I want to do is harmonize Medicare with Social Security: go from 65 to 67 over the next 30 years. And I want means testing for people in my income level, Newt's income level, Van's income level. Have to pay the actual costs.

SANDERS: But you also support the chain CPI.

GRAHAM: Yes, I do.

SANDERS: Which cut benefits -- let me talk. Which would cut $650 from Social Security benefits between the ages of 65 and 70. And make massive cuts for disabled vets.

GRAHAM: Well, no. What I'm trying to do is save the country from bankruptcy. And when the president of the United States, who I usually don't agree with, put CPI on the table, I thought it was a very courageous thing to do. And I am willing to flatten that tax code. I can go to the rich people in America and all the corporations, say, "We're going to take deductions off the table you now enjoy. Take that money back for the many, not just the few."

But if you don't help me reform the entitlements, there's no way to get there by taxing people.

SANDERS: I want everybody to understand, when Lindsey talks about reforming entitlements, what he means is cutting Social Security and cutting Medicare. I think that's a bad idea.

GINGRICH: OK. And I would say -- and we're about to run out of time. But I would say what you're talking about is going bankrupt, and that's a debate we want to invite you to come back.

GRAHAM: ... program. I've actually spent...

GINGRICH: We'll have you back on access for health care, which will be a great topic, the two of you. And we ought to come back and talk a little bit more about how do we solve this?

GRAHAM: Eighty million Baby Boomers are going to retire in the next 40 years. How do we replace them? We need rational immigration.

JONES: The first thing, maybe stop giving those subsidies...

GRAHAM: How do you save Medicare and Social Security with 80 million people coming into the system?

JONES: What about first of all, you supported $4 billion subsidies to oil company that don't need them. We've got -- we have a lot of conversations we need to have -- I'm going to give it back to you, Newt, to take us out of here.

GINGRICH: Kind of -- You almost agreed with him for a second. I was sitting back.

JONES: I changed my mind.

GINGRICH: Let me -- I want to thank Senator Sanders and Senator Graham.
Next, we "Ceasefire." Is there anything out of all this that the two of us can agree on?

I think Sanders did a good job here, but it would have been nice to see him push back harder when Graham pulled the "we're becoming Greece" card."

When Graham wants to address what's gone on with Wall Street and the banks and what they did with Greece and allowing them to mask their debt, maybe we can have an "honest conversation" about that as well, but I've seen no desire on the part of the likes of Graham or his fellow Republicans to do anything other than further deregulate financial markets and make those sort of problems worse and not better.

The fact that he continually brings up Greece to justify gutting our social safety nets is dishonest and disgusting, but that hasn't stopped him from doing it over, and over, and over, and over again.

Written by Michael Sallah, Debbie Cenziper, Steven Rich

Graphics by Ted Mellnik, Emily Chow, Laura Stanton

Photos by Michael S. Williamson

Published on September 8, 2013

This man owed $134 in property taxes. The District sold the lien to an investor who foreclosed on his $197,000 house and sold it. He and many other homeowners like him were

Left with nothing.

On the day Bennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to the curb.

Movers carted out his easy chair, his clothes, his television. Next came the things that were closest to his heart: his Marine Corps medals and photographs of his dead wife, Martha. The duplex in Northeast Washington that Coleman bought with cash two decades earlier was emptied and shuttered.

By sundown, he had nowhere to go.

All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill.

The retired Marine sergeant lost his house on that summer day two years ago through a tax lien sale — an obscure program run by D.C. government that enlists private investors to help the city recover unpaid taxes.

For decades, the District placed liens on properties when homeowners failed to pay their bills, then sold those liens at public auctions to mom-and-pop investors who drew a profit by charging owners interest on top of the tax debt until the money was repaid.

But under the watch of local leaders, the program has morphed into a predatory system of debt collection for well-financed, out-of-town companies that turned $500 delinquencies into $5,000 debts — then foreclosed on homes when families couldn’t pay, a Washington Post investigation found.

 As the housing market soared, the investors scooped up liens in every corner of the city, then started charging homeowners thousands in legal fees and other costs that far exceeded their original tax bills, with rates for attorneys reaching $450 an hour.

Families have been forced to borrow or strike payment plans to save their homes.

Others weren’t as lucky. Tax lien purchasers have foreclosed on nearly 200 houses since 2005 and are now pressing to take 1,200 more, many owned free and clear by families for generations.

Investors also took storefronts, parking lots and vacant land — about 500 properties in all, or an average of one a week. In dozens of cases, the liens were less than $500.

Coleman, struggling with dementia, was among those who lost a home. His debt had snowballed to $4,999 — 37 times the original tax bill. Not only did he lose his $197,000 house, but he also was stripped of the equity because tax lien purchasers are entitled to everything, trumping even mortgage companies.

“This is destroying lives,” said Christopher Leinberger, a distinguished scholar and research professor of urban real estate at George Washington University.

Officials at the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue said that without tax sales, property owners wouldn’t feel compelled to pay their bills.

“The tax sale is the last resort. It’s also the first resort — it’s the only way in the statute to collect debt,” said deputy chief financial officer Stephen Cordi.

But the District, a hotbed for the tax lien industry, has done little to shield its most vulnerable homeowners from unscrupulous operators.

Foreclosures have upended families in some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. Houses were taken from a housekeeper, a department store clerk, a seamstress and even the estates of dead people. The hardest hit: elderly homeowners, who were often sick or dying when tax lien purchasers seized their houses.

One 65-year-old flower shop owner lost his Northwest Washington home of 40 years after a company from Florida paid his back taxes — $1,025 — and then took the house through foreclosure while he was in hospice, dying of cancer. A 95-year-old church choir leader lost her family home to a Maryland investor over a tax debt of $44.79 while she was struggling with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home.

Other cities and states took steps to curb abuses, such as capping the fees, safeguarding houses owned by the elderly or scrapping tax sales altogether and instead collecting the money themselves.

“Where is the justice? They’re taking people’s lives,” said Beverly Smalls, whose elderly aunt lost her home in Northeast Washington. “It’s just not right.”

Liberal Firebrand Alan Grayson Leads The Opposition To Strike On Syria

By Deborah Montesano

Rep. Grayson (D-FL) on military intervention in Syria: ‘You notice how, with 196 countries in the world, no one else wants to touch this problem.’ Photo from The Blaze.

The controversy over whether to punish the Syrian government for the chemical weapons attack that took place there has done the unbelievable. It split the political parties and forged new alliances, creating unlikely bonds between Tea Partiers and liberals. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-FL, has become one of the loudest voices leading the opposition to military intervention in Syria.

Grayson is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which questioned Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Wednesday about the chemical weapons episode. On Thursday, the congressman appeared on the PBS News Hour and Democracy Now to express, first of all, his appreciation that President Obama put the question before Congress — but secondly, to make the case for not doing as the President requested. He sums up his own conclusion, that a ‘limited strike’ would not be a good idea, with four major points:

1. It not only isn’t our responsibility, but it’s especially not our responsibility to act unilaterally. He said:

You notice how, with 196 countries in the world, no one else wants to touch this problem … The international community has spoken. We are the only ones who are contemplating anything like this.

2. There is not a clear result that a strike can accomplish. It won’t end the regime or the civil war or even prevent another use of chemical warfare:

We cannot dictate, much less even influence, what goes on in Syria. It started as a civil war. It’s evolving into a proxy war between Shiite Muslim fundamentalists and Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, both of whom historically are our enemies.

3. A strike would be expensive, costing up to a billion dollars:

The best guess at this point is that the attack we’re talking about here, as it’s been described in general terms, will cost a billion dollars. That’s a billion dollars that could be spent, at least in part, on humanitarian aid to help the almost two million refugees who are now in Jordan and Turkey. It’s also a billion dollars that could be used for domestic needs.

4. It could spin out of control:

It’s clear that if the Syrian government does anything other than simply taking a pounding and ignoring it and brushing it off, and it retaliates in virtually any way, then there will be a war between Syria and the United States, and it will involve boots on the ground.

Grayson then puts the matter in perspective by talking about the enormous problems that the U.S. faces, that must be dealt with by Congress, and soon. Yet, valuable time is consumed by the debate over Syria at what is an extremely crucial moment:

… three weeks from now, there’s going to be a government shutdown, and five weeks from now, the government runs out of money when we reach the debt limit.

It’s appalling to me, appalling to me, that we spend two or three or four weeks debating whether to create a whole new category of war called humanitarian war, rather than dealing with our own problems and trying to solve them.

Americans largely agree. The Congressman told interviewer Jeffrey Brown that he and his colleagues in the House are hearing opposition to the president’s proposed strike by a ratio of 100 to 1. Furthermore, at the time the News Hour aired, only 20 members of Congress were supportive of the idea and 183 opposed.

It’s a novel idea that Congress might actually be listening to the people on this issue and that a new coalition, however temporary, is coming out of the process. The participants in the coalition surely don’t all have the same motivation, but what Grayson wants is to focus on the real concerns of the American people — the 20 million who are still looking for full-time work, the 50 million who don’t have food security, and the 40 million who can’t afford to see a doctor.

And he especially wants them to continue making their voices heard. In order to facilitate the process, he has set up a website, dontattacksyria.com. By signing the site’s petition, the people can send a clear message to Congress: military intervention in Syria is totally unacceptable.

Here’s a video from Grayson’s interview with PBS on why he opposes military intervention in Syria:

Veterans Blast Shinseki For Disability Claims Backlog

 

WHITE HOUSE PETITION: www.MillionVetBacklog.com

End the #MillionVetBacklog & relieve Secretary Shinseki

Four years ago, both President Obama and VA Secretary Shinseki vowed to fix the VA disability claims backlog. Instead, it has increased by 2,000% — and is projected to soon reach one million veterans. A tragic milestone.

Military commanders are not allowed to fail for four years and keep their job. Nor should Secretary Shinseki. It's time for new VA leadership, and a bold vision for reform.

It is time for the White House to stop making excuses and start delivering results. Only Presidential leadership can end the #MillionVetBacklog. We urge the President to act now.

SIGN OUR WHITE HOUSE PETITION and JOIN THE MOVEMENT TO END THE #MILLIONVETBACKLOG. www.MillionVetBacklog.com

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Why are homeless veterans in LA being blocked from using Brentwood land donated for their shelter?

Jon Wiener, contributing editor for The Nation, tells Current TV’s John Fugelsang about an ACLU lawsuit involving a plot of Brentwood, Calif. land donated to the Veterans Administration specifically to house disabled veterans more than 100 years ago. The land is now used for a variety of purposes — the site includes both a parking lot and a dog park —while more than 6,300 veterans remain homeless in Los Angeles according to a Dec. 2012 Housing Department report.

“The VA says that while they have an obligation to provide medical care for veterans, they have no obligation to provide housing even though this lawsuit is about severely mentally ill vets who are unable to get the medical treatment they need unless they’re provided with housing on site, basically,” Wiener says.

“It seems like the main reason the VA doesn’t want to house homeless vets on the Brentwood campus is that it’s a very upscale neighborhood – these are multimillion homes sort of down the block, around the corner, and in L.A. the homeowners groups have immense power.”

$59,820 After Incorrect Terminal Illness Diagnosis

By Evan Bleier, Fri, May 10, 2013

A judge in Montana has ordered a hospital to pay almost $60,000 to a man after incorrectly diagnosing him with brain cancer and telling him he had only a few months to live.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ordered the Fort Harrison VA Medical Center to compensate Mark Templin and his family for the distress they suffered because of Dr. Patrick Morrow's "negligent failure to meet the standard of care" in delivering the 2009 diagnosis.

Molloy decided Templin should receive an award of $500 per day for the initial period of severe mental and emotional distress immediately after the diagnosis.

After being told he was going to die, Templin quit his job, sold his pickup truck, celebrated a "last" birthday,  contemplated suicide and even bought a prearranged funeral service. His son-in-law also constructed a box to hold his ashes.

As Templin began to feel better, he underwent more testing that eventually revealed that he had suffered several small strokes. The judge ordered that he receive $300 per day for that time period. Including repayment for cost of the birthday party and funeral, Templin was awarded $59,820, CBS Local reported.

"It is difficult to put a price tag on the anguish of a man wrongly convinced of his impending death," Molloy wrote in his decision. "Mr. Templin lived for 148 days ... under the mistaken impression that he was dying of metastatic brain cancer."

He added: “While under the impression that he was afflicted with metastatic brain cancer, Mr. Templin wondered each day whether it would be his last.”

Templin, who's in his 70's, was given two drugs to treat brain cancer. One of those drugs was not supposed to be prescribed to stroke patients.

He also was ordered to undergo hospice care.
 

Sources: CBS Local, The Independent Record   

A Steelworker’s Personal Fight To Beat John Boehner In 2014

John Boehner's opponent in 2014 is an Army Veteran, steelworker, husband, father of triplets and a native son of Ohio - and aims to give the 8th District the representation it deserves.

 By Nathaniel Downes

While the President is elected every 4 years, and a Senator every 6, members of the House of Representatives are up for elections every two years. Which means every two years, every member of Congress must face off against whatever challenger happens to be running against them. John Boehner has been safe in his seat for many years, without a strong challenger running against him, and always enjoyed double-digit leads over any challenger, never getting under 60% of the vote.

Many times, the Democratic Party did not even bother running a candidate against Congressman Boehner.

However, in 2014, times are changing.

Meet Andrew Hounshell, an Army Veteran, steelworker, father, husband. Here he is with Ohio Senator, Sherrod Brown:


He is still getting organized, but so far has been pounding the pavement, engaging in the old fashioned method of campaigning. Instead of fancy ad blitz campaigns paid for with big corporate money, he’s out there meeting people, taking his message to them. His donation page is set up for the small time donor. He has 20 months in which to get his message to the people of the 8th District of Ohio. And he is wasting no time in doing it.

But, as to why he is running, I will leave explaining that up to his own words:

Why I’m A Democrat
By Andrew Hounshell

I was 5 years old when I heard the dreadful news that our President had been shot in a failed assassination attempt. Even at that young age, I felt the impact the event had on the grown-ups around me. On the way to the grocery store, I asked my mother if we could get a get well card and send it to President Reagan. Together, we picked out one and mailed it to the White House. A few weeks later we received an official letter on White House Stationary from the President, thanking me for the well wishes. Our local newspaper ran a story, “Middletown Boy Gets White House Response,” and I was the talk of the town. From that moment on, this 5 year old from southwest Ohio loved President Reagan and thought he could do no wrong.

Fast forward 10 or 12 years, my brother was stationed in Germany while serving in the Army and was being transferred to Ft. Lewis, Washington unable to take any leave to visit his family due to his orders. His wife had given birth to our parent’s first grandchild and they had yet been able to see him. As legend goes (time clouds the memories in my family), someone made a call to our Congressman’s office (then a fairly new John Boehner) and my brother was able to get his orders changed so he could take leave and visit with his family before reporting to Ft. Lewis. In my young impressionable eyes, John Boehner was personally responsible for me getting to see my nephew for the first time, and getting to spend some precious time with my oldest brother after not seeing him for years. Once again, a young Andrew Hounshell was quite impressed by yet another Republican politician showing how much they cared about my family. These guys were great!

What I didn’t know was what was happening to other families around me. If I had been older than 5 years old when I bought that Get Well card, I might have known that it was only five months later, when our President fired over 11,000 PATCO striking Union workers; a move which has been described as starting “America’s downward spiral;” that our nation’s wages would stagnant for the rest of my life. That decision didn’t affect me as a kid, but nearly 30 years later, it is an event that persuaded me to take a deeper look into policy decisions that our elected officials make and ask myself a deeper question. Could it be the dear Republicans I grew up admiring, were not as supportive of the very middle class that I now spend my adult life fighting for?

Memories like mine can mold and shape a person’s voting patterns for a lifetime.

Luckily for me, my thirties brought on a time of clarity. There wasn’t one particular event that turned on a light bulb, but rather a combination of many: college, union work, community work, my father relying on the VA for health care, my mother relying on her Social Security to survive, in-laws going without health insurance because they can’t afford it after my father in-law was laid-off from Delphi, having 3 children at one time (the list goes on and on). I realized that through policy, our elected officials do have a huge impact on our livelihood. Through cuts in Social Security, appointments to the NLRB, cuts to the VA, immigration reform (or lack thereof), tax loopholes for corporations, subsidies to oil companies, etc., our middle class has been eroded and we are not taking care of those who can no longer take care of themselves.

The Republicans I loved as a child, and I thought loved me back, were the very ones who were supporting this erosion. How could this be?

The five year old in me feels so betrayed. It turns out, I’ve been caught up in a very real version of the fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood. At first glance, Grandma looked sweet and innocent, with her thank you card from the White House and an a few weeks of leave for a soldier to visit his family. Now that I am all grown up and have a family of my own to support, I see what big teeth you have, and how you have used them to take a huge bite out of the Middle Class. Like many voters in Ohio’s 8^th District and in this country, I see the GOP for what it really is. No disguise is good enough to hide the Big Bad Wolf these days.

Now I dedicate my time to trying to make this world a better place for my children and that includes supporting those who actually support the working class in this country. In 2012, when I looked for that person in the 8th District of Ohio, the ballot was blank. It was then that I decided in 2014 there was going to be a Democratic option for my family, neighbors, coworkers, and community; an option that leads to re-building our Middle Class and a stronger America.

No More Boehner. Our Time is Now.

We could not say it any better ourselves.

If you want to support Andrew Hounshell in his fight to remove John Boehner from congress, feel free to donate to his campaign, or at least drop him a note on his Facebook page. And we wish him the best of luck?

---

Nathaniel Downes is the son of a former state representative of New Hampshire, now living in Seattle Washington.

Feel free to follow Nathaniel Downes on Facebook.

Paralyzed Iraq Vet Tomas Young Discusses His 'Last Letter' to Bush & Cheney, His Decision to Die

 Tells 'Democracy Now!' his decision to end life comes after years of being 'sick and tired of being sick and tired'...

 

By Brad Friedman on 3/21/2013, 4:05pm PT  

Yesterday we published Tomas Young's "Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a Dying Veteran", in which the 33-year old U.S. Army veteran, paralyzed from the chest down during an ambush on a rescue mission in Iraq in 2004, announces his plan to soon allow himself to die, as his physical condition has intolerably deteriorated.

We included a link to our own interview with Tomas in 2005 when he first came down from Kansas City to "Camp Casey" in Crawford, TX, on his honeymoon, in support of Cindy Sheehan whose son Casey was killed on the same day, in the same city --- 4/4/04 in Sadr City --- where Tomas was shot twice and gravely injured in the unarmored truck his platoon had been sent out in.

Tomas has been a tremendously heroic and outspoken anti-war voice over the years, as we were reminded once again today during this morning's heart-wrenching episode of Democracy Now! devoted to his story.

Phil Donahue, co-director of the 2007 documentary film about Tomas, Body of War, (in which our '05 interview with Tomas is briefly seen) is on hand as well for the discussion. The hour included a live satellite interview with Tomas, who now struggles to speak. His thoughts seem very coherent, but what is left of his body and its functions are clearly breaking down. He is joined by his wife Claudia.

It is all worth watching, if you can spare the time. The clips from Body of War, especially the one in which Tomas speaks with the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-VA) as they read off the names together of the "Immortal 23" who voted against the Iraq War in the U.S. Senate, are particularly moving.

This is the story of the Iraq War ten years later --- and how it broke this nation just as surely as it broke Tomas Young's body and eventually his spirit and will to live...



After the lengthy segment above, Donahue is asked about his plight at MSNBC where he was fired just before the war began, as we would later find out from an internal executive memo, because his show included too many anti-war voices.

He says the episode reveals "how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage."

"They were terrified of the anti-war voice. And that is not an overstatement," Donahue says. "If you're General Electric, you certainly don't want an anti-war voice on a cable channel that you own. Donald Rumsfeld's your biggest customer!"

He explains again how he was required to have two pro-war voices for every anti-war voice he had on his show. "I could have [Bush Admin Iraq war hawk and architect] Richard Perle on alone, but I couldn't have Dennis Kucinich," he explains. "I was considered 'two liberals'." That segment can be watched here.

Finally, in the last moments of the show, Tomas reads his "Last Letter" to Bush and Cheney aloud and answers Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman's question as to whether there is anything that might lead him to change his mind about his decision to soon stop using his feeding tube in order to allow his life to end.

That video segment, including Tomas' answer to Goodman's question, follows below...

Anonymous Veteran Leaves Stunning Note On Stranger’s Car, Story Goes Viral

By Lorraine Devon Wilke

Surprising gift from a passing vet; @Facebook

It was just another morning for Samantha Ford. She’d been with her two kids at at neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts outside Boston and as she gazed out the window toward the parking lot, she noticed what looked to be a ticket stuck onto her windshield. The morning just got worse. As the kids clamored back in the car minutes later, she reached over to grab the unwelcome ‘gift’ tucked into the window and that’s when she noticed it wasn’t a ticket after all. It was a note written on the back of an envelope… accompanied by two $20 bills.

Shocked, she looked around to see who might have left it but no one obvious appeared to be in the area. With money in hand, she read the note and was stunned to tears:

“I noticed the sticker on the back of your car. Take your hero out to dinner when he comes home. Thank you both for service. Him deployed and you for waiting. — United States Veteran, God Bless”

The car sticker the veteran referenced reads, “Half my heart is in Afghanistan,” where Ford’s boyfriend is currently deployed. She was so moved by the anonymous vet’s random act of kindness that she took a picture of the note and money and posted it on the “Our Deployment: 101 ” Facebook page (which describes itself as a collection of “military affiliate people just looking for kindness and inspiration”), adding this note of her own:

Samantha Ford > Our Deployment: 101
“I just thought I would share with you all what happened to me today! Came out of Dunkin Donuts and found this under my windshield wiper. There are no words to describe how I’m feeling right now. Tears in my eyes. I just wish I could thank whoever did this! God bless our troops and all of those who stand behind them. ♥”

As amazing stories like this are wont to do, the post went viral. As of this writing it has 1,691,239 “likes” and countless comments from people, some touched by the veteran’s act, others sharing their own stories of deployment.

The Today Show found the story moving, as well, and got in touch with Samantha. In an email correspondence, Samantha shared some of her thoughts. From TodayNewsToday:

“It was crazy!!” Ford told TODAY.com via email. “He was so touched and he said it’s people like this that make him proud to be an American Soldier. We are forever grateful and we will DEFINITELY be paying it forward! God bless our troops!”

Ford said she hopes the photograph will draw attention and recognition to the nation’s service members.

“They are all heroes. I just happen to be in love with one,” she said.

Her deployed boyfriend, Albert DeSimone, is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, 1st Armor Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division based in Fort Stewart, Ga.

Both Ford and DeSimone look forward to that dinner together when he gets home, courtesy of the “amazingly kind and heartwarming gift” from an anonymous vet, but mostly they want to convey how truly moved they are by the thoughtfulness and generosity of a stranger.

“We are forever grateful and will DEFINITELY be paying it forward… it’s amazing to know that there are still people in this world as beautiful as this individual,” she said. [Source]

Indeed, it is.

---

Follow Lorraine Devon Wilke on Twitter, Facebook and Rock+Paper+Music; for her archive at Addicting info click here; details and links to her other work: www.lorrainedevonwilke.com.