Monthly Archives: April 2014

It’s Time

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…to bring the Veterans Administration within the Department of Defense, to be run by active duty military personnel from mid-level management on up.

I’ve written about the Veterans Administration’s apparently routine failure to perform a number of times.

Now it seems to be killing our veterans through neglect.

Last week, Jeff Miller (R, FL) Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, said the panel’s investigators concluded as many as 40 Arizona veteran deaths could be related to VA delays in providing them medical care.

Some veterans say wait times now average 55 days.

It gets worse.

Miller also said panel investigators had evidence that officials at the Phoenix VA Health Care System kept two sets of records to hide lengthy wait times for patients seeking doctor appointments and treatment, the Arizona Republic reported.

Dr Sam Foote, a former VA doctor in the Phoenix system, told Megyn Kelly on “The Kelly File” Thursday night “we believe senior management obviously had knowledge of this.”

Earlier, he told CNN that the alleged secret waiting list was used by senior management to conceal the fact that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor.

It gets even worse. Apparently, the VA also just moves its mismanagers around, rather than terminating them.

Sharon Helman, Director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system [a member of the “senior management” about which Foote talked above], is accused with other management officials of keeping a fake waiting list that made it appear sick veterans were being treated in a timely manner—while hiding the real list that showed up to 1,600 sick veterans were waiting months to see a physician.

And

From July 2007 through the first week of July 2008, at least 22 veterans in the Spokane VA service area committed suicide. During that same time period, however, Spokane VA reported nine suicides and 34 attempted suicides, according to Military.com and other media outlets.

Helman was director of the Spokane facility at the time the number of suicides were being misreported.

Or maybe it’s time to utterly disband the VA altogether, returning all VA personnel other than the doctors and nurses to the private sector. Then build, from the ground up, an entirely different facility whose function would be to take care of our wounded, the families of our fallen, and to help those who separate or retire get on with their lives in their new environment.

This VA is an insult to our soldiers. It’s an insult to our nation.

More…Sanctions

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There were “sanctions” against Iran, wherein we threatened to take away their peeps if they didn’t stop their move toward nuclear weapons. Now we’ve lifted even that, and Iran is months away from getting those weapons. Then there were “sanctions” against Russia, wherein we froze the empty bank accounts of a couple of oligarchs, and the Russians still occupy Crimea and are moving to invade eastern and southern Ukraine after having first inserted their personnel into the cities in the area to prepare the battleground. Oh, and we’re still paying one of those oligarchs a ton of money because the “sanctions” were for the oligarchs, not their businesses.

Now there are “sanctions” threatened against northern Korea.

[I]t may be time to consider sanctions with “even more bite” against the North as it threatens its fourth nuclear test.

So said President Barack Obama while he was in the Republic of Korea late last week. And he said that northern Korea would be even further isolated if it proceeds. How he plans to achieve that is a mystery, given his additional remark:

North Korea already is the most isolated country in the world, by far[.]

And on. And on.

What’s going on—did Obama stay up all night memorizing this word a while ago? Unfortunately, ….

What Hath the Kerry/Obama Axis Wrought?

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Hamas, a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of Israelis with random rocket shots into urban areas, at children’s schools, etc, has joined forces with Fatah, the sort-of government of Palestine to form a unity government.

Given Hamas’ declared intent to destroy Israel as a polity, as a society, and as a people, this unity government will be unified in its efforts to destroy Israel. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted from this

He [Mahmoud Abbas, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization] must choose. Does he want reconciliation of Hamas, or peace with Israel? He can have one but not both.

Appallingly, no one in the White House or in State had a glimmer that this was coming.

The unity pact, coming days before the April 29 expiration date for the American-brokered peace talks that have been the mainstay of Secretary of State John Kerry’s tenure, surprised officials in Washington….

It’s going to be a long two-plus years. For us, and for Israel.

Income Inequality and Blinders

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The impact of Obamacare, still being denied in some circles:

In January, nearly half of small-business owners with at least five employees, or 45% of those polled, said they had had to curb their hiring plans because of the health law, and almost a third—29%—said they had been forced to make staff cuts, according to a U.S. Bancorp survey of 3,173 owners with less than $10 million….

And

Given how much the President talks about income inequality, it is perhaps ironic that his signature achievement is preventing people from earning incomes.
…
ObamaCare-induced phenomenon of “29ers”—employees held below 30 hours of work per week to avoid counting as full-time workers eligible for employer-provided health insurance. As a Journal editorial explained last year, “The savings from restricting hours worked can be enormous. If a company with 50 employees hires a new worker for $12 an hour for 29 hours a week, there is no health insurance requirement. But suppose that worker moves to 30 hours a week. This triggers the $2,000 federal penalty. So to get 50 more hours of work a year from that employee, the extra cost to the employer rises to about $52 an hour—the $12 salary and the ObamaCare tax of what works out to be $40 an hour.

Hmm….

A Museum Kerfuffle

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A bunch of self-important clergy are all in a tizzy because of a 7-minute film, “The Rise of al Qaeda,” planned for the opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Sheik Mostafa Elazabawy, the Imam of Masjid Manhattan wrote to the NS11MM director,

The screening of this film in its present state would greatly offend our local Muslim believers as well as any foreign Muslim visitor to the museum.

Unsophisticated visitors who do not understand the difference between Al Qaeda and Muslims may come away with a prejudiced view of Islam, leading to antagonism and even confrontation toward Muslim believers near the site.

Unsophisticated. Because Americans are just too stupid to form the “correct” conclusions without the instruction of our betters.

And that difference between al Qaeda and Muslims about which the imam worries so? There surely are differences, but we wouldn’t know that from the words of any mullahs or imams identifying them, or from their decrying al Qaeda or other jihadists conducting terrorism in the name of Islam.  Their silence has been as loud as the roar of the fires in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  No, we had to figure out those differences all by ourselves.  And we did.  Go figure.

Professor Akbar Ahmed, Chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, added this bit of contempt for Americans:

[W]hen you associate their [al Qaeda’s] religion with what they did, then you are automatically including, by association, one and a half billion people who had nothing to do with these actions….

You might, because you don’t think about what you’re doing; you only project your own failings onto others, as this example illustrates. I don’t at all make such associations, and neither do the folks I know. We think more clearly than that.

The museum plans to proceed with the showing, and that’s all to the good.