Category Archives: culture

The VA Strikes Again

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Several times.

First up is this petty (and more) move by the Veterans Administration.

Congressman Brian Mast (R, FL)a retired Army Ranger, spoke out on Thursday after he was evicted from his congressional office space in the West Palm Beach Veteran Affairs Medical Center.
The move came after Mast, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, grilled a Department of Veteran Affairs official at a hearing earlier this year.

After a spate of veteran suicides in VA facilities, Mast questioned a number of VA officials last April.  Now the VA wants him out of that office space:

The department will use the space previously dedicated to 6 members of congress for the provision of medical care services.

Which might actually be plausible, except for the timing of the move. And the fact that, were the office space actually needed, the facility could have declined to lease the space to Mast in the first place.

 

Next is this, even more egregious, item. It seems the VA has been refusing to reimburse veterans who go to an emergency medical facility that’s not a VA hospital.  Never mind the “emergency” part of that.  It took a judge’s order in a lawsuit to force the VA to pay the bills.  And this isn’t the first time on this specific matter.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been ordered to reimburse veterans for the cost of their emergency care at non-VA hospitals—something the agency has actively told veterans they are not entitled to, an appeals court ruled this week.
The VA has wrongfully been denying veterans’ claims while also misrepresenting a regulation that entitles them to reimbursement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said Monday.

The appellate court was not impressed with this deliberate misbehavior [emphasis added].

A previous regulation ended up excluding “nearly every type of expense a veteran could have incurred if he or she had insurance covering the non-emergency VA medical service at issue” from reimbursement, the court said, which violates a 2010 federal law.
“The Agency has effectively rolled back the clock and, with no transparency, essentially readopted a position we have authoritatively held inconsistent with Congress’s command,” the judges said, according to court documents. “Recognizing this is what has happened is—quite frankly—startling enough.
“It’s difficult to conceive how an agency could believe that adopting a regulation that mimics the result a federal court held to be unlawful is somehow appropriate when the statute at issue has not changed[.]”

That deliberate illegality ought to get some VA folks into jail.

 

And this, the worst of the lot.

…a Vietnam War veteran was reportedly found last week covered in ants and ant bites before he died at a Georgia VA nursing home.
Joel Marrable, who served in the Air Force, had more than 100 ant bites when his daughter visited him at the Eagle’s Nest Community Living Center in Decatur, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Laquna Moss said her father died shortly after being bitten in two incidents while battling cancer.

The VA still is actively killing through neglect our veterans.

The VA apologized, though. Like that makes everything all better.

Actions, not pretty words, and after all this time since the VA was first discovered falsifying appointment records and veterans were dying while on those fake appointment lists, nothing has changed.  Not a single item.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Personal Responsibility

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Business executives lack it. Or at least those who sent a letter to members of the Senate demanding action on gun control.

The letter asks senators to pass legislation requiring background checks on gun sales and said failing to take action on the issue is unacceptable.

With no trace of irony, the letter insists

We are writing to you because we have a responsibility and obligation to stand up for the safety of our employees, customers and all Americans in the communities we serve across the country[.]

So you have to satisfy our responsibility for us.

Cue Bill the Cat.

There’s nothing stopping these executives from barring firearms from their places of business on their own responsibility. Federal—and State—laws only authorize individual carry; they do not mandate it, nor do they prevent private businesses from saying, “not in our house.”

However, it’s easier for some to demand Government do something in their name than it is for those some to act on their own responsibility.

Unions for Socialism

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That’s the situation in Oregon, the new front-runner for socialism in the US, surpassing even California.

[T]he Oregon AFL-CIO wants voters to limit self-checkout kiosks in grocery stores.

The State’s Attorney General still has to sign off on the union’s ballot measure, ironically titled the Grocery Store Service and Community Protection Act, but that’s a formality in a State that favors Antifa violence over law and order and actual protection of communities.

The union claims—and it’s serious—that

self-service checkouts add “to social isolation and related negative health consequences” for shoppers.

And

…contribute to retail workers feeling devalued….

Because, the union insists, Oregon’s citizens are such snowflakes, so easily triggered.  Such infantilization of grown, adult human beings ought to be insulting to the people of Oregon, consumers and workers alike.  We’ll find out whether they’re insulted, though, from how they vote in 2020 when the measure is on the ballot.

If the good citizens of Oregon do show their tenderness by voting up the measure, we can look forward to the unions demanding sackers in stores be featherbedded.  Make-work is, after all, how the socialists keep their populations (more or less) employed.  And how the Precious find comfort.

“Impartiality Is the Source of a Newspaper’s Credibility”

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That’s the headline of Walter Hussman’s piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  Impartiality certainly is a contributor, but the Critical Item for a newspaper’s credibility—for any journalistic entity—is integrity.

To set themselves on the path back to honesty, and so to believability—not just credibility—members of the journalism industry must address these items:

  1. identify at least some of their sources
  2. if an anonymous source refuses to be identified, show two things

-the source actually exists
-why the source should be believed

  1. if the anonymous source is a whistleblower, show that the source has exhausted all internal whistleblowing channels before deciding to leak

4. most importantly, journalism used to have a standard that required two on-the-record sources to corroborate the claims of anonymous sources. An editor-in-chief must address the following:

-why his news outlet has chosen to walk away from that standard of journalistic integrity
-explain the standard he currently uses in place of that one.

These questions have been asked before, and journalists continue studiously to duck them.  Interestingly, Hussman, as publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, is among those ducking the questions.

None of this does anything for newspapers’ or other journalistic outlets’ credibility.  After all, merely impartial lying is still lying.

For Cheating on College Admission

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Prosecutors want a whole month in jail for Felicity Huffman, who’s pled out for trying to buy her daughter’s way into college.  That seems light to me, for what amounts to a bribery beef.

On the other hand, her attorneys

pleaded with a Boston federal judge Friday to spare her jail time after she pleaded guilty in connection with the college admissions bribery scandal and instead give her probation, community service and a fine.

This is an even lighter sentence than the prosecutors are requesting.  Apparently, what amounts to a crime of bribery is no big deal.  Furthermore, the “fine” of $20,000 is an insult.  That’s pocket money for someone of Huffman’s means and income.

On the other hand, I don’t entirely disagree that a year’s probation and community service for a first-time offender make a good framework for suitable punishment.

Let’s have her serve the terms of her punishment, though, like she means it.  Take Huffman out of the environment in which she was led astray, put her under probation in Baltimore, not Los Angeles.

Instead of the 250 hours of community service with at-risk youth that the defense “offered”—a bare six weeks of 8-hour days, although no calendar interval was suggested for those hours—have Huffman do some serious community service with those youth: spend the entire year’s probation working with Baltimore’s at-risk youth, 2080 hours (because she hasn’t earned two weeks for vacation). No dilletantism to fill a court-ordered square; do 52 weeks of full-time work.

And to be sure she understands and faces the environment of that youth population as well as the youths themselves, have her live in an apartment in one of those at-risk neighborhoods, to be verified aperiodically and on a no-notice basis by her parole officer.

Those 20 stacks for the fine? Double it to take some of the sting out of the insult, and have her pay the money to a couple of the NGOs in Baltimore that work with at-risk youth.

Regarding her daughter’s learning disability situation, her husband, who’s not charged with anything, can deal with that.