Tag Archives: politics

Failure of the VA

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The way the Department of Veterans Affairs is (mis)treating our veterans suffering from PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is appalling. Drug them up with a multiplicity (as many as five or more simultaneously) of psychiatric drugs and call it a day is the current protocol.

The VA’s own guidelines say no data support drug combinations to treat PTSD. The Food and Drug Administration warns that combining certain medications such as opioids and benzodiazepines can cause serious side effects, including death.
Nonetheless, prescribing cocktails of such drugs is one of the VA’s most common treatments for veterans with PTSD, and the number of veterans on multiple psychiatric drugs is a growing concern at the agency….

Aside from just drugging up these men and women who put their lives on the line for our nation, that “growing concern” is the sham of empty words unbacked by corrective action.

The VA has long been aware of the risks of overprescribing, and has internal research since at least 2016 showing the potential harms, including increased risk of suicide.
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Studies by VA researchers link the simultaneous use of multiple psychiatric drugs to suicide risk among veterans, including a 2016 paper that found Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans taking five or more central nervous system drugs faced higher risks of overdose and suicidal behaviors.
Yet the agency has been slow to mandate changes. It has failed to implement nationwide electronic systems to alert doctors when they prescribe multiple psychiatric drugs, despite evidence from its own studies that these alerts improve care. The VA doesn’t uniformly require written informed consent for all psychiatric drugs with suicide risk, something that veterans groups and some members of Congress are urging. Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

Not only is the VA passively refusing to do anything about its mistreatment of our veterans, the agency and “doctors” are threatening our veterans if they don’t comply with those dangerously ineffective VA prescriptions.

Some veterans who have resisted taking cocktails of drugs say they were warned by VA and military doctors that refusing them could jeopardize their eligibility for disability benefits, which can reach $4,500 a month.

These men and women would be far better served, as would all of our veterans, if the VA were dissolved and its then-current and all future putative budgets converted to vouchers for each veteran which s/he could use to get treatment from a doctor, clinic, and hospital of his choice and on the schedule that suits him rather than the agency. Other “benefits” of the VA, viz., Home Loan Guarantee, Insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, GI Bill, and Compensation & Pension, are far better done from within HUD and DoD.

VA Secretary Doug Collins should have the mission of achieving that dissolution, to be completed by the end of 2028. Continuing to prop up the department is worse than a waste of our taxpayer money: it’s outright destructive of our veterans, who already have sacrificed so much for our benefit.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Core Progressive-Democratic Party Policy

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Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) made it explicit a couple days ago in a speech opposing unanimous consent passage of some bipartisan bills, including one led by his Progressive-Democrat colleague Catherine Cortez Masto (D, NV). Booker’s position, loudly and proudly stated on the Senate floor:

It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone[.]
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This is a problem with Democrats in America right now. We’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump to let this pass through, when we have all the leverage right now. When are we going to stand up as a body and defend our work, defend our jurisdiction, defend this coequal branch of government?

Then, when challenged on this by Cortez, instead of responding with facts and logic, Booker answered in typical Progressive-Democrat fashion:

Don’t question my integrity, don’t question my motives[.]

Those Progressive-Democrat Senators who disagreed with Booker and his behavior, Senators Masto and Amy Klobuchar (D, MN), are increasingly on Party’s fringe, far from the Party center. That’s where the Bookers of Party stand.

That stance: everything against Trump and Republicans, nothing for what’s explicitly good for their constituents or for our nation as a whole.

Party’s core and only policy is naked opposition to all things originating outside of Party.

Tacit Hamas Apologia

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United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said his nation would join France in recognizing a Palestinian state by the end of summer. Never mind that there is no state to recognize; the far larger problem and UK failure is this:

So today [Starmer said], as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations general assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.
This includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank. Meanwhile, our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal.
The Palestinian people have endured terrible suffering. Now, in Gaza, because of a catastrophic failure of aid we see starving babies, children too weak to stand—images that will stay with us for a lifetime.
The suffering must end. Yesterday I discussed this with President Trump and we are mounting a major effort to get humanitarian supplies back in, by air—and UK aid has been air-dropped into Gaza today—and, crucially, by land. We need to see at least 500 trucks entering Gaza every day.

The trouble with Starmer’s position is that it entirely mischaracterizes the source of the problem. It is Hamas that opposes peace and refuses any sort of ceasefire short of Israel’s abject surrender; it is Hamas that is actively interfering with delivery of humanitarian aid, actively interfering as it does with Gazans’ efforts to get to aid deliveries unless they come through Hamas, diverting UN-sourced aid from deliveries to Gazans toward itself, stealing delivered aid from Gazans; it is Hamas causing the Gazans’ suffering, especially that of children for the sake of the optics—which is rewarded by their effects on the naïve and those like Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, who should know better.

This is Starmer sub rosa (not sotto voce because he really does know better) supporting the terrorists. That’s the unequivocal message he has for Hamas. How far the UK has fallen.

Can’t Come Soon Enough

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is moving to rescind an Obama-reign rule that classified atmospheric CO2—plant food—as a pollutant and a threat to public health.

The rescission can’t come soon enough; it’s cost us more than enough already in dollars and foregone hydrocarbon-sourced—which is to say, cheap and reliable and clean—energy generation. It’s cost us more than enough already in dollars diverted to patently unreliable “green” energy sources like solar and wind, the former which fails utterly when the sun doesn’t shine ( and that’s not only at night), and the latter which fails utterly when the wind doesn’t blow or it blows too hard. Windmills have additional, drastically destructive, impacts on birds, on aquatic life, and on our beaches when offshore windmills shed their blades.

Naturally, the Climate Funding Industry and a potful of fee-seeking lawyers will sue and try to tie up the rescission for as long as they can. That just puts a premium on pushing ahead, promptly, with the rescission.

Progressive-Democratic Party Policies

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Neera Tanden, ex-policy advisor to ex-President Joe Biden (D), has a proposal regarding immigration. I’ll elide the manufactured hysteria with which she opens her piece.

Our proposal ends the misuse of asylum and restores it to its original purpose—to protect those persecuted for who they are or what they believe.
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…more personnel, better technology, and barriers where appropriate—to deter illegal immigration and apprehend contraband goods.
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We should expand legal immigration—with safeguards that prevent displacement for American workers….

With no ideas for how to prove the legitimacy of those asylum claims; throw money and bodies at the problem, though; and make sure those lettuce pickers and lawn mowers and house cleaners are available to do the dirty work for us.

The core of Tanden’s position, though, is this:

Democrats can win this issue—and cleave Republicans—if they support ending illegal immigration and increasing legal immigration. The left also has a chance to split the right as they have split us.

Party adherents’ policy plainly is merely anti-Republican and not at all pro-what’s good for America and America’s citizens. What about a policy whose goal is America and Americans winning?

Party adherents have no policies that they’re for; their core policy is Oppose the Other Side. Immigration is merely a tool for Party defeating Republicans. It’s not about making our nation greater.