Tag: veterans

I’ve written a bit about Bush’s despicable abuse of our military personnel, treating them as little more than props in his juvenile cowboy fantasy. Well, it just keeps coming. Joseph L. Galloway of McClatchy Newspapers has this bit of encouraging news:

Sen. James Webb, D-Virginia, a Vietnam veteran, has been doggedly pursuing passage of a new GI Bill aimed at helping these new wartime veterans get that education by giving them much the same educational benefits that were extended to their grandfathers after WWII.

Under his bill, which has attracted three dozen other sponsors, the government would resume paying full college tuition for these veterans for a period linked to their times in uniform, but for no more than 36 months or four academic years. Every eligible college veteran also would receive a check for $1,000 a month to help cover living expenses.

This would cost the government about $2 billion a year, which is about what we’re presently spending every 36 hours in Iraq.

President George W. Bush and the Pentagon oppose any such improvement of this miserly benefit for our young veterans. Why? The president says it would cost too much and be too hard to administer, and he’s threatened to veto Webb’s bill if it ever passes.

The Pentagon says that if you offer more realistic college benefits, too many troops might decide to leave at the end of their enlistments and take advantage of it. And that, they say, would only make it even harder to find and enlist enough recruits to man our wars.

It would cost too much. What we spend every day-and-a-half on Bush’s Iraq disaster is too much to spend to ensure that those of our military personnel who survive Bush’s disaster can come home to a promise of an education. Because if they can get an education, they won’t want to re-enlist! Could it be more clear that the Pentagon is deliberately taking advantage of lower-income Americans to provide cannon fodder for Bush’s war?

Bill O’Reilly is broadcasting his “O’Reilly Fester” from Los Angeles all this week. We don’t particularly want him, but hey, it’s a free country – despite O’Reilly’s best efforts to promote authoritarian rule via his bullying brand of demagoguery.

The question I have is, “Why is he here?” Seeing as Billo is unlikely to return my calls, and I don’t have a producer like Stuttering Jesse Watters to ambush him at his hotel, I’m left with speculation.

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Join Sancho Press to help.

IF YOU HAVE NOT YET READ PART ONE IN THIS SERIES, I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU DO TO GET NEEDED INFORMATION THAT IS ONLY IN THAT PORTION. http://sanchopress.com/showDia…

See above for part one also -buhdy

Series of two to be posted from Sancho Press on Docudharma, Turn Maine Blue, DailyKos and sent to the Communications Director (per her request) for Congressman Michael Michaud, Maine 2nd district, member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.  

CAN YOU SPARE JUST ONE HOUR OUT OF YOUR LIFE?

If you REALLY want to know what problems our troops and veterans are battling, then you might want to take that one hour to read and watch these. It took me about 90 minutes to read every word and watch every video. I have TBI and am not the sharpest tack in the box. It took me MUCH longer to compile excerpts from 27 articles, videos and photos.  

cross posted from sanchopress.com

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories…

CBS News’ investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years.

Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.

CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health.

“There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem,” he said.

Why hasn’t the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?

“That research is ongoing,” he said.

So CBS News did an investigation – asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

OUR GOVERNMENT, OUR VA AND OUR DOD SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES.