Hating Veterans is Fun
From the New Jersey Star Ledger:

Vets up in arms over proposed cuts im medical benefits

Tuesday, March 15, 2005
BY MARYANN SPOTO
Star-Ledger Staff

When World War II veteran Stan Kloby went to a veterans clinic eight years ago, the Dover Township resident said he was told no doctor could see him because of the patient backlog.

The 80-year-old former Navy gunners mate made a stink and was allowed to register. He has been receiving care at the Brick Township facility ever since.

But veterans groups and a New Jersey congressman said yesterday that Kloby and all veterans could suffer under the Bush administration's proposed budget for Veterans Affairs, which.

Kloby's solution: "If they don't want to pay veterans benefits, then quit making veterans."

Kloby was among a group of veterans outside the James J. Howard Community VA Clinic in Brick Township yesterday with U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-6th Dist.). Pallone called on the Bush administration to restore full funding for veterans' benefits.

Although the proposed 2006 federal budget calls for a 1 percent increase in the overall veterans affairs allotment -- from $67.5 billion to $68.2 billion -- some programs are recommended for cuts, in part to compensate for rising disability and pension costs.

"At a time when the number of veterans from the Iraq War continues to grow, it's unconscionable that President Bush is not thanking them for their sacrifice by fully funding veterans programs," Pallone said.

The president's budget recommendations would translate to $351 million in cuts nationwide from veterans' nursing homes, resulting in 28,000 fewer patients being served, he said. That would mean a loss of about $11 million annually for New Jersey, which could force the state to shut one of its three nursing homes for veterans, said Pallone aide Matt Montekio.

The Congressional Budget Office also has said the budget plan falls $762 million short of what is needed to maintain current veterans programs, Pallone said. To close that gap, the Bush administration has proposed a $250 annual enrollment fee for medical care and hiking prescription drug co-payments from $7 to $15. The enrollment fee would generate $1.75 million and the co-pay would raise more than $5 million from New Jersey veterans, Montekio said.

The House is scheduled to vote this week on a version of the proposed budget that does not include the co-pay increase and enrollment provisions, but Pallone said it would only be a matter of time before those recommendations, highly unpopular among veterans organizations, would be adopted.

New Jersey has eight veterans clinics and 583,000 veterans, Pallone said. Another 4,000 military personnel are currently serving in Iraq, he added.

John Muntone, a 77-year-old Jersey City man who served in the Korean War, said the co-pays and enrollment fee would drive 213,000 veterans out of the health care system.

James Manning Sr., chief of staff for the Department of New Jersey Veterans of Foreign Wars, said the cuts will "wreak havoc on all veterans."

"Veterans' health care should be a cost of war," he said. "Apparently it is not."

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Preston M. Taylor Jr., former assistant adjutant general of New Jersey under Gov. Jim Florio, said the federal Office of Management and Budget tried to cut veterans benefits while he was assistant secretary of Veterans Employment and Training under the Clinton administration.

However, he said, officials were able to persuade Clinton to restore the funding. He noted that happened when the nation was not at war.

"Here we have soldiers that are dying and being wounded and the budget's being cut," Taylor said. "This is insane."

~~

I'm sure this will all be chalked up to some "tough decision-making" and trying to keep the balance between what we'd like and what we can afford, but come on! You create a stop-gap situation so that soldiers can't leave the military and then make it difficult for them to get health care benefits when they finally come out of the war in god knows what kind of shape. What kind of a society are we? How is this compassionate conservatism?

An Open Letter to Star Jones
Dear Star,

SHUT! UP!

Stop ruining people's lives. You take and take and take and never pay for anything and then just run rampant over good, innocent people.

Oh, and by the way? Save some eye shadow for the rest of us, huh?

Closer And Closer to Fascism
From the Washington Post:

Administration Rejects Ruling On PR Videos
GAO Called Tapes Illegal Propaganda

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A21

The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government's role in producing them.

That message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David M. Walker. Walker wrote that such stories -- designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing -- violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.

But Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said in memos last week that the administration disagrees with the GAO's ruling. And, in any case, they wrote, the department's Office of Legal Counsel, not the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, provides binding legal interpretations for federal agencies to follow.

The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda,' " Bradbury wrote. "Our view is that the prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency."

The existence of the memos was reported Sunday by the New York Times.

Supporters say prepackaged news stories are a common public relations tool with roots in previous administrations, that their exterior packaging typically identifies the government as the source, and that it is up to news organizations, not the government, to reveal to viewers where the material they broadcast came from.

Critics have derided such video news releases as taxpayer-financed attempts by the administration to promote its policies in the guise of independent news reports.

Within the last year, the GAO has rapped the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy for distributing such stories about the Medicare drug benefit and the administration's anti-drug campaign, respectively.

In an interview yesterday, Walker said the administration's approach is both contrary to appropriations law and unethical.

"This is more than a legal issue. It's also an ethical issue and involves important good government principles, namely the need for openness in connection with government activities and expenditures," Walker said. "We should not just be seeking to do what's arguably legal. We should be doing what's right."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday that federal agencies have used video news releases for years. "As long as they are providing factual information, it's okay," he said.

Walker said that even by that standard, some prepackaged news stories are out of bounds.

"Congress has got to settle it -- either Congress or the courts," Walker said. "Congress may need to provide additional guidance with regard to their intent in this overall area."

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said through a spokesman yesterday that he will try to attach language to an appropriations bill to clarify that taxpayer money cannot be spent on such productions. He and fellow Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) wrote to President Bush yesterday asking him to pull back the new memos from Justice and the OMB.

They noted that following revelations this year that the Education Department had paid conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind law, Bush had directed agencies to abandon such clandestine public relations practices.

"Whether in the form of a payment to an actual journalist, or through the creation of a fake one, it is wrong to deceive the public with the creation of phony news stories," the lawmakers wrote.

~~

You think? I mean, really? Politicians lie, yes, but my God.

Mussolini was very good at things like this, too. He once noted that "A thing said enough times eventually becomes the truth."

There's a certain frightening wisdom in his thought and it makes me pause to think about what our government keeps telling us about Social Security, No Child Left Behind, the practically forgotten Occupation of Iraq, and our friends in oil-rich Saudi Arabia just to name a few.

Anti-Evolutionary Scientist...Isn't That An Oxymoron?
From the Center for American Progress and the Washington Post:

It seems scientific reasoning is not what it used to be. After years of crafty strategizing orchestrated by conservatives, policymakers in nearly twenty states are now considering measures "that question the science of evolution." Though most do not seek to completely disavow the teaching of evolution, an overwhelming number of the proposals attempt to address the "gaps" in Darwinian theory by means of the intelligent design theory, which claims that the vast complexity of nature is evidence of the existence of a great cosmic "designer." Though many scientists are aghast at what is being called neocreationism, religious activists and anti-evolutionary scientists have long felt "persecuted" by the teaching of evolution and are now simply taking advantage of the opportunity provided by the Bush presidency, as President Bush himself believes the "jury is still out on evolution."

~~

Did you hear that? The JURY IS STILL OUT on evolution. Yes, that's right. Apparently, all of the empirical evidence that supports evolution was planted by the "Supreme Being" in an attempt at one big fabulous practical joke. Boy did he pull one over on us! Gosh, I feel so silly.

If it were only true...
"In the future, I will refrain from discussing my private life in interviews," [Britney] Spears wrote on her site. "It will be expressed solely through art."

Bwahahahahahahahaha!! Tears! The tears are blurring my vision! I can't see! Dear God, can it be? Is she really calling what she does...ART?!

Ah, Britney. All I can do is shake my head at your poor simple stupidity.

I knew I liked PETA
"Lopez may try to convince her fans that her rabbit-trimmed jackets are a must-have, but what she won't tell you is that bunnies killed for fur coats scream as they are skinned alive!"

ANOTHER Open Letter to Michael Jackson
Dear Michael,

If people think you like having kids in your bed, reminding them of your sleepwear might be a bad idea. It just isn?t good sense.

Love,
The World

Funnily enough, when I did a Google search of ?Michael Jackson + pajama pants? the number of links that didn?t have anything to do with this past week was truly frightening. And the picture attached to the above link? Yikes. His skin is pulled so tight that he looks like a freaking mummy. Michael? Please go away. I don?t want to deal with you anymore

Parker Posing
Can I be the first to comment on how utterly annoying and bitchslap-worthy Sarah Jessica Parker is in the new Gap commercial?

I mean, the one with her and Lenny was awesome. But this? SJP prancing around singing about how pretty she is?

I?d rather stab myself in the eye with a fork than see it one more time.

I Hope the Liberal Media Knows About This
From this morning?s New York Times:

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

~~

You know what my favorite part of this "Wag The Dog" senario is? That Pubs will be all over this story, calling the NYT a rag and pointing at it as if to prove their claims of a Liberal Media.

Newsflash: The media is only as liberal as the rich, powerful and conservative moguls who own them.

One Last Kick to this Dead Horse
From FactCheck.org

In a new TV ad, Progress for America exaggerates the true state of Social Security's finances by comparing it to the Titanic. The ad claims the system will go "bankrupt" if nothing is done and that we must rescue the program "before it hits the iceberg." Actually, neutral experts predict the system can pay between 70 and 80 percent of currently scheduled benefits even if the Trust Fund is exhausted, which isn't predicted to happen for another 37 years, at least.

The ad also touts Bush's plan for "voluntary personal retirement accounts" as though that would improve the system's finances. But even the White House now acknowledges that individual accounts alone do nothing to fix the system's long-term financial shortfall.

~~

The lies just keep getting bigger and bigger and no one seems to care.