Brad Blog: GOP Voter Fraud Found in Wisconsin

Waukesha, Wisconsin Follies: 97.63 percent turnout in 2004?

20,000 More Votes Than ‘Ballots Cast’ in 2006?

Trying to get to the bottom of new anomalies discovered in County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus’ bizarre election results requires a federal DoJ investigation needed.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was already known, for some time, to be among the nation’s worst elections official. And that’s saying quite a bit. But new information being discovered over the past several days suggests she may be even worse than previously known — which is also saying quite a bit.
- Via Veterans Today

Anti-choice Bushie Pushed VA Death Book Lie

As Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander remains silent, a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet is still the object of right wingers misleading veterans and other Americans it is cast as a "death book."

This lie was begun by anti-abortion George W. Bush staffer, Jim Towey. From Veterans Today:

How did the phony ‘death book’ debate involving Veterans Affairs begin? Simple. Fox News-owned Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Jim Towey, former Bush coordinator of anti-abortion activities and political fixer.

Towey is now president of St. Vincent's College, though he has no experience of any kind as an educator. Further, 80% of the faculty have called for his resignation for falsifying documents. It was Towey, in his WSJ editorial who continually mischaracterized VA attempts to inform patients of choices as an attempt to encourage Gulf War veterans to commit suicide.

The pamphlet itself, Your Life, Your Choices, is far from controversial. In fact it is, if anything, frighteningly conservative and mainstream. The document is exhaustive in its addressing of faith based decision making. Every imaginable attempt was made to see to it that no group, no matter how ‘wingnut’ or extreme, would find anything to complain about. The result was a huge document, though extremely informative, that is too long for anyone to read or at least want to.

Now GOP Aims Lies at Veterans

Hey Sussex, Wisconsin native Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

Because nothing is sacred to the Republican Party, certainly not veterans.

Chris Adams at McClatchy Newspapers reports, "While Republicans are calling a Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) health planning booklet a 'death book' that encourages veterans to kill themselves or forgo care, ethicists and legal and medical experts say it's a reasonable attempt to help America's veterans plan for the end of their lives."

Make no mistake, the GOP will tell any lie and dishonor America's 26-million veterans for a chance to stir up its benighted base. Now, they are claiming that the DVA is encouraging veterans to kill themselves.

Does the VFW approve of these lies?

There is seemingly no bottom to the Republican Party's capacity to lie in service to ... who knows what these people think they are doing?

Writes Gordon Duff at Veterans Today:

In a TV appearance where Michael Steele, GOP Chairman and defacto spokesman for the medical industry and Fox News's Chris Wallace fabricated a story citing the Department of Veterans Affairs for creating programs to force veterans to commit suicide. ...

Defending veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs was Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, a watchdog group famed for uncovering VA corruption. Other veterans groups, some whose aging members were terrified by the Fox News story have neither made any significant effort to inform their membership or call the GOP and Fox News to account for this attack on the veterans health care system.

The wild and totally falsified claims made by Steele and Fox News are part of a pattern of deceptive reports intended to bring about an outcry against the government's attempt to guarantee health care for the ever increasing millions of uninsured Americans who are victims of the current economic collapse.

Why a political party and news network with passive complicity from veterans organizations would perpetrate such a massive fraud meant to victimize thousands of aging veterans may seen surprising to some.

Again I ask, Thomas Tradewell, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Commander, where are you?

Veteran Advocates Hit Service Orgs

America has 26-million veterans comprising a tremendously powerful and effective lobby for veterans' interest after service. Wrong.

Veteran advocates who do the thankless work assisting veterans navigating through an often uncaring [and under the administration of George W. Bush hostile] bureaucracy in the U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) see themselves as sleeping with the enemy as service organization such as the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) are perceived as posing a barrier to reform.

Recently a resident of Sussex, Wisconsin, Thomas Tradewell, was elected VFW National Commander.

Mr. Tradewell said in his acceptance speech in mid-August, "to honor our military heroes is to ensure that our military and our veterans are honored, recognized and cared for … which is the focus of every program we conduct at every level of this great organization."

But many veteran advocates see institutional surrender by the VFW and American Legion to the inaction of bureaucracy and neocon aversion to meeting the responsibility to care for our veterans.

In the words of one veteran advocate harboring contempt for the VFW and American Legion: "It's time to rain on these pricks."

Writes Gordon Duff in Veterans Today:

It's worse, much worse. Not only do they say nothing good, most work openly against veterans who, especially recently, have won huge victories for veterans rights, victories won, not only against an uncaring government but with no support from millions of fellow veterans and the organizations who have rubber stamped every oppressive act, every abuse that has for decades destroyed veterans and their families.

Truth is very simple. For 60 years things have gotten worse for veterans although tens of billions of dollars have bloated Veterans Affairs into the most dysfunctional and oppressive bureaucracy in our entire government. Courts now ‘officially’ find the DVA proven ’troubling’ but nobody seems to know why. We know. Sick veterans know. Veterans who have worked claims thru the system know.

What vets don't know is how the American Legion, VFW and other groups have advised the DVA and Congress, led us, every step of the way, to the total failure and utter disaster we have now. These groups ‘played’ at helping vets but became a home for political extremists or dimwits addicted more grandstanding than the hard work required by informed veterans advocacy. ...

For every failure of the service organizations, most military retiree groups even go further. Some actively oppose funds for veteran medical care and benefits feeling it threatens retiree privileges. On one landmark issue, retiree groups continually oppose use of Space A military flights for disabled veterans and Medal of Honor winners, yet millions of tax payer dollars are spent to subsidize both flights and facilities, terminals, hotels, for retirees to use.

All the game playing, be it retirees against vets, conservatives against liberals, delusional idiots against less delusional idiots or serving military who are systematically instructed by our military to disrespect veterans and their service, makes unity an impossibility.

The industry that breeds ignorance is too powerful and ingrained to convert. Veterans have been too polite and understanding, not only with the public and their leaders who could care less what happens to us but with other veterans whose utter ignorance has left us powerless.

The idea that social organizations with good and decent members operate under a national bureaucracy so less decent than the members themselves, or most of them anyway, that reason itself is challenged.

How do we say, thanks for your service, thanks for the flowers and the motorcycle processions but keep the hell out of politics and please, please dump your leadership, fire your lobbyists and get connected to the real world?

Veterans Scandal in Montana

Update: Here's a jobs program, processing veterans' claims that are pouring in (NYT). Would give veterans the respect they deserve, but I suppose the bureaucrats would rather set veteran against veteran like what the Inspector General is trying to pull off in the Robert Anthon affair out of Fort Atkinson. Just another thought, how about no war?

Here's an appalling, emerging Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) scandal in an agency that one would think ought to operate with the force and discipline of a Vince Lombardi-coached offensive line.

But the flag-waving and faux patriotism that is such a pervasive aspect of our culture does not translate into the DVA helping our 26 million veterans as they deserve.

See the following pieces posted over the weekend about a scandal in our neighbor to the northwest:

- VA 'Quack' Scandal in Montana May Be Worst Yet

- Massive Patient Abuse Fraud,Courageous Vets Stand Against Hospital Cover-up

Vietnam War Veterans Called Bums

Funny how the most effective and most committed veteran advocates have nothing but profane language for those veterans who wrap themselves in the flag and scream Republican and God Bless America.

Take Gordon Duff, a Vietnam War Marine combat veteran and regular contributor to Veterans Today.

What Duff [that's the crazy SOB in photo] lacks in subtlety, he makes up in commitment and candor. From Duff's latest:

Who are these folks we see, festooned in vests and ribbons, all screaming for war against someone? Are they real Vietnam vets, aging holdovers from a disastrous war? Having spent 40 years as a Vietnam veteran, I have a pretty good idea. NO! ...

I served in an elite Marine combat unit that was 100% against the war. Everyone in Vietnam was. Why? We lived like pigs, ate slop out of a can and were killed or blown apart in numbers our current troops could never understand and thankfully will never have to.

Even the guys in the rear were worked to death, many of them. There weren't the tens of thousands of mercenaries and kitchen workers there. It was about filling sandbags and 'burning shitters.'

Everyone was sick or wounded and still in the field. During summer, we looked like skeletons, many covered with sores, some with active malaria (me). ...

Chances are you were angry. Marines called the Corps, "the crotch." When Marines quit complaining, it was a sign morale was down. No, I am not kidding.

Full Metal Jacket gives the feel pretty well. Someone must have actually 'been there.'

I have a couple of friends left. I have many now gone. They are good people, hard working and the same people I trusted with my life long ago. I do their complaining for them as I am the only one who can type. I don't spell so well, went to the wrong colleges, I am afraid. ...

At recent count, the majority of those who served in Vietnam are dead. A few years ago, only a million of the 2.4 million were still alive. Last year the number was 813,000. Death through chemistry and neglect is my diagnosis.

Current troops are told, in training, that we were a pack of bums. For kids serving now who have parents and grandparents who served in Vietnam, I hope they speak up. I would like to see someone ‘talked to’ maybe. How can a kid listen to this kind of crap when his father fought in Vietnam and may have been the reason he chose to serve? What is the military thinking? Oops. I said ‘military’ and ‘thinking’ in the same sentence.

What was I thinking.

VA finding: Liberal-biased news worsens PTSD

"At the NEOCON-run VA, the first rule of PTSD treatment is to not talk politics (meaning anything that is negative about the war is TABOO) ...," writes Robert L. Hanafin, Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired.

Hanafin's piece in Veterans Today shines a light on the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) that has become almost as politicized as the Dept. of Justice.

Nothing, not even the treatment of returning troops, is safe from the rightwing, pro-war-at-any-costs ideology of this administration.

Hanafin quotes from a VA "fact sheet" on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): “Families should minimize exposure to anxiety-arousing media related to the war. News programs often emphasize fearful content and frightening images to create a 'story.' Watching a lot of TV news programs, for example, can create needless distress. "

Bush's war against veterans just may be the worst scandal yet of the most corrupt and inept administration in American history. Writes Hanafin:

"I personally believe that what ‘the management’ of the VA meant to say way, 'Limit exposure to news media programs that are not screened, monitored, and controlled by AmericaSupportsBush.mil. If the media refuses to paint a rosy picture of Iraqinam, boycott it. IBEWARE the doom sayers of CBS, PBS, plus any other mainstream media outlet that does not enforce the Pentagon/VA picture of the war President Bush and enough members of Congress sent you to fight and die in and ‘maybe, just MAYBE’ you will limit your exposure to PTSD stressors.' COME ON NOW PEOPLE, the following had former House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Steve Buyers and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Doctor Phil (oops I mean) Sally Satel's behind the scenes stench all over it. ..."

IF you are a Vet who does not know who Dr. Sally is or what the American Enterprise Institute is. The AEI for Public Policy Research is one of the oldest and most influential of the pro-business right-wing think tanks. It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism, and has been extremely successful in placing its people in influential governmental positions, particularly in the Bush Administration. AEI has been described as one of the country's main bastions of neoconservatism. Dr. Sally, is the Bush administration's EXPERT on PTSD, with 'too many' PTSD fraud 'conspiracy' theorys [She really sounds more like a UFO expert, EXCEPT UFO experts have more credibility.] She adores B.G. Burkett, the Texas associate of the Bush mob, and she TOO OFTEN quotes FACT from Burkett's fake Vet book, Stolen Valor. Dr. Sally looks down on Vietnam Vets unless they fit Stolen Valor's criteria."

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