An Iraq war veteran will be kicked out of the Marines days early with a general discharge after he wore his uniform during an anti-war demonstration, the military announced Wednesday.
The military said Lt. Gen. John W. Bergman, commanding general of Marine Forces Reserve in New Orleans, agreed Monday to give Marine Cpl. Adam Kokesh a general discharge, based on the recommendation of a panel that met last week at the Marine Corps Mobilization Command in Kansas City. A general discharge is one notch short of honorable.
Kokesh got in trouble after The Washington Post published a photograph of him in March roaming the nation's capital with other veterans on a mock patrol. A superior officer e-mailed Kokesh, saying he was being investigated because he might have violated a rule prohibiting troops from wearing uniforms at protests. The demonstration marking the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq was aimed at bringing the experience of the war home to Americans.
Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, responded to the superior with an obscenity, prompting the Marines to take steps to remove him with an "other than honorable" discharge. This is an older news story, as I am not posting the link to his campaign in New Mexico for congress, as he does not deserve hits on his page. However, on it he claims an Honorable discharge.
#2
For example, someone who has fulfilled their military obligation but gets out before the official end of their enlistment might get a general discharge under honorable conditions. It basically means you were fired but it doesn't result in the loss of any benefits.
Also, he may have had the discharge upgraded to Honorable. That can usually be done in about 75% of cases by sending a letter to the DoD after you have been out for 6 months to a year.
#4
Re #2: Isn't that what John Kerry (probably) did? He was probably discharged with something other than an honorable discharge after he participated in the Winter Soldier lie sessions. And he met with the North Vietnamese during the peace negotiations.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
03/08/2010 17:25 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Lurch was an Officer. Officers resign their Commissions instead of receiving discharges.
Everyone knows Democrats are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to get ObamaCare through the Senate. Less well known is that Democrats are plotting add-ons to that bill to get other liberal priorities enacted--programs that could never attract 60 votes.
One of these controversial measures rewrites the Higher Education Act to ban private companies from offering federally guaranteed student loans as of this July. Congress has already passed laws in recent years discouraging private lenders from making loans without a federal guarantee. But most college financial-aid departments still want private companies to originate and service the guaranteed loans. That's because the alternative--a public option run by the Department of Education--has been distinguished by its Soviet-style customer service.
The Democratic plan is to make this public option the only option mere days before colleges send out their financial aid packages to incoming students. The House and Senate budget committees issued instructions last year to look for savings in the student-lending program, so the Democrats have prepared in advance their excuse to jam these changes through the reconciliation process.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan portrays the changes as eliminating subsidies to private companies, but no one should misinterpret these comments to mean that taxpayers will benefit. The plan that passed the House includes $67 billion in "savings," according to a Friday estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. But the bill also has more than $77 billion in new spending.
The net loss to taxpayers isn't limited to $10 billion. After inquiries from Senator Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) and Rep. John Kline (R., Minn.) last year, CBO explained that "savings" estimates are artificially high because of government accounting rules that undercount the risks of default when the government is originating the loans, while the new spending estimates are artificially low. This could be significant. Many colleges oppose the government plan specifically because the feds don't make the same effort to prevent defaults that the private lenders do.
Taxpayers have even more reason than academics to fear the impact, in part because the public may not learn the details before this plan becomes law. Democrats aim to bring their education revolution to the floor without a committee vote or even a hearing in the Senate.
Democrats might seek to enact the bill passed by the House last summer, an even more ambitious plan sketched out in the President's 2011 budget, or some mystery meat prepared by chef Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate education committee. So far he won't tell anyone what's on the menu, and he may not have to. The limited 20 hours of reconciliation debate will no doubt be consumed by ObamaCare, but another new entitlement could be hustled into law under cover of bloviating lawmakers.
Both the House-passed bill and the President's budget increase Pell Grants and also create automatic future increases, so individual grants will grow faster than inflation every year. Colleges will pocket the money by raising tuition, so we have yet another federal program ensuring that higher education costs continue to rise even faster than health-care spending.
Mr. Obama's budget also calls for making Pell Grants a mandatory entitlement. At least now they are subject to annual appropriation and their growth can be slowed when tax revenues fall or other priorities rate higher. Mr. Obama would prefer spending that is quite literally out of control.
"Various changes that the President proposes to the Pell Grant program would add another $0.2 trillion to the deficit between 2011 and 2020," CBO said Friday. That could turn out to be a very optimistic estimate if unemployment remains high and more people seize the educational opportunity to which they have just become entitled. Still another taxpayer trap will be sprung if the President's proposal to forgive some debt incurred by "overburdened" borrowers is included in the bill.
The federal education takeover is another example of the Democrats' willingness to use whatever tactics are necessary to advance their agenda to concentrate power in Washington--while they still can.
#1
Pell Grants means that you and I have to pay for our own kids to go to college and then we get taxed so poor kids can go to college for free...and don't you dare ask if those poor kids are in the country legally.
Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) says the House ethics committee is investigating him for inappropriate comments he made to a male staffer on New Year's Eve and that he's the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he's a "no" vote on health care reform.
"Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill," Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. "And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they've gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots."
Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Massa insisted that he did not know the basis of a House ethics committee investigation into his conduct until after he announced his retirement last Wednesday, and he took House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to task for going public with information related to the probe before it is completed.
In the monologue an audio recording of which has been posted by Rochester's WHAM-TV Massa said he first heard that the ethics committee was questioning his staff in early February but had no idea why.
He said he now understands the basis of the committee's investigation and dismissed it as a matter of "political correctness" gone awry.
"I have to come find out that on New Year's Eve, I went to a staff party it was actually a wedding for a staff member of mine," Massa said. "There were 250 people there. I was with my wife, and in fact we had a great time. She got the stomach flu, I went down to sing "Auld Lang Syne." And with cameras on me I'm talking three of them filming me, I danced with the bride, and I danced with the bridesmaid. Absolutely nothing occurred.
"I said goodnight to the bridesmaid. I sat at down at the table where my whole staff was, all of them, by the way, bachelors. One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don't know, 15 gin and tonics and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid. His points were clear, and his words were far more colorful than that.
"And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and I said, 'What I really ought to be doing is frakking you,' and then tossled the guy's hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where I shouldn't be there."
"Was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely."
A Massa aide has told POLITICO that the New York Democrat has been engaged in inappropriate behavior for eight months.'
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Everyone knows Democrats are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to get ObamaCare through the Senate. Less well known is that Democrats are plotting add-ons to that bill to get other liberal priorities enacted--programs that could never attract 60 votes.
