For whatever value of sacrosanct obtains for a man to whom nothing is sacred.
[AnNahar] President Barack Obama I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money... Tuesday proposed a $1 billion plan to finance extra U.S. troop, air and naval rotations to "new allies" in eastern Europe amid an East-West showdown over Ukraine.
The "European Reassurance Initiative," which must be approved by Congress, would also build the capacity of non-NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis.... states including Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to work with the United States and the Western alliance and build their own defenses, the White House said.
"The United States stands by its allies, as they have stood by us," said a White House statement issued in Poland where Obama began a European tour.
If approved, Obama's plan would amount to his most concrete effort yet to reassure allies in eastern Europe and to signal to Russia that its actions over Ukraine will be met with a firm U.S. response.
The statement noted that "newer allies" of the United States in eastern Europe were "deeply concerned by Russia's occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea and other provocative actions in Ukraine."
The initiative would increase exercises, training and the rotational presence of air and ground forces sent from the United States into Europe.
It would include detachments of U.S. planners sent to eastern European states and lead to the prepositioning of equipment and improvements in infrastructure that could be used by NATO forces to deploy swiftly.
The statement said the plan would see increased "participation by the U.S. Navy in NATO naval force deployments, including more persistent deployments to the Black and Baltic Seas."
The White House also said that in addition to the proposed plan, Washington would review its force presence in Europe "in the light of the new security challenges on the continent."
It cautioned however that the renewed focus on Europe following a drawing down of forces in the region after the Cold War would not come at the expense of the "rebalancing" of U.S. power to the Asia-Pacific region.
#7
What's even more disturbing is that he obviously hasn't learned anything from his Syrian red line flub. He just keeps on making the same mistakes over and over again.
#9
How nice, when your chain has been yanked,
To hear Barry say "sacrosanct,"
For he's bound by his word
Like Houdini interred,
So he's sure to look shocked when you're shanked.
[CBS News] In the wake of the VA hospital scandal, several reform proposals are taking shape in the Senate this week with a focus on allowing veterans to seek medical care outside the Veterans Affairs medical system.
Three Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina, the ranking member on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, announced a proposal on Tuesday, which they say will give veterans greater flexibility and choice in health care providers and increase accountability and transparency at the VA.
The legislation, "would empower veterans who can't schedule an appointment within a reasonable time or live too far away from the VA medical facility to exercise the choice - I emphasize the choice - of getting medical care from any doctor in a Medicare or Tricare program. I've always believed that veterans could choose and should choose," McCain said at a press conference announcing the bill. It would also prohibit the use of metrics like wait times from being used to award bonuses, penalize employees for falsifying data, and give the VA secretary the power to remove any top executive if they determine that his or her performance warrants removal.
On CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, McCain argued that the VA should aim to provide care in the military-specific areas where it excels, such as traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, prosthesis and other war wounds.
"Why should a veteran have to get into a van and ride three hours to get to Phoenix in order to have routine medical care taken care of? Why doesn't that veteran have a card and go to the caregiver that he or she needs and wants?" McCain said. "That's the solution to this problem, this flexibility to the veteran to choose their healthcare, just like other people under other healthcare plans are able to do."
Burr noted that the bill does not encompass every reform Congress would like to put in place, but rather addresses the most urgent things needed at the moment.
The chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced his own bill that allows any veteran who can't get a timely appointment the option to seek treatment at a community health center, military hospital or private doctors.
The bill will also would give the VA authority to immediately remove senior executives based on poor job performance while preventing wholesale political firings, authorize the agency to lease 27 new health facilities in 18 states, and use emergency funding to hire new doctors, nurses and other providers. That, Sanders believes, is the root of the problem.
"What is very clear to everybody right now is that in many parts of the country, the VA simply did not have the doctors and the staff to make sure the veterans got timely care," Sanders said on "Face the Nation."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., praised Sanders' "really good" bill, which will "improve the manner in which the United States of America cares for its veterans."
"I'm hopeful that all members will support this," DickheadReid said on the Senate floor Monday.
But the Republicans believe their bill fixes issues that Sanders' does not.
"Unlike Sen. Sanders' bill this legislation addresses the root causes of current VA scandal and empower veterans with greater flexibility to get the quality medical care that he or she deserves," McCain said. Coburn also disagreed with the premise that the agency needs more doctors, citing an Annals of Family Medicine study that said the average practitioner in the VA hospital sees just half the number of patients that the average practitioner outside the VA hospital system does.
That study, however, also concludes that "the average primary care physician's panel size is too large for delivering consistently high quality care under the traditional practice model."
Senate Republicans have also pushed for a VA reform bill passed overwhelmingly by the House last month, which would give the VA secretary increased power to fire or demote senior VA officials in an attempt to reduce red tape that can stretch out the process of removing an ineffective staffer from their position. Nothing will be fixed until this happens.
Criticism of the House-passed bill has come chiefly from the Senior Executives Association, a selfserving professional association that represents career federal executives in the Senior Executive Service (SES). They have warned members of Congress that the bill demonizes VA executives without actually fixing problems facing veterans' access to care.
Soon to be ExWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney said last month that the White House "share[s] the goals" of the House bill, but had other Union unnamed concerns about the legislation. He has not indicated whether the president will sign it if it passes the Senate. This is the one chance Congress has to fix the VA if they can get this to the champ's desk before the November elections.
Meanwhile, Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Jerry Moran, R-Kansas, have inserted the language of the House bill into the VA's 2015 spending bill in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The pressure for a quick solution came to a head last week when an interim report from the VA's inspector general found "systemic" problems at a VA hospital in Phoenix, Ariz., confirming the mounting reports of misconduct and lengthy wait times that had been circulating for several weeks. Two days after the report was issued, VA Secretary Eric Shinseki stepped down amid growing calls for his resignation.
#2
"We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately! Immediately! Harrumph! Harrumph!"
#3
Unlike these clowns, my proposed legislation --
1) close all VA hospitals, every one of them; sell/give them to the communities in which they sit
2) vets of any age with >50% service connected disability get a platinum health care plan and go where they wish for care; if service connected between 20 and 50% they get a silver health care plan
3) all vets over age 65 go into Medicare; vets with 20+ years of service get VA funded Medigap insurance to supplement Medicare
4) vets under 65 go to Medicaid; vets with 20+ years of service get VA funded basic insurance
5) the parts of the VA outpatient system that cover specialized care that the private sector traditionally doesn't do well, like psychiatry and prosthetics, are kept for the benefit of veterans who need these services
6) university medical centers stop leaching on the VA system
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/04/2014 8:21 Comments ||
Top||
#4
The VA should be held to the same standard obamacare puts on private insurers, a 85% medical loss ratio. That means 85% of revenue spent on clinical services, not bureaucrats.
#7
Yawn. You think Levin, Schumer and Durbin are really gonna investigate? You think the evening news is gonna cover the story? Wake me up when it gets into WaPo and the NYT.
Top General Services Administration officials learned of a troubling discovery by the agency's watchdog office back in December: a GSA executive responsible for intelligence agency customers had gone to China a year earlier without telling anyone. The official not only held a top-secret compartmented information clearance that required him to report the trip, he failed to disclose decades-old felony arrests or report multiple contacts with foreign nationals, according to a Dec. 6, 2013, memo from the GSA Office of Inspector General to the agency's top acquisition and human resources officials.
There was more: The GSA employee misused a government travel card, made false statements on ethics and national security forms and failed to disclose an airplane he owned as an asset in a 2008 bankruptcy case, among other serious misconduct findings.
The Times confirmed he is Norman Wear, a GSA employee working in the agency's Office of Customer Accounts and Research
The investigation ended quietly without criminal charges late last year when the Justice Department declined to prosecute, according to the memo, which The Washington Times obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/04/2014 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11122 views]
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#1
While Mr. Wear initially told investigators he'd disclosed all of his assets in his 2008 bankruptcy, he subsequently said he wasn't sure if he told his attorney about an airplane he'd owned since 2002, according to the case memo.
Large dollar gifts from Won Hung Lo.... no need to report those, right ?
#4
WTF - over? How on God's green earth is this guy not in chains? He's walking CI case study:
--Money problems ? Check
--Unreported travel to critical CI country ? Check
--Unreported foreign contacts from a critical CI country? Check
--Knowing failing to disclose prior felony arrests? Check
At least with Ames and Hanson we could blame our own CI folks for not catching them. This guy lands in our lap and we fumble. Thanks Erica "Red" Holder.
Posted by: Bangkok Billy ||
06/04/2014 9:02 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Yo Billy, could have been worse.
--Money problems ? Check
--Unreported travel to critical CI country ? Check
--Unreported foreign contacts from a critical CI country? Check
--Knowing failing to disclose prior felony arrests? Check
--Admitted use and sale of cocaine and MJ
--Unauthorized travel to Pakistan while a student
--Holding duel Indonesian citizenship
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.
Senate Republicans have also pushed for a VA reform bill passed overwhelmingly by the House last month, which would give the VA secretary increased power to fire or demote senior VA officials in an attempt to reduce red tape that can stretch out the process of removing an ineffective staffer from their position.
