Free Republic

Congress has rushed to protect the medically retired and survivor benefit recipients from the cap on annual cost-of-living adjustments it approved only a few weeks ago for all “working age” military retirees. The quick “COLA fix,” part of a massive “omnibus” funding bill for 12 federal departments, still leaves most military retirees under age 62 with future COLAs trimmed by one percent below the annual inflation rate, an erosion of retirement value set to begin in January 2016. The fix also creates a disparity in COLA protection between separate groups of disabled retirees, critics contend. It won’t affect retirees with...

A massive spending bill taking shape on Capitol Hill is likely to repeal a recently enacted pension cut for disabled veterans. Capitol Hill aides said Wednesday that the $1 trillion-plus omnibus spending bill measure will reverse a 1 percentage point cut to annual cost-of-living increases that was inadvertently applied to more than 63,000 veterans who have left the military due to injury or disability. But the controversial pension cut included in last month's budget agreement would continue to apply to other military retirees. It would save about $6 billion over the coming decade, money that's being used to ease cuts...

National Right to Life News Today has posted a number of stories about the documentary “After Tiller,” hailed by the usual culprits as a successful effort to “humanize” the four remaining abortionists in the United States who perform third trimester abortions. (See, for example “A brief for third-trimester abortions: the documentary ‘After Tiller’”) One of the more remarkable statements to which I have not paid sufficient attention was that at least one of these abortionists went out of her way to accommodate those women who wished to name the nearly-full term babies they had aborted and/or hold them. You don’t...

What would we call them?Handicapped? Disabled? Both words apply perfectly here.How about Liberty Challenged?Whatever it is, this would be their symbol...

Last week the House passed the Ryan-Murray budget deal that inadvertently changed the benefits for service members who retired due to a disability or a service-related injury. This is not acceptable and was not the intention of either Chairman Ryan or Chairwoman Murray. I do not support changing the retirement benefits for disabled veterans, and today, I introduced a bill with House Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller (FL-01) that will ensure this COLA reduction does not impact service members who retired because of disability or a service-related injury. The bill I introduced will exempt: - All veterans who medically...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday defended cuts to military retiree benefits, noting that Congress would change a provision for individuals who were “medically retired” or received “survivor’s benefits.” In a USA Today op-ed published on Sunday, the Republican budget guru, who spent weeks crafting a two-year bipartisan budget deal with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), noted that the budget chiefs “have agreed to amend the law … well before the reform takes effect in December 2015.” “Many raised concerns that these reforms would affect the retired pay of service members who are medically retired and those...

The battle over military retirement benefits in the budget deal was the first skirmish in a larger compensation war, and next year's outcome could determine the fate of long-protected military compensation programs. Budget experts and veterans groups say the retirement benefits fight will serve as a test case to see what appetite there is on Capitol Hill to actually cut military compensation costs — and how much blowback will come from those efforts. “There’s no doubt that this is a little bit of a weather vane, a litmus test as to what the veterans and military communities’ tolerance is going...

The Ryan budget deal keeps getting better and better. And by “better,” I mean much worse. When I wrote about the cut for military retirees, I mentioned the possibility that this might be the only income some of them have. The original sequestration had wonderful priorities in exempting personnel. Ryan is sacrificing those who have already served for the sake of more war power abroad. We already have a military that spends as the next ten nations combined. Why take away from military retirees (some of whom are completely dependent on that income exclusively) to feed an institution that...

For Florida’s nearly 200,000 military retirees — more than any state except Texas — a budget deal moving through the U.S. Senate Wednesday is projected to shave $20 billion dollars from the country’s deficit in ways that have many veterans organizations outraged. The legislation struck by House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray has a provision that drops the cost of living allowance for military retirees and disabled veterans to 1 percentage point below inflation. That is, if inflation for a given year is 3 percent, cost of living adjustments will rise only 2...

(CNN) – Sen. Patty Murray, co-crafter of the bipartisan budget agreement and member of the veterans affair committee, said Wednesday cuts to pension benefits for some military veterans under the spending plan was a part of a compromise to avoid billions in cuts to the defense industry. "We had to look at how we could find compromises. There are things in this I like and there are things in this I don't like," the Senate Budget Committee chair and Democrat from Washington State said in an interview on CNN's "New Day." "But at the end of the day, if we...

Sarah Palin may have launched a book tour promoting Good Tidings and Great Joy this Christmas season, but more importantly, she is promoting what she calls, “the greatest joy” – children with special needs. As she meets with ordinary Americans all across the heartland, Palin makes a point to connect with families who have children with special needs. It has been five years since Palin promised those families on national television, “I pledge to you that…you have a friend, an advocate, in the White House.” Well, she may not be in the White House, but she has certainly reached out...

Above: Illegal aliens made out like banditos thanks to Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Disabled vets? Not so much.- They actually did it. They are on the record. Senate Democrats, led by their filibuster-slaying dictator Harry Reid, actually put the interests of illegal aliens above those of our disabled military veterans.Let that sink in for a moment. Now the details: The two-year budget deal brokered by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, would cut military pensions by $6 billion over ten years. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined by several others in his party, tried...

Say what you want about pro-life incrementalism, but one thing about the movement to ban abortions at 20 weeks is undeniable: it has exposed just how entitled abortionistas feel to the “mainstream” mantle even as they refuse to give an inch from their extremism. Last week, Cosmopolitan’s Liz Welch relayed the testimony of Vanessa Riley to the Texas legislature opposing the state’s new protections for pain-capable unborn children. Her “devastating” account is supposed to prove how these “harsh” laws “can prevent women from getting the care they need. Riley defines herself as a pro-choicer committed to never having an abortion...

Twenty-week abortion bans shine light on the practice of disability discrimination abortion. Elective abortion occurs when a pregnant woman does not want to have a child. Disability discrimination abortion occurs when a particular child, initially wanted, is aborted because that child has a disability. Disability discrimination abortion is similar to gender discrimination abortion, which is when a particular child is aborted because that child is a boy or is a girl. If most disability discrimination abortions occur after 20 weeks gestation, then laws prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks gestation, except for medical emergencies not including fetal disabilities, will have the...

PHILADELPHIA, A US Airways flight in Philadelphia was canceled when passengers became outraged about a blind man and his seeing-eye dog being kicked off the plane. Albert Rizzi said flight attendants removed him and his dog from the Wednesday flight from Philadelphia International Airport to Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, N.Y., because the dog became agitated during a delay on the tarmac, KYW-TV, Philadelphia, reported Friday. "What I'm concerned about is that there are a tremendous number of individuals in the disabled community who might not have the stamina, the strength, the confidence to stand up for their rights...

Japanese company Nano Optonics Energy displayed its caterpillar-tracked UNiMO (UNIque MObility) micro EV drive train at the International Robotics Exhibition in Tokyo last week, promising new levels of personal mobility for wheelchair users. There are two models of the UNiMO: the US$18,000 Unimo Grace which is now available for purchase and the US$10,000 UNiMO Sport which will be available by the end of this month (November 2013). Even more importantly, the 400 W drivetrain designated E-001 is being made available to other manufacturers to create their own micro EVs. The UNiMO Grace is a stylish armchair-on-wheels that looks like it...

The United States is the world leader regarding the rights of people with disabilities. But a United Nations treaty seeks to use Americans’ concern for the disabled to undermine U.S. sovereignty.It’s time for proponents of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to come clean about this treaty. They claim, falsely, that it would help Americans with disabilities who are traveling abroad. But as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said at The Heritage Foundation recently: "Ratification is not going to materially change the degree of compliance by foreign nations, but it is going to open avenues to undermine...

A heavyweight rock crusher's disability claim is being slammed by critics as more mental than physical. Glenn Taylor — who infamously filmed his ability to knock over an ancient 2,000-pound sandstone with his bare hands — filed a lawsuit claiming "debilitating" physical injury weeks before the stunt's filming, it has been revealed. Taylor, seen destroying a 200 million-year-old goblin sandstone formation in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park last week, filed a personal injury lawsuit last month claiming to have been disabled after a car crash four years ago.

(Vatican Radio) It was a moving scene this morning in the chapel of the Serafico Institute of Assisi, when Pope Francis warmly greeted a room full of children and young people with disabilities and their caregivers. The Pope approached each of the residents and held their hands, caressed their faces, signed the Cross on their foreheads and often kissed them on the cheek. One of the residents also kissed the Pope’s pectoral cross. After words of welcome from the mayor of Assisi, Claudio Ricci, and the president of the Serafico Institute, Francesca Di Maolo, the Pope addressed the people...

This article was published a couple of years ago, but it is important in highlighting prejudice against people with disabilities that was common in the past. (....)There are numerous stories of German doctors under the Nazi regime using disabled patients as subjects for horrific medical experiments. But an obsession with experimenting on disabled people was not confined to Germany. Hospitals in Britain and America were also keen to experiment on disabled people in the first half of the 20th century(....)Some British psychiatric patients were given malaria to see if it would cure their mental illness. Barbiturates were often administered in...