Free Republic

A VA whistleblower who spoke out in an interview with Neil Cavuto says he's faced harassment and retaliation for going public with his allegations about the lack of medical care for veterans.

Medics responded to the Pentagon this morning for a report of a woman on a tour bus who was sick and vomiting. When they learned that she had recently arrived from Africa, the hazmat team was called out of “a complete abundance of caution,” Pentagon Force Protection Agency spokesman Chris Layman told ARLnow.com. A large portion of the Pentagon south parking lot has been cordoned off with crime tape, and police are telling those who don’t work at the Pentagon to avoid the immediate surrounding area. The woman has been transported via ambulance to Virginia Hospital Center. The county’s medical...

The son of a former Virginia state senator has told federal investigators that U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner discussed the possibility of several jobs, including a federal judgeship, for the senator’s daughter in an effort to dissuade him from quitting the evenly divided state Senate.

Watchdog.org, a self-described “collection of independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity” is fuming mad over the state of the Veterans Administration hospital at Shreveport Louisiana. Watchdog is reporting that the facility experiences shortages of clean linens and toiletries at the same time its administrators are spending our tax money on non-essential items. The American Legion’s National Commander said his organization will provide $5,000 worth of supplies to the VA for use in the Shreveport facility. He said, “If more is needed, more will be provided. While the American Legion family is more than happy to provide this assistance,...

A House Democrat from Hawaii didn’t attend a hearing on veterans’ access to healthcare back in August because she was being profiled for an article and video profile about surfing by Yahoo News. According to the Honolulu Civil Beat, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) originally told the paper that she missed the August 19 hearing because she was “delayed in another meeting.” But the paper later realized the hearing and her surfing interview were on the same day. When asked again, her office acknowledged that Gabbard was hoping to attend both the surf profile and the hearing, but said the Yahoo crew...

RICHMOND — The Supreme Court on Monday effectively allowed same-sex marriage to go forward in Virginia, deciding not to take up a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the commonwealth’s ban on same-sex marriages. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a mandate to remove the last barrier to same-sex marriage in Virginia. The first same-sex marriages were performed in Charlottesville and Richmond shortly after 1 p.m. At the same time, the commonwealth recognized marriages already performed in states as legal. ---snip--- Virginia state Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), co-author of the state’s marriage ban, decried the move...

The quintessential question of Watergate was “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer. Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper. After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies...

Veterans at the Shreveport, La., Veterans Affairs hospital have been going without toothbrushes, toothpaste, pajamas, sheets and blankets while department officials spend money on new Canadian-made furniture, televisions to run public service announcements and solar panels, a Watchdog investigation has revealed. Sources inside the hospital told Watchdog.org that patients also have had to contend with substandard care, as many nurses spend less time on work than on cell phones, iPods or accessing personal data on hospital computers.

A recent investigation has uncovered a shocking tale of corruption and adultery at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Susan Taylor, a longtime federal employee and Deputy Chief Procurement Officer at the Veterans Health Administration since 2010, not only used her position to award government contracts to a former business partner, and worked with said company to hide the thousands and thousands of dollars it was making off the government, but conspired with her married boyfriend — who also had close personal ties to the company — to thwart investigations into her misconduct. The salacious story began in 1994, when Taylor...

The Department of Veterans Affairs has reached settlements with three whistleblowers who helped expose wrongdoing at the Phoenix VA hospital, where details of a nationwide record-keeping scandal emerged this year. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a small federal agency that investigates whistleblower complaints, announced the settlements on Monday. At least two of the agreements involve promotions, signaling that the agency wants to reward employees who report bad practices. Each of the employees said they were retaliated against for their efforts to report problems. Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said in a statement on

[Full Title: CCHR Says Congress Should Look at Conflicts of Interest Influencing VA’s Failure to Investigate Psychotropic Drug Deaths] While Congress currently is focusing on the VA’s alleged poor quality of care due to long wait times for medical access, still little, to no, attention is being given to the hundreds of veteran cardiac arrests and suicides that occurred after being prescribed cocktails of dangerous psychotropic drugs, especially antipsychotics. Why? The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), the nation’s leading mental health watchdog, presented written testimony this year to Congressional hearings into military and veteran deaths and believes that conflicts...

The Department of Veterans Affairs said Tuesday it will investigate allegations that the appointment records of a retired Marine who died after having seizures were falsified to cover up delays in patient care at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. Cathy Gromek, spokeswoman for the VA's inspector general's office in Washington, told the Associated Press she wasn't sure when the investigation would be finished. "We're working it and when we can report out, we'll report out," Gromek said. The announcement followed calls from Minnesota's congressional delegation for an investigation, one day after KARE-TV reported that VA records showed that a...

Where in the World is Russ Potts? By Chris Freund September 19, 2014 The new Republican majority in the state Senate quickly went to work reorganizing committees while in town for the special session on the budget and Medicaid. Of course, those who’ve been paying attention may remember the battles over committee makeup when Republicans took over the Senate with then LG Bill Bolling casting the tie breaking vote, only to see a reversal of fortune in January when Democrats took control with LG Ralph Northam. Bad blood has been flowing between the two caucuses ever since, so the changes...

Statement of House Speaker William J. Howell on HR566 RICHMOND, VA - Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford) issued the following statement Thursday on the passage of House Resolution 566: "Today the House of Delegates passed HR566, a resolution authorizing the Speaker to employ legal counsel to defend the laws and Constitution of the Commonwealth, as well as protect the responsibilities, authority and prerogatives of the House of Delegates. "I am deeply concerned by Attorney General Herring's refusal to defend the laws and Constitution of the Commonwealth. His actions represent a dangerous threat to separation of powers...

This image of a VA letter revoking second amendment rights based on PTSD diagnosis appears to be legitimate.   I do not recall ever seeing this type of revocation being challenged in the courts.   As the decision is a bureaucratic one, not one that was made with due process through the courts, a challenge other than the appeal process might hold promise. The point here is that the VA should not have the power to unilaterally make this decision without court oversight.  The existence of an appeals process is not, in my opinion, sufficient due process.   I do not know...

Doctors say deaths, can be linked to delays. A starkly different view than the one painted by VA inspector general’s report. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., questioning of acting VA IG, Richard Griffin, about whether IG was corruptly influenced by VA officials.... Miller banged his gavel to stop acting shill Griffin's speel. “You want the truth?” Griffin, incredulously. "As a physician” Katherine Mitchell, I believe the OIG case review systematically overlooked relationships between delays and deaths. Mitchell, joined by VA doctor Samuel Foot. Foot, "VA IG’s office used a criminal activity, as damage control, rather than using it to get to...

Two Veterans Affairs Medical Center employees were arrested last week for using VA facilities to smuggle and deal cocaine, the Department of Justice recently announced. Robert Tucker and Erik Casiano had been using the U.S. Postal Service and the mailroom of a VA Medical Center in the Bronx to receive and distribute cocaine since “at least November 2013,” according to the press release. Tucker has worked for the VA since 1997, and in 2012 was promoted to supervisor of the Logistics Warehouse and Mail Center. Casiano, a pipefitter in the plumbing department, had worked for the center since 2012. All...

MINNEAPOLIS — Two former employees of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center allege they were pressured to falsify patient appointment dates and medical records to hide delays, a television station reported. In a report that aired Wednesday night, the ex-employees told KARE-TV that in some cases, they were told to falsify medical records by writing that patients had declined follow-up treatments when, in reality, they say the veterans had never been contacted. The former VA workers fear that patients' lives may be at risk because they say some cases involved suspected colon cancer. "Some of them were getting missed altogether," said...

The Veterans Affairs clinic in Wasilla is without doctors after the three physicians working under contract over the summer decided not to renew those. A nurse practitioner, who transferred from Anchorage last week, is now carrying the 1,000-patient caseload. The Mat-Su Veterans Affairs Community Based Outpatient Clinic is supposed to have two full-time doctors but has been down one since 2012. The last full-time doctor left in May, KTVA reported (http://bit.ly/1rxNG8o ). "There were three physicians at various times who had been selected to come work there and had dropped out for various reason or there were credentialing issues with...

While the national media is busy convincing the American electorate that the Supreme Court ruled that no one can ever touch a birth control pill ever again because the GOP hates women, let me present to you a story that would be a national outrage emblematic of half the country’s values…if it involved a Republican.