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Courtesy of the author The genius of Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- “The Wall” -- is the visitor’s overwhelming sense of loss. The names of the dead, on 140 black granite panels, appear infinite in number. It has been 32 years since The Wall was dedicated. It has become a place of healing, where Americans could separate the sacrifice of the warriors from what had become America’s most unpopular war. Back then, a young veteran, Jan Scruggs, took $2,000 of his own money and began raising the $8.4 million in private contributions to build what...

Barack and Michelle Obama are quite the diversionary tag-team. He blames everyone else for his problems. She takes credit for progress on his behalf that he doesn't deserve and distracts public attention from his avalanche of failures with endless feel-good photo-ops. While the shirker in chief golfed and grubbed for money at closed-door celebrity fundraisers this week, his East Wing flak-catcher provided him cunning cover on the still-festering VA scandals. Mrs. Obama flew to Los Angeles to declare a war or something on veterans' homelessness. At a summit with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday, she said the neglect...

President Obama’s visit to Delaware was not met with all cheers and admiration as his photo-op shots might suggest. BuzzPo reports that a group of 25 veterans decided to show Obama just what they think about his poor treatment of America’s veterans. Eric Reed, founder of Gun Rights Across America, spoke with the organizer of the back turning protest, Martin Nicholson. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corp, Nicholson gives the command to around 25 veterans to turn their backs to Barack Obama’s passing motorcade at approximately the 35-second mark. (Watch Video Below) They remain with their backs turned until...

GERMANTOWN, TN - (WMC) - A young war veteran was shot and killed by Germantown police officers Tuesday night just before 10 p.m. Justin Neil Davis' best friend, who asked to be called Val, told WMC Action News 5 that Davis went to Cameron Brown Park in Germantown off Farmington Boulevard, because it is where he had happy memories of his childhood. Davis was reportedly sitting in his car with a rifle and thoughts of suicide when Germantown police shot and killed him. Wednesday night, family and friends say they still have questions.

The Department of Veterans Affairs needs $17.6 billion in additional funds over the next three years to meet patients’ needs and fix the troubled agency’s problems, its acting director said Wednesday. Testifying for the first time on Capitol Hill, interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that the money would help VA medical centers decrease appointment waiting times and hire more doctors. But the request divided lawmakers. Democrats, including Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, supported the appeal, while Republicans, including Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska, questioned whether VA care would improve if it received additional funding....

Another day, another VA tragedy. An Albany nurse claims dying New York Veterans were denied painkillers. Instead they were given salt water mixtures. Valerie Riviello, a nurse at the Albany Stratton VA medical center, claims that fellow employees had reported to her that dying veterans were denied painkillers such as morphine to ease their pain. Instead, they were given salt water mixtures. Riviello told the Times Union: Among stories that nurse Valerie Riviello has heard from other employees at the Albany VA is one about dying patients who were supposed to receive morphine to alleviate pain, but instead got a...

The U.S. Department of Justice has finally found something to do. Since investigating multiple “fake” scandals like the White House Benghazi cover-up and IRS targeting of conservatives seem so petty, Holder’s crew have been itching for something worthy to investigate. A controversial float in the Norfolk Independence Day parade is just the ground-breaking case they were hoping for. “One of the floats included a zombie-like mannequin standing near an outhouse labeled ‘Obama Presidential Library,’” Omaha World-Herald reported. According to the World-Herald : "The department sent a member of its Community Relations Service team, which gets involved in discrimination disputes,...

The VA’s defenders insist that the wait-list scandal demonstrates a need for better funding, but how does the agency ensure that its current funding levels are used efficiently? After all, the VA has seen a 78% increase in funding over the last six budget cycles, and its budget has grown more on a percentage basis than any other Cabinet-level agency during that time. All of that cash got used properly and effectively, right?Wrong. Huffington Post’s David Wood does solid work in analyzing a recent audit of the VA, which found that as many as 13,000 employees have been misclassified...

Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis .. that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from ... Davis said the VA placed him on paid administrative leave after he filed the complaints

Joe Geoghagan is a 31 year old veteran and he’s begging the VA not to let him starve to death. Let me repeat that. Joe Geoghagan is a 31 year old veteran and he’s BEGGING the VA not to let him starve to death. Joe first came to my attention because he wrote the Right Wing News Facebook page asking for help. Imagine that: a veteran who did three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan reduced to writing the owner of a Facebook page because he doesn’t know where else to turn to get basic medical attention. After doing some basic...

Ok, this is just the germination of the plan. We have independent units from the Bolinas Border Patrol and the Central Valley Citizens militia joining forces with independent citizens militia units of Texas to defend our southern border in Texas, to protest Obama's lawless open borders policies and to rally support for Governor Perry to officially call out Guard units and Texas militia units at his disposal to defend the border!! Lawsuits will not cut it. The invasion is happening now. Action must be taken NOW!! FReepers, Patriots, Militia members: Prepare to answer the call!!

In an act of patriotism this Fourth of July, a pair of business executives has paid the fines for a Florida veteran who faced foreclosure for displaying a small American flag in a flower pot on his front stoop. The two senior executives for Los Angeles-based Lear Capital had read the story of 73-year-old Larry Murphree, of Jacksonville, whose homeowners association at Tides Condominium at Sweetwater began hitting him with fines of $100 a day last year for violating his homeowners association’s flag display rules, and have offered to pay the bill which has climbed into the thousands. Along with...

"...we actually put incoming applications aside so we could focus on the ACA related applications that came in over last summer."

FREMONT -- Tesla Motors, which is on a mission to bring electric cars to the masses, now has another goal -- to become a leading employer of America's military veterans. "We want to be known throughout the veteran community as a great place to work," Arnnon Geshuri, Tesla's vice president of human resources, said in an interview. "Veterans are a great source of talent for Tesla, and we're going after it." "Tesla has risen to the top" among companies known for creating veteran-friendly workplaces, said Ted Daywalt, president and CEO of VetJobs, the nation's leading military job board. "They have...

do not get sick at this hospital

President Obama plans to nominate former Procter and Gamble executive Robert McDonald to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, sources confirm to Fox News.

President Obama warned people in Minnesota Friday not to believe what they hear on television: "They're fabricated issues, they're phony scandals that are generated. It's all geared towards the next election or ginning up a base. It's not on the level," the president insisted. Here are his remarks in context: I don't -- I don't watch TV news generally, or cable shows, but I suspect if you're out here and going to work and picking up your kids and taking them to soccer or at night sitting there paying the bills, and you just turn on the TV, sometimes it...

It is a shameful act of discrimination for a business to turn away someone who returned home after being at war with battle scars that cannot be visibly seen. But, that’s precisely what happened to one veteran while vacationing in Florida. Not only is it an act of discrimination, but also what this hotel, and many others, did to this veteran is against the law. (Watch Video at the link) Former Army Sgt. Robert Price simply wanted to find a place to sleep while he was on vacation in Daytona Beach, FL. He was not alone. He had with him...

Imagine how much better off America’s veterans would be if the federal government spent more time delivering actual care and less time compiling tyrannical lists. The death-inducing secret waiting lists for patients are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know, for example, that the VA keeps a database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets that results in arbitrarily restricted care?

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) $1B in malpractice settlements as horror stories revealed.The problems at Veterans Affairs extend well beyond long wait lists, with a report Tuesday showing the department is plagued with poor care that has cost up to 1,000 veterans their lives and left taxpayers on the hook for nearly $1 billion in malpractice settlements since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the problems detailed in the report by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are downright ghoulish. They include the case of a former security chief at a New York Veterans Affairs medical center whom the FBI...