Free Republic

Former military members DO NOT get their military time counted toward their federal employee retirement unless they pay into the system. They must pay 3% of their total base pay for their military time into the FERS system in order to receive retirement credit for it.

He is against amnesty. He also does not want illegals counted in the census.

You’ve given us very little to go on, a few lines from a news article. I’m speaking from 24 years of Navy service. Whether your wife has the paperwork that says the Navy can do this in hand or not, the Navy can do this. JAGS are nothing if not risk averse. That they are being so inflexible in your case is telling.

I’m surprised the Navy is requesting all the money upfront. In my experience that not how the Navy handles indebtedness, although I have heard of other services, specifically the Army, requiring immediate, full payment for indebtedness, although not repayment of tuition.

In only one instance have I ever heard of tuition repayment being demanded by the Navy, and that is in the case of a young woman who went AWOL and hopped a plane to see her boyfriend without telling anybody where she was going. She was thrown out of school and the Navy and immediate payment of tuition was demanded. So the fact that the Navy is taking such a hard line leads me to think that 1) there’s a WHOLE lot more to the story than we’ve been given, and; 2) somewhere along the line your wife ticked off the wrong person and/or gave someone in her chain of command or the medical chain of command reason to be angry with her. I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but I am saying that in my experience what the Navy is doing to your wife is unusual bordering on unheard of, and things like that aren’t done without reason.

My advice is this: neither suing the Navy (good luck with that!)nor declaring bankruptcy will accomplish your goal. I think you and your wife need to keep in mind that the Navy has the upper hand here, and conciliatory tones and and a kindly offer to work with the Navy to lower the amount of the debt and get favorable repayment terms are the way to go. Start with a FOIA request and get ALL the paperwork the Navy has about her case. The FOIA won’t make you any friends, You may be able to figure out the rest of the story that way. Get a good attorney who was a former Navy JAG, one who worked with medical boards. And good luck.

“SHE didn’t reject the Navy, it rejected her.”

She is unable to fulfill the terms of a contract which she signed of her own free will. In this case the moral of the story is READ THE FINE PRINT. If the Navy didn’t have the clear legal upper hand here, they would not be taking such a hard line. I have sympathy for her, but I won’t condemn the Navy for acting like the military service it is instead of a jobs program like the liberals want it to be.

“But there ARE jobs that are done, onshore, in the Navy. Seems they could have left her in and had her taken one of those. There are Navy folks serving at the Pentagon, for example.”

There is a sea-shore rotation. So many years at sea then so many years ashore. Those guys and gals at the Pentagon have been to sea and are currently on a shore tour. Some specialties spend more time than others ashore, but I know of no specialty, none, where one is guaranteed to spend an entire career ashore. Even the GURLS must be deployable, and an asthmatic is not deployable.

While your friends’ son’s inner ear problem makes him unable to fly, it does not make him a potential medical emergency like asthma does. In a case like your friends’ son, sometimes an officer will be allowed to “lateral” to another specialty. It depends on the medical condition and the officer’s skills. I know of a pilot who developed a medical condition which precluded flying so he became an intelligence officer. If circumstances like those applied here, the Navy would have offered alternatives.

“And why couldn’t she have been trained by the Navy for a less strenuous position? Not everyone in the Navy has a position that is physically demanding.”

Here’s why. Navy officers go to sea. In fact, I can’t think of a navy officer job that doesn’t go to sea. Dentists, lawyers, supply officers, intelligence officers, cryptologists all go to sea, not just the pilots, submariners and surface warfare types. What are considered REMF-type jobs in the army, those which mostly require sitting at desk and producing paperwork, are done at sea in the navy. Navy officers, therefore, must be deployable, which precludes a lot of medical conditions that may be acceptable in the other services where REMF-types can be are stationed at bases with good medical facilities. Not so in the Navy. At sea, an asthma attack can become a medical emergency that requires a whole lot of manpower and extraordinary effort, effort that is not, at that point in time, going into accomplishing the mission. The navy, understandably, goes to great lengths to minimize medical emergencies at sea.

In my experience the navy is a whole lot faster to “medical board” an officer (toss them out for medical reasons) than the army or air force. I had a friend with cancer who sought treatment at army facilities instead of navy facilities for that reason.

I was a senior officer in the reserves when I developed asthma in my early forties. Even though I hadn’t been “haze gray” (deployed) in decades, I was told I had to retire. Bottom line is—navy officers must remain deployable, or they must go.

“...even though many here viciously eschewed such open speculating.”

I hear ya. I had everything from my motivations to my parentage impugned because I posted that if Rasmussen said Obama was going to win, Obama was going to win.

Your point about Ras vs. TIPP is right on. Ras’ final prediction is his final poll result, no sauce applied, unlike almost all the others, who make a final prediction that may be several points off their final poll.

You are correct that the aggregate averages of the polls were highly accurate in the last several elections. But, in four years, if the pollsters don’t have the Pubbie winning, the same Freepers will come out of the woodwork asserting that ALL the polls are ALWAYS wrong and skewed toward the Dems, even when confronted with hard evidence to the contrary. Such vicious, widespread, galloping mendacity is why I’m mostly a lurker these days.

“The only exceptions I’d make is for military voting and perhaps voting at embassies, because at both locations you could have trained people to maintain a chain of custody to prevent fraud.”

That’s utterly and completely unworkable. Military members and their families do not vote the same ballot. Each votes the ballot of his/her “home of record,” which could be anywhere from NYC to a small town in Alaska. Each gets a ballot from his/her particular jurisdiction, so that one servicemember may vote to retain judges in Florida while another votes for County Council members in Iowa and another for the governor of New Mexico. Many ballots require an OCR reader, others are counted using other specialized equipment, while still others, especially those from small jurisdictions, are designed to be hand-counted. Those are decisions made by supervisors of elections all over the US, not DOD. And it is their right, not DOD’s, to do so. The same goes for members of the diplomatic corps and their families. They vote their various absentee ballots, which are returned to their proper jurisdictions for authentication, counting and certification. In the case of both DOD and the State Department, voting is a many-months-long process, as the proper ballots are requested, received, voted, and returned.

Suppose we adopt your “voting at embassies” and “chain of custody” idea. Who is going to train and equip all those thousands of people to count the tens of thousand of potential types of ballots? Who is going to certify the results? The Constitutions of the 50 states require that their Secretaries of State certify the vote and award electors to the winning candidates. Do you really want to give that states’ right over to the Executive Branch of the federal government, the same Executive Branch that will be under the control of BO and the Dems in two months? That would violate the Constitutions and weaken the authority of all fifty states where elections are concerned. I thought conservatives were for states’ rights and limiting the authority of the Federal Government. I know I am.

I have no problem with absentee or early voting. There is no constitutional reason to oppose it. It is a states’ rights issue and people should decide at that level what the rules should be, as long as they comply with the Constitution, which says very little on the matter.

Attempting to blame early voting for the Republicans’ loss, as this thread does, is shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating. “The system” didn’t cause the Republicans to lose. Blaming “the system” for one’s problems is what liberals do. ACORN didn’t give Obama 365 electoral votes. Nope, the Republicans did that, and unless and until the Republican Party is willing to face up to its core problem, which is that it doesn’t stand for anything anymore, it will continue to lose elections, whether we all go the polls one single day or not.

Nothing says the entire vote must be done in one day, just that the electors shall be appointed on that day. That is a law made by congress which can be changed at anytime, not a requirement of the Constitution, which only demands that the electors, not the electorate, all vote on the same day.

And, jveritas, by requiring the military to vote in one day you would be disenfranchising large numbers of them. Military operations cannot and will not come to a halt all over the world for one day so military members can vote. Otherwise, we are asking to be attacked on that day.

I find it revealing that nobody here complained during the last two elections when the Pubbies beat the pants off the Dems in early voting. Run a candidate who actually has some core conservative values and the willingness to articulate them and we’ll win, every time. Run Mr. Lib Lite Wishy Washy and lose, every time. The failure is wholly and completely that of the Republican Party and McCain, not the voting system.

Way to purposely misunderstand my post. I clearly said I would NOT judge protestants by Obama’s acts, since that would be unChristian and unfair. Would that some on this thread afford Catholics the same courtesy.

I was clearly making a point by using the SAME standard used by Catholic bashers on this thread. Voters who told exit pollsters they were Catholic, whether they’d been to church in decades or not, have been labeled “Catholic voters” and their actions used to bash the church in general.

By that very same standard, I could use Barack Obama (or Hillary or Bill Clinton, or Al Gore or a whole host of others) to bash all protestants, because they CALL themselves Protestant Christians, even though you and I both know they are anything but.

Using the actions of some nominal members of a religion who have shown by their actions that they are NOT adherants to that religion’s teaching in order to smear that religion is neither Christian nor conservative.

“First off, marriage isn’t a Sacrament for Protties.”

Yes, which is why you will find priests very reluctant to deny it to people who otherwise meet the requirements.

“I understand the disappointment of seeing your church do so poorly in fighting infanticide...”

Two can play at painting with a broad brush. How ‘bout we discuss our new pro-partial birth abortion PROTESTANT president as an example of how PROTESTANTS do poorly in fighting infanticide? How ‘bout I ping you and bash ALL protestants every time that Protestant president promotes morally reprehensible acts like abortion and homosexuality over the the next four years? Sound fair to you?

I’m not a religious bigot, so I will not stoop to judging a whole group by the actions of a few who, while they may consider themselves part of that group, prove by their actions that they are not. I take the teaching of my Lord in His encounter with the Samaritan woman seriously, when He taught me to judge others on their individual merits, not on their membership in a group.

So I will not judge you by the actions of your fellow co-religionist Barack Obama, since I’m sure you and I both agree that his actions should not reflect poorly on you nor on protestant religious doctrine, if you will agree that the votes of catholics in name only should not reflect poorly on me nor my religious doctrine.

Otherwise, expect a lot of pings over the next four years.

“For some strange reason Blacks aren’t classified as Fundamentalists, Protestants, or even chr*stians. They’re just classified as ‘Blacks.’”

Convenient, isn’t it? They pull blacks out of the Protestant numbers, making the “Protestant vote” appear more Republican, but don’t pull hispanics out of Catholic numbers. No agenda there!

In the same way, observant Jews should not be lumped in with secular Jews. There is no “Jewish vote.” It is well known that the more observant a Jew is, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican.

I’ll say it again: There is a religious vote and a non-religious vote. Crunching the numbers in a way so as to make members of certain religious groups appear to be sinning Democrats is bigotry, pure and simple.

Protestant churches, of course, NEVER allow ceremonies among those who don’t attend regularly.

I’ve been to big protestant weddings where the bride and room were openly living together. Generally such things are the individual decision of the priest, just as they are individual decision of the minister. A discerning individual realizes that it is the priest or minister in that case who is erring, not the entire faith.

You are comparing apples to oranges. If every voter who had ever been baptized in a Protestant church was considered a “Protestant voter” by pollsters, the voting patterns of so-called protestants would line up very much with those of so-called catholics.

That comparison is never made, however, because it doesn’t comport with the “What’s WRONG with those people?!” meme.

I agree that Bush did a lot more than most. And you’re absolutely right about the Court. However, the majority of presidents during the time that Court has been claiming overarching powers have been Republican, which gets us back to the main problem. The effective check on that claim has to come from conservatives clearly and effectively teaching the people that “checks and balances” doesn’t mean the courts always have the last word. And we haven’t had a leader who can articulate conservatism since Reagan.

And, as we found out once again this election, when the voters are offered socialism vs. socilaism-lite, they will pick the real thing every time.

You make a good point. I had a discussion with younger family members who were on the fence about voting for McCain or Obama. Their response to my pro-life argument was that abortion would be legal in four years regardless of whether Obama or McCain was president. My argument about possibly moving the Supreme Court to the right with a McCain win fell on deaf ears.

They have a point. The Republican party has had ending abortion as a plank in it’s platform for decades, yet it’s no closer to being outlawed than it ever was. I think that’s part of the reason why the pro-life argument doesn’t resonate anymore with a lot of people, especially young people. They see lotsa talk before every election, but little action afterwards.

You don’t think an article called “What’s WRONG with Catholic Voters” isn’t Catholic bashing? I disagree. We get this every cr@p every single election, as the media lumps religious Catholics with those who use the church for baptism, marriage and burial only, yet tell pollsters they’re “catholic.”

Let me restate my argument. Lump blacks with every American who was ever baptized in a Protestant church and put those votes up against the “catholic” vote and a very similar voting pattern will emerge.

There is no Protestant vote. There is no Catholic vote. There is the religious vote and the non-religious vote. But if the media spoke in those terms they wouldn’t get to bash Catholics after every stinking election.

I bet if they count black and white Protestant voters together, they will find that a majority of self-described protestants voted for Obama. But the media won’t do that. Nope, they’re too busy trashing real Catholics who practice their religion along with “catholics” who never darken the door of a church.

There are “catholics” and Catholics. If every American who had ever been baptized in any Protestant denomination was called a Protestant voter by the media, we would see similar voting patterns among that group, since it would cover a whole lot of “protestants” who never bothered to darken the door of church.

There is no Catholic vote. There is the churchgoing vote and the non-churchgoing vote, and voting patterns of Catholics who attend mass regularly are virtually indistinguishable from those of Protestants who attend services regularly.

Rasmussen got something else right, too. His final party ID number was +6.5 for the Dems. According to preliminary numbers from the NES, the official year-long National Election Survey, party ID yesterday was +6 for the Dems.