This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan

  • Romney failed veterans

    Yes, I’m blaming Romney for failing veterans. He ran a piss-poor campaign to attract veterans. It’s been eating away at me that half of veterans in Virginia voted for Obama, if Fox News is to be believed. Of course, veterans in Virginia are going to be the hardest hit when sequestration takes hold because of the large presence of defense contractors there and the fact that many veterans are on their payroll there. But, back to the campaign. To their credit, the Romney campaign asked for help from milblogs early on, well, they reached out to Blackfive who reached out to the rest of us. I pledged that I would comment on the campaign in regards to politics related to veterans. But, you know what? That was the last we heard from them. Maybe others heard about it, but TAH didn’t.

    You might remember that I wrote a piece last month about the Romney campaign and veterans. That was because I had to pester John Noonan, the Romney campaign’s defense policy adviser, because he happened to be one of my Facebook friends. Yes, I had to get answers on Romney’s veteran policy on Facebook.

    Most of the issues I asked Noonan about, I also had to provide links to news stories because he didn’t know what I was talking about. Most of the news stories links were already on TAH. For example, when I asked Noonan about the Obama Administration shutting down Tricare Prime, he admitted in the email that I published as a post that he didn’t know anything about it because the Obama campaign hadn’t said anything about it. Why would they admit that they were screwing veterans in their campaign? It was Romney’s job to point it out, but he didn’t.

    Just like in the debate, when Romney brought up sequestration, Obama’s answer was that sequestration isn’t going to happen. That short answer to a complicated question. Apparently, defense contractors think it’s going to happen, they’re already laying off people in prepartion of it. But Romney let Obama get away with his lie that the law wasn’t going into effect instead of pressing the issue.

    The weekend of Hurricane Sandy, I wrote to Noonan again on Facebook and told him that I knew the campaign was going to cease out of respect for the tragedy and that they should mount an offensive on the blogs and let us carry Romney’s water for him during the campaign blackout. I didn’t hear anything back from him, not a word. Well, except the one video he sent everyone about Bill Clinton, which I dutifully posted.

    Now, I’m not so conceited that I think I can influence entire elections with my little corner of the internet, but, if political campaigns can’t take advantage of the reach some of us have, they really don’t want to win. Do you honestly think that Obama would have got half of the veteran vote in Virginia if they had heard that Tricare Prime was being shut down in five western states in April? Everyone on this blog knows it, why didn’t the Romney campaign know it, and once they were told about it, why didn’t they hit Obama with it?

    Yeah, Romney failed veterans by taking our votes for granted and it may have cost him the election.

  • Romney and veterans; from the campaign

    I’ve been in contact with John Noonan all weekend. Noonan is the Romney campaign’s Defense Policy Adviser. I’ve been trying to get answers to your questions from the Romney campaign in regards to veterans’ issues and John has been very helpful. This is the result of our conversations;

    Will a Romney Administration reverse the odious hikes to Tricare out-of-pocket costs for military retirees? Good question. President Obama asked for $11 billion in TRICARE fee increases, fees that would ostensibly be passed on to military retirees. The House of Representatives thought the hike was a bad idea, and largely neutralized it by tying any increase in Tricare to cost of living adjustments. That bill was passed in May but we’re still waiting for Senator Reid to take it up in the Senate. So the battlespace will remain shaky until we know what are the exact fee increases. Congress is out until after the election, so my guess is that this happens in the lame-duck session.

    But there’s a larger point here. The philosophy that guides Governor Romney on troops and veterans is two-fold. First, he’s a promise-keeper. His record in Massachusetts is sound evidence to that point. Second, he believes that a promise was made to our military veterans and families when they volunteered for service, and that promise must be kept. If we’re going to keep faith with the military and veterans community, you have to do more than go through the motions. You have to improve on care where care has faltered, you have to restore faith where faith was lost, and you have incentivize a new generation of volunteers who are willing to take an oath on behalf of our shared security. There’s consequences if you don’t meet those obligations, both morally and strategically.

    Will the Tricare surplus remain for Tricare and not used to fund air craft carriers? It was wrong to propose huge TRICARE fee hikes when you have a surplus in that account. But keep in mind that the surplus was approximately $800 million, when the TRICARE bump requested by President Obama was $11 billion dollars. If only that money was used towards something like Navy ships! At least more ships in the fleet would reduce the time our sailors spend away from their families. I note that the USS Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier, is on a 9 month deployment rather than the more typical 6 month rotation. My dad pulled WESTPAC tours on the USS Enterprise during the Cold War, and I know that’s a hell of a long separation time. We’re also cutting 100,000 troops out of service to comply with President Obama’s defense cuts. Another 100,000 will probably go if sequestration is triggered. To that point, a deployment in Afghanistan is typically twice as long as a Navy tour. So yes, we have some money that could be used to ease the strain on deployed forces, whether it’s in decreasing dwell time or adjusting TRICARE. But instead, the money is going to pay for huge increases in the size of federal government. Governor Romney is a firm believer in the U.S. military. In addition to stopping defense cuts, he plans to increase shipbuilding from 9 to 15 ships a year, add 100,000 troops to the force, and increase spending to the base defense budget as war costs come down. When I was in the Air Force, I experienced the dreaded reduction-in-force boards, and know there’s an awful lot of uncertainty in the military ranks that go beyond health care costs. It’s my hope that the Governor’s election, and reemphasis on our national defense, will throw a wrench into fears about RIF boards, retirement, and separation times.

    The president promised the American Legion convention last year that he wouldn’t “balance the budget on the backs of veterans.” While he was making that promise, his SecDef was doing just that. Can Romney make the same promise without reneging on it? President Obama has nearly doubled spending at the Department of Veterans Affairs in four years. But he’s focused on inputs rather than outputs. His emphasis is on how much taxpayer money you can pump into bureaucracies. Governor Romney’s emphasis is the opposite. What are the taxpayers getting out of government agencies – particularly the VA? For example, the VA’s struggled to provide timely care in the past four years. The backlog for disability claims has become a terrible problem. It is reaching one million overdue claims. Same with the waitlist for veterans to see a mental health care provider. The Governor has made reforming the VA a priority. He’s talked about common sense solutions, like directing sources to health care providers and claims adjudicators, rather than nameless administrators and bureaucrats. He will hold VA officials accountable for poor performance and mismanagement, which regrettably is becoming the standard rather than the exception. He doesn’t believe in giving out senior executive bonuses for poor performance when you’ve got a sergeant with post-traumatic stress waiting 60 days to see a therapist. The Governor has advocated simple, common sense technical reforms to the VA like creating a single electronic medical record from boot camp to retirement, so we’re not burning precious time mailing heavy paper medical files across the country. And with incidents of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury on the rise, plus an average 18 veterans a day committing suicide, a waitlist of 2 months to see a mental health provider is unacceptable. The Governor’s solution is to provide veterans access to the TRICARE network of mental health care professionals at the VA’s expense. This doubles the number of mental health care providers available to the VA overnight. It’s outrageous that bureaucratic inertia is standing in the way of fixing this problem, when we already have the resources at our disposal to make meaningful progress on fighting TBI, PST, and veteran suicide. Finally, President Obama’s defense cuts are projected to force up to 200,000 troops out of service. Those unfortunate enough to be separated will become new VA customers. If you think the VA is struggling to meet demand now, just wait will we start forcing that many bodies onto an already overburdened system. It won’t be pleasant to watch.

    Will a Romney administration stop shutting down Tricare Prime? Basically, will the Romney Administration keep the promises that the government made to veterans? We fulfilled our end of the bargain and all we want is what we earned. I haven’t heard of any proposal to shutdown Tricare Prime from either campaign, ours or the President’s. But this does speak to the larger importance of keeping faith and honoring promises. There’s both a strong moral and strategic case to be made here. Start breaking promises, and it’s going to be much harder to attract quality people to staff an all-volunteer military.

    John Noonan
    Defense Policy Advisor
    Romney for President, Inc

    My thanks to John for taking the time to answer the questions we haven’t otherwise heard from the campaign. I especially appreciate that he took the time to do this while the campaign is focused on the debate tonight.

  • UN/Iran warn against your Romney vote

    Yep, the folks at the UN and in Iran have decided that you shouldn’t vote for Mitt Romney. According to Breitbart, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights says a vote for Romney is a vote for torture and that will only turn the world (and terrorists) against us – because, you know, everyone treats us so well now;

    “The re-introduction of torture under a Romney administration would significantly increase the threat levels to (Americans) at home and abroad,” Emmerson said.

    “Such a policy, if adopted, would expose the American people to risks the Obama administration is not currently exposing them to.”

    Yeah, thanks for your concern, but it seems to me, what with four Americans recently murdered in Benghazi, that we’re not all that safe from the evil in the world the way things are now, Ben.

    Iranian state-run Press TV is spreading the word throughout the world that the GOP is poised to steal the elections “like the successful ones of 2000 and 2004”. Apparently, the Iranian government likes the fact that they have nothing to fear from the Obama Administration and a Romney Administration scares the beejeesus out of them;

    Riots also may break out after Romney is declared the winner, the media outlet continued.

    Press TV quoted its “Truth Jihad Radio” guest John Hankey as saying, “African-Americans, unlike white liberals, are not a ‘bunch of pussies.’ Kill white liberal heroes JFK and RFK, or steal the presidency from white liberals Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, or John Kerry, and the white liberals are too terrified to even whimper. Kill a black hero like Martin Luther King, or even just beat up an ordinary black guy like Rodney King, and African-Americans might just get angry enough to protest in a fashion that cannot be ignored.

    In your dreams, Mahmoud.

    By the way, I’m headed for Bethesda today, so I’ll be off the net most of the day, but I fully intend to live blog the last debate tonight, since you folks live blog it yourselves when I’m not here. So, even if you don’t hear from me today, be here for the debate at 9pm.

  • Where are veterans’ issues?

    OK, I’ve been sitting here for a couple of hours listening to the media tell me what was important about the debate last night. No one has mentioned that veterans and national security have been noticeably absent from all of the debates so far this year. In a link sent to us by Chief Tango, the Daily Beast notices it, too.

    Here’s why: 68 percent of Americans think the war in Afghanistan is going somewhat or very badly, and the same percentage thinks we should withdraw entirely or start drawing down troops now. Compound that with less than 1 percent of Americans serving in the active-duty military, so much of the nation feels no real stake in or connection to the war effort. That disconnect and distance helps explain how, at this time of collapsing support for the government, the press, and other institutions, three of four Americans say they’ve maintained their confidence in the military.

    The only thing we’ve heard from this administration in regards to Afghanistan was in the vice-presidential debate from Joe Biden as he gave the Taliban his personal guarantee that no matter how well, or poorly, the war is going in Afghanistan, we’re out of there by 2014.

    I did notice that last night President Obama asked the governor “How are you different from George Bush?” I think Romney missed an opportunity by not asking Obama the same question, since most of what Obama has done that could be put in the “successful” column was hold over policy from the Bush Administration – things like the hunt for bin Laden, keeping Guantanamo open, the military tribunals, and re-certifying the PATRIOT Act. The things Obama did that were to change Bush policies were failures and Obama could have listed them for Romney’s next campaign commercial.

    Obama is most vulnerable on national security and the way he’s fought the Afghanistan War. Yeah, you can continue to beat Obama over the head with the Benghazi consulate thing, but it’s really just a symptom of how disingenuous this administration have been with Americans on national security.

    The word I’m getting from folks in Afghanistan is that if this administration was forthcoming on how many attempted blue on green attacks there have been this year, Americans would be outraged. The attacks that have been reported resulted in deaths, but I’m told they’re only the tip of the iceberg compared to the number that resulted in wounds or were thwarted. By hiding these attempts from the public, the administration was able to call them “negligible” for the first eight months of this year. But the sheer volume of the attempts would have alerted us to the problem before it became a problem.

    This administration has consistently been unable to call terrorist attacks terrorist attacks. From the jihadist who murdered a soldier at a recruiting station in Little Rock to Nidal Hasan’s attack on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Even the underwear bomber. This administration couldn’t admit that we were under attack in our own country by terrorists. So why is everyone so surprised that they couldn’t admit the truth about Benghazi?

    And the green-on-blue attacks are a direct result of the Obama Administration’s failures in Afghanistan. They half-assed “surged” in 2009 contrary to the needs the commanders said they needed. The CIA and the generals correctly predicted that fully staffing the surge would not have a long term impact in Afghanistan and we’re seeing that prediction come to fruition now.

    And while we’re complaining about Romney, I haven’t heard a word from that campaign in regards to Obama’s promise to the 2011 American Legion Convention that he wouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of veterans while his Secretary of Defense was planning to do exactly that. Despite the fact that Congress told the DoD that they wouldn’t hike Tricare fees, DoD has hiked Tricare fees just in case.

    This president is more vulnerable on veterans’ and national security issues than anything else, including the Obamacare bill and economy because it doesn’t take charts, graphs and wonkish blather to explain how poorly they’ve performed in regards to the issues. So why is the Romney campaign so averse to the discussion?

  • Romney files lawsuit in Wisconsin for military voters

    Poetrooper sent us a link to an article in the Daily Caller in regards to a lawsuit that the Romney campaign filed against the state of Wisconsin to insure that they allow military ballots to be returned since 30 of the state’s municipalities failed to mail absentee ballots in the time frame mandated by federal law.

    “Because members of the military are often stationed in remote, dangerous, frontline locations, there is a substantial likelihood that the defendants’ violations of law will prevent military voters from receiving, completing, and returning their ballots in time to have them counted,” the lawsuit filed Friday reads. “The defendants’ unlawful conduct therefore may effectively disenfranchise the very men and women who make daily sacrifices to protect our system of democratic government.”

    Please don’t bother to preach to me that this is a campaign ploy for both military votes and because Romney is fairly certain that those military votes will be for him. I know that. I’m not hard of smelling.

    But, it should be the Justice Department filing lawsuits against the state to insure that military votes are counted, because, you know the Justice Department is supposed to be defending the rights of all Americans, not just Democrat-voting Americans. According to the DC article, the Justice Department did file a lawsuit against Vermont – you know, Vermont with it’s 3 electoral votes. So they can hide behind that.

    Wisconsin says that there were only 44 ballots mailed late, but the Romney campaign says they’d fight this if it was only one ballot. Well, at least we know what a Romney Administration would do about military voting. And we know what a second Obama Administration would do.

  • That election thing

    H1 sends us a link to the Military Times poll that purports to prove that 2/3 of their subscribers support Romney in the upcoming election. I doubt that their poll proves anything, really, but I’ll let them explain;

    This population is older and more senior than the military population at large, but it is representative of the professional core of the all-volunteer force.

    The 3,100 respondents — roughly two-thirds active-duty and one-third reserve component members — are about 80 percent white and 91 percent male. Forty percent are in paygrades E-5 through E-8, while more than 35 percent are in paygrades O-3 through O-5.

    Almost 80 percent of respondents have a college degree — including 27 percent with a graduate degree and more than 11 percent with a post-graduate degree — while an additional 18.5 percent have some college under their belts.

    And they are battle-hardened; almost 29 percent have spent more than two cumulative years deployed since 9/11, while a similar percentage has spent one to two cumulative years deployed.

    All it really proves is that the staff of the Military Times is out of step with their readership, since they generally write stories about Rangers who support Obama and they give Paul Rieckhoff a handjob under the table to defend him against puny military blogs who point out that he wears stuff on his uniform he shouldn’t.

    I’ve read the Army Times more since I got out than I did when I was in uniform. The only time I ever bought single issues was when I was competing for E-5 and E-6 and wanted to see the cut-off scores. And there was the time they ran an article about us during the Gulf War, so I’m not sure how representative their readership is of the entire military population. But that’s me.

    If it’s true, and I kind of hope it is, it just means that most of the military isn’t being bluffed by the Obama Administration and their blather about increasing access to the VA, their commitment to fighting the war in Afghanistan, and their campaign slogan about bin Laden being killed by this administration instead of crediting the soldiers who’ve been fighting this war for 11 years.

    On a similar note, The Washington Times reports that Romney is giving a foreign policy speech at VMI today;

    And after delaying for nearly a month, the Republican presidential nominee will sharpen his attack about the way Mr. Obama handled the assault on American diplomatic posts in Egypt and Libya.

    According to excerpts, he will say the president’s first reaction was to blame an Internet video mocking Islam, and only belatedly to spot “the deliberate work of terrorists who use violence to impose their dark ideology on others.”

    “Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Romney will say. “We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.”

    There’s more about his speech by Mr. Hanson. While I agree with Mr Romney on his characterization of this administration’s handling of the events in the Near East, I think the Obama Administration is most vulnerable on foreign policy if Romney summons the gonads to mention the war in Afghanistan.

    The White House took the advice of the biggest boob on the planet in regards to foreign policy, Joe Biden, and subscribed to his “robot ninja zombie strategy” while they ignored the commanders in 2009. The troops did the best they could with what they had, but they weren’t given enough. And the Taliban only had to wait out the half-assed surge. Am I the only one to notice that the green-on-blue attacks peaked the same week that the administration was celebrating the well-publicized end of the “surge”? The same green-on-blue attacks that they were warned were going to increase this year more than a year ago? And it was a scant few weeks ago that Big Army decided that the troops should be armed while they’re in their bases.

    Obama reticence to admit that there’s a war going on got troops killed. Like I’ve said ad nauseum, I’m in my living room in West Virginia and I have a loaded gun next to me, why weren’t our troops allowed to be armed in a war zone?

    The Obama Administration thinks their drone strategy can win the war, like the Johnson Administration thought their bombing strategy could win the war in Vietnam. It takes troops on the ground to win wars and for purely political reasons this administration was unwilling to commit to giving the commanders the troops they needed. Mostly because victory isn’t in the Obama Administration’s vocabulary.

    Romney should be making these points and take that “I killed bin laden” thing out of Obama’s quiver. Any of us would have made the same decision given the opportunity. Killing bin Laden didn’t win the war and neither did anything this administration did in that regard. In fact, everything they’ve done has strengthened the Taliban.

    Folks in the military know that, if Military Times’ poll is to be believed, but we can’t win this election for Romney. He needs to say it out loud and often.

  • Obama tax hikes loom

    Remember those “Bush tax cuts for the rich” we heard so much about for eight years? Well, it seems that now that they’re about to expire in the New Year, it’s the poorest working Americans who will suffer the most, according to the Washington Post;

    For most taxpayers, the bulk of the increase would be triggered by the expiration of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 during the George W. Bush administration. The expiration of President Obama’s payroll tax holiday, which shaved two percentage points off the 6.2 percent Social Security tax, comes in a close second.

    But the lowest earners would be hit hardest by the expiration of tax breaks enacted as part of Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package, the study found. The stimulus includes a temporary expansion of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit for working families. And it temporarily bumps up a two-year, $1,800 tax credit for college tuition to four years and $2,500.

    “The fiscal cliff turns out to be quite complicated,” said Donald Marron, director of the Tax Policy Center, the result of “an accumulating snowball of temporary tax provisions.”

    Yeah, not complicated at all by calling them “tax cuts for the rich” when they were really tax cuts for working Americans. Some people who were exempted from paying taxes because of their low wages will have to pay taxes for the first time.

    Just like those stupid Obama ads I see that say that Romney will raise taxes on the middle class while cutting taxes for the richest Americans. There’s not a bit truth in that, either, but you can use the the Bush “tax cuts for the rich” catch phrase as an example of how truthful the Democrats are when they talk about taxes. Like Clinton’s middle class tax cut which became the tax hike on all Americans, even Social Security recipients. Yeah, it turns out that we’re all rich according to Democrats.

  • The phone lady thing

    Yes, a couple of you sent us the video of the woman near Cleveland who told the interviewer that she was voting for Obama because he got her a free phone. I’m sure you’ve seen the video, but here it is if you haven’t. You’ll want to turn your speakers down because she’s pretty enthusiastic about her phone;

    Well, the Left of course, is quick to defend the free phone program. Think Progress blames Bush (of course) and then doubles down with the lie that the phones are provided without tax payer support;

    Since 2009, there has been an urban myth that Obama created a program to provide free phones to low-income Americans at taxpayer expense. There is, in fact, a government program that will provide low-income people with a free or low cost cell phone. It was started in 2008 under George W. Bush.

    The idea of providing low-income individuals with subsidized phone service was originated in the Reagan administration following the break-up of AT&T in 1984. (It was expanded and formalized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.) The program is paid for by telecommunications companies through an independent non-profit, not through tax revenue.

    Well, the Washington Examiner takes a closer look at the program, and if it’s not taxpayer supported, then why are members of Congress offering cuts to the program?

    In 2008 the program cost $772 million, but by 2011 it cost $1.6 billion.

    A 2011 audit found that 269,000 wireless Lifeline subscribers were receiving free phones and monthly service from two or more carriers. Several websites have been created to promote “free” government cell phones, including the”The Obama Cell Phone” website at Obamaphone.net.

    Rep. Tim Griffin R-Ark. has proposed a bill to eliminate federal subsidies for free cell phones and has produced a great YouTube video highlighting the runaway cost of the program. The program has also been highlighted for reform by Senator Claire McCaskill D-Mo.

    My question to Old Trooper who sent us the link early yesterday was “Why does she need a phone at all?” If she’s out protesting Romney in the middle of the day, she obviously doesn’t have a job. People without jobs don’t need phones, unless they’re looking for work. She doesn’t seem to be burdened by that particular problem.

    Unless, of course, protesting Romney is her job, because apparently SEIU was paying protesters $11/hour for that service at that particular event;