Category: Veterans Issues

It seems that Chase bank is being accused of overcharging and improperly foreclosing on homes of Veterans.

One of the nation’s biggest banks — JP Morgan Chase — admits it has overcharged several thousand military families for their mortgages, including families of troops fighting in Afghanistan. The bank also tells NBC News that it improperly foreclosed on more than a dozen military families.

Chase bank has said that there have been at least 4,000 people that might have been overcharged and at least 14 who had theirs homes taken because of this. Chase Bank has said in a statement that it will be sending out refunds and help those that have lost their homes to have them returned.

“We are deeply appreciative of those who fight to protect our country and Chase funds a number of programs that provide benefits to military personnel and veterans, and while any customer mistake is regrettable, we feel particularly badly about the mistakes we made here,” Chase chief communications officer Kristin Lemkau said in a statement to NBC News.

She said that beginning this week Chase will be mailing a total of about $2 million in refunds to families that may have been overcharged. She says most of the families improperly foreclosed on have gotten or will get their homes back. A bank official described what happened here as “grim,” but emphasized the mistakes were inadvertent, not malicious.

If you have or know anyone that is currently having a mortgage with Chase bank to get the word out to make sure that people are not being overcharged on their interest rates.

We’ve been haunted by these Westboro fags for nearly six years…us…veterans and the military and our families. Thankfully, our own (the Patriot Guard Rider and the American Legion Riders) have taken up the chore of shielding many families from the Westboro “Baptist” Church’s irrational and incoherent vitriol. But now, suddenly, government has discovered a way to stop them at the funeral of a nine-year-old girl;

Unanimous votes by the House and Senate on Tuesday sent the bill to Brewer. It took effect immediately with her signature Tuesday night. The new law prohibits protests within 300 feet of a funeral or burial service.

Now, suddenly, people with no connection to the wars and the military are upset;

“How dare you come with your hateful message when we’re in mourning,” Gilmer said. “Nobody comes into our beautiful town and tries to spew hate at the celebration and memorial of someone’s life.”

From the NY Post;

“It makes me sick to my stomach,” said Glen Littell, who is bringing a pack of bikers from the Phoenix Motorcycle Rider Group to Tucson on Thursday. “They’re a stench from a slaughterhouse. We’re just going to block the stench so the family can catch their breath.”

Where was all of this concern and this emergency legislation when the Westboro fags were spending $200,000 a year to send their minions to military funerals?

Indiana, Michigan, Illinios and South Dakota have passed similar legislation. George W. Bush signed and Congress overwhelmingly supported the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act which has the same effect at cemeteries administered by the National Cemetery Administration.

So does a nine-year-old girl have to be murdered in every State so veterans and their families can get the same protection?

Some guy named Mothax at The Burnpit has a post called Arizona Shootings: when speculation is acceptable…

I was contentedly playing World of Warcraft when I got an in-game message from Demophilius:

“How much are you hoping the shooter isn’t a veteran?”

I had no clue what he was talking about since, like the rest of male Americana save Demophilius, I was watching football. So, I went to my designated homepage, Drudgereport, to see what was up. Sure enough, right there in one of the links at top was the words I feared: “Military Veteran.” Ah $#!^, I thought.

The link took me to a Washington Post article that indeed stated that law enforcement officials stated (anonymously) that they believed the guy was a veteran. Based on past experience, this made me suspect that he wasn’t.

Go read the rest. Thanks to Mothax for heavily quoting me, as much of the blogosphere has done since Sunday.

We all knew this was coming. Autumn Sandeen, a transgendered guy who wears a female Navy uniform when he protests with the Dan Choi crowd, who I’ve mentioned before isn’t satisfied with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He/she wants transgendered rights to serve in the military, too, according to the New York Times;

Sandeen was the only transgender person among the six veterans arrested in April while protesting the military’s ban on openly gay troops. But when she watched President Barack Obama last month sign the hard-fought bill allowing for the ban’s repeal, melancholy tinged her satisfaction.

“This is another bridesmaid moment for the transgender community,” the 51-year-old San Diego resident said.

The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy now heading toward history does not apply to transgender recruits, who are automatically disqualified as unfit for service. But the military’s long-standing posture on gender-identity has not prevented transgender citizens from signing up before they come out, or from obtaining psychological counseling, hormones and routine health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs once they return to civilian life.

The Transgender American Veterans Association laughably estimates that there are over 300,000 transgendered people among veterans. It makes me wonder when all of this shit is going to stop. There are hundreds of occupations that I can’t do, so I’ve found a couple which I can do.

If you’re a man and you don’t like that fact, it’s not up to the military to accommodate your choices and it’s not the responsibility of the American taxpayer to pay for your choices. The government pays for my service-connected health treatment, being a woman trapped in a man’s body is not service-connected. As if I had to say that out loud.

Thanks to TSO for the link.

On top of several attendees at the Congresswoman Gifford rally in Tuscon probably being saved by a veteran, Col. Bill Badger, the LA Times says her surgeon is a 24-year veteran who honed his skills near the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan;

Rhee, 49, chief of trauma at University Medical Center in Tucson, said his work in the Navy tending to injured soldiers and Marines and teaching the next generation of battlefield medical personnel unquestionably played a role in his ability to treat Giffords and direct care for the 10 other victims who began arriving in his unit Saturday morning.

“There’s no doubt,” he said. “I was in the Navy 24 years, and I trained to do nothing but battlefield casualty care. When I did go to Afghanistan and Iraq, I wasn’t in a hospital. I was in very forward surgical units, so I was very accustomed to working with very little gear and people and personnel, very little resources, with wounds that are very different than civilian injuries,” Rhee said Sunday. “Did it prepare me? I would say of course it did. And that makes it so that when we have a mass casualty of 11 people here, it’s really not as bad as it can get.”

Hmmm, it seems that vets have done a good portion of the heavy-lifting in this case, yet the only time anyone seems interested in veterans is when a gunman makes a one-day visit to a MEPS station almost two years ago. Still waiting for Mark Potok and his protege Janet Napolitano to announce that community college students are the new threat.

Yesterday, everyone from Sheppard Smith to Linda Lopez to Fred Phelps was calling Jared Loughner an “Afghanistan veteran” when he murdered six people and wounded 13 others in Tucson. They seemed absolutely gleeful over the media’s half-assed research. It took me all of ten minutes to determine that he hadn’t been in the Army or the Marines. And it only took that long because I’d let my AKO password expire earlier this month and I had to reset it.

Yesterday, CJ at A Soldier’s Perspective, did a yeoman’s job of tracking all of the Loughner news that was fit to print.

Today, Mr. Wolf is calling for an apology from State Representative Linda Lopez from the bulwarks at Blackfive and Big Peace. Apology, hell, I want her scalp on a stick.

We’re constantly warned, since 1991, to be careful about calling terrorists terrorists. We’re warned about speculation whether a terrorist is Muslim, an attack comes from Islamic extremists…shit, we can’t even profile at the airport. But one little douche-bag shows up at the MEPS station and gets rejected and goes on a shooting spree with a girl’s gun (yeah, a Glock in 9mm is a total chick gun), suddenly he’s a combat veteran.

Ever since the Oklahoma bombing, the Media and the Left have been eager to pin some violence on a veteran. Nearly two years ago, in one of my iconic posts, I addressed the McVeigh Syndrome which afflicts the Left and the Media;

McVeigh was a Bradley gunner in the same division that I went to Desert Storm with – no one I know got any “training” in anything McVeigh did that day in Oklahoma City. Nothing. He built a truck bomb, he parked a truck bomb, he ran away. Check the eleven-mike skill level two tasks. He was never trained by the Army to do those things. Any doofus off of the block could accomplish those things without ever having served in the military.

And apparently, any doofus off the block could do what Loughler did yesterday, because that’s what Loughner is; some doofus off the block.

If we can accept that not all terrorists are Muslims, why can’t we get past the fact that not all white-boys in the military aren’t terrorists, too? I wonder how pissed off Ms. Lopez would be if I declared that all stabbings in Arizona are done by Mexicans. A legislator who seems so protective of her brown constituents from racial profiling should be more concerned about racially profiling white boys who commit terror.

Lopez should lose her job because obviously she has a racial blind spot when it comes to white boys who stop by the MEPS station. Or her scalp on a stick, metaphorically speaking, of course.

Since before the 2008 elections I’ve been predicting that Democrats will try to make it look like they’re balancing the budget and they’ll do it on the backs of the active duty and retiree military. Yesterday the DoD announced that they’ll slash manpower by 69,000 soldiers and Marines.

Today, it’s retirees;

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the military’s future health care costs “unaffordable” and said the department could save up to $7 billion over the next five years with modest increases in Tricare fees for working-age retirees. Active-duty troops and their families would not be affected by the plan.

“The current Tricare enrollment fee was set in 1995 at $460 a year for the basic family plan and has not been raised since,” Gates told reporters. “During this time, insurance premiums paid by the private sector and other government workers have risen dramatically. For example, the fees for a comparable health insurance program for federal workers cost roughly $5,000 per year.”

As a result, he said, many of those retirees forgo their employer’s health plan to remain with Tricare, creating a heavy burden on the defense budget.

Yeah, we forego our employers’ health plan because part of the reason that we stayed on in the military was that the government promised us free health care for the remainder of our lives. We knew our pensions were going to be a pittance and the prospect of dependable health care sweetened retirement. We earned our health care in good faith.

We worked, did our best and stuck it out through rough times because we had faith in our government keeping it’s promises. We were there every time you called, now we get this shit. We paid and you’re reneging.

And, oh, it WILL affect active duty soldiers when it’s their turn as retirees. The active duty military doesn’t stay in a static pool. Think they’re going to make a career out of the military when they see how we are getting treated?

And in 2009, veterans groups lashed out at the White House when officials there resurrected the idea.

You ain’t seen nothing yet, ass wipe.