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

Category: VoteVets

  • Phony soldier Rick Duncan\Strandlof resurfaces

    You may remember the phony we helped uncover in Colorado Springs who had fooled IVAW and VoteVets and going by the name of Rick Duncan, but was actually Richard Strandlof. He was charged with Stolen Valor Act violations and the Ninth Circuit Court gave him a pass saying he had the right to free speech which included his claims of awards of the Silver Star and Purple Heart.

    Well, it seems that karma is a bitch. The Denver Post reports that he has resurfaced in a new disguise – as a Jewish lawyer.

    Last October, a man named Rick Gold, a 30-something lawyer who said he lived in Denver’s trendy Highlands neighborhood, appeared on the social scene and slipped comfortably into a welcoming circle of young Jewish professionals.

    He attended Passover meals and Sabbath dinners, knew enough Hebrew to participate in the prayers and joined several faith-based organizations as he told friends of his Israeli heritage and sought to reconnect with his religious roots.

    Through parallel social networks, online and in person, a lot of people got to know Rick Gold.

    Except that they didn’t.

    Last weekend, many of his friends concluded — to their shock and disbelief — that Rick Gold is, in fact, Rick Strandlof, the fake military hero whose unmasking in 2009 triggered an uproar and criminal charges.

    Here’s screenshot of his LinkedIn account. it includes a picture of him posing with Colorado Senator Mark Udall from back when he was posing as Rick Duncan the decorated Iraq veteran;

    He seems to continue his romance with military service since he has now taken on service with the israeli Defense Forces. His fantasies continue; He’s a martial arts instructor, a member of GOProud, the conservative gay advocacy group

    So I wonder if the 9th Circuit will be as forgiving with Duncan\Strandlof\Gold when he poses as an officer of the court as they were when he posed as an officer of Marines. Maybe if the courts continue to let this moron manufacture identities, they’ll see him sitting on the bench next to them in a few years.

    I can state authoritatively from this experience that irony tastes like a banana split with extra chocolate sauce.

  • VoteVets secretly funds political activities

    TSO sends a link to an article from Bloomberg about how some tax-exempt non-profits are evading IRS and Federal Election Commission scrutiny to fund political activities and allow donors a measure of anonymity. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom you’ll read this;

    VoteVets Action Fund, a tax-exempt that raised money from secret donors and favors Democrats, reported $3.2 million in election spending to the FEC in 2010.

    The group told the IRS in its filing covering the 2008 election that it had no political activity, while it reported $205,000 in ad spending to the FEC for that year. Questioned about this, Ashwin Madia, the group’s interim chairman, called it a mistake. VoteVets “should have checked yes under political activity,” Madia said. “We’re going back to the IRS to correct that oversight.”

    In its latest filing, for the year ended June 30, 2010, the group told the IRS it had campaign activities and reported a $200,000 donation to Patriot Majority, a Democratic-leaning organization whose donors include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Teamsters union.

    2008? Wasn’t that when Jon Soltz was running the joint? And now Ashwin Madia is caught holding the bag. Really? An Army officer trying to defraud the American tax payers? That probably won’t sit well with his commander.

  • VetVoice forgets that it’s a “war against terror’

    Dicksmith goes off on a tear about Leon Panetta’s talk with troops in the Green ZOne yesterday during which Panetta said;

    “The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,” Panetta told the troops [in Iraq]. “And 3,000 Americans – 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings – got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that.”

    So Dicksmith says;

    Seriously, Leon? What exactly happened on 9/11 that made invading a country that had nothing to do with it, getting several thousand American troops killed in the process over the last eight years, a worthy course of action? I’m sure the troops the SECDEF spoke to heard that statement and looked at him like he had an additional appendage sprouting from his forehead.

    There’s a reason we called the recent wars “the war against terror”. George Bush in his speech to the nation on 9-11-01 said specifically “I’ve directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

    Before bin Laden the most wanted terrorist in the world was Abu Nidal – the real reason Oliver North installed security around his house. Abu Nidal was hiding in Iraq for decades until he death in 2002. A year before the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, Hussein was paying off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers encouraging the practice. And then there’s always Salman Pak. And there was the 500 tons of yellow cake uranium that the US shipped from Iraq to Canada.

    You can probably argue that Iraq had little to do with the attacks on 9-11, but they certainly weren’t some innocent passerby in the war against terror. And Panetta was right that the reason we were in iraq is because of the events on 9-11.

  • VetVoice making stuff up again

    How did the arrest in Seattle yesterday of two plotting terrorists have anything to do with interrogation techniques? I don’t know either, but dicksmith thinks it does;

    Yeah, I don’t know what the f**k he’s talking about, and I don’t think dicksmith knows either. I get the impression that he’d rather write it like this: “Obama takes down terrorist cell using only his mind. Could George Bush do that?”

  • What I heard last night

    So I decided to listen to the President last night. I usually don’t because I always know exactly what he’s going to say, but I figured “ten minutes…what could it hurt?” He said exactly what I figured he would say;

    Blah, blah, blah…Bush’s fault…blah, blah, blah…eye off the ball…blah, blah, blah, if you Taliban guys can hold off for three years, we’ll be outa there and it’s all yours…blah, blah, blah, [insert pretty words to make us feel good about ourselves for cutting and running] blah, blah, ninja robot zombies will rule the world.

    And then this morning, I switched on the TV and the O’Reilly Show had VoteVet’s Wesley Clark on who tried to revise history by saying out loud that we went to Afghanistan, not to defeat the Taliban but to capture or kill bin Laden. What? Was Clark even paying attention. The initial phase of the war was to support the Northern Alliance so they could topple the Taliban from power because they created the environment in which al Qaeda and bin Laden could safely operate and launch their attacks on the world. Of course, that’s Clark’s way of revising events to excuse the President’s decision to cut and run slowly.

    Clark is a f**king moron. Speaking of morons and VoteVets, I had a brief exchange yesterday with Brian McGough, formerly of VoteVets, currently of the Veterans Affairs Department, like the rest of those unemployable VoteVets losers. Apparently he’s on a hair trigger whenever my name is mentioned because of the review I wrote for his wife’s book. But he tried to tell me that our war in Afghanistan was an emotional response from the beginning. Really? We went to Afghanistan solely for revenge? I thought it was to cleanse that which Clinton had allowed to fester for five years.

    Yeah, we can be happy for the troops who are coming home and getting some down time, but don’t forget that the burden of the war will fall on the shoulders of others who remain in that shit hole. The war isn’t over, there are just fewer Americans slated to be engaged…until the next attack in this country.

  • VetVoice can’t be right no matter how hard they try

    At Vetvoice, our favorite frontpager there, Dicksmith, just can’t seem to get anything right these days. He wrote about how Dana Rohrbach got his ass tossed from Iraq along with his all-Republican delegation for mentioning to the Maliki administration that they should pay the US back for liberating them from Hussein’s boot.

    Well, some rudimentary research on my part forced Dicksmith to alter his post because almost half of the delegation were Democrats. Now TSO finds out that they weren’t tossed out of Iraq at all – it seems they were leaving anyway. And the reason they were asked to leave was not because of their recommendation for partial repayment, it was because they wanted to inspect an Iraqi military post which had just recently been the scene of reported beatings and torturing of prisoners to death, according to The Hill.

    The group met with Maliki on Friday morning and had a “frank and candid” discussion, Gohmert said. During the talk, Rohrabacher, Gohmert and Poe pressed Maliki for access to Camp Ashraf, where 35 people were allegedly killed in April by Iraqui [sic] soldiers.

    “(Maliki) did not appreciate us bringing up Camp Ashraf,” Gohmert said. Malike denied the delegation access to the camp, citing “Iraq’s national sovereignty,” Gohmert said.

    So they were investigating reports that Iraqis were beating and killing prisoners when they were asked to leave. So I’m guessing that dicksmith supports Iraqis’ torture of prisoners. That’s fairly surprising given the fact that they have Tony Camerino on their staff.

    So I guess we can conclude that dicksmith is correct less often than a broken clock on a daily basis.

  • VetVoice: Republicans won’t help veterans

    Yes, dicksmith is up to his old partisan rhetoric again at VetVoice – the non-partisan blog of the non-partisan VoteVets. He reports, like we did yesterday, that unemployment rates for young veterans is higher than the average American unemployment rates. Of course, he blames the current Republican-led Congress;

    While the unemployment rate is 25% more than the general population, the current [Congress] has not passed one job creation bill. Not one.

    Please name for me one “job creation bill” that the last Congress enacted. Or the Congress before that. In fact, tell me what Congress can do to “create jobs” beyond hiring larger staffs and expanding the number of government employees.

    You’d think an organization which touts it’s connections to veterans would have spent a couple of bucks on lobbying for help for veterans rather than spend millions on the Senate campaign of Harry Reid, a draft dodger and perpetuating the cut and run from Iraq strategy for Zombie Murtha, a gigantic chicken shit coward.

  • VoteVets still pushes the Murtha cut and run policy

    I’m not really surprised that VoteVets sans Jon Soltz continues to press for a cut and run from Iraq agenda. What does surprise me is their reasoning. Emphasis is mine;

    “The attacks this morning in Iraq, which tragically killed five US Service Members, are a stark reminder that no matter what, combat in Iraq is not at an end. The rise in violence comes as remaining insurgents try to dissuade Iraq’s government from requesting that US Forces stay past the year-end Status of Forces Agreement deadline. The attacks emphasize what VoteVets has been saying for some time – as long as US Forces remain in Iraq, there will be no end to violent attacks against them. President Obama should honor the Status of Forces Agreement, and affirm to Prime Minister Maliki that all US troops will be returning home, as planned.”

    First of all, I’m pretty sure that the families of those five casualties don’t appreciate “the largest progressive group of veterans in America” standing on their sons’, husbands’ and fathers’ corpses to promote their MoveOn agenda. Secondly, cutting and running from Iraq will make their sacrifice null and void.

    The attacks on US troops are miniscule compared to the attacks on Iraqi citizens and the attacks are meant to scare Iraqis and Americans into doing what the terrorists want. So is VoteVets saying that they want to concede to the terrorists’ demands?