Obama: Here’s a Tenth of a Promise – Deal?

Guess the ole’ Vulcan calculator brain wasn’t working the day he made this promise: Military.com’s  Obama: Hike Pay For 100k Disabled Retirees.

Why has Obama targeted Chapter 61 retirees for concurrent receipt? Sources on Capitol Hill said the White House’s Office of Management and Budget developed the idea as an affordable compromise. It would cost $5.4 billion over 10 years versus $45 billion if Obama fulfilled a campaign pledge to extend concurrent receipt to all disabled military retirees.

“Since not everybody could be included at this time, because of cost, the idea was to look at those who might be the most deserving,” said a pay official.  Retirees “put out…because of disabilities, whether in combat or just job-related — that was the group we wanted to make sure we got in.”

Didn’t seem too hard to find 300 Billion + for the banks this year, but still too much to honor campaign promises to Vets. And yet we can find it to pay the federal workers’ full retirement and disability without similar offsets.

Homophobic Priest Rips Off Homophobic Congregation

Lovely man here:   Pastor charged in parish theft – The Denver Post.

Pastor charged in parish theft

A Springs minister who broke from the Episcopal diocese is accused of taking $291,000 from the church and a trust.

The Rev. Don Armstrong is facing 20 counts of felony theft.

What Makes Us Happy or Gives Us a Mental Injury?

month’s The Atlantic  Magazine has an interesting article about a generation-spanning study of a group of people.  It’s a long read but interesting, found at What Makes Us Happy? – The Atlantic (June 2009).

What caught my eye was this passage:

More than 80 percent of the Grant Study men served in World War II, a fact that allowed Vaillant to study the effect of combat. The men who survived heavy fighting developed more chronic physical illnesses and died sooner than those who saw little or no combat, he found. And “severity of trauma is the best predictor of who is likely to develop PTSD.” (This may sound obvious, but it countered the claim that post-traumatic stress disorder was just the manifestation of preexisting troubles.) He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

Which didn’t contain any followup but adds a dimension of time to the more recent studies that are specifically looking at PTSD.  I hope that other researchers will take note and that the information here is given at least as much credence as the pre-battle conditioning that the Army and some others are touting. I am not discounting those things but merely pointing out that there is good objective data that would suggest you can’t really prevent mental injuries despite the conditioning.  Much as you can’t train to resist a cold injury, one can only go so far in preparing for a traumatic experience.

Economist: Palaeolithic Porno

Here’s the funniest thing I read in the Economist in a long time:

From photography to the internet, a characteristic sign that a new medium is going to succeed is that it is exploited by pornographers.

via Palaeolithic pornography: Unveiled | The Economist.

Witness Testimony – Reynaldo Leal, Jr. – House Committee on Veterans Affairs

From Rey last week

via Witness Testimony – Reynaldo Leal, Jr. – House Committee on Veterans Affairs.

We owe it to our veterans to provide the best mental health resources available, and currently we are falling far too short of that goal. At my VA hospital in San Antonio, the psychologist only works two days a week because that Texas clinic, like many VA clinics and hospitals throughout the country, has to stretch its funding to make sure the money lasts the whole year. They don’t know how much funding they’ll have next year because the VA budget is routinely passed late. In fact, in 19 of the past 22 years, the budget has not been passed on time.

So despite the fact that the VA’s mental health budget has doubled since 2001, thanks to the dedication of veterans’ supporters in Congress, the VA is still forced to ration care for the almost 6 million veterans that depend on its services.

President Obama Appoints Phillip Carter as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs

Phil’s got a helluva job ahead of him but should be up to the challenge.  

via President Obama Appoints Phillip Carter as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.

>President Obama appoints McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP (MLA) attorney Phillip Carter to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.