Take some Welsh shepherds, Samsung and LEDs, put them all together and what do you get?  It’s … well, watch.

On March 10, 2009, Adam Levine from CNN posted the following (my excerpts) that has fed a great many bloggers and media with ammunition against President Obama’s administration:

WASHINGTON(CNN) — Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under “consideration.” A final decision hasn’t been made yet,” he said.

According to the Washington Post today, this was confirmed yesterday:

Nevertheless, the White House confirmed yesterday that the idea remains under consideration, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and leaders of veterans groups are scheduled to meet tomorrow (March 18, 2009) to discuss it further.

“A small company is not going to want to take on the burden of increased premiums” by hiring a wounded veteran, said Craig Roberts, media relations manager for the American Legion. He added that the proposal could make buying private health insurance prohibitively expensive for these veterans.

From what I have been able to research from the sketchy details, it is estimated that if this billing process actually went into effect, there would be about a $500 million savings for the VA, and everyone knows they really need the money. (It should be noted that not ALL veterans would be affected by this, only those with private insurance). There also has been a mention of an increase in their budget of about 11%, which is a good thing.

However………

As most of my acquaintances know, I “retired” from military service with the U. S. Army after 20 years of duty. While I served my country for all of those years, others were out there creating their “corporate” image, building up working backgrounds as well as their wallets, something I was unable to do. Most ex-military know you can not convince employers that your military skills equate to skills corporations want, regardless of all the hype.

I know it takes some mental and physical fortitude to be able to adapt and live with military service for that long a time. It is well known that simply not everyone can do it, and that is okay too. It is a hard life to live and has been hard in various degrees on those veterans who made it through to retirement or to their discharge, if they were able to make it that far.

One of the main things that kept me going was knowing that I would get some kind of retirement benefits from the 20 years of my life spent in the military. It wasn’t the reasons I stayed in, but it was a good motivator to keep going when it got really tough.

Now, some of those corporate people are now higher up in the corporate ladder, like the ones in AIG, GM, Chrysler, etc. Now they are getting billions of dollars for outright mismanagement conducted in their positions. You can never convince me that as a high-level manager, (CEO, CFO, etc), they did not KNOW what was happening within the company, because if they really did not know, then they were either not doing their jobs or what I suspect simply were not capable of doing their jobs.

If I had operated that way as a manager within the military, I would never have been promoted if I was lucky enough to even get to stay in the service. And try that as a manager in a McDonalds, or Safeway store, or wherever.

Note that I am not picking on them specifically, but keep in mind, you get promoted or bonuses based upon your performance. If you perform well, you get promoted, or a small bonus, or some types of one-time benefit like a paid day off.

So why is this administration, the one who has said repeatedly that they support the military, even going to the actual step of even considering this action? Because this administration is a political rookie and the Congress has let this get to this point by not working together to get the economy back to where it could be.

Politics are still politics and nether have changed whatsoever. Give away billions of dollars without any controls whatsoever, continue bickering among yourselves, making deals to get stuff passed by giving up controls, and add all of the most ill-logical and expensive projects you can to make yourself look good, (instead of the Congress which you are a member of), and call it change.

And then, to add insult to further injury, you point fingers at everyone else and blame everyone else for the rush job you did giving my tax money away!

Don’t ask me what change I want because you won’t be in office the next time around when I vote. You won’t have time to make the changes – you take too long and are doing with blinders.