In the interests of saving money

If you plan on being an Obama critic, take ideas under consideration out of context and proceed to foam at the mouth over them.  Take for example J.R. Labbe’s rants about President Obama wanting to put on the private insurer’s tab the cost of a military service member’s treatment for war related injuries.  No news report chose to address it at length but did a cut and paste job.  Only saying as much as need be to “do damage.”  As a military veteran, as one who had been in active service, there was an insurance policy that you signed onto provided by the military itself.  But, it was not necessarily an insurance that continued to be available to reservists and National Guardsmen.  If you did get it, you had to begin to pay for it, if I am not mistaken.  Having been out of the military myself since 1991, I wouldn’t know what might have been changed about the policy; but I do recall that when GW got in to office, he wanted faith based institutions not V.A. hospitals to take care of any wounded vets.  When that policy decision came out, did Ms. Labbe wax hot and wounded over the matter?  Did members of Congress declare that such a policy change was “dead on arrival?”  Apparently not.  As military veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan complained mightily about such a policy change coming from the then Bush administration in such pages as Time magazine.  Which is probably why the Washington Post could finally report about the deplorable conditions of Walter Reed Medical Hospital that confronted military veterans arriving there for secondary medical care.  GW wasn’t interested in maintaining the facilities that was slated for closure as it was.  And why should he have been if “faith based institutions” could do the job instead?  You didn’t hear a whole lot about it.  But I can see where we are going to hear all about Obama wanting to save millions of dollars by encouraging veterans to rely on private insurance.  And presumably, if they have private insurance they are already reservists and guardsmen.  They got that insurance through other sources, at their regular jobs for example.  I can understand Obama wanting to save money.  Why should the military pay an insurance premium if the reservist already has insurance?  But, the news report Labbe cites apparently made no distinction between a reservist and an active member of the U.S. Military.  And therefore, neither shall Labbe.  Yes, it can stick in the craw, but no more so than GW wanting to farm out to “faith based institutions” any final care of war injured veterans.  It would help if the news media would provide more in depth reporting and not simply fulminate over a bare minimum of coverage.

But, Labbe goes on to discuss why the U.S. Military forces “not trusting” their new Commander in Chief based on what, the resale of fired brass?  Labbe discusses certain types of rounds that are more effective against feral hogs but are hard to find and outrageous in price.  Now, the policy being that military fired brass being sold to private companies for recycling purposes, why is it that the round sizes Labbe mentions in her editorial (republished 2 April 2009, Spokesman-Review) aren’t readily available and at a reasonable price?  Would that be because the manufaturers don’t only sell the recycled brass in the open American gun market?  But that such repackaged brass can be and is sold world-wide?  And because such repackaged brass is sold world-wide, such rounds might just get locked and loaded into the weapons carried by terrorists themselves.  While Labbe is screaming her fool head off about this, I can see why we don’t want to arm the enemy, given the fact that we have already armed very well narco traffickers/terrorists with black market gun sales.  No brass recycling company is “going to promise” to sell such products solely to Americans wanting to chase feral hogs off their farms and property.  Nor solely to Montanans who like their elk hunting.  And get this, from whom does the Pentagon get the rounds in the first place?  Well, I believe it is from private manufacturers?  Not only can manufacturers create specific sized rounds for the types of weapons used by the Military, but they could also manufacture the same size rounds for private use.  Labbe so busy foaming, that she doesn’t bother considering the implications.  Just because military used brass doesn’t get recycled back into private usage doesn’t mean that world-wide ammo sales would get much of a dent and the crushed metals might just get re-used anyway for the manufacture of new bullets.  When self-interest becomes more dominant over the issue being reported on, or screamed about.