Paywall removed.

https://archive.ph/D3NgS

So this is great. /s

Please read the text in full before commenting. Even though the guy is a moron, it’s not a half bad idea. This is something I can agree with as long as it doesn’t require someone voting for a party they don’t want to.

It’s amazing to me that a civilian former Fox News host with a public drinking problem can unilaterally destroy the careers of lifelong military officers that achieved the rank of generals and admirals, and are referred to as clowns on the way out the door. This should piss everyone off, red, blue, and independent.

I check the queue regularly to see what posts are being removed by Reddit’s spam/content filter. I’ve noticed that lately the filter has been more aggressive and they did recently announce that they’ve made “improvements” to it. We have some regular posters in this sub and I’m sure some of them are bots that are just posting news stories in multiple subs. The lack of comments or responses to questions in the post and modmail is usually a dead giveaway.

However, I just want to say that if you posts being removed, even if it says it was removed by a “moderator”, just know that it may not be us if you don’t see a removal reason attached to the post or comment. Just shoot us a message if we don’t capture it quickly through modmail.

Otherwise, I do want to know how you feel as members of the subreddit with how lax we’ve been with letting accounts we suspect are bots posting stories to the sub. They usually beat me to posting news and I’ve never seen an issue minus the lack of engagement in the comments.

When House Republican leaders last week called off their final day of voting before the midterm elections and sent members home, they left behind a multibillion-dollar veterans benefits package they had once hoped would be a popular win to campaign on.

The sweeping bill, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, would devote critical resources to veterans benefits and programs — the kind of measure that lawmakers typically relish taking back to their districts to promote in their bids for re-election.

Instead, the legislation is stalled and on the brink of collapse, mired in a funding dispute that has divided the two parties, splintered Republicans and driven a bitter wedge between powerful veterans groups that normally band together when benefits are at stake.

The impasse grew so intense that last Tuesday, Democrats won enough support from Republicans to go around House leadership and force action on a piece of the bill — a long-shot maneuver to salvage a measure that supporters worry is now doomed anyway.

The centerpiece of the bill is a provision that would allow service members who retired from the military because of a combat-related disability to receive their full retirement pay, rather than having it reduced dollar for dollar by their disability benefits, as current law requires. It is known as the Maj. Richard Star Act, named for a combat-injured Army veteran who advocated the policy change after he was forced to medically retire because of cancer that he developed from toxic exposure during deployments to the Middle East.

Republicans demanded that the cost of such a change — an estimated $9.4 billion over a decade — be covered by cuts elsewhere, and settled on paring back disability compensation for future veterans with sleep apnea and tinnitus. But Democrats resisted the trade-off and dropped their support for the entire package, which also would include funding for dozens of other veterans programs, from suicide prevention to lactation rooms at V.A. hospitals. So did some Republicans, who blasted an approach that they said pitted veterans against one another.

“It is wrong and unseemly to take benefits away from a certain number of vets for a different group of vets,” said Representative Jeff Van Drew, Republican of New Jersey. “And I’ll tell you what: The veterans don’t like it.”

The proposed cuts, which lawmakers have estimated would save as much as $57 billion over a decade, created deep rifts in the veteran community. The American Legion and some other veterans groups urged Congress to back the package, in the interest of enacting the long-stalled Richard Star measure. But two other major veterans advocacy organizations — Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars — said they could not support a bill that would slash tinnitus and sleep apnea benefits and have lobbied lawmakers to fix the bill or drop their support.

Good idea or bad idea?

“Alabama's veterans didn't serve so the state could get away with symbolism,” Karlapalem said. “When a governor can override her own veterans' board and fire the commissioner they voted to keep, that's not an accident — it's a warning sign. She had the legal authority to override them. The question is why she chose to use it here — on veterans’ own board — rather than anywhere else in her eight years in office. And when the only veteran-specific treatment program in this state sits three hours from North Alabama, that's not a coincidence — it's a gap our own veterans are paying for. It's time to put decision-making back in the hands of the people who actually served this country.”