It's Veteran's Day Again

Ditto.

A Salute to Veterans

So it’s Armistice Day again.

Well that’s what they used to call November 11, anyway. But now we call it Veteran’s Day and that’s OK. November 11th was originally Armistice Day because that is the day that The Great War, as it was called then, came to a conclusion. November 11th 1918.

On the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour no less.

This is when hostilities ceased on the Western Front. In Europe. The Turks were a little behind on things so they fought for awhile longer before their country, the Ottoman Empire, was segmented into smaller countries, one of them being Iraq.

Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, is still celebrated as such in many countries of the world, in remembrance of the 20 million who died between the years 1914 and 1918.

But after fighting in a war that saw the deaths of double that number, some US veterans argued that Armistice Day was somewhat passé, since we had learned not to name our world-wide wars, but to number them instead. In 1953 it was proposed to honor all veterans on Armistice Day, and the bill to change the objective of the day was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on May 26th 1954. On November 8th of the same year Congress amended the law to change its official name.

So on Veteran’s Day, I wish to honor my forefathers who served their country during the World Wars.

The guy in this first photo is my grandfather. He was the son of a German immigrant (who left his country before they called it Germany) who enlisted in General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force.

There he is in France.

He’s standing there with a running board full of guns. The auto is the one that he was repairing at the time.
This guy is my father. My father was drafted in 1943. He tried to enlist but he was rejected because of his perforated eardrum. Imagine his surprise and glee when he was drafted into the USAAF so he could repair shot up B-24s in El Paso.
And this guy is my uncle. Sure he looks young. He was 15 when that photo was taken. Too young to fight in the war in the Pacific, he enlisted in the Merchant Marines and sailed from one end of the Pacific Ocean to the other under the gun sights of Japanese submarines, delivering war materiel to combat areas.

They served, but not one of them fired a shot in offense or defense.

But they served, nonetheless.

A South Texas VA Hospital? Cornyn Can’t Deliver the Goods.

Working fast and furious, our two Republican senators got some tax extensions included in a tax bill, and got some hurricane relief funds included in it as well. But when it came down to the wire, the much-promised funding for a VA hospital to serve the Rio Grande Valley somehow did not make the cut.

So South Texas veterans will have to continue to receive health care from VA hospitals that are up to a 6 hour drive away.

According to Cornyn, who is very quick to lay blame at others’ feet, the bill was not included as an amendment to a defense funding bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and bill manager Carl Levin refused to include it.

John Cornyn has only himself to blame for this one.

Cornyn’s problem?

John Cornyn.

As the second to lowest ranked senator in the US Senate in terms of effectiveness, Cornyn is a liability for his constituents and the Senate leadership knows it. John Cornyn is up for re-election this year against a formidable opponent, Lt Col Rick Noriega. Senate leadership sees an opportunity to exchange a lemon for a plum, and declined to give the junior senator a piece of pork to deliver to his state.

The message to Texans is clear. Clean up your act and send a Democrat to the US Senate. If Texans want to get these things funded, they need to rethink this whole “elect-a-Republican-at-any-price” thing.

So South Texas veterans who are being told by John Cornyn to “keep up the pressure on Congress by making phone calls, sending e-mail and letters, and holding meetings” maybe ought to reconsider working on this with Cornyn. As we all found out this week, Cornyn can’t deliver the goods because Cornyn is Cornyn.

Rather than gnash your teeth at Cronyn’s failure, better to send a Democrat to the US Senate. A Democrat will be able to get this done.

A Democrat like Rick Noriega.

Noriega to Cornyn: Support Our Troops

Now my guess is that this is all pretty much moot now, but here I am again practically expecting the worst to occur. Texas’ junior senator John Cornyn votes against our troops over and over again. But now the new GI Bill, section 3003 of HR 2642 has just passed the House with a final vote of 416 to 12, with my congressman, Nick Lampson, finally voting for it.

It goes to the senate now.

In a huge flip flop that signals the beginning of an increasingly irrelevant presidency, Bush has promised to sign the bill.

Now all we need to see is the Senate approve the bill and I think that’s a shoe-in. A lot of people took some heat for voting against this bill. But that hasn’t stopped Rick Noriega from keeping the burner turned on high under John Cornyn as he has organized yet another online petition for we voters to sign to urge Cornyn to vote for the bill.

Here is the You Tube video that the Noriega campaign has uploaded that includes veterans of Pearl Harbor up to the Gulf War exhorting John Cornyn to vote for the GI Bill when it comes to the Senate.



Now go and sign the petition. No, go now, I’ll wait here.

John Cornyn votes with his president except if it has to do with illegal immigrants, then he votes with all of those who endeavor to whip up a public anti-immigrant frenzy. So I imagine that the odds are that he will vote with his president on this one, even if he and a mere 24 others stood against the bill the last time it came around.

So do I think that “Big Bad John” will vote for this bill this time? Probably. But go and sign the petition anyway.

Veteran’s Day 2007

It’s Veteran’s Day again. I don’t know about you but in my neighborhood in southeast Texas you need about 4 full-sized American flags planted in the parkway in front of your house just so it doesn’t look like you support the terrorists.

Veteran’s Day has an interesting history. It was originally proclaimed by then-president Woodrow Wilson in the following statement:

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”

Yes, Veteran’s Day was originally called Armistice Day, a holiday to commemorate the end of The Great War (“great” as in big, not “great” as in really good). That is what they called World War I back then before we knew that we had to number them.

In the original observance, all commerce came to a stop for 2 minutes at 11 A.M. They also had parades where war veterans would parade in their uniforms.

In 1938, Armistice Day became a national holiday.

After the 2nd World War and the Korean War, President Eisenhower signed a bill officially changing the holiday’s name to Veteran’s Day. This made sense because we would otherwise have too many national holidays to celebrate the end of all of the wars. Every war was different, fought for different reasons, but the one thing that they had in common was that they all created veterans.

That’s one thing that this country, the United States of America, is very good at doing: creating veterans. Now don’t get me wrong, I admire and respect our war veterans as much as the next person, I just wish that there were fewer of them.

In the best of all possible worlds, then, best case scenario, we should have no veterans because we don’t fight wars any more.

And that would be good because then we could pass a law in which November 11th again commemorates the end of The Great War.

Something tells me that that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

What Do Alcoholic Beverages And Higher Education For Texas’ Veterans Have In Common?

No, I’m serious, there is a connection.

In a Chron article today, we learn that Gulf War veteran William Sanchez has been denied a waiver of college tuition and fees guaranteed to other Texas veterans by the
Hazlewood Act. So he has joined in a federal lawsuit that has been filed in San Antonio by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Apparently there is a hole in the Hazlewood Act that excludes people who are not citizens of the United States. This hole was to be repaired by legislation sponsored by Letitia van de Putte (D-San Antonio) and Rick Noriega (D-Houston). The bill failed in the last legislative session, leaving the hole unfilled.

Of this failure and the situation faced by thousands of Texas veterans, Rick Noriega said:

“Our government says that you're OK to join the military and fight overseas, and when you return you're afforded GI Bill benefits. But, the state of Texas says if you're a Texan and fight overseas, you're not afforded Texas benefits. It's a real hypocrisy.”

Where is this hole and how did it come to be?

First, you need to answer this question: What is the difference between a “resident” of Texas and a “citizen” of Texas? At first blush you will say, there IS no difference and you might be right. In actual fact, when you look at any given time requirement in the Texas Education Code, which the Hazlewood Act amends, you will find that there is a “residency requirement” of 12 months. Yes, you must be a resident of Texas for 12 months before you can attend a Texas public institution of higher education and not pay out-of-state fees.

And that’s a good law. Texas’ higher education institutions benefit from local taxes that Texas residents pay. Out-of-staters, aka “foreigners”, need to pay a surcharge since they have not paid into supporting the schools in other ways.

But if you look at the Hazlewood Act, you see two actual requirements. The benefit is available to all veterans who “were citizens of Texas at the time they entered the services indicated and have resided in Texas for at least the period of 12 months before the date of registration”.

Now I look at that and say well of course, they have to have come from Texas when they entered the service, and they had to have been paying into the various ways the state raises revenue. No problem.

Yes problem.

It caused Letitia van de Putte to send a letter to Attorney General Greg Abbott seeking clarification:

“It is significant that the act explicitly requires both Texas citizenship and residency which may indicate that lawmakers viewed citizenship and residency as distinct requirements. The two requirements may have been conflated because of the lack of an explicit definition of citizenship.”

All Abbott had to do was to view these two requirements as separate as I have done, and not fused as suggested by van de Putte.

Why?

“Texas citizen” is not statutorily defined, which, I think, is the point that van de Putte was making.

But give Greg Abbott enough rope and he’ll find a way to tie a noose. He (or most probably someone on his staff) found a definition of “Texas citizen” in the statutes. Once, but that was enough. It is found in the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code. In his opinion, Abbott writes:

“only the Alcoholic Beverage Code defines it: "In this code . . . '[c]itizen of Texas' and 'citizen of this state' mean a person who is a citizen of both the United States and Texas." Tex. Alco. Bev. Code Ann. § 1.04(20) (Vernon 1995).”

Oh boy, that one is a stretcher isn’t it? One has to have one long arm to reach for that one, but Greg Abbott is equal to the task. That discovery, and Abbott’s acceptance of it as a valid definition, dumped a load of cock-a-doodle on thousands of Texas veterans. Those who served their country, some who went to war, and some who faced bullets and IEDs.

When Rick Noriega called this a “real hypocrisy” I think he was being polite.