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Thank you to all of you for your service to our
country, for signing that check that devoted life, limb, well being....
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Disabled Military Members & Veterans can now move through airport security checkpoints without having to remove shoes, light jackets or hats, according to a new policy announced March 27, 2013, by the Transportation Security Administration. The new policy is part of TSA's Wounded Warrior Screening program, which was established in 2005 in an effort to ease the screening process for wounded service members. These individuals will be escorted through the security checkpoint and will be eligible for expedited screening through TSA Pre-Check. They also will not be required to remove their shoes, light outwear jackets or hats when passing through security checkpoints.
Severely Injured Military Personnel
Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center (MSIJSOC) Program
TSA wants to facilitate the screening of injured and wounded service members. To address these specific situations, TSA has established the Wounded Warrior/Military Severely Injured Joint Support Operations Center Program to support and facilitate the movement of severely injured service members and veterans through the security screening process at our nation’s airports. This service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Here is how the process works:
· ; Once flight arrangements are made with the airline, the severely injured service member, or family member, or other representative can contact the Operations Centers (24/7) with details of the itinerary. Contact points:<![if !suppo rtLists]>· <![endif]>Toll-free telephone number (888) 262-2396· The Operations Center will acknowledge the request by reply e-mail, or over the telephone· &nb sp; The Operations Center will then notify the Federal Security Directors or their designated representatives at the involved airports. Federal Security Directors are responsible for ensuring that necessary security screening is conducted with empathy and respect, in order to make the overall experience for the Wounded Warrior as simple and trouble-free as possible.http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/military-personnel More info at web sitePlease click on the links below for specific information about what to expect for passengers who:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/blum.asp
Subject: No Shame
MORE and DEEPER CORRUPTION in CONGRESS ...
All In The Family
The US government has entered into a contract with a real estate firm to sell 56 buildings that currently house U.S. Post Offices. The government has decided it no longer needs these buildings, many of which are located on prime land in towns and cities across the country.
The sale of these properties will fetch billions of dollars to the company handling the sales. That company belongs to a man named Richard Blum. Who is Richard Blum? He's the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein. What's wrong with this picture?
Senator Feinstein and her husband stand to make a fortune. His firm, CRI is the sole real estate company offering these properties for sale. CRI will be making a 6% commission on the sale of each and every one of these postal properties.
All of these properties being sold are all paid for. They were purchased with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, and they are allowed free and clear by the U.S.P.S. The only cost to keep them is the cost to actually keep the doors open and the heat and lights on.
The United States Postal Service doesn’t even have to pay property taxes on these properties. Would you sell your house just because you couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill?
Well, the Post Office is.
How does a U.S. Senator from San Francisco manage to get away with such a sweet deal? A United States Senator’s husband is standing by ready to make millions from a U.S. taxpayer funded enterprise.
No one in the mainstream media is even raising an eyebrow over his 6% commission on the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of quasi-public assets.
Pass this info on before it’s pulled from the Internet. Check it out at
Subject: No Shame
MORE and DEEPER CORRUPTION in CONGRESS ...
All In The Family
The US government has entered into a contract with a real estate firm to sell 56 buildings that currently house U.S. Post Offices. The government has decided it no longer needs these buildings, many of which are located on prime land in towns and cities across the country.
The sale of these properties will fetch billions of dollars to the company handling the sales. That company belongs to a man named Richard Blum. Who is Richard Blum? He's the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein. What's wrong with this picture?
Senator Feinstein and her husband stand to make a fortune. His firm, CRI is the sole real estate company offering these properties for sale. CRI will be making a 6% commission on the sale of each and every one of these postal properties.
All of these properties being sold are all paid for. They were purchased with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars, and they are allowed free and clear by the U.S.P.S. The only cost to keep them is the cost to actually keep the doors open and the heat and lights on.
The United States Postal Service doesn’t even have to pay property taxes on these properties. Would you sell your house just because you couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill?
Well, the Post Office is.
How does a U.S. Senator from San Francisco manage to get away with such a sweet deal? A United States Senator’s husband is standing by ready to make millions from a U.S. taxpayer funded enterprise.
No one in the mainstream media is even raising an eyebrow over his 6% commission on the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of quasi-public assets.
Pass this info on before it’s pulled from the Internet. Check it out at
U.S. Reportedly Ignoring Veterans' Graves in Philippines Published July 03, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_VGxfmDmEo
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/07/03/us-reportedly-ignoring-veterans-graves-in-philippines/ [Where's the money for it now. Money is impacted by the sequesteration]
U.S. Reportedly Ignoring Veterans' Graves in Philippines Published July 03, 2011
Associated Press
CLARK, Philippines – Walking along the rows of tombstones here offers a glimpse of the wars America has fought and the men and women who waged them. But most of the grave markers have been half-buried for 20 years, and there is little hope that the volcanic ash obscuring names, dates and epitaphs will be cleared any time soon.
Clark Veterans Cemetery was consigned to oblivion in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo's gigantic eruption forced the U.S. to abandon the sprawling air base surrounding it. Retired U.S. soldiers, Marines and sailors volunteer to keep watch, relying on donations to try to maintain the grounds, but they lament that they're helplessly short on funds to fix things, and that Washington is unwilling to help.
"It's the veterans' cemetery that America forgot," Vietnam War veteran and ex-Navy officer Robert Chesko said.
As America marks Independence Day, the U.S. veterans who collect funds to care for the cemetery renewed their calls for Washington to fund and take charge of the work.
Workers at the cemetery north of Manila recently dug to fully expose a gravestone for an Army sergeant who died in World War II in the Philippines. They discovered his wife's name engraved under his and a long-hidden tribute: "Daughter, sister, wife and mother of veterans."
It's impossible to say what else remains hidden at the 17-acre (seven-hectare) cemetery. It holds the remains of 8,600 people, including 2,200 American veterans and nearly 700 allied Philippine Scouts who saw battle in conflicts from the early 1900s to the resistance against brutal Japanese occupation troops in WWII.
Clark's dead also include military dependents, civilians who worked for the U.S. wartime government and at least 2,139 mostly unidentified soldiers whose marble tombstones are labeled "Unknown."
"People celebrate on the Fourth of July but they forgot the 8,600 who helped make that freedom happen," said former Navy Capt. Dennis Wright, who saw action in Vietnam and is now a business executive.
"We're trying to get the U.S. government to assume responsibility for maintaining the cemetery so we can get it up to standards ... not on nickels and dimes and donations and gifts," said retired Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Larry Heilhecker, who served as cemetery caretaker for five years until last month.
Clark was a U.S. base for nearly a century and was once the largest American Air Force installation off the U.S. mainland. It served as a key staging area for U.S. forces during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The Clark cemetery, which can accommodate at least 12,000 remains, was developed between 1947 and 1950, when it was used to collect the remains and tombstones from four U.S. military cemeteries as American officials sorted out their dead from WWII and previous wars.
An American cemetery at the then-Fort McKinley in Manila became the exclusive burial ground for all Americans and allied Philippine Scouts who were killed in WWII combat. The 152-acre (61-hectare) Manila cemetery collected 17,202 dead, the largest number of American casualties interred in one place from the last world war.
Now closed to burials, the stunningly landscaped Manila cemetery became one of 24 American burial grounds outside the U.S. mainland. Nearly 125,000 Americans who perished in WWI and WWII and the Mexican War are interred in those U.S.-funded overseas cemeteries, regarded as among the most beautiful war memorials in the world. The overseas burial sites are administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission, or ABMC.
The dead at Clark are not limited to World War II casualties -- they date as far back as 1900. Also unlike the Manila cemetery, it continues to accept burials. One U.S. veteran who lives in the area had his son buried here after he was killed in Iraq in 2004. But Clark is not administered by the ABMC.
The Air Force managed Clark cemetery from 1947 to 1991, when it abruptly left after nearby Pinatubo roared back to life from a 500-year slumber. Even before the eruption, negotiations with the Philippine government for a new U.S. military lease on Clark had bogged down after nearly a century of presence in the Philippines, according to the veterans.
Philippine authorities failed to look after the cemetery. In 1994, American veterans were shocked to find it had become an ash-covered jungle of weeds, overgrown grass and debris. Half of its old steel fence had been looted.
Today, a pair of U.S. and Philippine flags flutter in the wind over the graves. A recently restored marble obelisk, pockmarked by World War II gun and artillery fire, venerates the unknown dead. A small sign at a new steel gate ushers in visitors with a tribute to the war dead: "Served with honor."
All the improvements came from donations. Wright's company spent $90,000 to construct a new concrete and steel fence and a parking lot and make other improvements. An old veteran, confined to a nursing home in Florida, sent one dollar in a touching act, Heilhecker said.
Ret. U.S. Air Force Technical Sgt. Littleton John Fortune has been giving small amounts from his pension for the upkeep of the cemetery, where many of his friends lay. He said the worst day in his life came in 2004 when his son, a young Army sergeant, was killed by a bomb in Iraq. He buried his son at Clark and continues to help the cemetery.
Still, the Clark gravesites look forlorn compared to the American cemetery in Manila. A U.S. government decision to take control of the Clark cemetery could shed light on the fate of still-missing Americans, Wright said, citing the case of a U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Hershel Lee Covey, whose name is on a Clark cemetery tombstone that declared him as having died on July 17, 1942 in the Philippines.
A check by The Associated Press showed ABMC lists Covey as "missing in action or buried at sea."
Dashing the hopes of the American veterans, the ABMC and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which manages 131 U.S. mainland cemeteries through an agency, both said Clark was outside their mandate.
"Whether the U.S. government should take on responsibility for maintaining such a foreign, private cemetery is a veterans' benefits issue outside the scope of our authority," ABMC public affairs director Michael Conley told the AP in an e-mailed reply to questions.
U.S. Ambassador to Manila Harry Thomas, who has visited the Clark cemetery twice, praised the American veterans for looking after the burial grounds, which he said volunteer embassy staff and visiting U.S. sailors have helped clean up. But he said the U.S. Congress only appropriates funds for official cemeteries overseas through the ABMC, Thomas said.
Philippine officials have authorized an American veterans' group led by Chesko to manage the Clark cemetery up to 2030, and have said they are open to allowing any U.S. agency to manage it.
"Without them, we wouldn't have this freedom now," said Felipe Antonio Remollo, president of the state-run Clark Development Corp., which oversees the former base, now an industrial and commercial hub.
Once developed and possibly turned into a war memorial, the cemetery could draw in tourists, Remollo said.
Clark's elderly veterans, some of whom become teary-eyed when reminiscing days with fallen comrades, worry about who will look after the cemetery as their ranks dwindle. Two passed away and were buried last week.
"We're getting old. We can feel it in our bones, you know, in mind and everything," said 65-year-old Chesko. He has wondered whether fallen soldiers' sacrifices still matter to young Americans. "What bothers me sometimes is, will they still remember?" Chesko said.
The new cemetery caretaker, John Gilbert, said the veterans were not trying to pass the responsibility.
"We're proud to do it, don't get me wrong, but we do not have the resources to do it," said Gilbert. They would have no choice if Washington ignores their pleas, he said.
"We are not ready to let this cemetery be taken back by the jungle," he said. "If we have to do it ourselves, we will do it."
"We don't leave our brothers behind."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/07/03/us-reportedly-ignoring-veterans-graves-in-philippines/#ixzz2UKibWnyL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003176.html
Veterans group seeks federal upkeep of forgotten U.S. cemetery in Philippines
