military retirements and health care

I do appreciate that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is considering grandfathering in soldiers when they decide to butcher the retirement plan for the military. They want to "protect the current soldiers and keep the faith of the military families". He was quoted as saying that as long as they took into consideration the soldiers that were in, there was no reason not to go ahead and consider future changes. What I do not appreciate is that they are talking about doing away with retirement benefits after 20 years and making the payout kick in only after the legal retirement age. They are talking about decreasing the amount you get for retirement and they are talking about having it be just be a contribution only retirement plan. This all said, then, also adding that most soldiers do not even stay in for 20 years and so do not get retirement anyway.

They are also talking about significantly increasing the premiums for Tricare(military) healthcare because of the rising costs attributed to taking care of the soldiers and their familes. Not taking into consideration that we are at one of our highest numbers in a ong time and are downsizing our forces as we speak due to the withdrawl from Iraq. Also not taking into consideration that instead of increasing premiums for soldiers & their families, they should just making smarter decisions. If you only allow same day "sick" appointments and everyone else has to go to the emergency room, you are flushing thousands of dollars away. If the on base clinic is only open 4 1/2 days a week & the doctors still take extended lunches & vacations, so we have to go to a minor emergency or emergency room, you are throwing money away. I recently have had to make 4 appts with my doctor because I was told they can only talk about 1 issue at a time. They are too busy to take any longer with a patient. Direct quote from the nurse. 4 appts take a LOT longer than just hearing me out the 1st time. I believe all issues are tied together & should be addressed as 1 issue. It is not the families fault that these military health care professionals are paid salary so they don't feel they have to work. Or that we have to often times go a more complicated or expensive route to get the care we need.

Why are we singling out military families? Education of our children? Foriegn aide to ravaged countries? Why are the biggest budget hits to the very places we need to be protecting? Hilary Clinton says that her husband made the hard choices and gave us a balanced budget and that sometimes you have to make unpopular decisions. I say that women and children first wasnt meant to be the quoted for the line to slaughter. Last I checked, and yes I checked, the Clintons made $20,400,000 in 2007. Their salary had increased every year from 2000 to that year also, so I can only imagine what it was in 2010. I know that they have big important jobs and I don't take away from that. What I do take issue with is the fact that to keep her in office and to keep these and all other government head's salary we are doing tax increases and premium increases and taking away from the retirement of people who I feel do a VERY important job as well.

I do not care if you consider yourself Republican or Democrat, military families and soldiers should not have to pay the deficit our politicians have gotten us into. Children should not have programs cut from their schools because the powers that be decided that as part of their retirement package, they should get the use of a private jet. We should not have to pull our relief workers from Africa because the President decided that the government paid vacation should be at a 9 million dollar ocean front estate in Hawaii for 9 days. If I don't have money to pay the bills, I don't go on lavish vacations. If I can't balance my budget I don't go buy a new car or hire a housekeeper. Why? Because these are "extras" They are fluff things that I don't need. I don't tell my kids that they can't eat lunch anymore because I can't pay for groceries (got to afford the new Benz), I don't tell the water company to suck it because momma needs a tummy tuck. If our country is broke, then it is broke. I think that there are better areas to make cuts and redistribution of funds. What do you think?


I do appreciate that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is considering grandfathering in soldiers when they decide to butcher the retirement plan for the military. They want to "protect the current soldiers and keep the faith of the military families". He was quoted as saying that as long as they took into consideration the soldiers that were in, there was no reason not to go ahead and consider future changes. What I do not appreciate is that they are talking about doing away with retirement benefits after 20 years and making the payout kick in only after the legal retirement age. They are talking about decreasing the amount you get for retirement and they are talking about having it be just be a contribution only retirement plan. This all said, then, also adding that most soldiers do not even stay in for 20 years and so do not get retirement anyway.

They are also talking about significantly increasing the premiums for Tricare(military) healthcare because of the rising costs attributed to taking care of the soldiers and their familes. Not taking into consideration that we are at one of our highest numbers in a ong time and are downsizing our forces as we speak due to the withdrawl from Iraq. Also not taking into consideration that instead of increasing premiums for soldiers & their families, they should just making smarter decisions. If you only allow same day "sick" appointments and everyone else has to go to the emergency room, you are flushing thousands of dollars away. If the on base clinic is only open 4 1/2 days a week & the doctors still take extended lunches & vacations, so we have to go to a minor emergency or emergency room, you are throwing money away. I recently have had to make 4 appts with my doctor because I was told they can only talk about 1 issue at a time. They are too busy to take any longer with a patient. Direct quote from the nurse. 4 appts take a LOT longer than just hearing me out the 1st time. I believe all issues are tied together & should be addressed as 1 issue. It is not the families fault that these military health care professionals are paid salary so they don't feel they have to work. Or that we have to often times go a more complicated or expensive route to get the care we need.

Why are we singling out military families? Education of our children? Foriegn aide to ravaged countries? Why are the biggest budget hits to the very places we need to be protecting? Hilary Clinton says that her husband made the hard choices and gave us a balanced budget and that sometimes you have to make unpopular decisions. I say that women and children first wasnt meant to be the quoted for the line to slaughter. Last I checked, and yes I checked, the Clintons made $20,400,000 in 2007. Their salary had increased every year from 2000 to that year also, so I can only imagine what it was in 2010. I know that they have big important jobs and I don't take away from that. What I do take issue with is the fact that to keep her in office and to keep these and all other government head's salary we are doing tax increases and premium increases and taking away from the retirement of people who I feel do a VERY important job as well.

I do not care if you consider yourself Republican or Democrat, military families and soldiers should not have to pay the deficit our politicians have gotten us into. Children should not have programs cut from their schools because the powers that be decided that as part of their retirement package, they should get the use of a private jet. We should not have to pull our relief workers from Africa because the President decided that the government paid vacation should be at a 9 million dollar ocean front estate in Hawaii for 9 days. If I don't have money to pay the bills, I don't go on lavish vacations. If I can't balance my budget I don't go buy a new car or hire a housekeeper. Why? Because these are "extras" They are fluff things that I don't need. I don't tell my kids that they can't eat lunch anymore because I can't pay for groceries (got to afford the new Benz), I don't tell the water company to suck it because momma needs a tummy tuck. If our country is broke, then it is broke. I think that there are better areas to make cuts and redistribution of funds. What do you think?

Sometimes it is the little things

Doing a 30 day photo challenge on Facebook. It got me thinking. Thinking about my favorite memories, my favorite people, my favorite moments. This video is of my oldest daughter a few years ago. Sometimes it is the little everyday moments that stick with you. The funny quirky most amazing things that happen on a tuesday night....

Scout suspended for pocket knife in car

6-Year-Old Scout Suspended for Bringing Knife-Fork-Spoon Utensil to School - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News - FOXNews.com

6-Year-Old Scout Suspended for Bringing Knife-Fork-Spoon Utensil to School - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News - FOXNews.com

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World won't end in 2012 Mayans insist

MEXICO CITY (Oct. 11) — Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.
Or is it?
Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."
It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.
At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.
"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."
Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.
A significant time period for the Mayas does end on the date, and enthusiasts have found a series of astronomical alignments they say coincide in 2012, including one that happens roughly only once every 25,800 years.
But most archaeologists, astronomers and Maya say the only thing likely to hit Earth is a meteor shower of New Age philosophy, pop astronomy, Internet doomsday rumors and TV specials such as one on the History Channel which mixes "predictions" from Nostradamus and the Mayas and asks: "Is 2012 the year the cosmic clock finally winds down to zero days, zero hope?"
It may sound all too much like other doomsday scenarios of recent decades — the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the Jupiter Effect or "Planet X." But this one has some grains of archaeological basis.
One of them is Monument Six.
Found at an obscure ruin in southern Mexico during highway construction in the 1960s, the stone tablet almost didn't survive; the site was largely paved over and parts of the tablet were looted.
It's unique in that the remaining parts contain the equivalent of the date 2012. The inscription describes something that is supposed to occur in 2012 involving Bolon Yokte, a mysterious Mayan god associated with both war and creation.
However — shades of Indiana Jones — erosion and a crack in the stone make the end of the passage almost illegible.
Archaeologist Guillermo Bernal of Mexico's National Autonomous University interprets the last eroded glyphs as maybe saying, "He will descend from the sky."
Spooky, perhaps, but Bernal notes there are other inscriptions at Mayan sites for dates far beyond 2012 — including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.
And anyway, Mayas in the drought-stricken Yucatan peninsula have bigger worries than 2012.
"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."
The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy
Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and the 13th Baktun ends around Dec. 21, 2012.
"It's a special anniversary of creation," said David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin. "The Maya never said the world is going to end, they never said anything bad would happen necessarily, they're just recording this future anniversary on Monument Six."
Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."
If it were all mythology, perhaps it could be written off.
But some say the Maya knew another secret: the Earth's axis wobbles, slightly changing the alignment of the stars every year. Once every 25,800 years, the sun lines up with the center of our Milky Way galaxy on a winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon.
That will happen on Dec. 21, 2012, when the sun appears to rise in the same spot where the bright center of galaxy sets.
Another spooky coincidence?
"The question I would ask these guys is, so what?" says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog. He says the alignment doesn't fall precisely in 2012, and distant stars exert no force that could harm Earth.
"They're really super-duper trying to find anything astronomical they can to fit that date of 2012," Plait said.
But author John Major Jenkins says his two-decade study of Mayan ruins indicate the Maya were aware of the alignment and attached great importance to it.
"If we want to honor and respect how the Maya think about this, then we would say that the Maya viewed 2012, as all cycle endings, as a time of transformation and renewal," said Jenkins.
As the Internet gained popularity in the 1990s, so did word of the "fateful" date, and some began worrying about 2012 disasters the Mayas never dreamed of.
Author Lawrence Joseph says a peak in explosive storms on the surface of the sun could knock out North America's power grid for years, triggering food shortages, water scarcity — a collapse of civilization. Solar peaks occur about every 11 years, but Joseph says there's evidence the 2012 peak could be "a lulu."
While pressing governments to install protection for power grids, Joseph counsels readers not to "use 2012 as an excuse to not live in a healthy, responsible fashion. I mean, don't let the credit cards go up."
Another History Channel program titled "Decoding the Past: Doomsday 2012: End of Days" says a galactic alignment or magnetic disturbances could somehow trigger a "pole shift."
"The entire mantle of the earth would shift in a matter of days, perhaps hours, changing the position of the north and south poles, causing worldwide disaster," a narrator proclaims. "Earthquakes would rock every continent, massive tsunamis would inundate coastal cities. It would be the ultimate planetary catastrophe."
The idea apparently originates with a 19th century Frenchman, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a priest-turned-archaeologist who got it from his study of ancient Mayan and Aztec texts.
Scientists say that, at best, the poles might change location by one degree over a million years, with no sign that it would start in 2012.
While long discredited, Brasseur de Bourbourg proves one thing: Westerners have been trying for more than a century to pin doomsday scenarios on the Maya. And while fascinated by ancient lore, advocates seldom examine more recent experiences with apocalypse predictions.
"No one who's writing in now seems to remember that the last time we thought the world was going to end, it didn't," says Martin, the astronomy webmaster. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of memory that things were fine the last time around."
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