Central Alabama VA freezes hiring due to national $2.6 billion shortfall
The Central Alabama Veterans Affairs hospital system has stopped hiring medical support staff to cope with a $2.6 billion budget shortfall nationally. The Montgomery Advertiser reports the hiring freeze in the Central Alabama system affects human resources personnel and customer service workers. It does not affect doctors, nurses or other health care service providers. The medical support and compliance portion of the system’s budget will be $5 million short for the remaining three-and-a-half months of the fiscal year, according to a bulletin to CAVHCS employees from interim director Robin Jackson. However, the hiring freeze will not affect staffers tasked with helping veterans schedule their medical appointments, VA spokesman Amir Farooqi said. The budget shortfall and hiring freeze caught the attention of Congressional leaders who have pressed the VA to reduce waiting times for veterans seeking treatment. “There’s not a funding problem, there’s a gross mismanagement problem,” said Rep. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery. Sloan Gibson, the deputy secretary of the VA, said the $2.6 billion shortfall is due in part to increased demand from veterans seeking care. “As we are improving veterans’ access to care across VA, veterans are responding and seeking VA care at higher rates,” Gibson told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee this week. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Jeb Bush: New gun control limits not way to prevent shooting tragedies
New gun control measures are not the way to prevent mass killings such as the shooting deaths of nine people in a South Carolina church, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Saturday. Bush, who plans to meet with black ministers in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday, said identifying potentially violent people before they commit such crimes is a better approach than further restrictions on gun ownership. “We as a society better figure out how we identify these folks long before they feel compelled to take up a gun and kill innocent people,” the former Florida governor said at a town hall meeting. Afterward, he told reporters gun control was an issue that should be sorted out at the state level. “Rural areas are very different from teeming urban areas,” he said. The comments came less than a day after President Barack Obama eulogized one of the nine people shot to death June 17 at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston. During his remarks, Obama recalled episodes in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown Connecticut, to again, suggest Americans seek tighter restrictions. “For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation. Sporadically, our eyes are open,” Obama said. “But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day.” Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Ted Cruz book says his dad asked to fight alongside Fidel Castro
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz‘s father was a 1950s Cuban revolutionary who longed to slip into the island’s eastern mountains and join Fidel Castro‘s guerrilla army. At 17, Rafael Cruz led a group of insurgents staging urban sabotage against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Cruz was eventually jailed and tortured, and upon his release wanted the underground to help him personally reach Castro’s camp in the Sierra Maestra highlands. “My dad asked if he could join Castro in the mountains and keep fighting,” the firebrand Republican presidential candidate writes in his book, “A Time For Truth,” which is being released Tuesday. “But he was told there was no way to get to the rebels.” Instead, the elder Cruz bribed his way to a Cuban exit visa and headed to the University of Texas. He returned home shortly after Castro seized power in 1959 but, Ted Cruz writes, was appalled to see Castro had “declared to the world that he was a communist.” Castro didn’t formally call his revolution socialist until the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The Cruzes have long admitted that Rafael was an early Castro sympathizer. But Ted Cruz’s memoir — a copy of which The Associated Press purchased — provides new details about his desire personally fight alongside the guerrilla leader. The Cuban government hasn’t commented about Rafael Cruz, making the anecdotes difficult to confirm. But Ted Cruz also writes that his father had planned to join Castro and help attack an army barracks in the city of Santiago in 1956, but didn’t because Castro was delayed in returning to Cuba from Mexico. Today, the 76-year-old Rafael Cruz is a pastor who frequently quotes scripture in anti-government speeches to grassroots groups. He’s compared Barack Obama to a young Castro. Ted Cruz writes that his father didn’t open up about being tortured in Cuban jails until the future senator was a teenager, when the pair went to See “Rambo.” The movie features scenes where the title character is tortured. The son describes how his father says he was beaten with clubs and kicked in the head. That’s also difficult to confirm, but the book includes a Rafael Cruz mug shot where his nose appears to be broken. In the book, Cruz briefly tells how his elder half-sister, Miriam, died of a drug overdose in 2011. He discusses his wife, Heidi’s, bouts of depression in 2005, which he chalks up to her having trouble adjusting to Texas life after the couple moved to Austin from Washington. Ted Cruz also recalls heading to Maine in 2009 to meet former President George H.W. Bush — whose son Jeb is now one of Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign rivals. Cruz was invited to go sailing but was wearing a suit, so Bush loaned him clothes, including a “President of the United States” belt buckle. Cruz writes that the borrowed duds felt “surreal.” Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Group gathers at Alabama Capitol to protest removal of the Confederate flag
The Confederate flag waved proudly on Alabama Capitol grounds again Saturday, as a group of nearly 1,000 gathered at the Capitol building for the “Southerns Rally” to protest the removal of Confederate flags from the Capitol grounds. Held at the State’s Confederate War Memorial located on the north side of the Capitol, the rally was organized by the Mike Williams, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to send a message that the flag is about pride in heritage, not racism or hate. On Wednesday, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley had ordered the removal of four Confederate flags from the Capitol grounds, drawing mixed emotions from across the Yellowhammer state. Bentley’s actions were in response to calls to remove the Confederate emblems after the massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. last week. The suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, posed in photos displaying Confederate flags and burning or desecrating U.S. flags, re-igniting national disapproval over the flag’s symbolism. Saturday’s rally puts on display the growing momentum to reinstate the flag. Shortly after the removal of the flags, a Change.Org petition to reinstate the flags was started by Phillip Giddens from Gadson. Four days later the petition now has 17,500 supporters and counting (June 27, 2015: 12:33 p.m. CST). Photos from the rally:
NJ Gov. Chris Christie goes live with presidential campaign website
Republican Chris Christie‘s political team has gone live with a presidential campaign website days before he jumps into the 2016 race. The new website – https://www.chrischristie.com – shows the New Jersey governor’s name along with the slogan, “Telling it like it is.” Christie also is promoting the site with a short animated video posted on his Twitter feed. The site says it’s paid for Chris Christie for President, Inc. Christie has a “special announcement event” set for Tuesday in the gym of Livingston High School, from which he graduated in 1980. Donors and friends have gotten invitations, and Christie’s team has invited reporters to attend. After his announcement, Christie plans to go to New Hampshire for a town hall meeting. The crowded GOP field already has 13 candidates. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Jeb Bush schedules meetings with pastors in Charleston
Jeb Bush plans to meet with black pastors in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday — part of a rescheduled visit to the state after he cut short an earlier stop because of the church shooting. The Republican presidential candidate was in Charleston as part of his campaign kickoff on the day that nine people were shot to death during a prayer meeting at a church. Bush was staying not far from the scene of the shooting. Bush then canceled the rest of his visit, which included a town hall meeting focusing on military issues. His campaign says Monday’s meeting with the ministers will be closed to the media. Later that day, Bush plans to visit a pharmaceutical company in the Columbia area. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Hillary Clinton says ‘love triumphed’ in gay marriage ruling
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday praised the Supreme Court’s ruling declaring same-sex couples have a right to marry and suggested that her Republican opponents were being left behind by history. In one of her most partisan speeches since announcing her presidential campaign, Clinton criticized the field of more than a dozen Republican candidates for opposing gay marriage, gun control, immigration reform and women’s reproductive rights. “We can sum up the message from the court and the American people in just two words: Move on,” she said in a fiery speech to Democratic activists gathered in Northern Virginia for a party fundraiser. Casting herself as a fighter for struggling Americans, Clinton pledged to advocate for all those facing economic discrimination and prejudice. “I’m on the side for everyone who’s ever been knocked down but refused to be knocked out,” she told the cheering audience. “I will always stand my ground so you and my country can gain ground.” Clinton equated the gay marriage decision with the decision striking down bans on interracial marriage, saying that “love triumphed in the highest court.” She vowed to fight discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and accused Republicans of being “determined to lead us right back into the past.” “Instead of trying to turn back the clock, they should be joining us in saying no, no to discrimination once and for all,” she said. Clinton was making the first stop of her presidential campaign in Virginia, a state likely to be closely contested in the general election. President Barack Obama won the state in 2008, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had captured its electoral votes in decades, and again in 2012. Clinton’s political tactics in the state will likely mirror Obama’s winning strategy: increase the number of black and minority voters at the polls while capturing a sufficient share of the white vote in suburban Washington, D.C. Her personal connections may give her an additional advantage. She took the stage alongside Gov. Terry McAuliffe, her longtime friend and fundraiser, who won office in 2013. His fundraising efforts helped bankroll the campaigns of both Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. After they left the White House, McAuliffe used his personal wealth to help the couple get a mortgage on their house in Chappaqua, New York. McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign was run by a young operative, Robby Mook, who now is working as Clinton’s campaign manager. “This is personal for me,” McAuliffe told the crowd at the fundraiser. “I’ve known Hillary for decades. We’ve worked hard together. We’ve played hard together.” He added: “She’s a lot more fun than Bill Clinton is and I love him, too.”
