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‘What the hell?’ Boehner rips VA for firing almost nobody, year after Shinseki resignation

House Speaker John Boehner tore into Veterans Affairs leadership Wednesday, alleging that nearly a year after then-Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned amid the scandal over veterans care, his successors have done little to fix the agency -- or even discipline those involved in the wait-times crisis.
"Just one person has been fired. One," Boehner said in a scathing House floor speech. "What the hell happened to the rest of them? "
He appealed for the agency to take care of America's veterans as well as they take care "of the bureaucrats."
Boehner, R-Ohio, said he is especially frustrated that so few VA officials have been fired, despite evidence that at least 110 VA facilities kept secret lists to manipulate and hide long wait-times.
In February, VA Secretary Robert McDonald claimed in a TV interview that the department had "fired" 60 people connected with the scandal.
That estimate was later revised down to 14. But The New York Times reported in late April that, according to documents given to Congress, only one person had actually been fired -- Phoenix VA hospital director Sharon Helman. Another retired under pressure and another's "termination" was pending. Several others were disciplined in other ways.
Boehner likened some of the punishments to a "slap on the wrist," noting some got transfers and others got paid leave. And "all of them went on collecting checks from taxpayers," he said.
Further, Boehner said, the number of patients facing long waits is about the same as it was last year, while the number of patients waiting more than 90 days has nearly doubled.
The VA's problems are so deep that -- despite a new law that overhauled the agency and authorized $16 billion in new spending over three years -- it can't even build a hospital, Boehner said, referring to a half-finished project in Denver that is $1 billion over budget.
Boehner said more legislation to hold the VA accountable is likely.
"But only the administration can change the culture from within," he said.
As Memorial Day approaches, President Obama "owes the American people a real, long-term plan to fix the VA," Boehner said. "Not a promise or a pledge or a rearranging of deck chairs: a real plan to clean up this mess."
A VA representative has not yet responded to a request for comment on Boehner's allegations.

Fox News, Facebook to host first GOP primary debate of 2016 race

Fox News and Facebook will host the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 presidential race on Aug. 6 in Ohio, the network announced Wednesday.
The debate, to be presented in conjunction with the Ohio Republican Party, will be held at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
The announcement comes as the Republican field is still taking shape. Six primary candidates have formally declared their intention to seek the nomination -- but several more are expected to declare in the coming weeks, contributing to one of the largest-ever GOP primary fields.
The Aug. 6 debate will be moderated by Fox News' Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace.
The format will allow Fox News viewers and Facebook users to share video questions via the social media site, some of which will be used for the debate, the network said.
Fox News' Executive Vice President of News Editorial Michael Clemente also announced the criteria for candidates:
They must meet all constitutional requirements; must announce and register a formal campaign; must file all required paperwork with the Federal Election Commission; and must place in the top 10 in an average of the five most recent, recognized national polls leading up to Aug. 4.
Those who do not place in the top 10 will be provided additional coverage and air time, Clemente said in a statement.
The debate will be presented live from 9-11 p.m. ET, on Fox News Channel, with additional coverage on Fox News Radio, Fox News Mobile and FoxNews.com.
Andy Mitchell, director of News and Global Media Partnerships at Facebook, said, "Facebook's scale and foundation in real identity give Fox News and the Republican contenders for the nomination the opportunity to open up the debate to Americans in a new and unique way."
Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges reiterated the crucial role his state is playing this cycle in both the primary process and general election -- as the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention, and a crucial swing state.
"A Republican can't win the White House without carrying our state, so there's no better place to host the first primary debate," he said.

‘They will pay off’: Employers, advocates help returning vets face next battle -- landing a job

For many veterans coming home after multiple tours over 14 years of war, getting a job in the civilian world has been their most personal battle yet, marked by disappointments and dead ends.
But, thanks to a slowly improving job market and active efforts by veterans' groups, officials and recruiters in private-sector companies, that dim outlook is beginning to brighten.
Though still higher than the national average, the unemployment rate among recent veterans has steadily declined. Veterans' advocates say, perhaps most importantly, the mindset in corporate America is starting to change.
It boils down to this: Seeing that hiring a veteran is not just a good deed. It can be a smart hire.
"I think there is a commitment by the corporate community and associations and groups like ours that are trying to make people understand ... We make it a point that veterans should be viewed as an investment, not as a charity," said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American (IAVA).
This is only the start. Tens of thousands of returning veterans are still looking for work. And the mission of IAVA -- founded in 2004 to help returning vets reintegrate into the workforce -- and similar groups has become only more critical as the Iraq war ended (despite the subsequent return of U.S. forces to combat ISIS) and the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan drew to a close.

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• Walmart Boosts Hiring of Veterans

The progress, though, can be charted. At its peak, joblessness for those serving since 9/11 (which labor statisticians refer to as Gulf War-era II vets) was nearly 12 percent in 2011. In January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that number had fallen steadily to 7.2 percent in 2014. On a monthly basis, the latest BLS figures show that among all post-9/11 veterans, the number was 6.9 percent for April, up slightly from 6.5 percent in March.
First lady Michelle Obama, speaking in April on behalf of the four-year-old Joining Forces White House initiative to support vets and their families, credited employers across the country who she said heeded "the call."
"[These] companies were seeing for themselves that hiring our military members and our spouses wasn't simply the patriotic thing to do, it was the right thing to do for their bottom line," she said.
The first lady said that businesses have hired or trained more than 850,000 veterans and military spouses, which she called an "outstanding" number.
Their unemployment rate is still higher than the national one, which was pegged at 5.4 percent for April, and 6.7 percent at the end of 2014. According to recruitment officials who spoke with FoxNews.com, there are several factors at play. Aside from fierce competition in the job markets, many vets don't know where and how to get assistance in finding the right job. All of their contacts are inside the military, and largely unhelpful for networking. Some don't know what to do after years of being told what to do.
Finally, employers themselves don't always understand the value veterans could bring to their workplace.
Many are trying to change that. Since 2011, Verizon has had an active veterans' advisory panel and a robust recruiting program that also includes job-seeking assistance offered at job fairs across the country, and virtual workshops, according to Evan Guzman, the head of Military Programs & Veteran Affairs at Verizon's corporate offices in New Jersey.
"It really started out as a campaign of winning hearts and minds [of the internal organization]," convincing executives that hiring vets was a win-win for everyone, Guzman said. Verizon has hired 3,000 post-9/11 vets since 2013.
Aside from its own efforts, Verizon is also part of the Veterans Employment Initiative at the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), which brings together greater Washington, D.C. firms, many of them defense and technology contractors, to recruit and mentor vets through transition.
This includes resume building, interviewing and, of course, networking. "It's one thing to leave the military with a resume," said Guzman, "but if you can't network, you're going to find yourself stuck."

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Shown here is a veterans recruitment event sponsored by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. (Courtesy of NVTC)

NVTC's member companies told FoxNews.com that they have tens of thousands of applications coming into them every week (there are currently 198,000 veterans' resumes on file at NVTC's website). NVTC has worked with 368 vets directly for transition and placement, and provided one-on-one mentors for 78.
"There is a lot of outreach going on," said Gabe Galvan, the Veterans Affairs portfolio director for the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit organization that operates research and development centers for the federal government. Some 20 percent of its workforce are veterans, including severely disabled. "We have a supply of people leaning in who can deliver these structures of support to the veterans," he said. They also have also designed a "boot camp" to get other employers on board.
Eric Bartch, who runs the veterans outreach program at CACI, a major federal defense contractor based in Northern Virginia, says its important that the employers are providing a pipeline for vets, and veterans seek that connection out. Otherwise, they are sending resumes blindly to companies, which might as well be a black hole. CACI gets over 1,400 veteran applications a week, and over 5,000 a month, he said. Right now its workforce is 30 percent veteran, and of that number, 7 percent are disabled.
"There is just so much competition," Bartch said. "[Veterans] really need to have someone inside the company to be their advocate, look for those military support teams that most companies have now -- reach out to them first." He said CACI is part of a healthy network of companies in the area, along with Joining Forces and other groups, providing a bridge. Veterans that are in demand include those with IT, cybersecurity, security, logistics and litigation skills.
But outside the Beltway, the job market is not as flush with federal contracts, and not every company has a small army of people working solely in veterans outreach. The economy is still struggling, especially in America's small towns and rural areas.
"The gap is closing but the economy is still sluggish. The companies, in many cases, don't have the openings," said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., who as chairman of the Oversight & Investigations subcommittee has been at the forefront of probes into the rash of scandals at the nation's VA health care facilities.
"In Kentucky and West Virginia, coal companies are closing down. This is hurting people because they can't come home and work. A lot of your grunts come from small towns, they hope to make a new life for themselves and then come home to find their town just isn't hiring," he told FoxNews.com.
Many of the young vets coming home from war have a double strike by being out of the civilian workforce for years -- if they ever were in it. Young infantrymen and women for example, don't know what their battlefield skills are good for. Then there is prejudice.
"People are still concerned about hiring a vet with a disability and mistake a disability for inability, though I think some of those concerns of five or six years ago have gone down. But it has been difficult for employers to understand," Murphy said.
Veterans offer "safety, teamwork, loyalty and knowing how to get the job done," he told FoxNews.com. "I just met a former general in charge of hiring for a company who said he is hiring veterans because they can read maps. You just can't train someone on the assets the military builds into you."
This is where groups like IAVA come in. They work with employers to make sure they are not just in "reactionary" mode, hiring vets to plug gaps in low-wage paying jobs, or because they feel compelled to. They also want to take that "grunt" and help him or her sell themselves to the employer.
Matt Ross, project manager for the employment programs at IAVA, is planning the group's May 18 Career Boot Camp in New York City. He recalls one of his own early interviews when transitioning out of the military. "I told [the interviewer] I was a rifleman," he recalled.
After she asked what that meant, "I drew a blank, I hadn't prepared for that. I could have said, it meant accountability for equipment, [and experience in] logistical and operational planning."
It's that type of prep work the Boot Camp hopes to offer.
Employers will be there, too. "We're not out there begging for jobs, or to give people a break," said Szymanski. "We're saying, invest in a veteran, invest in their programs, because they will pay off and our country will be better."

ISIS controls 50 percent of Syria after takeover of Palmyra, monitoring group says

The Islamic State terror group controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra in the central part of the country Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said.
Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Associated Press the extremists overran the archaeological site, just to the southwest of the modern settlement on Palmyra, shortly after midnight local time.
An activist in the central province of Homs who goes by the name of Bebars al-Talawy also says that Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, now controls the ruins at the UNESCO world heritage site famous for its 2,000-year-old towering Roman-era colonnades and other ruins and priceless artifacts. Before the war, thousands of tourists a year visited the remote desert outpost, a cherished landmark referred to by Syrians as the "Bride of the Desert."
Both activists said Thursday that ISIS had not damaged the ruins so far. ISIS has previously destroyed major archaeological sites in Iraq that predate the founding of Islam. Sky News reported that hundreds of statues and artifacts had been taken to safety ahead of the ISIS advance, but larger items, such as stone tombs, could not be removed in time. 
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had also seized control of Palmyra's military air base, prison and intelligence headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the prison, known as Tadmur, is where thousands of Syrian dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured over the years.
An amateur video posted online showed ISIS fighters, allegedly inside the prison, burning a giant poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad and cheering as flames rose around them against the night sky. The video and its location could not be independently verified, but appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events.

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Clinton breaks media silence, answers reporters’ questions on emails and more

Hillary Clinton, having faced weeks of criticism for ducking the press since entering the presidential race, finally broke her media silence Tuesday, fielding multiple questions from reporters during a stop in Iowa -- addressing, albeit briefly, the two controversies dogging her campaign.
On the controversy surrounding her use of a private email address and server while secretary of state, Clinton insisted: "I want those emails out."
On questions about the transparency surrounding foreign-government donations to the family foundation, Clinton said she's "proud" of the organization, and the donations just show that others are supportive of the work it does.
While the Democratic presidential candidate's responses may not have been surprising, her engagement with the press marks a departure from the way she's run her campaign since entering the race a month ago.
She largely has kept to low-key, tightly orchestrated campaign events, eliciting concerns from reporters and criticism from Republicans that she's staying inside a "bubble."
Clinton has done no formal interviews since entering, while occasionally fielding a question bounced at her from the press corps.
Tuesday's back-and-forth was one of the most extensive Q&A's since she held a press conference addressing the email scandal -- before declaring her candidacy.
On the email controversy, Clinton on Tuesday insisted the matter is in the State Department's hands and said she wants them released as soon as possible.
"Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do." Asked if she would demand their release, Clinton said of the emails, "They're not mine. They belong to the State Department."
Clinton reiterated her push to release the emails shortly after a federal judge rejected the State Department's proposal to disseminate portions of the emails by next January and said the agency must instead conduct a "rolling production" of the records.
The court ordered the department to produce the schedule for that rollout by next week, and a department spokesman said they would comply.
Clinton spoke after a small business event for her campaign in Iowa, the home of the nation's first presidential caucuses. The disclosure that she conducted State Department business on a private email account has been a controversy from the very inception of her campaign this year and raised questions about her commitment to transparency.
More questions were raised Tuesday after The New York Times published emails showing she may have had a second personal email address, despite claims she only used one as secretary of state.
During the Tuesday court hearing, a federal judge gave the State Department a week to craft a schedule for releasing the records, according to Vice News lawyer Jeffrey Light.
The agency made its initial proposal in a federal court filing Monday night, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Vice News.
In the filing, John F. Hackett, who is responsible for the department's responses to FOIA requests, said that following a review of the emails, the department will post the releasable portions of the 55,000 pages on its website. He said the review will take until the end of the year -- and asked the court to adopt a completion date of Jan. 15, 2016, to factor in the holidays. That's just a couple of weeks before the Iowa caucuses and early state primaries that follow.
In Monday night's filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Hackett said the State Department received the 55,000 pages of emails from Clinton in paper form. Aside from those, Clinton's office has deleted about 30,000 emails deemed personal.

Louisiana religious liberty bill goes down in defeat as Republicans side with LGBT activists

UPDATE: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an Executive Order late Tuesday to protect religious liberty and prevent the state from discriminating against those with deeply held religious beliefs.
“In Louisiana, the state should not be able to take adverse action against a person for their belief in traditional marriage,” Jindal said. “That’s why I’m issuing an Executive Order to prevent the state from discriminating against people, charities and family-owned businesses with deeply held religious beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman.
Earlier story:
Louisiana Republican lawmakers sided with Democrats, big business and LGBT activists to kill a bill that would have protected individuals and religious institutions opposed to same-sex marriage.
In doing so, lawmakers defied the objections of an overwhelmingly majority of voters and handed Gov. Bobby Jindal a significant defeat for his legislative agenda.
A house legal committee voted 10-2 on Tuesday to shelve the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act – a measure that critics said could sanction discrimination against same-sex couples.
However, the proposed law clearly stated its sole purpose was to prevent the government from discriminating against a person or a non-profit because of their support for traditional marriage.
“These ten legislators voted today against freedom and against two-thirds of Louisianans who support the Marriage and Conscience Act,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a supporter of the bill. “This is a failure of leadership and goes to the heart of what’s wrong with American politics today.”
Perkins was referring to a WPA poll commissioned by the Louisiana Family Forum and FRC that indicated 67 percent of likely voters supported the bill. Even more shocking – 63 percent of Democrats supported the bill.
“These elected leaders effectively endorsed government discrimination against individuals and nonprofits simply for believing in marriage between a man and a woman,” Perkins said. “No person or nonprofit should lose tax exempt status, face disqualification, lose a professional license or be punished by the government simply for believing what President Obama believed just three years ago – that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”
Among those strong-arming the bill was IBM – which is building a technology jobs center in Baton Rouge.  An IBM executive penned a letter to The Times-Picayune warning that “IBM will find it much harder to attract talent to Louisiana if this bill is passed and enacted into law.”
Gov. Jindal scoffed at such threats in an April 23 op-ed published by The New York Times.
“I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: save your breath,” he wrote.
He said he would not be deterred by corporations that were pressured by radical liberals.
“As a nation we would not compel a priest, minister or rabbi to violate his conscience and perform a same-sex wedding ceremony,” Jindal wrote. “But a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses. That’s why we should ensure that musicians, caterers, photographers and others should be immune from government coercion on deeply held religious convictions.”
Equality Louisiana accused Johnson of trying to bring discrimination to the state through the back door. They partnered with Louisiana Progress Action and other groups to oppose the bill.
“I remain convinced that the bill is bad for Louisiana – bad for our state’s economy and bad for our state’s people,” Equality Louisiana’s Matthew Patterson said in a statement.
State Rep. Mike Johnson authored the bill. The Republican, from Bossier City, took a beating not only from the Left – but also from fellow Republicans.
A Republican city councilman in Baton Rouge called him a “despicable bigot of the highest order.”
“It’s shameful,” Johnson told me. “He never met me before he said that. He never read the legislation. People will say what they say – I can’t control that.”
However, it appears that Republican lawmakers bought into the lies and distortions propagated by activists and big business.
“This bill is a simple measure to protect religious freedom,” Johnson said. “A few well-funded activist groups have intentionally mischaracterized the bill – spreading fear and intimidation and misinformation.”
Johnson said he was not at all surprised by the survey that found even Louisiana Democrats supported his doomed measure.
“The people of Louisiana are at their heart very patriotic, very conservative – even in the Democrat party,” he said. “They understand that religious liberty ought to be protected.”
Johnson said he has seen the future of religious liberty in America – and it is grim.
He foresees a day when Christian churches could lose their tax-exempt status and Christian schools could lose their accreditation. He foresees a day when those who refuse to endorse same-sex marriage could be prohibited from practicing their profession.
That’s why he pushed the legislation.
“If society’s views on marriage are going to change – if the Supreme Court declares there is a right to same-sex marriage – we have to do all we can to ensure that religious liberty is not a casualty of that new and emerging idea,” he said.