Kay Bailey: Moderate & Compassionate ... or Hostile Skinflint towards Texas Veterans?

The ongoing saga of Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison living of the fumes of her 1980s rep as a moderate Republican get chipped away day by day ...

Via Team Radnofsky:

Barbara Ann Radnofsky's campaign for US Senate '06 continues to focus on the leadership she will bring to the Senate for Texans. She has focused on KBH's veteran-hostile record: opposition to VA funding, support for anti-veteran legislation, and active opposition to legislation that would have protected service members from financial fraud and abuse. The opposition camp reacted to BAR's exposure of these facts with orchestrated visits to VA facilities, and a flip-flop in signing onto legislation that attempts to make up for shortfalls in VA funding.

Consistently Barbara Ann has advocated for service members and exposed the ineffective leadership and anti-service member bias of her opponent. Veterans' issues in Texas are long-term, critical, and they deserve careful foresight and advocacy in Washington, not votes such as the following:

KBH opposed Senator Murray's amendment to fully fund VA needs in 2006

KBH opposed Senator Akaka's amendment to fully fund VA needs in 2006

KBH opposed Senator Durbin's amendment to protect veterans and service members from usurious lending practices.

Senator Durbin's amendment would have done four things

• Prevent unscrupulous payday lenders from using bankruptcy courts to fleece military members, veterans, and spouses of service members who die in military service. Any claims based on debt they owe that require payment of interest, fees, or other charges in excess of 36 percent would not be collectible in bankruptcy proceedings.

• Exempt members of the armed services, veterans, and spouses of service members who die while in military service from means test provisions.

  Allows the bankruptcy judge--not an arbitrary and inflexible formula--to determine whether a military member, a veteran, or a surviving spouse of a service member who dies while serving America deserves the protection of chapter 7.

• Establish a basic homestead exemption of $75,000 for service members, who cannot choose where they live.

• Establish a federal personal property exemption, to override the varying exemptions from state to state because service members move around a lot.

Barbara Ann promises Texans that she will fight to see that the promises we have made to our veterans and service members are honored in word and in deed.

There's also still that messy issue of the Waco VA Hospital that has yet to be resolved ...

Waco Tribune Editorial: 'I've got a big decision' ... The Waco VA Hospital first opened its doors to serve veterans in 1932. It consistently provided only the highest quality care for veterans.

Since the day the Waco hospital first opened, it concentrated on providing quality care for veterans with psychiatric problems, what was then called ?shell shock.?

A complete community infrastructure has been developed and refined over the years to help veterans recover their physical and mental health.

While other VA facilities around the nation have received embarrassing reports detailing poor patient care, unsanitary conditions, staff indifference or other condemnations, the Waco VA Hospital has always received excellent marks for providing the highest quality of care in all respects.

WaPo: VA Hospital in Texas Fights to Stay Open ... The Waco hospital, with its well-kept pre-World War II red-brick, red-roof-tiled buildings, has provided health care for veterans in central Texas for 73 years. Now it is on the chopping block, scheduled along with 17 other VA hospitals to be closed or downsized as part of an agency plan to restructure the health care system. A 1999 government study found the VA was spending $1 million a day on buildings it did not need, and in 2003 a government commission recommended closing older, underused hospitals, including the one in Waco. The Waco facility is part of the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, which also includes a hospital in Temple and outpatient clinics in Austin and five other communities.

For the past two years, Waco officials, residents and veterans groups have been fighting back, emphasizing the importance of the facility's specialized blind rehabilitation, psychiatric and post-traumatic stress disorder units; the large and aging veteran population (Texas has the third-largest population of veterans in the country with 1.7 million, a third of whom received VA health care last year); and, now, the wave of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who will need its services.

"They guaranteed so many years ago that they will take care of [veterans], and I would say they're pretty much going back on their word," said Ron Peterson, 35, an engineer with the 91st Engineer Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood. Peterson used a day off last week to provide a motorcycle escort for Nicholson's visit to Waco and to register his support for keeping the hospital there open.

Moderate? Compassionate? ... or just wrong and ineffective?

I blog, you decide.