During the May 18-19
full session hearings of
the VA Disability Commission
at Arlington, VA there
was a well organized VSO
panel that appeared before
the Commission just before
they were about to take
their vote on the hotly
debated controversy of
the Commission doing SSDI
data collection.

Between the 4 men sitting
on this VSO panel, the
following organizations
were represented:

VFW, DAV, American Legion,
Military Order of Purple
Heart, Blinded Veterans,
AmVets, VVA, and Paralyzed
Veterans.

The VFW had organized a
single unified statement
and then the other 3 men
on the panel all endorsed
the main statement adding
short comments of their
own to supplement the main
statement.

The VFW representative who
read and apparently drafted
the main unified VSO statement
in opposition to the SSDI
data collection was dead-on
target with his oratory,
telling Commissioner
Dennis McGinn at one point,
that the system was "bullshit"
and they weren't going to
take it anymore.

The VFW representative
alleged that he himself was
a former VARO Claims Adjudicator
out of the Los Angeles, CA
area thus he felt more than
qualified to take on the
important controversy of
the SSDI data collection
matter at hand.

Sitting in the 2nd row, I
have to say that all 4 of
these guys were a breath
of fresh air. The grandstanding,
the rubber-stamping, the
I-Love-My-Country CRAP was
all gone from these not
so smiling faces, and they
were in there for a fight
to the finish.

We can only be hopeful that
VFW will be the first to
break ranks in this VSO system
and start down the road of
TRULY representing the interests
of their membership and Veterans
everywhere, instead of this
lame-assed thing they have
been doing for entire decades
of siding with the VA at
every turn no matter how
wrong the VA was.

Kudos, thumbs up, and Atta Boy
for the VFW for finally getting
the stones to show up at these
hearings, saying it like it
needed to be said, and setting
the polite ass-kissing at the
side of the road.

The VSO panel largely road
upon a unified argument that
the Commission did not have
the jurisdiction to hold
the SSDI data collection vote.

But in pursuit of that debate,
the Commission had produced
some 8 letters from the
House and Senate, plus a full
agency presentation by the
Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) expressly stating that
the Commission DID have the
jurisdiction with recommendations
to proceed on this pursuit.

The vote carried in favor
to proceed, 11 to 2.

Regardless of the outcome of
the vote, let me (as the lead
griper about the VFW and it's
uneffective efforts in the
past) be the one to say
that VFW has finally come
out of it's non-profit coma
and figured out what REALLY
needs to be done in the
face of a VA controversy.