This is a news story, because?
good ole privatization.
Great way to dump taxpayers dollars down the toilet or I should say, rip off the taxpayers.
Show me the list of all the pop up security businesses and all the politicians and family along with some close friends connected to each contract.
Sounds like the Blackwater deal in Iraq that ended up being, well you know, made a few politicians kids rich.
What’s the overall rate of vandalism in military cemeteries? Do they all rate private security?
Sounds like a waste of money. People were targeting statues in the public glorifying slavers, not cemeteries.
We should spend some public funds hiring security for Dr Ford. She still cannot return to her home due to threats of violence.
Do we have data on how many granite-based hate crimes they prevented?
Why does the VA have anything to do with cemeteries dedicated to Confederate “veterans”? They are not veterans just because they once bore arms and killed people with them, any more than murderers or armed robbers are veterans. In fact, they are guilty of the much worse crime of treason, and treason entered into in order to defend slavery.
Now, of course, the fact that a person was a murderer or an armed robber, or even a mass-murdering traitor, in life, does not mean he should be denied a decent burial, or a decent respect for his grave site. But nothing, absolutely nothing, about having served in the armies of the Confederacy, means that the graves of such people deserve the special public honor reserved for the veterans of US military service, including interment in cemeteries dedicated to veterans and maintained by the VA.
No way should the taxpayers of the US be put to any expense even maintaining the grave sites of amnestied traitors, much less guarding them against any lingering anger against the slave system and the underlying racism that was the basis of the slave system. And if those graves, marked as honoring people who bore arms against their own country in order to perpetuate slavery, are desecrated, the perpetrators deserve a sort of “fighting words” legal defense for their actions. People who are concerned about the morality of desecrating the graves of even traitors should, at their own expense and not the taxpayers’, relocate the bodies to graves in private cemeteries, graves that do not publicly proclaim the treason committed by the deceased.
Where did the money come from?
Why couldn’t they have used military people for this? Or the National Guard?
YOUR pocket of course. The Cons don’t care when THEY are in charge.
“The security effort, which runs around the clock at all but one of those VA-operated cemeteries…”
The article, in its first and second paras, tells us that the VA spent this money on the security guards, and, something new to me, that the VA maintains Confederate cemeteries. X@!?#%!!!
It came from Northern Union descendants who had their taxes raised by Republicans when GOP’ers decided to cap SALT deductions - to punish states who responsibly pay their own way by collecting state and local taxes.
I’m guessing. I don’t know that for sure, but it’s all fungible anyway - so yeah, that’s where it came from.
New to me too. I thought that it was probably the Daughters of the Confederacy that handled that shit.
I am shocked really at the VA. The Confederates were traitors. I’m pretty sick of the Confederacy being seen as anything other than the treason against the constitution that it was.
Thank you VA.
Apparently traitors can be veterans too.
Why exclude foreign war criminals? Any SS soldiers still alive should apply for VA benefits. The difference between some foreigner who killed US soldiers to defeat us in WWII and some Confederate “veteran”, is that at least the former wasn’t betraying our country in making war on it.
I’d prefer a memorial that says something like:
“Here lies Confederate traitor Bob Jones: Here is the list of people he’s presumed to have injured or killed.”
I mean right? We have or had - they are dying from old age - many Nazis who relocated here. Where’s their military cemetary? Why does’t the VA take care of them?
The UDC doesn’t have that kind of funding, and the cemeteries were created by the federal government so that prisoners of war could be treated fairly and humanely.
Respect for the dead is not a bad idea—I don’t care if they’re confederate or union.
“However, when the threats and vandalism have all but ceased, it might be time to rethink” the spending, Kalin said in a statement.
Threats and vandalism have not all but ceased.