At VA, a blogger criticizes from the inside

At VA, a blogger criticizes from the inside

By Lisa Rein, Published: May 9

Back from a 15-month deployment to Iraq, Alex Horton penned a 1,000-word rant against the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“How many obscene scandals, misappropriations and misdiagnoses does it take to see there’s a rotten core at the center?” the 23-year-old soldier wrote on his war blog from Austin in 2009. He was in his fourth semester at community college, and VA was holding up money he needed for rent and schoolbooks under the new GI Bill.


His unsympathetic VA counselor “provides the same level of care you would expect from a Tijuana back alley vasectomy,” Horton wrote, expressing a frustration felt by generations of veterans.

What happened next was a watershed for one of the government’s most maligned bureaucracies.

Veterans Affairs hired Horton to keep blogging — about itself.

The agency hopes to use the Internet — and a critic operating from the inside — to help turn around its reputation as obstructionist, antiquated and overwhelmed. The goal is not just to answer veterans’ questions faster and in real time but also to open the bureaucracy to scrutiny. Although they’ve gotten a slower start than the private sector, federal agencies are interacting with citizens on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, a big change for many used to more-controlled communication.

At first Horton said no when the department’s new-media director tried to recruit him last spring. “Then I thought, this might be an opportunity,” he said.

He quit school and a part-time job corralling grocery carts at Costco and drove his Ford Ranger to the District, where he rents an English basement on Capitol Hill.

Instead of blogging without pay in a dusty Internet cafe in Mosul, Horton makes $47,500 a year to write full time from a ninth-floor cubicle at VA headquarters on Vermont Avenue NW. Now 25, he arrived with instant credibility with veterans, who followed his must-read war blog, Army of Dude, during the U.S. troop surge for its unvarnished, eloquent dispatches.

But his job has an inherently awkward dynamic — work for “The Man” and risk selling out (“Now I suppose he will be busy spewing government propaganda,” one military blogger wrote after his hiring); become too critical and irk your bosses.

Brandon Friedman, who oversees the five-member new-media team created last fall, said: “I told everyone upfront, Alex is not here to flack for the agency but to help facilitate our communication with our clients.”
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At VA, a blogger criticizes from the inside

Veterans Affairs reaching out to vets via blogs and social media

Department of Veterans Affairs reaching out to vets via blogs and social media

By Amanda Erickson
Friday, April 9, 2010

A little before 8 every morning, Brandon Friedman steps into his cubicle, turns on his computer and tries to single-handedly revolutionize the way the Department of Veterans Affairs talks to vets.

Friedman, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, arrived at VA eight months ago with a mandate: to reach veterans using new media -- and little else. It's no easy mission at a department known for its communication failures and cumbersome bureaucracy.

Friedman has helped overhaul the department's Web site, created a dozen Facebook pages and launched a Twitter account. The goal, he said, is to improve communication between veterans and the department.

Friedman, who served in the 101st Airborne, knows how hard life can be for veterans. "When I got out of the Army, I was done," he said. "I didn't want to deal with anything anymore."

He spent his first months at home drinking and traveling. But after a bout of appendicitis left him bedridden, he began blogging about his experiences. That led to a book deal ("The War I Always Wanted" was published in 2007) and eventually a position with VetVoice, an online forum for progressive veterans.
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Veterans Affairs reaching out to vets via blogs and social media

Someone needs to reclaim Army Standards

This goes with what I wrote the other day about problems in the military.

Reclaiming Army Standards
by: Brandon Friedman
Tue Jan 13, 2009 at 18:20:54 PM EST
The fact is, while the Army has been lowering its entrance standards with regard to education, physical fitness, and crime since the end of the Cold War, that process has accelerated since the invasion of Iraq. And this is something that the incoming Army Secretary should address.
The numbers are shocking when you actually see the scope of the issue:
Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer, points out that in 1992 98 percent of recruits had a high school diploma. By 2004, that number had fallen to 86 percent. In 2007, only 79 percent of Army recruits had completed high school. Whereas nearly everyone in the Army had a diploma 15 years earlier, by 2007, fewer than four out five soldiers did.





Standards
by: Brandon Friedman
Fri May 23, 2008 at 12:54:34 PM EDT
WTF is this?

This is a full-blown, four-alarm, Army-wide emergency as far as I'm concerned. I swear to God somebody needs to answer for this on Capitol Hill. The Defense Department, the Army, the generals. . .I don't care. Just somebody. This is a failure in leadership from top to bottom.

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McCain's war posturing killing morale for troops

Veteran, vets' advocate: McCain's war posturing killing morale for troops
Nick Langewis and David Edwards
Published: Thursday June 12, 2008

The "surge" is working, we are winning in Iraq, and it's "not too important" as to when the troops will be returning home, Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain (R-AZ) said this week.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), or McCain's "dog's body," as MSNBC's Keith Olbermann refers to him, portrayed McCain as a particular authority on the Iraq occupation based on his service in Vietnam.

McCain's potential position of power as Commander-in-Chief and his experience in combat give his words extra power to disappoint the troops that hear his projections, and he should know better, said Brandon Friedman, Vice Chairman of VoteVets and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Keith, this is a morale crusher," Friedman said. "If you can imagine, say, a sergeant, who's on his third tour, and he's in the fourteenth month of that tour, and he hears the potential President say something like this, it kills morale.

"The troops over there hang on every word they hear from a leader...especially the Commander-in-Chief, but also someone who could be the Commander-in-Chief. And when they hear something like this, it really kills them on the inside because, you know, their families want them home--they want to come home--or focus on the real Global War on Terror elsewhere."

Olbermann asked: "Does it matter more that they are abandoned by a John McCain who did serve as opposed to a George Bush who did not?"

"Absolutely, Keith," Friedman said. "We've come to not expect a whole lot from George W. Bush. But, when you have a veteran like John McCain who has gone through so much in Vietnam, you really expect a lot more out of him...He should know better. And, for those of us who have been there and who have lived through this, we just would expect a lot more, and it really saddens us to see this happen, because there are thousands and thousands of veterans who just disagree with him on this."

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, broadcast June 11, 2008.
go here for video
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Veteran_McCain_gaffe_kills_morale_for_0612.html

Keith Olbermann had a special comment tonight which will end up on YouTube sometime tomorrow I'm sure. He talked about this and about the fact the families are really hurting with the redeployments and extended tours. Olbermann also raised the point that the American people are paying for all of this. It doesn't seem to matter very much to the people in Washington DC that none of this was what we were told it would be and no one lived up to the obligation they owed those who were sent.

I would really like to know what McCain thinks qualifies him to run as someone ready to lead the military. Did he ever plan any kind of military operation? Give orders to men and women in his command? Was he ever responsible for anything more than what he flew? When it comes to being a veteran, yes he was a POW and he bravely chose to stay with the rest of the POW's when he had the chance to leave, his record however as a veteran and a Senator has not been with the veterans. Is it because he had it so hard as a POW that he doesn't think the troops are suffering so badly compared to what he went through so no one should really feel sorry for them, want to take care of them or want to fight for them? It really is a shame when you get right down to it. I voted for McCain in 2000. If he was still the same kind of man he was back then, or what he appeared to be, I would be thinking of voting for him again. The problem is, that man, the man who earned respect is now thinking he's entitled to it without any question.

As for the rest, he doesn't seem to know much about Iraq or Afghanistan, the economy or anything else.