Nevada veterans take to Capitol Hill to air budget complaints

Benjamin Grove

Monday, March 6, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

WASHINGTON - Nevada veterans will be in the nation's capital this week to lobby for fairer funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

White House and VA budget officers have been under fire in recent years for submitting inadequate budget proposals. In an embarrassing reversal last year, the agency defended its budget request, but later went to Congress to request an emergency budget boost of $1.2 billion when it became clear the agency had underestimated expenses.

Many veterans groups would like to see lawmakers grant the agency a more reliable stream of money every year, rather than subject the VA to the whims of annual congressional budget setting.

Bush administration critics this year have alleged the White House intentionally low-balled its VA budget request for fiscal year 2007 to make its deficit-reduction numbers look better, fully expecting that Congress would increase the budget at a later time.

Carl Owens, president of the Nevada chapter of the Paralyzed Veterans of America, said he finds it hard to believe that the government isn't doing a better job of funding the VA as veterans stream back from Iraq and other battlefields in the war on terror.

Owens will join other veterans from around the nation trekking to Washington. He plans to meet with Nevada lawmakers and attend a meeting with VA Secretary Jim Nicholson.

Owens said he was concerned about the White House proposing cuts for prosthetics and spinal cord injury research.

"There's a shortfall every year," Owens said. "I don't think the administration understands that this is not just a problem now, but it's a problem that will be there long down the line."

How big a role did Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D Nev., play in Hackett-gate?

Not very big, he says.

As part of their effort to win a Senate Democratic majority, Reid and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., not long ago helped convince Iraq war veteran and Democrat Paul Hackett to run against Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, according to Hackett.

Then Reid and Schumer goaded him to pull out after Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, got into the race, Hackett said. Brown's entry meant both candidates would have had to spend a lot of money and energy in the primary campaign, and Reid and Schumer believed it would be best if Brown could focus solely on DeWine, Hackett said.

Hackett dropped out of the race two weeks ago, and his supporters directed their wrath at Reid and Schumer, especially in the blogosphere.

Reid downplayed his role, although he admits he talked to Hackett.

"But I certainly never said, 'You should get out of the race,' " Reid told an MSNBC columnist Feb. 14.

When asked if he had gone so far as to discourage donors from giving to Hackett, Reid said, "absolutely not."

But Hackett was irked. He got his full version of the story on the record in a column last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the beginning, "The calls kept coming," Hackett wrote.

"Schumer and Reid said, 'Your country needs you.' "

He wrote that Reid and Schumer's wives even called Hackett's wife with the same message. Later, "Schumer and Reid, the guys who said my country needs me, had a change of heart," Hackett wrote.

A Sun story last week described how all of the major players in the long-running drama of Yucca Mountain were assembled for a status hearing Wednesday in the Senate on the proposed nuclear waste repository: The Project Manager (Energy Department), The Nevadans, The Lawmakers, The Experts, and The Regulators.

But the story left out another player in the saga: The Reporters, noted Brian O'Connell, a long-time Yucca observer and director of the nuclear waste program with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

O'Connell e-mailed his addition: "This assemblage of weary scribes could almost write their stories in advance once they see the witness list, as though they were the 'writers' for the little play.

"They scoop up the prepared statements tossed at their feeding table. During the actual hearing they are checking their Blackberries.

"After the politicians make their statements, the 'first panel' of government witnesses are brought to the witness table for their lawyer-vetted testimony and the evading of hard questions. When the chairman shows some mercy, the wounded are carted off as the next panel is called.

"This is the signal for most of the reporters to exit stage left to go back and file their stories."

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., had rave reviews for her new neck, enhanced by plastic surgery in August.

"For the last couple of years whenever I was on TV all I could do was look at my neck," Berkley told interviewers Steve Friess and Miles Smith, who host an online audio "podcast" show.

The interview was also picked up by The Drudge Report and recounted in Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper.

"I have the neck of a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old body," Berkley said.