Making tomorrows Military today: July 2005

Militantpundit posted @ 8:40 PM

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Lets kick the pants out of an article

Lake Tahoe!

Military recruiters aggressive with teens

On March 13, Jimmy Coalter and his family were celebrating his 18th birthday with a turkey Thanksgiving-like dinner when the phone rang. It was a military recruiter asking if the teenager-turned-adult ever considered enlisting.

"We were eating dinner and he called," Coalter recalled. "My mom said 'hang up on him' so I did and he called right back."

This is aggressive?

Since there isn't a recruiting station in Tahoe, recruiters from Carson City and Placerville make trips up to the basin. Staff Sgt. Jeremy Funk, an Air Force recruiter in Placerville, hits South Lake Tahoe twice a month. He visits the high school and Lake Tahoe Community College to speak with interested students.

He also asks businesses if he can post a flier describing the benefits of enlisting in the Air Force, such as 100 percent tuition assistance for college and a possible $12,000 signing bonus.

Funk has been working the county for seven months enlisting a dozen future soldiers. It's on target, Funk said, since he works in a rural county and has an expectation of enlisting at least one future soldier a month.

This is aggressive?

Whittell High School graduate Patrick Rafferty decided to join the Navy this year after some indecision. He said $4,000 was pledged to him for signing up although he hasn't received the money. Money for college tuition was also promised.

A recruiter visited his campus but "he really didn't talk me into my decision. I just made it on my own," he said.

He leaves for boot camp Aug. 7.

"I don't like the feeling of being in combat," he said. "I would have probably joined the Army if it wasn't for the war."

None of this is aggressive. These journalists do not know what aggressive is. The kid in the last paragraph was promised a 4,000 bonus for enlisting AND completing his initial training, known as A-School for the navy (AIT for the army, etc). OF COURSE he has not received the money. He still has a chance of getting injured and not being able to commit to the Navy. If we were giving money willy-nilly like this journalist-Field General wants, recruiters would have no such thing as DEP losses. Then it would become a desertion thing. The field general journalist would then cry foul that the military was getting the local police to do their dirty work of getting people into boot camp. We cannot win with these people.

My call to all of the local journalists: spend a day, not a phone call, with your local recruiter. The field guys. Not the Station Commander. Spend it with the guy kissing babies and shaking hands every day. Follow him (or her, don't e-mail me) to see what the street recruiter goes through. From getting people in to getting soldiers out, the days are getting longer and longer, but more and more rewarding.

This week has been nice and long for my office. We have people ready to join, but issues keep coming up. No one is doing well in my area this month. All of the media attention is starting to wear on each of the branches.

Militantpundit posted @ 9:12 AM

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Thursday, July 21, 2005

Good natured ribbing

I love these:

Anyone else have any good political cartoons?

11 pages of RSS feeds from Yahoo yielded no good articles on recruiting. It seems that the fresh meat of the Army missing mission is now stale and the journalists have moved on.

Militantpundit posted @ 10:33 PM

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Monday, July 11, 2005

More "stay away from my kid!" version 1.2

So.

I wonder how many times this stuff is going to kick up before it sparkles and fades.

I love mis-information. I wish I had this laundry list of info on a kid. (bolded will be what we are required to receive from schools)

The new database will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., a private database marketing firm, and will include the following information for each student: name, date of birth, gender, address, Social Security number, e-mail address, ethnicity, telephone number, grade point average, education level (by proxy, we only get seniors and we know what year they grad), name of college attending, and any relevant information about expressions of interest in enlisting in the military.

If I could get every e-mail address of every student, I would not call a single person. I would be an e-mailing foo'! If I had an SSN on each person, well, I would do anything different. You can pretty much guess gender.

And the conclusion:

International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011

Support Mumia Abu-Jamal: http://www.millions4mumia.org/

Who is this dipstick? He is a cop killer. You can argue what you want, but he was the REASON that a cop was killed. He was shot and a cop what shot while he was in a fight with said cop. If he pulled the trigger matters not in the same way that the lefties want to blame Bush for... well... everything. If this cop killer did this in 1978? Why hasn't be been on the receiving end of a lethal injection when he is on Death Row? Don't ask me.

Militantpundit posted @ 10:16 PM

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Does anyone with a brain live in San Francisco?

Goodness.

I am sick of this line:

"Wiping away tears, Sheehan said that the recruiter who persuaded her son to join the Army four years earlier promised Casey he would never see combat and reneged on most of the signing bonus he was guaranteed."

I call Bull. A bonus is written in a contract. That contract will either say you get a bonus or you don't. It also has a block that is WELL explained which verifies that the contract is full and correct, that all verbal promises are written in the contract. If you initial that block, then you are saying that the contract is correct. The recruiter does not guarantee you anything. MEPS and the processors who write up your contract guarantees you things set out by the Dept of (insert branch). If the contract is in error, you have the option of getting out of your contract, accepting the error and continuing in the service, or trying to force the branch to obligate themselves to the contract.

I have never seen or heard of anyone getting screwed out of a deal with the military. If you only get 50% of your bonus up front and the rest over x number of years, then that is the deal. That is what you signed up for. IF you do not obligate to your end of the contract, you do not get the rest of your money. Period. You have to do the time to get paid. Simple as that. I smell a rat in her story.

There are so many other things in this story that I could pick apart, but I am tired tonight. It is all the same counter recruitment crap that is trying to get a foothold. My guess is that it will stop at the end of the summer.

I am going to do my best over the summer to piss off each and every activist parent on my list of schools. I urge each and every recruiter out here with me to get on your cold call lists and hit them up. Lets get to 100% contact of your senior market before school starts.

Militantpundit posted @ 9:52 PM

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I guess the NG needs that girl after all

Wow...

I had no idea. 20 months straight of missing mission nationally. Holy batpoop Batman!

The NG is behind significantly because their recruiters are not trained how to recruit during a war where they are being used. It is as simple as that. They are still selling from the late 90's playbook. The playbook that says that if you join the NG, you will not go to war, you will get college cash and be a weekend warrior.

Kids are not that dumb. IF they are told they are going to defend their country and then get to come back and go to college, I am sure that the guard would not miss it's missions nationally. The guard is doing well here. The local armory is not down any troops.

Oh boy. I bet the news media is going to have a field day with this one.

Militantpundit posted @ 9:44 PM

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Sunday, July 10, 2005

The NG is on a girl's ass!

Woo!

Linky

This dumbass girl. She was drilling and getting paid every month by the PaNG. Then, magically (I bet once her unit received a deployment assignment) she claims that the recruiter lied and she vanished. Now, in an unprecedented move (at least to an active duty recruiter) they put a warrant out on her ass! God I would KILL to do that.

I cannot confirm or deny that a cop buddy of mine has accompanied me on a home shipping visit. The thought was that we would both open our back doors and give the ultimatum of "choose a seat". It turned out that the kid was ready for Boot Camp. Thank goodness.

Militantpundit posted @ 12:41 AM

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More haters

I love this stuff.

Military Families Speak Out is back at it again, this time in Unemployment RIDDEN Michigan. With over 7% of Michigan out of work, these Momrons (I coined that yesterday, you can all use it in your daily life if you choose, just give me credit. I accept cash or paypal) want their kids to stay at home, just to live off of the system.

Momron in action... "Oh, no. He's not going," Diane Oleksyn, 40, said of her 17-year-old son, Brandon Benson. "He's my hockey player. He's going to be a Red Wing."

Wait for it....

Wait....

Idiots. Both her and her son. He is going to be a Red Wing my ass. He needs to get his JUMP WINGS. Or his Air Warfare wings.

I bet I can call the local recruiting office there, and the kid has sent in lead card after lead card. He wants to be in just like his brother, who is a Marine. Good luck bud.

Militantpundit posted @ 12:40 AM

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Used War Salesman... I think NOT

I am getting a little pissed off with the Chickenhawk crap.

For those of you who do not know, a chickenhawk is someone who is for the war, but will not volunteer themselves or their children for the conflict.

This page went a little too far... I am no used war salesman.

What is the obsession with Jenna Bush being on the front line? Can someone tell me? The freaking News went batshit crazy when a suicide bomber came along side a convoy and killed 5 female marines and a female Navy Medic. Do these sick bastards want more women killed in combat? Oh... It is ok if it is some rich, snotty person who is killed, gender be damned. If it is a dirt grunt from the Red State South it does the media no good, therefore, it seems to me, they do not care.

You show me a puff piece on CNN about the Iraq war, and I will show you a nice, crisp, 1 dollar bill.

Any Takers?

Militantpundit posted @ 12:03 AM

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Quotey Quote Quotes

This is going to be a list of quotes that I find that show me the thoughts in Journalists minds.

"I have no qualms about saying my daughter won't fight, nor does she. The Bush administration justified the war with rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction that didn't make sense at the time and has since been proven exaggerated, if not outright bogus." The Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Just a list of drivel from some folks near Minneapolis, Captain Ed from Captain's Quarters needs to smarten up some of his neighbors.

Well crap. It is the weekend and there are not that many links to good stuff. I will find more later.

Enjoy what is left of your weekend!

Militantpundit posted @ 12:01 AM

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Saturday, July 02, 2005

Sniffing out the politics

Some Soldier's Mom posted a comment that got me thinking last night. I started replying to it but I decided to make it into a post.

Why are parents pissed about schools giving their kids info to the military? Really? The schools give a list of their students to local governments for safety in case a student goes missing, a fire, etc. Schools get paid large sums of money to provide their school lists to colleges and universities that SPAM THE PISS out of you. The schools are not the local yoko schools either. Using 8 years ago data, the schools were places that no one has ever heard of, universities that have only been around for 3 or so years, etc. I understand marketing. I understand that they need people too. But come on.

Then there is the list to the local recruiter. It costs me nothing (now) with the NCLB. We are required to have three things according to the NCLB: student's name, addy and phone. No SSN, nothing else. Some schools are a little "liberal" with what they give us. I have one school that will print out the entire 9-12 list with mom's name, dad's name, ssn, everything that the school knows about the student.

So why is it ok for the universities to have the info and the recruiters cannot? Here is my guess. M.O.N.E.Y. Mr Larry Sykes from this post has been outed. He is not just some local crony military dude like they wanted you to believe. He is the freaking Toledo public schools president as noted on this site. What the hell? So he is pushing saying "I think it comes down to dollars and cents for the recruiters," when it smells to me that it is dollars and cents TO THE SCHOOL DISTRICT.

The jackasses that own this press release are a front organization. They are a front for a company called Working Assets, which from this page you find this paragraph (I will hand it to them, they at least put it at the top)

Working Assets was established in 1985 to help busy people make a difference in the world through everyday activities like talking on the phone. Every time a customer uses one of Working Assets' donation-linked services (Long Distance, Wireless and Credit Card), the company donates a portion of the charges to nonprofit groups working to build a world that is more just, humane, and environmentally sustainable. To date, over $47 million has been raised for progressive causes.

Who are these "progressive causes" you say?

Since 1985, Working Assets has generated over $47 million for progressive nonprofits, including Greenpeace, Oxfam America, Rainforest Action Network, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, ACLU and People for the American Way, among many others.

Each year Working Assets supports nonprofit groups in five categories: Economic & Social Justice, Environment, Civil Rights, Peace & International Freedom and Education and Freedom of Expression. In 2004 alone, Working Assets raised nearly $7 million in donations for worthy causes.

What the hell is this? The ACLU? Jay, get on these guys! We at least have a by proxy link between the ACLU and anti-recruitment now. I am on the asses of the Board of Directors of this working assets place. The first one is Lawrence Litvak. This dood is the manager for Working Assets, and also the treasurer at the Tides Center. Check out how the Tide's Center gets money to all of the people that are left and in power in this country.

The CEO's name is Laura Scher. Her hands touch salesforce.com as well. So if you are planning on using that company, don't. Beth Sawi is also on the board. She is not really a nutjob, that I can find.

Oh wow. Lookie what I found. BuyBlue.org is a website that has a list of all companies that donate to the left. Make sure you take a look at it prior to buying stuff from a new company. They want you to use it to buy blue, but at least you can buy red as well.

I will have to work on this more as the weekend goes along.

Militantpundit posted @ 9:21 AM

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