What? GOP Reps Propose US Military Benefits To Americans In ISRAELI Military!
Two Republican US Representatives have submitted a bill that would extend the same benefits provided to US military servicemembers and veterans to American citizens who choose to serve in the Israeli military. This at a time when US vets find themselves out in the cold when it comes to getting the care and benefits they were promised. Also today: F-35 fighters are stacking up at Lockheed factories as the Pentagon says "no, thank you" to purchasing them. Also today, Bill Maher defends Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today with Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Good.
Ready to solve a problem.
Well, I hope so.
I hope there's at least one left over for us.
A lot of people out there fighting these, you know, runaway government.
At least you hear noise.
But I think our job will be available if that's what we think our responsibility is.
I think we'll have something to do for a while longer.
So, but today, another insult to sanity.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
And this headline caught our attention.
And here it says, GOP representatives want to want same benefits for Americans serving in Israel's army.
Serving Israel.
Well, I know our position is if you're a volunteer, you want to just leave the country and go over and be in the army, you do it on your own nickel.
Yeah.
And your own risk.
But this is a little bit different than this.
This means that once they go, I guess whether they're in the army already or not, they are serving the benefits of Israel.
But they're now wanting, and two members of Congress introduced legislation that they should get every equivalent benefit, co-benefits, and when they return and all these things, the side benefit.
So it's just another insult, I think, to what happens when there's not a concept of sovereignty.
Sovereignty should limit these things, but if you live in a free society and a republic, you solve the problems of people who might not want to follow all the others and the leaders and what wars you want to fight that libertarians say, well, if you want to go and help the Palestinians or want to help Israel, it's up to you.
But don't come crawling to us and say, oh, we're coming home and we just got fired and we want all our benefits protected and added on if necessary.
So I don't know if you have a couple good things to say about this, but I don't think you're going to be super excited about what's happening.
Yeah, I mean, this is breaking all over TwitterX today.
So many people are talking about it.
And our good friend Kelly Vlajos wrote a piece about it for Responsible Statecraft, if we can put it up.
And this is the article you referenced, Dr. Paul.
GOP reps want same benefits for Americans serving in Israeli Army.
And she starts out by saying, it might sound like something out of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, or for more modern twists, Seinfeld's Bizarro World.
Two Republican congressmen introduced legislation that would extend the same employment protections to Americans serving in the Israeli Army as Americans who leave work and home to serve in the U.S. military.
And as you point out, there's never been a problem as far as we're concerned, as far as you're concerned.
If you, for example, look at the fighting in Ukraine, maybe you're of Ukrainian background, what have you, whatever the case, if you want to go over there and fight for the Ukrainians, go for it, you know.
And the same is true with Israel or any other country, you know, and a lot of Americans do.
A lot of Americans have been killed in Ukraine fighting as mercenaries.
But this is very, very different in that essentially it melds the military of the U.S. with the military of Israel.
So if you're an American citizen and you don't like what's happening in the Middle East, a lot of people don't, and you go and, you know, say you're working in a factory somewhere.
You're going to go and join the military, not of your own country, but of Israel.
Well, if you go to the next clip, this legislation, if it passes, will give you the same benefits as the person, say, next door who went down to the recruiter and signed up to fight for the United States.
Now, this is from Kelly's piece.
She said the legislation would, according to lawmakers, amend Title 38 of the United States Code and the Service Members Civil Relief Act to include American citizens, including Israeli dual citizens, who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.
This Service Menders Civil Relief Act allows protections against foreclosure, default judgment in legal cases, repossession of rental property or leases, and hiked interest rates while an individual is serving.
The amendment would also extend these IDF soldiers protections under the Uniformed Services, Employment and Re-Employment Rights Act, which extends civilian job rights and benefits for veterans, members of reserve components, and even individuals by the President of the United States to provide federal response for national emergencies.
Essentially what it means is if you leave your job, if this passes and you leave your job as a baker working in a bakery and you go fight for a foreign country, when you come back, that bakery has to hold that job for you.
So it's a huge burden on American businesses.
You know, and this gets a little bit confusing because I'm sure some of the individuals that have chosen to go this route aren't necessarily un-American.
I mean, they see themselves as being dedicated Americans helping their ally that they want to help.
And yet, they really are creating a situation where there's almost like dual loyalties, you know, because I don't think they go deliberately because, you know, we're supposed to be on the same side.
But I think there's an increased risk to American sovereignty because, you know, these individuals, they may have been in the service, maybe they want to go into the service and whatnot.
And here they're in another service.
But that's the mess with interventionism because we're already mixing these benefits and the troops who are there.
It's one thing and significant.
But what about the dollars that we send over there, the whole, you know, to Israel?
We send billions and billions of dollars, and that's a big deal.
And I'm sure our special forces are involved in every potential and every military operation in the country.
And that's been going on for decades.
That's part of the routine.
And also, you know, CIA agents and getting information to pass on to our friends are always involved.
But then if these individuals they go over that are American citizens, they may be easily identified.
They might be increased to be as a target to be a refugee, to be arrested from and used as a divvying up.
We'll trade, we'll trade with you.
Hostages.
I don't, I don't, well, because I don't like the war and I don't like all the financing and all that we do.
It's easy for me to say this is all one more complication from us not obeying the rules about when we should be at war.
And this, we should not be.
And they say, well, we're not at war.
It was a no good to no troops on the ground.
We just get around that.
But that's the problem.
You get involved differently.
I would say that if you supply all the military information and all the money and all the weapons, you're pretty much at war.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the other thing, and I think he mentioned it yesterday, is how American veterans are having a difficult time accessing all the benefits they were promised.
They're finding that the well is dry when they come to it and they need something.
So, this seems like a real insult to American veterans.
And I wonder if the U.S. veterans groups are going to speak out against this.
But the other thing, here, let's actually look at the bill because in case people think that we are exaggerating this, this is the actual legislation.
If you go to that next clip, and you're going to have to increase it a little bit.
But anyway, section 4336, treatment of service in Israeli Defense Forces.
For the purpose of this chapter, to the extent practicable, the service of a citizen of the United States in the Israeli Defense Forces shall be treated in the same manner as service in the uniformed services.
So that's exactly what these two representatives have suggested with this legislation.
So it's treated just like Americans, I guess.
See, the motivation for this is similar to the motivation in hysteria after 9-11.
It was terrorism.
We can do anything we need to do, and no limitations.
We're always fighting terrorists.
So the one congressman that is pushing for this support, Max Miller from Ohio, and he's quote, I'm quoting him.
He says, I'm proud that this legislation extends important protections to those Americans who choose to risk their lives in the fight against terror.
So this is the moral justification.
And they may have other ones.
And maybe this is truly their belief.
But, you know, I think that word has been stretched a long time.
You know, there's always a terrorist involved.
And another reason why we have to spend another $10 billion.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a big problem.
And we have, you've mentioned Max Miller from Ohio.
He's up from Cahaga Falls, I think, area.
But the other one is Representative Guy Reschenthaler from Pennsylvania, two Republicans from the essentially, I guess, Midwest you'd almost call it, who are putting in this legislation.
He says it'll ensure we do everything possible to support those heroes who are standing with Israel.
Now, you can applaud Americans that would go over there.
You can feel proud if one of your family members went over to fight.
But the idea that they're treated the same as an American service member, I think most Americans, unless I'm really out of touch, would find that rather insulting.
And in fact, if you can go to that next clip, this is back to Kelly's article.
I just wanted to show one more thing in Kelly's.
Now, Brian Mast, he's a Republican from Florida.
He caused a stir in October, shortly after the Hamas attacks on October 7th, when he showed up for work on the floor of the House wearing his Israeli Defense Forces uniform.
Quote, this is what he said.
As the only member to serve with both the United States Army and the Israeli Defense Forces, I will always stand with Israel.
Mast wrote in a post alongside several photos of him wearing the uniform.
So literally, the members that we elect and we pay to represent Americans in our House of Representatives wearing four military uniforms in the House.
That's a bit of slip of the tongue because he only mentioned one country.
He's in the bowl, but he only mentioned one country he was protecting.
I know.
Very strange.
Very strange guys.
So we'll see.
But I think this is, I just kind of think they've stepped too far.
And I think, I mean, I hope these guys lose their elections.
They deserve to do that.
But I think, you know, I think people are going to, even people who support Israel will say, you know, this is really a bridge too far.
So we'll see.
Well, the next one we're going to talk about, another bridge too far, is called the F-35.
Turn on this next one.
We got this on Zero Hedge.
It was on yesterday.
Lockheed is running out of parking spaces, Dr. Paul, for the F-35s that the Pentagon refuses to accept.
Do you think this is the first time we've mentioned this?
I guess we've been talking about it for a long time.
Not as long as they've been building the airplane.
It took a while before people woke up.
In the early years, there were warnings in the early years by some dedicated people that were working on it.
But it's been going on for 22 years.
I think it's $2 trillion they've spent.
That's all.
That's all.
And it's something that is sort of weird.
You're getting the attention.
They've run out of parking places.
So what are we going to do now?
But then when you start thinking about it, they've already spent the United States is up for $2 trillion.
But the planes, the planes still are owned by the United States.
It's just that, you know, we're responsible for that because the military for the United States, they don't even want them.
And they'll say we're crowded, but they're crowded because there's no big desire for them.
And you know, they're not beyond, you know, if all of a sudden they were pretty good planes and we just decided to change our foreign policy, we don't need so many, and they're up for sale.
If they were good airplanes, I would think there'd be a market for them.
Besides a discount big time.
We could get one.
Well, the story is it's a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
And the report came out showing that the Lockheed Martin factory is running out of parking spaces for all of these completed F-35s that the Pentagon refuses to accept.
We say, well, why would they refuse them?
They're the ones that they're planes.
Well, the DOD put a complete freeze on accepting these stealth fighters until Lockheed fixes huge hardware and software problems associated with the technology, refresh, et cetera, et cetera.
So basically, these planes, and if you read the article, they're having to reboot the computer in flight because it would just spark out.
It's kind of like sometimes we have in the studio.
You get an old computer and it doesn't work.
So can you imagine if you're up there in a dogfight?
You're like, oh, I got to hit reset.
I've got to reset my computer.
Hang on, Russians.
Don't shoot yet.
I've got to reset my computer.
But do we have to give Lockheed some credit for being good business managers?
Because they have done quite well.
22 years they've been in business.
They had one or two cost overruns a year or something.
All this.
And they have given, they've increased the dividends to Lockheed every year in 22 years, and all they had was negative information.
You know, you think somebody's controlling the media or somebody's controlling the pocketbook.
What a tragedy.
When someday they added up on how many people are really going to be suffering, and there's a lot of suffering already, you know, from the economic problems that we have created, and they're going to get worse.
You say, well, why did we do this back here?
Why did we do this?
Good question.
Every American should ask them, why did you?
Because if enough American people woke up, they could do something about it.
Then all of a sudden start running for Congress on this issue.
Paying The Price00:02:55
But no, they run on it trying to expand the benefits for this mischief.
I'd be interested in seeing how many members of the House and how many senators are owning Lockheed stock.
Those dividends go up every year and they keep going.
They're kind of embarrassing people.
They're doing well.
Well, here's a couple more little tidbits from the article.
If you can skip the next one and go to the one starting in the meantime, the next clip, this is from the piece.
In the meantime, don't bother asking for the specific number of undelivered F-35s.
In a lack of transparency that's surely driven solely by a desire to shield the military industrial complex from embarrassment, the DOD has deemed reporting the specific quantity of aircraft unsuitable for public release.
The chairman of the House Armed Service, Armed Services, Tactical AIR and land forces Subcommittee gave reporters a strong hint last week.
This is uh representative Bob Whitman.
He said we know one thing for certain, it's got to be at least over 100 aircraft stacked up on the tarmac.
100 aircraft stacked on the tarmac.
Nobody wants because they don't work very well.
A good investment, maybe the value will go up as the years go on.
What is what a tragedy it is.
It's all motivated by a stupid economic foreign policy system, because the foreign policy said that we're the king, king of the hill and it's our moral responsibility to police the world and you'd never have to worry about paying for it because we have the reserve currency in the world.
We can do it and there will be some inflation someday, but we can pass that on to either to the next generation or to the current generation.
I don't like it that people say it all has to be paid by the next generation, which is true there will be.
But I say they're still.
They're already paying, because every time you hear a complaint, you know about the economy and paying bills, and there was a report yesterday I think it was how many people are unemployed, and they were never counted.
You know they don't even have a job.
You know that and yet the unemployment rate is three percent, you know doesn't show up in the reports.
They must not be filling out the paperwork or something.
Well, the final thing on this and we talked about this several weeks ago when we talked to the F-35 last time, a report, a different GAO report, showing that only 15 to 30 percent of the F-35s are capable of combat.
So even if you have them delivered, only 15 to 30 percent, at best one in three is capable of actually doing something in combat.
You know there was a story in here that made me nervous, just reading it, that you can imagine how much electronic stuff is on the airplane and the whole thing went out and the pilot had to fly the airplane, probably with a lot less information, and he had to reboot the whole system and he was able to do that and land.
Bill Maher's Independence00:06:34
You know that is he was thinking about, where are my, where's my emergency exercise?
Yeah no kidding, crazy.
Well, they're good at wasting money.
Let's do our last uh show and it's a little bit uplifting, I think, our last little segment, and this is Bill Maher, and you've had some experience with Bill Maher and he's getting a lot of flack from the left.
And put up that next clip.
This is from FOX, but Bill Maher defends Harrison Butker amid speech uproar.
The quote, I don't see what the big crime is.
What Bill Maher said about this yeah no, I.
I sort of have a soft spot in my heart for Bill Maher because he is seen as a lefty, and he is yeah, but he does think for himself and he's independent.
Money, he's comfortable with himself.
And people who have to always follow the line and and shout all this nonsense I think they're insecure, you know, and that's what they have to.
I see him as a little bit differently, but I don't.
I'm not even positive.
It was probably in 08.
He had me on his show.
And I didn't know much about him.
Everybody said, he's a lefty.
He's a lefty.
I said, I don't know.
That's okay.
And so when he got me on there, he gave me a rough time.
I don't know what he picked on.
Maybe it was food stamps or something.
One thing was he was unhappy with my beliefs.
And he sounded like he was anti-libertarian.
And I couldn't believe it.
But a week later, he calls back.
This is why I have a little soft spot in his heart because he's an independent.
He calls back to the office and said, we want to get Ron back on the program.
We think he's the best candidate because he went and read the foreign policy.
He was excited about that.
But you have to, how many reporters do that?
You know, he had a streak of honesty, which is totally absent.
That's why it's exciting to hear something from him.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, here's what he said on his show.
Put out that next clip.
Because, you know, Harrison Butler is the kicker.
He's now the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs.
And he went to a private Catholic school and he gave a commencement speech that triggered a lot of people, especially on the left.
They flipped out over it.
The NFL, of course, being spineless as they are, one of the reasons I don't watch football anymore is they criticized him.
They attacked the guy for saying this, for speaking out at a private Christian school.
Anyway, here's what Marr said.
I can't express how much this guy is not like me, he said during a panel discussion.
He's religious.
He loves marriage.
He loves kids.
And now history's greatest, he's now history's greatest monster.
Mark continues.
Again, I don't agree with much this guy, but I don't get the thing.
He said, some of you go on to lead successful careers in the world.
Okay, that seems fairly like modern, quote.
But I would venture to guess the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into the world, end quote.
And here's Marr.
I don't see what the big crime is.
I really don't.
You know, what I sense in this, which I write into sometimes what I want to hear.
But I see this as an individual who knew something about natural law and a higher law because he didn't go along with the status quo and all this nonsense and fall on the rules.
Here he has 150,000 people joining this thing and say, you need to fire him.
You need to fire him.
Cancel him.
He said something we don't believe in.
What is it?
Like that, men should be strong and represent something.
And I think it's the people that get so upset or real insecure with evaluating themselves, and yet that's what they want to do.
They want to attack the person that's pointing this out.
But I just think that when you listen to his speech, he wasn't drawing on some regulation or something the government said or some program.
He was just drawing mostly on common sense and goodness, you know, and it made sense to him.
And he didn't have moral beliefs.
But that's what a higher law does.
It tries to draw people back to something that is natural and moral.
It's been around a while.
That whole sense has been here as long as they've written history.
But a lot of people get lulled into this is you have to go along with what you learn in college and what you learned in school.
And you can't buck the trend.
Besides, I don't want canceled.
I have a job to do.
So I don't know.
This will be an interesting story.
I don't know whether there's any chance that they would fire him.
Look how many they tried to fire because they wouldn't take the shot.
Good football players.
About getting fired because you didn't want to run track as a girl against men.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Oh, boy, you are really an evil person.
You mean you want to be fair?
Yeah.
And all the girls didn't join up with the person that did that.
None of them should do it.
Well, yeah, good on Marr.
You know, he's an old-fashioned liberal.
No, we don't agree with him on everything by a long shot, but he's an old-fashioned liberal.
Hey, I don't agree with the guy, but why is everyone freaking out over it?
That's how it used to be kind of the normal, you know?
I mean, anyway.
Well, we've recognized the progressive streak in the Democratic Party has been around for a long time, but it's pretty weak right now.
But when they pop up, we usually talk about them in a very positive way.
And it's to me a shame that, you know, we noticed a change from the time we were in Washington to now that it's harder to find an ally on the Democratic side there.
It's locked into, you know, this bickering and hatred, hatred.
Both sides, you know, do this.
It's all so nonsense.
And it's also political power is a driving force in Washington.
Also, most of the progressives that have done well are very rich.
Yeah, they do well.
They do well by doing well.
Well, anyway, I'm going to thank everyone for watching the show today.
We appreciate it.
And please come back and see us.
And Dr. Paul, up to you.
Very good.
I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today.
And I don't know how many more times we'll talk about the F-35, but I imagine we'll talk about it again.
One Catch to the F-3500:01:49
But it's so symbolic of the idiocy of the way we as a country and as a people and as a government go along with this and end up spending trillions and trillions of dollars over a 22-year period to a company.
And, you know, we think it's part of the military-industrial complex.
It keeps making billions of dollars.
And every year they get an increase in their benefits and their dividends.
So this to me is so bad.
We need to wake up and say, you know, that's not believed that you have to have the government for the distribution of wealth.
The one thing that I liked the most when I was talking to a lot of young people is they seem to really receive the explanation and the issue of just personal liberty.
They like that.
Yeah, you can do what you want.
You can do this and this.
And yeah, no, I don't want any laws against marijuana.
You know, the whole works.
But you're up for it.
I don't even want the government to come and take your money.
That's yours.
You earned it.
And they like that.
I said, but there's one catch to this.
And this is one I thought that they would get very upset.
I said, there's one catch that if things don't go well and you get your freedom and you don't do well for any reason, you can't crawl and go to the government and tell your government official, your congressman, look, I need some help, and my neighbors doing a lot better than I am.
So I want you to go and get some stuff because I need it.
And you know what?
Basically, the young people were willing to accept that because they never heard much talk about what it would be like to live in a free society.