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.