Nobody's Business

Hellcat

For the love of God! They gave this cat an honorary plaque — when what it clearly needs is a good exorcism. Begone, spawn of Lucifer!

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live. "He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. ...

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses. After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Cops: "That Lying Whore! Oh, Never Mind."

Priceless:

BRADENTON, FL — When a convicted prostitute said a police officer supplied her with drugs and money for sex, and that she had sex with another officer in an undercover vehicle, police and city officials were stunned. Nobody wanted to believe her. Investigators found the woman in the Manatee County jail and hooked her up to a polygraph machine — evidence that is not allowed in court but is routinely used when the police investigate their own. The questions police asked Dawn Marie Gibson were simple and direct. Her answers rattled the department, and documents released Wednesday indicate that Gibson told the truth about sexual liaisons with former Bradenton officers. 

On-duty police officers getting it on with prostitutes — I'm shocked, shocked.

There's just no precedent for that kind of thing, you know?

BONUS: If you have the stomach, check out the website Bad Cop No Donut (now defunct, I believe), where one measly three-month period yielded 70 cases, culled from the news, of North American police officers perpetrating sex crimes. And that's not just the rape or sexual coercion of prostitutes and strippers — not by a long shot. In fact, that strong stomach will come in handy when you realize that most of the cops' sexual assaults (in the BCND sample) were on minors.

Of course, these are only the incidents that (a) came to light and (b) were picked up by the website in question.

I wonder if, once you know the ratio of police officers to citizens, and once you know how many serious sex crimes are committed by those citizens vs. the number committed by our badged protectors, it's the cops who turn out to be the bigger sex fiends, or regular people. Anyone have the answer?

Don't Know Much About Geography

I have never been to Denmark — regrettably: I hear it's a fine country — and probably couldn't tell Danish from (say) Swedish or Finnish if my life depended on it. I imagine there are millions of Danish people who have never visited my country of birth, the Netherlands, and presumably they nonetheless lead rich and fulfilling lives.

Somehow though, in many Americans' minds — even those who've had the benefit of a higher education — the two countries are not only similar, but identical. And frankly, the conflation is beginning to confound a little.

Take the coda to Christopher Hitchens' recent Slate piece, an ignorant little addition that was no doubt written by an editor, not Hitchens. It points to a related Slate article about "the Dutch cartoon controversy."

Oy. The often violent (and in any event out-of-proportion) Muslim response to the cartoons was world news through much of last year. The phrase "Danish cartoons" (yep, D-a-n-i-s-h) made it into tens of thousands of press articles and blog posts. Remember?

Slate doesn't, I guess. (By the way, the article was published more than three weeks ago, and the fuckup still hasn't been corrected.)

I don't mean to be peevish or pedantic about this. Nor do I claim it's a one-way street. Surely there are legions of Europeans who'll be surprised to hear that Washington State is not the seat of the U.S. government, or that our southernmost state is Hawaii rather than California or Florida.

So here's the deal: If I apologize on behalf of those know-nothing Europeans, could you please help spread the bedeviling truth that the Danes don't actually grow tulips; and that the Dutch, sadly, can't claim a major presence in Macbeth? That Anne Frank didn't pen her diary in a Copenhagen attic; and that Hans Christian Andersen never knew the pleasures of living in Amsterdam, being quite content in his own city, 600 miles further north? Also, that the Netherlands (or Holland, if you prefer) is in fact not even part of Scandinavia?

Dank u wel. Or, as the Danes might say, tak. And if that's all Greek to you, may I kindly suggest this?

Are You Dead? Let the Government Help.

Federal welfare for entrepreneurs? Terrible idea. Down with it!

Federal welfare for entrepreneurs who happen to be farmers? A thousand times yes! Open the floodgates of generosity, and let not death disturb the gushing forth of taxpayers' dollars!

The Agriculture Department sent $1.1 billion in farm payments to more than 170,000 dead people over a seven-year period, congressional investigators say. ... Of the identified payments to deceased farmers' estates or businesses, 40 percent went to those who had been dead more than three years, and 19 percent went to those who had been dead for seven or more years. 

I'll bet those dead people were dumb enough to have paid for their own funerals, although Uncle Sam could easily have done it for them, as these corpses found out.

More fiscally prudent behavior by Agriculture Department employees (free lingerie! gratis concert tickets!) this way.

"I Take Full Responsibility, Kind Of"

Assistant Secretary of State Maura Harty wants you to know she's sorry for being incompetent.

"Over the past several months, many travelers who applied for a passport did not receive their document in time for their planned travel. I deeply regret that,'' says Assistant Secretary of State Maura Harty, who is in charge of U.S. passports. "I accept complete responsibility for this.''

You will scour the rest of the AP story in vain for what Harty means by taking "complete responsibility" for the passport fiasco, a federal mini-scandal that, for throngs of citizens, resulted in

...destroyed summer vacations, ruined wedding and honeymoon plans and disrupted business meetings and education plans. People lost workdays waiting in lines or thousands of dollars in nonrefundable travel deposits.

Does Harty's brave 'the buck stops here' stance mean that her professional failings will have (shudder) actual consequences? Will she take a pay cut? A voluntary suspension? Next time she needs a passport, will she insist on having her application delayed until she's missed at least two trips? Can we expect her to flagellate herself on the Washington Mall with a cat o' nine tails?

There's something distinctly dishonorable, disingenuous, and off-putting about public officials taking "full responsibility" as long as they fail to back it up with some sort of self-imposed sanction.

It's heroism without sacrifice; contrition without sincerity; guilt without conscience.

A couple of weeks ago, essayist Meghan Daum, writing in the L.A. Times, absolutely nailed it.

The "full responsibility" phrase has been uttered with such astonishing frequency by people who mean precisely its opposite that it's become conversational filler, a throat-clearing noise so inconsequential that most listeners forget that they heard it as quickly as the speaker forgets that he said it.

Then, after presenting a rogues' gallery of faux responsbility-takers, from George W. Bush to that criminal weasel Rep. Bob Ney, Daum ended on this delicious crescendo:

"I take full responsibility" is simultaneously over the top and utterly inadequate, allowing self-aggrandizement to distract from the actual wrongdoing. By elevating mere responsibility to full responsibility, failings are transformed into bragging rights.

As far as I'm concerned, Maura Harty's best atonement for her subpar job performance would be to learn Daum's spot-on column by heart, and to then quote it indefatigably among her Beltway brethren until they've all internalized the lesson.

A Skull Is a Terrible Thing To Waste

Weird:

A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head — yet lives a completely normal life. Scans of the man's brain show the huge fluid-filled chamber and the thin sheet of actual brain tissue. ... [T]he man, who works as a civil servant in southern France, has succeeded in living an entirely normal life despite a huge fluid-filled cavity taking up most of the space where his brain should be.

By the way, he works for the tax office. Got puns?

[hat tip: Fark]

Proposal: an Equal Service Amendment

I want to see a constitutional amendment ensuring that the President and Vice-President, plus every member of the Cabinet and every member of Congress, will ponder the personal consequences of sending U.S. soldiers into battle. So from now on, when declaring or authorizing war, they must dispatch at least one close family member to serve 12 months in combat operations on the front line (fewer if the war is over before the tour of duty ends).

It'll be part of their oath of office.

Chances are, with that measure in place, our country wouldn't be getting into pre-emptive wars of choice. Think of it as a national insurance policy against rashness; against intelligence skulduggery à la the Gulf of Tonkin or Saddam's non-existent WMDs; and against the kind of might-is-right international aggression for which America, unfortunately, has fast acquired a reputation.

And if we did end up embroiled in a serious military conflict — as we will and probably must from time to time — our troops would quickly get the tools they need (such as IED-resistant patrol vehicles). After all, Congress and the President would truly do everything in their power to keep their loved ones in uniform from harm.

It seems to me that the [ahem] beauty of the idea is not just its populist appeal but its simplicity (OK, the two are related). No ponderous study is needed to arrive at an answer. No geopolitical considerations must be weighed. No gray areas are evident. And no partisanship intrudes, as the new law would apply to Democrats and Republicans equally, regardless of who's in power. It's a straightforward up-or-down issue, a simple binary choice.

Here's a draft of the all-important question: "A new Constitutional Amendment proposes that when federal lawmakers, the President, the Vice-President, and their Cabinet decide to wage war, it's no longer just ordinary citizens who'll be asked to wear the uniform. Each of these public servants would have to designate a close family member for combat duty. Do you agree or disagree?"

I'd wager that if you polled people with that, it won't be much of a dilemma: at least three-quarters would be in favor. If that's the case, then we're collectively armed with a powerful fact — evidence of a popular groundswell — that allows us to hold cabinet members' and congresscritters' feet to the fire, not to mention the occupant of the Oval Office. They get to explain, time and again and until they declare their public support for the amendment, why they're happy to put your and my kids at mortal risk, but not their own.

I know, you'd need a supermajority to pass a constitutional amendment, and even without that hurdle, it's not very likely that lawmakers will vote against their own interests, against their relatives' safety.

But I don't think it matters much. If the long-term feasibility of such a proposal is uncertain, the short-term benefit isn't in doubt. Lawmakers and presidential candidates who are against the amendment instantly expose themselves as hypocrites of the first order — elitists several times worse than the Let Them Eat Bread royals of yore. They oppose or ignore the amendment at their own political peril. The electorate will surely make mincemeat of any politician whose actions (or lack thereof) betray a disturbing lack of interest for the safety of voters' family members, especially when these public servants essentially declare their own sons and daughters, and other close relatives, too good to go to war.

Details will need to be worked out. It's a potential legal obstacle that the amendment would create a special class of recruits — reluctant ones who did not volunteer for duty. Constitutional scholars will have to weigh in on that one. Who and what constitutes a close family member would have to be defined, as would the consequences for politicians who, when the time comes, fail to comply with the amendment. Censure (and automatic impeachment for the President and Vice-President) ought to be on the table, as far as I'm concerned.

We could call the new law the Fair and Equal Service Amendment (FESA), a name that makes up in invulnerability (who'd be against fair and equal service?) what it lacks in catchiness.

I'm dead serious here — at least dead serious about thinking about it... If you believe you can help with insights, ideas, polling, web design and promotion services, organizational talent, donations, possible fundraising, and what have you, drop me a line.

With any luck, this could be a real Netroots phenomenon. And it's going to be fun. Let's get the party started.

Prez to Fly in Style, Tells Troops to Drop Dead

Admirable as the USA Today investigation is (see the post below this one), I wish the paper had published a little sidebar comparing the glacial pace of the armored-vehicles procurement program to the speed with which the White House will get its fleet of 23 brand new executive VH-71 helicopters. The birds are to be used to transport the president as well as visiting dignitaries.

So let me do the honors instead.

First this: The VH-71 designers, rightly, haven't skimped on safety or luxury. Of course, it all comes at considerable expense. Last year, as I wrote at the time, the presidential helicopters were scheduled to cost 6.1 billion dollars — "for now," I added. And sure enough: the current projected budget overrun is reported to be 34 percent.

By comparison, the IED-deflecting armored trucks known as MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) cost 

...between $600,000 and $1 million, though some foreign models cost only about $200,000 in 2004.

Let's say that's an average of half a million dollars, including a few shipments of those foreign-made trucks. If the fancy presidential helicopters end up costing taxpayers eight billion dollars, that's the equivalent of 16,000 MRAPs, an amount several magnitudes greater than the number needed under the most dire Pentagon scenario. And if the White House had decided to order just four or five executive helicopters, instead of 23, the savings would still have been more than enough to build sufficient numbers of MRAPs to protect every single U.S. service member sent on motorized patrols in Iraq. (Riding a Humvee instead of an MRAP is the difference between having a makeshift road bomb blow you through the roof in little pieces, and walking away with, at worst, a mild concussion).  

Now, presumably, the lack of MRAPs isn't just a consequence of cost (although that's been a factor); it's also the logistics of building them in sufficient numbers. Production capacity is "limited."

But where there's a will, there ought to be a way. For some perspective, I pulled a book with the World War II photos of Edward Steichen (Steichen at War) off my shelves. Author Christopher Phillips almost off-handedly states that

Following Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt called upon industry to turn out fifty thousand warplanes each year — a staggering demand. Working around the clock, aircraft plants not only met but surpassed that goal.

Equipping troops with crucial materiel has always been a matter of priorities. So let's take a cursory look at where this administration's priorities lie.

Lockheed Martin is producing the 23 presidential VH-71 helicopters  

...at least three years faster than the usual timetable for a major defense program.

Huh.

In 2004, President Bush told families of service members that "we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones."

No doubt the 1,500 soldiers and Marines blown to kingdom come in unprotected vehicles would beg to differ.

You Go To War With the Army You Have

USA Today has an exhaustive, heartbreaking piece on the red tape and poor communications that kept IED-deflecting armored vehicles out of the hands of our troops in Iraq.

Pfc. Aaron Kincaid, 25, had been joking with buddies just before their Humvee rolled over the bomb. His wife, Rachel, later learned that the blast blew Kincaid, a father of two from outside Atlanta, through the Humvee's metal roof. Army investigators who reviewed the Sept. 23 attack near Riyadh, Iraq, wrote in their report that only providence could have saved Kincaid from dying that day: "There was no way short of not going on that route at that time (that) this tragedy could have been diverted." A USA Today investigation of the Pentagon's efforts to protect troops in Iraq suggests otherwise.

Years before the war began, Pentagon officials knew of the effectiveness of another type of vehicle that better shielded troops from bombs like those that have killed Kincaid and 1,500 other soldiers and Marines. But military officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon's own staff — to provide the lifesaving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA Today found.

It's not for lack of asking.

As early as December 2003, when the Marines requested their first 27 MRAPs for explosives-disposal teams, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of the vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by USA Today show. Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath the vehicles.

Despite the efforts, the general who chaired the Joint Chiefs until Oct. 1, 2005, says buying MRAPs "was not on the radar screen when I was chairman." Air Force general Richard Myers, now retired, says top military officials dealt with a number of vehicle issues, including armoring Humvees. The MRAP, however, was "not one of them." Something related to MRAPs "might have crossed my desk," Myers says, "but I don't recall it."

Some officers would finally like to see some real accountability.

Jim Hampton, now a retired colonel, questions why the Pentagon and Congress didn't do more to keep the troops safe. "I have colleagues who say people need to go to jail over this, and in my mind they do," Hampton says.

Forget it. As that brilliant strategist and great humanitarian Donald Rumsfeld pointed out, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Like, um, you know, shit happens.

And in this war, it mostly happens to grunts and young officers who have no choice but to risk getting blown to bits in grossly inadequate patrol vehicles with canvas doors, while the neocon puppet masters back in Washington, at every photo op, talk movingly about supporting the troops.

Homerman vs. Bonerman

Damn funny way to promote the Simpsons Movie, which is slated for release in the U.K. next week. But of course, not everyone has a sense of humor.

UPDATE: Must-see animated version here.