Month: November 2009

Today's NYT really brings it home:

The list of medals awarded to Sergeant Garza (no relation to the district attorney) tell of a good soldier. After two tours in Iraq, he shared a tight bond with unit members and missed them greatly when the Army sent him to a base in Georgia for additional training after a second deployment. He was troubled by a breakup with a girlfriend. And though he seldom spoke with his family about his combat tours, he once confided to his mother that he had a killed a person in Iraq. “He said, ‘It was him or me,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “But you could tell it troubled him.”

His family believes he did not get the care he needed, despite signs he had fallen into despair.

In June, he left the Georgia base without permission, and the Army tracked him to a hotel room in Paris, Tex. In a suicide note he sent to a friend before leaving, he said he wanted to end it close to his friends. Among his purchases was a shotgun.

Sergeant Garza was brought back to Fort Hood and committed for psychiatric care, first to a civilian hospital because there was no room at the base hospital, said his uncle, Gary Garza, who lives in Killeen. After three days, he was transferred to the base hospital. He was released after two weeks and assigned to take outpatient counseling.

“We thought he was doing better,” said his grandfather, Homer Garza, a retired command sergeant major who served in Korea and Vietnam and who himself had silently suffered for decades with post-traumatic stress. In fact, Sergeant Garza had shared misgivings about his treatment at the base hospital with his uncle. “He said he felt like he was getting really good treatment at the civilian hospital,” his uncle said. “He said the civilian doctors seemed to care more. And for the military doctors, it was just like a job for them.”

True or not, on July 7 Sergeant Garza received a message on his cellphone canceling what was to be his first outpatient appointment. Though his family says the Army was supposed to be checking his apartment for guns and alcohol, that Sunday he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

His mother later listened to the message. “They said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have a counselor for you today,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “ ‘If you don’t hear back from us by Monday, give us a call.’ ”

Frum reads Continentti’s Palin puff piece:

Palin supporters have constructed an alternative reality in which their heroine is wildly cheered by the American yeomanry, and despised only by a small coterie of sherry-drinking snobs. No contrary evidence, no matter how overwhelming and uncontradicted, can alter this view: not the collapse in Palin’s support in just 5 weeks in 2008, not the statistical studies that show her as the only vice presidential nominee in ticket to have hurt her ticket, not her rampant unpopularity with American women, not her own flinching from a second encounter with the Alaskan electorate.

In this regard, Continentti’s comparison of Palin to William Jennings Bryan begins to look not only apt, but ominous.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

What is called "socialist" today was not so socialist a while ago:

You could plausibly claim that the reforms on the table today are more or less what moderate Republicans were proposing under Clinton, just as the Clinton reforms were not that far removed from what Nixon himself wanted in the early 70s.

In the best sense of the word:

The world Parker actually wants is not a world in which women make babies and men chop wood. It is merely a world in which one can walk down an average city street and not be confronted by a 4-year-old in a "Future Porn Star" T-shirt, a world in which most women do not own stripper poles, a world in which most people do not know that sex-equity experts even exist. It's a world in which most people don't say "vagina" in polite conversation, vice presidents are expected to know something about the country that elected them, abortion is stigmatized but not illegal, and racial profiling is permitted but not celebrated. It is, in other words, precisely the world in which we actually live. For all her railing against our decadent times, Parker is a stalwart defender of the status quo, committed to the arbitrary prejudices of our age — recall her problem with men in jewelry — and skeptical of anyone whose ideology might challenge our present state of affairs. She is literally a conservative, which means she is nothing of a Republican.

Not these days anyway.

It's not a new question but there are some new answers:

"The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number

is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.

Reihan compares political campaigns, past and future:

Conservatives delighted in the ideological exuberance of Howard Dean's progressive youth, and they were unprepared for Barack Obama's slickly post-ideological campaign that drew on the left's energy while running a disciplined centrist campaign. We'll see if history repeats itself. Like a lot of people, my gut tells me that Sarah Palin or perhaps Mike Huckabee will be the Howard Dean of 2012. Of course, that would suggest that the Republican nominee in 2012 will be the right's answer to John Kerry, which is a prospect too disturbing to contemplate for very long.

No.

A reader writes:

The other piece of the new Trig-diagnosis story that doesn’t make sense is that I don’t know an ultrasound tech anywhere who would tell a person that there’s an abnormality. I’m bringing this up because I assume you and your husband haven’t been in this situation. They’ll tell you the gender (but they let the doctor confirm it). But no tech doing a real test on something that might be serious would tell you what they see.

They are not radiologists. I’ve had discussions with several stenographers (as they are apparently called in the trade) about this, because an ultrasound will make the patient nervous, just because it’s new data and you worry about what they might see. (In my case, I was recently in getting a test for fatty liver and I immediately wanted to know whether the student stenographer or her coach, who did it separately, were seeing anything. They politely demurred, but we ended up talking about how everybody wants to know their results during the ultrasound and they cannot diagnose or give any suggestions.)

I don’t spend much time thinking about Palin, but whenever I read bits of her narrative on Trig, it just smacks of what my wannabe novelist friends and I used to call book-description. Meaning, you wrote or told something based on information that you got out of a book or somewhere else but that you haven’t really lived it, and it shows. My guess is that Palin has had ultrasounds, but only good ones, which is the only time they’ll tell you anything, and she’s improvising about the rest.

DiA joins the death penalty debate:

I think "revenge" is a well-defined term, whereas "justice" is a bit of whatever you think it means. Justice certainly requires that guilt be certain, the crime clearly defined, and the offender aware of the law and its general consequences before committing the offence. Malice of forethought, and all that. All those being present, the question of punishment is an argument over values, and many answers are possible. William Petit Jr wants the death penalty for the men who tortured and killed his family in his presence. The death penalty remains on the books in the state of Connecticut, though it is rarely enforced. Perhaps this should be one of those rare cases. But if so, we do need what Sonny Bunch suggests: a generalised way to distinguish between cases where guilt is truly certain, and those where it is probable. And that doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda for legal reform.