http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1805284474389135521&q=chubb+chubbs&total=343&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2
6-year-old tries to drive to restaurant
Wed Oct 10, 8:13 AM ET
A hungry 6-year-old grabbed his grandmother's car keys, positioned his child seat behind the steering wheel and tried to drive himself to an Applebee's restaurant.
He didn't get far.
Unable to take the car out of reverse, the boy backed up 75 feet from her house into a transformer Tuesday, knocking out electricity and phone service to dozens of townhouses in this suburb north of Denver.
No one was injured and the boy, whose name was not released, got out of his car and told his grandmother what happened.
"He proceeded to start the car and started backing up," said Sgt. Colleen O'Connell of the Broomfield Police Department. "He went backward about 47 feet, hit the curb, then went backward another 29 feet."
Investigators couldn't figure out how the boy reached the accelerator.
No charges will be filed.
"I have five children of my own, so I know you cannot watch them every minute they're awake," said nearby resident Nancy Hollis, whose power was knocked out by the accident.
"Posting on the front page of the Daily Kos, this is one of the more prominent DailyKos members that Hillary and Obama will try to seek the approval of at YearlyKos."
As Tully mentioned briefly in the weekend round-up, Sen. Hillary Clinton has proposed a "national service academy" to train public servants for government work:
"I'm going to be asking a new generation to serve," she said. "I think just like our military academies, we need to give a totally all-paid education to young men and women who will serve their country in a public service position."
As someone who has spent most of my professional career working for the government, I think that public service can be a noble and rewarding profession, often understandably (if regrettably) maligned by our ultimate bosses, the people. Getting things done in government is not easy, and angering the wrong people (even when promoting great ideas) can quickly cut short your professional advancement or send you packing out the door. Most of us deserve more respect than we get.
Military academies make sense because the military is a very special, unusual sort of job. Ordinary university training does not prepare one to lead men (and increasingly women) into battle. It does not teach one how to mold excitable, hyperactive, undisciplined teenagers into clear-thinking professionals capable of operating $100 million pieces of equipment, with thousands of lives at stake.
Civilian public service, worthy as it is, however, requires no such specialized training. The rules are occasionally different than in the private sector (a LOT more record keeping, for example), but the jobs for the government, outside of law enforcement and the foreign service, are pretty much the same as in the private sector.
The public is already separated enough from government. Much of the highest bureaucracies of federal government are dominated by people like Sen. Clinton, graduates of Yale and Harvard, tightly connected to a relatively small group of like-minded people who bounce back and forth between the public and private sectors.
Why does Sen. Clinton wish to adopt a French program, Ecole Nationale d'Administration, which is under fire even in France? As long ago as 1995, Jacques Chirac warned of the dangers of a "dictatorship of a technocratic élite," the civil servants produced by a single school dedicated to producing "right-thinking" civil servants.
In a career of profoundly bad, leftist ideas, this just may be her worst ever. On a practical level, does she think that John Kerry's campaign was helped by his love affair with all things French?
If what Pvt. Beauchamp wrote is true, he's in bigger trouble.
Pvt. Beauchamp is the Baghdad Diarist whose July 13 article, written under the clever pseudonym "Scott Thomas," drew much skepticism.
Pvt. Beauchamp described how he made fun of a woman whose face had been severely scarred by an IED: "I love chicks that have been intimate with IEDS," Pvt. Beauchamp quotes himself as saying, loudly, to his buddies in the chow hall. "It really turns me on -- melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses."
"My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing," Pvt. Beauchamp recounted. "The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall."
Next he described finding the remains of children in a Saddam-era mass grave uncovered when his unit was constructing a combat outpost: "One private...found the top part of a human skull...He marched around with the skull on his head...No one was disgusted. Me included."
Finally, Pvt. Beauchamp described another friend "who only really enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs."
Pvt. Beauchamp described how his friend killed three dogs in one day: "He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks."
The New Republic's editors told Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard the chow hall incident occurred at Forward Operating Base Falcon near Baghdad. Since only one company of soldiers at FOB Falcon have Bradleys, the outing of "Scott Thomas" was just a matter of time.
Now that they've demonstrated their diarist is a real soldier, the New Republic's editors feel vindicated. But the issue is not whether Pvt. Beauchamp is a soldier. It's whether he's telling the truth or not. And his story stinks to high heaven. No one else at the base ever seems to have a seen a woman who fits the description of the woman in the chow hall. No mass graves have been discovered during the time Pvt. Beauchamp has been at FOB Falcon. It is physically impossible for the driver of a Bradley to see a dog to the immediate right of his vehicle.
It would be better for Pvt. Beauchamp if he made his stories up. It breaks no military rule to BS gullible liberal journalists. But if Pvt. Beauchamp is telling the truth, he and his buddies have broken so many articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that I haven't space to list them all.
It isn't only Pvt. Beauchamp who'd be in trouble. If the latter two stories are true, then his fire team leader, squad leader, platoon sergeant and platoon leader either witnessed them, and did nothing about them, or were negligent in supervising their soldiers. And if I were his company commander, I wouldn't be expecting below the zone promotion to major anytime soon.
His superiors won't be happy campers, and neither will his fellow troops, to whom he has brought unwanted scrutiny, deserved or not. I suspect Pvt. Beauchamp soon will be the guest of honor at a blanket party.
That he is Pvt. Beauchamp suggests this is not his first brush with the UCMJ. He called himself PFC Beauchamp on his Web site last September, which indicates he's been busted a stripe. He's been in the Army long enough to be a Spec 4.
On his blog (Sir Real Scott Thomas), Pvt. Beauchamp indicates he's an aspiring writer who joined the Army to establish credentials for voicing his liberal political opinions.
"I know that NOT participating in a war (and such a misguided one at that) should be considered better than wanting to be in one just to write a book," he wrote May 18, 2006. "But...maybe I'd rather be both."
But is Pvt. Beauchamp telling the truth about what he sees in Iraq?
In a blog entry for May 8, 2006, Pvt. Beauchamp describes an atrocity: "'Put a 556 in his head.' (The caliber of an M-16 rifle is 5.56 millimeters.) On the street below, the man's brown face dissolves in a thick red mist. The lights in the city's houses shut off in unison. Electricity rationing. Water rationing too. You ever tried to survive for more than a few hours in 120 degree weather?"
On May 8, 2006, Pvt. Beauchamp was in Germany, where temperatures rarely reach 120 degrees, and the electricity and water work just fine.
No, this isn't photoshopped. It's a real book. Seriously. What kind of poems are in it? No idea, but my guess is that they probably go something about like this....
Roses are red
Violets are blue
When I blow up that school bus full of kids
it will be the fault of the Jew
or maybe the poems are more like this...
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And I was sorry I could not kill infidels on both
Two roads diverged, and I-
killed infidels on the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
1 hour, 49 minutes ago
North Korea walked out of military talks with South Korea, ending three days of high-level negotiations Thursday with no agreement amid a lingering dispute over their shared sea border.
"We've come to the conclusion that we don't need these fruitless talks any more," North Korea's chief delegate Lt. Gen. Kim Yong Chol said at the final session in the truce village of Panmunjom.
Kim criticized the South for avoiding discussions of what he termed the "illegal" sea border. The frontier was drawn by the United Nations at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, and Seoul has repeatedly rejected the North's demands that it be changed.
The issue has been a constant obstacle at military talks between the sides, and the disputed waters that contain rich fishing grounds have previously been the scene of deadly battles in 1999 and 2002.
South Korea's chief envoy, Maj. Gen. Jung Seung-jo told Kim it was "highly regrettable" that the negotiations would end without results.
"Your side continued making this demand even though your side knows very well that our side cannot accept it," Jung said, referring to the border issue.
The generals from the North and South left the room after the 40-minute session without shaking hands or setting any date for a next meeting — with Kim appearing red-faced and visibly angry.
The South had called for the two sides to at least reach consensus on less controversial issues, such as opening a hotline between Navy commanders to prevent future clashes in waters off the peninsula's western coast.
At the start of Thursday's meeting, the North's Kim mocked his South Korean counterparts.
"Throughout the past few days, I feel as if I had become a victim of April Fool's Day jokes," Kim said.
Jung had tried to seek compromise and called for understanding the other side's position, but Kim flatly refused and retorted that "it would go against respecting principles and truth if you have to respect and accept anything just because it is the other side's view."
This week's talks are the highest-level dialogue channel between the two militaries, and were intended to follow up on agreements reached in May on setting up a joint fishing area around the contended border and cooperation on security arrangements for joint economic projects there.
Waters around the sea border are rich fishing areas and have been a past scene of deadly conflicts in 1999 and 2002.
The two Koreas have made strides toward reconciliation since a 2000 summit between their leaders, but they remain technically at war because the Korean War cease-fire has never been replaced by a peace treaty.
By Julie Steenhuysen, Wed Jul 25, 5:31 PM ET
When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.
In his two years living in Steere's end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence.
He wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"It's not that the cat is consistently there first," Dr. Joan Teno, a professor of community health at Brown University, who sees patients in the unit. "But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours."
Raised at the nursing home since he was a kitten, Oscar often checks in on residents, but when he curls up for a visit, physicians and nursing home staff know it's time to call the family.
"I don't think this is a psychic cat," said Teno. "I think there's probably a biochemical explanation," she said in a telephone interview.
While pets are often used to bring comfort to the elderly in nursing home settings, Oscar's talent is special, though not unexpected.
"That is such a cat thing to do," said Thomas Graves, a feline expert and chief of small animal medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine.
Graves said there is no evidence to suggest cats can sense death, but he doesn't discount it for a minute.
"Those things are hard to study. I think probably dogs and cats can sense things we can't," he said.
On a particular day detailed by Dr. Dosa, Oscar settled onto the bed of a patient in room 313.
His presence sent staff off to make calls and set up vigil.
When a grandson asked why the cat was there, his mother explained: "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven," according to Dosa's account.
She died a half an hour later.
Tue Jul 24, 10:47 PM ET
Who says Tom and Jerry can't be friends? For the past year, a special Colombian police unit has been locking rats in cages with cats as part of a project to train the rodents to sniff out the more than 100,000 landmines planted mostly by leftist rebels across this conflict-wracked Andean country.
Bringing the rats face to face with an enemy allows them to stay more focused once they are released, veterinarian Luisa Mendez, who's been working with the animals for two years, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
"Here the cats play with the rats instead of attacking them," Mendez said. "The cats wear shields on their nails so they can't cause any injuries and as a result the rats feel comfortable playing around them."
The rodents are taught to freeze in front of mines, but had difficulty staying put for fear of being attacked by predators.
Col. Javier Cifuentes, who oversees the project, said the rats' success rate in mine detection is 96 percent. Unlike dogs, the rats weigh a lot less and therefore don't trigger explosions.
Colombia is home to the world's largest number of land mine victims. Last year, there were 1,108 victims, or about one every eight hours, the government says. Nearly a quarter of the victims die from their injuries.
The nation's rat project was recognized last month as one of the five most innovative projects at a conference of behavior psychologists in Mexico, and its initial findings will soon be presented at a similar conference in Argentina.
