AmericaBlog is really on the case. Latest post:

Pentagon intentionally hiding 1/2 of Iraq injured and wounded — no wonder the health care budget for those troops isn’t enough

I’ve been asking myself the last two days why the Pentagon and George Bush’s White House dont seem to have asked for enough money to provide for the health care needs of all of our injured and wounded vets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Did they not know how many of our soldiers would be hurt and live? Or, did they know the number of injured and wounded who would return, but didn’t tell congress because that would require admitting that the “real” cost of the war is, at the very least, several times more expensive than what we’ve already spent? Or is it that the Pentagon and White House folks handling all of this are simply inept morons?

It seems to be option 2, cover-up.

First, here is what Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes uncovered:

The central argument of the new Bilmes paper is that so many soldiers are being injured that the costs of caring for them over their lifetimes is likely to be $350 billion, or up to twice that, depending on how long the war lasts. The high cost is the result of huge advances in military medicine that have greatly reduced the chances that a soldier injured in Iraq will die. As a result, the ratio of injuries to deaths — 16:1 by her estimate — is higher than in any other war in U.S. history. (By comparison, in Vietnam the ratio was 2.8:1 and in World War II the ratio was 1.6:1.)

Wonkette explains what happened next:

Turns out the VA “misunderstood” the DoD numbers, because the Pentagon doesn’t want anybody adding up the 25,000 or so troops hurt in “non combat” situations to the 22,000 or so it admits have been injured in battle.

Blimes says it hardly matters if somebody falls off a ladder or gets blown apart by insurgents — if they survive, they will be in the VA health-care system for the rest of their lives. A soldier shot by “friendly fire” is no less hurt than one hit by whoever it is we’re supposedly fighting over there.

As for the Pentagon, it has ensured Blimes will never find those numbers on DoD websites again, because all the damning evidence has just been changed on the military websites.

The publication Insider Higher Ed then nails the Pentagon to the wall about their lies:

Smith, the Pentagon spokeswoman, does not dispute Bilmes on the point that soldiers are entitled to health care regardless of how they are injured. “They are all cared for,” she said. So if Bilmes is correct that she’s counting injured veterans who are entitled to health care and the source for her data is the U.S. government (before the Pentagon had the public data changed), why is Smith issuing statements saying that Bilmes is engaging in “gross distortion,” as she said in an e-mail? And why is a top Pentagon official calling Harvard suggesting that numbers are erroneous when they are just not the numbers the Pentagon wants out?

So there you have it. The Pentagon and the White House know perfectly well how many wounded and injured we have and how much it’s going to cost. They’re simply lying about the numbers so as to keep the public in the dark, and buck up support for the war. Sure, it screws our injured and maimed vets because there’s now not enough money to provide them with the health care they need and deserve. But hey, no one ever said the Pentagon and the White House really gave a damn about the troops, so why start now?

AmericaBlog has this summary:

Veterans abuse: The stories in the news just the past few days

- “Concerns Mount Over Waiting Lists at Veterans Affairs Mental Health Centers: Marine Jonathan Schulze, who hanged himself Jan 16. His family says four days earlier, Schulze had called doctors at the veteran’s hospital in St. Cloud, Minn., and told them he was suicidal. They told The Associated Press that he was turned away on account of a waiting list for beds at the hospital. As a rule, the VA does not put off veterans with suicidal tendencies, say VA officials.” - FOX News, 2/13/07

- “Veterans Have Reduced Access to Mental Health Care at Department of Veterans Affairs Facilities, Investigation Finds: Veterans with mental illnesses on average had almost one-third fewer visits with mental health professionals in 2005 than they did in 1995, according to an investigation conducted by McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchy/Miami Herald reports…. almost 100 VA clinics ‘provided virtually no mental health care in 2005,’ McClatchy/Herald reports.” - Kaiser, 2/12/07

- “There are two troubling reports, one out today, that point to serious problems affecting the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ ability to treat military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan…. Our veterans’ mental and physical health is not something to play games with. They have served their country, and their country has an absolute obligation to return the favor.” - Macon Telegraph, 2/14/07

- “Bush budget cuts veterans health care in 2009: The Bush administration’s budget assumes cuts to veterans’ health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.” - AP, 2/13/07

- “[I]t is the invisible psychological harm - primarily post-traumatic stress disorder - that is the most pervasive and pernicious injury from this war and that is emerging as its signature disability. Veterans’ advocates say it is the number-one issue facing soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The scope of the problem is daunting: 35 percent of Iraq veterans sought psychological counseling within a year of coming home, according to the Department of Defense….

“Many VA PTSD programs are too full to accept new patients…. A survey of VA and Defense mental-health providers conducted by VA psychologist Steven Silver found that 90 percent had no training in the four therapies. Many said they did not treat PTSD at all because they did not know how.” - Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/19/07

- Veterans Affairs to end some medical research after computer data breach, AP, 2/16/07

- Veterans clinic cancels routine appointments: Understaffed center seeks staff physician, Texarkana Gazette, 2/18/07

- Growing Claims Backlog Frustrates Veterans: a growing backlog of disability compensation claims at the Department of Veterans Affairs has left many veterans waiting years for benefits they expected and needed much sooner…. VA workload reports for early February 2007 show that more than 600,000 disability compensation claims are waiting to be answered. - KFox TV, 2007.

- “A year ago on Thanksgiving morning, in the corrugated metal pole barn that housed his family’s electrical business, Timothy Bowman put a handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet only grazed his forehead. So he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger again.

“He had been home from the Iraq war for eight months. Once a fun-loving, life-ofthe-party type, Bowman had slipped into an abyss, tormented by things he’d been ordered to do in war….

“But an investigation by McClatchy Newspapers has found that even by its own measures, the VA isn’t prepared to give returning vets the care that could best help them overcome destructive, and sometimes fatal, mental-health ailments.” - Columbus Dispatch, 2/11/07

Following the suggestion of The Eldest, I will now make my own mayonnaise. I really should have been doing this all along. I have a Kitchenaid Food Processor (much easier to clean than the Cuisinart), and it would be ideal. In fact, I think it has a little oil-dripper thing to facilitate the adding of the oil. And I can use the luscious Moroccan olive oil I buy by the gallon.

From Daytipper.com:

Freeze leftover wine for drinks or sauces

Pour leftover wine into an ice cube tray and freeze. You can either use the frozen wine cubes for mixed drinks or add it to sauces while cooking.

Just read:

FORT LAUDERDALE — A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condos and beachside bars, where glitz and glamour mix with spring break revelry, lies an underwater dump - up to 2 million old tires strewn across the ocean floor.

A well-intentioned attempt in 1972 to create what was touted as the world’s largest artificial reef made of tires has become an ecological disaster.

The idea was simple: Create new marine habitat and alternate dive sites to relieve pressure on natural reefs, while disposing of tires that were clogging landfills.

Decades later it’s clear the plan failed miserably.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the bundles bound together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against the nearby natural reef some 70 feet below the sea surface, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life. Similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.

“They’re a constantly killing coral destruction machine,” said William Nuckols, coordinator for Coastal America, a federal group involved in organizing a cleanup effort that includes Broward County biologists, state scientists and Army and Navy salvage divers.

Gov. Charlie Crist’s proposed budget includes $2 million to help to dispose of the tires. Broward County will manage the work onsite, and military divers will use the effort as part of their annual training missions at no cost to Florida.

A month-long pilot project is set for June. The full-scale salvage operation is expected to run through 2010 at a cost to the state of about $3.4 million.

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The Simple Dollar’s been running a series on ten books that changed his life, and I thought the current book was particularly interesting:

Titan
Ron Chernow
Changed my life in January 1997

During my first semester in college, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Even worse, I felt completely as if I didn’t belong there. I grew up rather poor, no one in my family had ever attended college beyond a semester at a local community college, and I was only there due to a scholarship that I didn’t feel as though I’d earned. Basically, I felt like I didn’t belong there and as though I didn’t belong there.

The problem was that I had no real role model, no one tangible with a background like mine that I could clearly understand how they went from nothing to something. I had a sense that I had something greater inside of me, something more than just going to college and then going back home and becoming a park ranger (which is what I was planning on doing at that point), but I couldn’t see how that transition happened.

I never had a problem seeing a long term goal with my life, but before I read Titan, I felt aimless, almost like I was waiting for something to happen, that someone or something had to rescue me from who I was.

Then I read Titan, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had some sort of purpose.

What’s it about?

Titan is a biography of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. Wikipedia covers the highlights of Rockefeller’s life quite well and these events are covered in detail in the book.

If Titan were just an ordinary biography, however, it wouldn’t have stood out in my mind like a beacon. The real power of Titan lies in the way that it lays out Rockefeller’s growth from rather ordinary circumstances to the unparalleled levels of success that he found later in life, even down to the specific mechanics he used to organize his life and motivate himself. Although I had avidly read countless biographies before this, almost all of them related the person’s childhood in very broad strokes and didn’t connect their early lives to their later successes (there are some, but I hadn’t read them yet).

This is a book about work ethic, about taking what you have and making something out of it without anyone else’s help. It made me realize that I was just sitting around feeling sorry for myself and it changed my life’s path forever.

How did Titan shape the person I became?

It made me realize I wasn’t alone in starting off with nothing. I was surrounded by people who grew up never wanting for anything. Many of them had attended private schools and they had everything they could possibly want or need to help them to succeed. I was literally the only resident in my dormitory without a personal computer, for example, because I came from a background that couldn’t afford one, so I had to do much of my work in the public labs on the far side of campus. I felt like I was the only person in the world who came from a poor background - this book made me not feel alone.

It made me see I already had all the tools I needed to succeed. Everything I needed I already had: a work ethic, a desire to learn, and a sharp mind. I didn’t really need anything else.

It made me broaden my horizons. Before I read this book, I wanted to be a park ranger. It was something familiar, something safe. I grew up near a state park where the ranger was quite old and I visualized replacing him. It wasn’t long after I closed the book that I realized that it was up to me to define my own destiny, and that destiny could be pretty much anything I wanted.

Because it’s Washington’s Birthday (as celebrated — the “Presidents Day” thing is creation of marketing: the official name of the holiday is Washington’s Birthday), the appropriate hospital offices are closed. So we can’t get the insurance procedure number and I can’t verify coverage, which my doctor wants me to do. What he wants is a bone scan (aka nuclear bone scan). From the info at the links, it seems as though this will provide more detailed information.

I realize this post will be of interest only to a few readers—my family, and readers whose hip is now sort of sore…   Here’s some info:

Your doctor may order a bone scan to help diagnose subtle or hidden bone fractures that may not show up on a routine X-ray, such as a stress fracture. Bone scans can also help detect:

• Bone cancer
• Bone infections
• Arthritis
• Causes of unexplained bone pain

A bone scan falls under the category of nuclear medicine, which means that it uses tiny amounts of radioactive materials called tracers (radionuclides). These tracers accumulate in certain organs and tissues, such as bones. Once introduced into the body, tracers emit gamma waves of radiation, which are detected by a special camera. This camera produces images that are interpreted by radiologists or nuclear medicine specialists.

In a sense, a nuclear procedure such as a bone scan is the opposite of a standard X-ray examination. An X-ray passes radiation into or through your body to create an image on film placed on the other side of your body. In a nuclear scan, the source of radiation is inside your body and travels to the surface, where a camera detects it.

Glenn Greenwald explains:

One of the great, still-lingering myths is that Brit Hume is a serious journalist and news anchor rather than a Republican Party spokesman. On every issue, what Hume says is indistinguishable from what his colleague, Tony Snow, says — except that, if anything, Snow’s comments are more muted and restrained and less partisan than Hume’s. Any lingering notion that Hume is some sort of news journalist on a news channel — and that pretense is widespread and accepted in most Beltway political and media circles — was obliterated by Hume’s behavior this weekend.

Following in the footsteps of Michelle Malkin — who finally came out with it this weekend and, Jean-Schmidt-like, called Jack Murtha a “coward” — Hume also unleashed a deeply angry and purely personal attack on Murtha, all but calling him senile. But he then went further and attacked the entire Democratic Party this way:

HUME: And think of the Democrats in the middle of this. They know these facts. They can see them. They know that Iran is up to no good. And what are they worried about? Are they worried about Iran? Not so as you’d notice.What they’re worried about is that the president might do something to Iran without clearing it with them. Wonderful. I mean, think — I mean, this is why the Democratic Party has had this reputation, going back decades, of really not being very serious about national defense. It’s because they aren’t.

First, is there any precedent for someone masquerading as a “news anchor” — and who is widely treated as such — making such an explicit personal attack on a leader of one political party and, even worse, making such accusatory statements about one of the two parties?For all the talk about the supposedly “liberal” and “biased” news anchors in the oh-so-left-wing “MSM,” is there a single instance that compares to Hume’s consummately partisan attack? Hume sits on that opinion panel each weekend and spews rhetoric on every issue that makes Bill Kristol look moderate. There is just no question that Hume is a pure partisan advocate, not a journalist. Why is the myth that he is a journalist and that he hosts a news program so widely indulged?

In one sense, his comments are the standard trope that spews forth regularly from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, National Review, and Sean Hannity. But the difference is that they do not pretend to be objective journalists, but instead are widely understood to be purely partisan advocates. Hume is, literally, indistinguishable from them. So on what conceivable basis is Hume entitled to be treated as a journalist rather than an advocate — or his show treated as a real news show rather than a RNC propaganda program — in light of these outbursts?

Second, Hume is not only a partisan advocate, but he is a dishonest one. What Hume said — that the Democratic Party is perceived as “not being very serious about national defense” — is not only nakedly partisan, but also factually false.

Polling Report compiled numerous polls conducted over the last several months on the questions about which Hume opined. A November, 2006 by CNN/Opinion Dynamics asked: “Who do you have more confidence in when it comes to handling foreign affairs — President Bush or the Democrats in Congress?” The response:

Democrats in Congress - 53%
President Bush - 39%

The same poll also asked: “Who do you have more confidence in when it comes to handling the situation in Iraq — President Bush or the Democrats in Congress?” The response was virtually identical:

Democrats in Congress - 53%
President Bush - 38%

A USA Today/Gallup poll from October asked: “Do you think the Republicans in Congress or the Democrats in Congress would do a better job of dealing with . . . . Terrorism? ” The response:

Democrats in Congress - 46%
Republicans in Congress - 41%

An October, 2006 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to “do a better job handling the situation in Iraq” (51-3 as well as “the U.S. campaign against terrorism” (47-41).And a comprehensive Washington Post poll from August, 2006, revealed that Americans not only trust Democrats over Republicans to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq (43-38), but trust Democrats over Republicans by an even wider margin “to do a better job handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism” (46-38).

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The Washington Post has run a two-part article (part 1 and part 2) on how very, very badly run the Walter Reed Army Medical Center is, along with all support services.

I’m not going to excerpt this. Both parts were run on the front page of the Washington Post and I hope that the Representatives and Senators of Congress read them and will for the love of God take some action. It’s a national scandal and a measure of just how far the Bush Administration has run the government into the ground during the course of this ill-advised war—and how little oversight the GOP Congress exercised.

I will get you started. Part 1 begins:

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely — a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them — the majority soldiers, with some Marines — have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.

They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially — they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 — that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan’s, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed’s treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.

All that is needed is for good people to do nothing. Joe Conason has an excellent excerpt from his new book, It Could Happen Here, that Alert Reader pointed out. (The link to the excerpt goes to Salon.com, for which I have to use IE Tab in order to see the “sponsor logo” you’re supposed to click on—probably because I have installed Ad Block as a Firefox Add-on.) Here’s what you see at the link:

Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of “it” is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” “it” plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America’s most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe’s fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as “it.”

If “it” denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then “it” hasn’t happened here and isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

For contemporary Americans, however, “it” could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis’s darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today — along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes — as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

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It was wonderful—and pretty easy to make. I trimmed off a little more of the fat layer, then coated with the honey-dijon mustard and patted the herb-crumb mixture onto it. It cooked quite nicely, and we had a good local Pinot Noir (from a winery just up the road in Marina). Extremely pleasant.

And I’ve posted my plea for the recipe name in AskMeFi, in the New Yorker Librarians’ Forum, and elsewhere, so I may soon have a report on that.

A soap maker has sent a group of us samples from several experimental batches: 4 soaps and 2 creams:

• HS 1 Olive branch
• HS 2 GIT
• HS 3 Bay Rum
• HS 4 Sandalwood
• CS 1 Violet
• CS 2 Bulgarian Lavender

Half are tallow based, half palm-oil based. I’ll work through the six, judging them on these criteria:

1. Effect on skin (dryness, etc.)
2. Quantity of lather (how easily it lathers up)
3. Quality of lather (slickness)
4. How well lather lasts

To minimize the number of variables, I’ll use the same brush and the same razor for the week: the Rooney Style 3 Small Super Silvertip and the Futur with a Swedish Gillette blade.

So today I used HS 1:

1. Effect on skin: no problem there
2. Quantity of lather: got a good lather initially
3. Quality of lather: lather felt slick
4. How well lather lasts: lather didn’t last well: very thin for final pass

Got a fine shave, nonetheless, since yesterday was a no-shave day.