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Dallas cop does finally does the right thing: He quits

Dallas police officer Robert Powell has been one of the most viewed cops on TV and the Internet during the last week or so. He was the cop who stopped the Houston Texans’ Ryan Moats for rolling through a stop sign outside a Plano hospital. Moats and family members were literally just minutes away from his mother-in-law’s death inside the hospital from breast cancer. Powell unholstered his gun and generally made an ass of himself while Moats’ mother-in-law died. Today Powell resigned from the Dallas PD.

This is one of those cases you can beat like a dead horse (to death, as Yogi Berra might say). The incident was not one about right and wrong. Moats in the technical sense was wrong. He ran a stop sign and he broke the traffic laws. Even emergency drivers like firefighters or paramedics don’t get a pass on traffic laws, they have to obey them like everyone else is supposed to do. 
But there is a great difference between what is right and what is common sense.  Powell clearly wasn’t using common sense after he stopped Moats. Powell might have made a case for himself that would help him avoid being fired or suspended. But he would be ridiculed by both fellow officers and the public for a good while at the Dallas PD.
Moats received and accepted an apology from Powell, according to news reports. Maybe Powell actually learned something from this. Perhaps if he steps back awhile and has a chance to reflect, perhaps he can be a police officer again. But if he feels victimized for his own shortcomings then it could be he ought to find another profession, like say a call center worker.
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Wake me up when the Code Blue's over

The title of this post sounds like some kind of medical country-western song, or veterinary C & W, but it instead refers to the hysterical narcissism which overcomes me when thinking about the end of the line for the hit TV-med/drama “ER.”

Slate, the online magazine, has been conducting an ongoing dialogue all this TV season among some of its writers about the critically acclaimed “Friday Night Lights” and thus apparently got the journalistic guilts for not gushing over the run-up to the end of “ER” as we know it. FNL rocks. Everyone knows that so I don’t know what is the big deal.
Nonetheless, Slate asks its readers why they still watch “ER.” While that might be thought-provoking to some, it is a very easy question for me to reply.
I don’t.
I don’t watch “ER.” I never have  watched the show more than a couple of episodes. I think what I most dislike about it is its innate smugness. That combined with the fact that if most people acted in reality in the nation’s emergency rooms like some of the self-important schmoes “ER” has featured over time, there probably would be many more instances of assaults in hospitals. At least “Grey’s Anatomy,” just as overbearing but with a smidgen of redeeming value, has an overwhelming theme of sex running through every aspect of its dramatic episodes so that one gets distracted from Meredith’s non-stop pondering of every little nuance in the universe. Just shut the hell up sometimes, Grey! Oh my God, I just now hit the wrong button on my computer and heard perky music voiced over with the even perkier (and whinier Meredith Grey — Oh the humanity!)
So those who pine for the days of George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle and whomever, sorry but I just don’t care. Besides, you surely will see “ER” in perpetuity as reruns. And if you love the show all that much now, you’ll likely love it 30 years down the road, not that I would want to imagine the thought.
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"Best Political Team on Television" wearing thin

Since taking to the air in 1980 I have watched CNN through thick and thin. I watched CNN when President Reagan was shot. I knew that the United States was under attack by terrorists on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as I looked on in horror as United Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. During a number of times working as a reporter, I knew I better start heading toward the office after watching CNN: The start of the Iraq War, to name one.

It is because I have viewed so much history on CNN that is rather painful to admit the cable network is getting on my last nerve. My problem is their relentless focus on politics and as of late, waiting for President Obama to screw up while they exhibit a sort of network attention deficit disorder as the clock ticks on the first 100 days of the administration.  A good example of this “gotcha journalism” mindset is the exchange last week between CNN White House reporter Ed Henry and the president during his prime-time news conference:

ED HENRY: On AIG, why did you wait — why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage?  It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the Attorney General’s Office.  It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we’re outraged.  Why did it take so long?

THE PRESIDENT:  It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak, you know?  (Laughter.)

To make matters even more ridiculous, Henry wrote a blow-by-blow account of his encounter on the CNN Web site the next day. It was thoroughly self-serving and elicited an Ed Henry self-congratulations. Too bad Henry either didn’t know or didn’t care that many of the viewing public saw Obama’s retort as a put-down of the correspondent’s whiny follow-up.

The conservatives, of course, will continue to say until their last breath that CNN is liberal, left-leaning and an Obama-Democratic National Committee propaganda machine. One friend of mine, who is very conservative, often sends out e-mails titled: “You won’t see this on CNN” when some instance of liberal or progressive wrong-doing (at least in his mind) is shown on Fox (Faux) News or the like.

But if watch CNN closely you will see that their only agenda is scoring a big “gotcha” scoop and since the Dems are in control they happen to be the closest and most visible target. 

Hey, I like competition and enjoyed beating other media when I worked in the business. But that wasn’t the only reason for my existence. CNN needs some perspective.

I  suppose part of the problem is that the other cable channels have staked out claims in their political outlook. Fox is, of course, decidedly right-wing in its talk shows but is even that way in much of their newscasts. MSNBC is largely liberal but often entertaining. CNBC, well, I don’t watch them. So I guess that is why CNN seemingly plods down the middle but is out to get whomever it can sink along the way.

So far, I still think CNN is the best at the “real” breaking news story. I draw a distinction between legitimate breaking news and the “Just In” or “Breaking News” graphic which CNN displays way too often for something that way too distant from a real breaking story. It is getting to be ridiculous and could result in a “Boy Cries Wolf” syndrome some day if it is not brought under control. That is not just a criticism leveled at CNN but at all TV news networks. Nonetheless, I stayed up very late watching the CNN coverage of the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo, N.Y., in February.

While I still like a lot of CNN’s correspondents some, like the network itself, are annoying. I have to say as well that many of their anchors get on my nerves. But with some screwball optimism which comes from where I have not clue, I keep waiting for the leopard to change its spots. I am not one of your world-class optimists though I could probably play one on TV.

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Good news and bad news for VA patients exposed by colon tests

Remember the story the other day about thousands of Department of Veterans Affairs patients being exposed to HIV due to contaminated equipment used in colonoscopies? Well, there are new developments, good news and bad news if you will.

The good news is that some of the patients don’t have HIV. The bad news is that some veterans have tested positive for hepatitis B and C.

Ten patients have been found to have either hepatitis B or C contracted from faulty endoscopic equipment used for colonoscopies and ear, nose and throat exams, according to the Associated Press. Hopefully this doesn’t mean that the equipment was used for ear, nose and throat tests after they were used for colonoscopies. Ewwwww.

The VA reportedly warned patients recently at hospitals in Murpheesboro, Tenn., Miami and Augusta, Ga., “who had colonoscopies as far back as five years ago at those hospitals that they may have been exposed to the body fluids of other patients and should undergo tests to make sure they haven’t contracted serious illnesses.” Hey, thanks for telling us in a timely manner!

Seriously, many problems which are often discovered at VA facilities can usually be found at any type of hospital. However, the VA system is so massive that they can’t afford to let such screw-ups take place and then wait for years to sound the alarm.

These discoveries are the first major crises to face the VA’s new secretary, retired U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shenseki. I certainly hope that his reaction will not to name a “blue-chip panel” to study the problems to death for when you have so many people possibly exposed and the contamination goes as far back as five years time is not your most abundant commodity.

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EFD once again obsesses over time***

An e-mail from Classmates.com came today reminding me that this was my 35th anniversary of graduating from high school. They needn’t have reminded me.

I have no trouble remembering that I graduated from high school in May 1974, or that I enlisted in the Navy in July 1974, or that I started college in May 1980, or that I graduated from college 25 years ago come this May.

The truth is that milestones kind of become more irrelevant after time. Time itself is a like some kind of cosmic fun house in how it lets one see the past during one period as if it happened just yesterday and other incidents seem like they were oh so long ago. If this self-reflection took place in a seemingly logical manner — where each and every time the things happening long ago seem like a long time and more recent events appear as if they were only but days ago — it would hardly be worth one’s while to ponder it. But that isn’t how one always views memories.

Each time I hear the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” I am carried back almost 35 years ago. I have just reported to Navy boot camp. It’s a pretty hot July day at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Illinois. I think that it is the day after the night we arrived at O’Hare from Houston and after checking in on the base got to bed at midnight (excuse me, it is 2400 hours now boot!) only to be rudely awakened at 0500 by a bunch of racket for something called “reveille.”

“What’s your name (what’s your name), Who’s your daddy? (who’s your daddy?) He rich? (Is he rich like me?)” sings Zombies’ lead singer Colin Blunstone, as I wait in what will seem to be millions of miles of lines before my enlistment ends four years later. This line is to get measured for and receive uniforms. I’m going to look like a real sailor … eventually. I don’t really know why I remember that particular instance. Perhaps it is when I first felt inertia. I don’t know.

Flash forward to a couple of months ago. Actually, I tried to flashback to a few months ago earlier this week. It happened when my supervisor on my part-time government job asked me and my colleague why we were not satisfactorily meeting a particular milestone for work. The work I do, however, tends to happen in a cyclical fashion and even though I suppose I would be smart to keep hard copies of every schedule I work with on my computer, I feel it’s kind of pointless in striving for a paperless workplace. Thus, no copy, no memory.

Both of these instances — one long ago but feeling like yesterday and another figuratively yesterday and feeling long ago are not earth-shaking events like when I thought I was going to be blown up fighting a gasoline truck fire, or graduating from college. The point is that time is just as arbitrary as life itself often seems to be, or is, depending on your point of view.

After a certain point in one’s life every day feels like a milestone and not a bad one at that.

***It’s true. Time holds quite a fascination for me. I think it was the visit to that clock museum in New Zealand 31 years and four months ago that did it.