I buy groceries on Saturday mornings. Usually a lot of the cars in the parking lot have those yellow ribbon magnets. Sometimes they have a bit of text on them. Something like “Support the Troops.”

There’s this one particular ribbon magnet I see sometimes. Not every week, but often enough. It looks like all the other magnets—yellow ribbon, black text—but it doesn’t say “Support the Troops.” It says “Go Hawks.” The Hawks being the local college football team.

I guess you can tell I don’t follow sports much. I hadn’t even heard they’d been playing in Iraq.

When you’ve reached the pinnacle of your profession…

When you’ve joined a top federal agency like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms…

You’re ready for something a little more dangerous… a little more deadly… a little more *important* than ticketing speeders and arresting drunks.

You’re ready for *homework*.

>The man who recently departed as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered his staff to help with his nephew’s high school homework, wasting the agency’s time and violating ethics rules, an inquiry found Wednesday.

The kid’s homework was “a documentary about the ATF that took 10 months to complete” that the director justified as “a form of community outreach.” After all, what could be better publicity than a widely seen and well-distributed high school-level amateur film project?

>An estimated 20 ATF employees were pulled in to help with the documentary, spending dozens of hours on research, pulling film footage from the agency’s library and setting up interviews with Truscott and other officials in Washington and Philadelphia.

>The nephew received an ‘A’ on the project, the report noted.