Now that is insecure

From The New York Times: By Thomas Friedman

This Iranian regime is afraid of its shadow. How do I know? It recently arrested a 67-year-old grandmother, whom it accused of trying to bring down the regime by organizing academic conferences!

Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth — had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmother and dual Iranian-U.S. citizen, while she was visiting her 93-year-old mother in Tehran. Do you know how paranoid you have to be to think that a 67-year-old grandmother visiting her 93-year-old mother can bring down your regime? Now that is insecure.
It’s also shameful....

In other words, our only hope of either changing this Iranian regime or its behavior, without fracturing the country, is through a stronger Iranian middle class that demands a freer press, consensual politics and rule of law. That is our China strategy — and it could work even faster with Iran.

I'm not quite sure how fast that is, but it probably does beat another war.

David Brooks on Al Gore's "Vulcan Utopia"

From The New York Times:

Fortunately, another technology is here to save us. “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” he writes. The Internet will restore reason, logic and the pursuit of truth.

The first response to this argument is: Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?

Go animalistic on me, David!

Maureen Dowd goes Greek with W, neocons

How We’re Animalistic — in Good Ways and Bad - New York Times:

Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who taught political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”...

With cold realism, Thucydides captured the Athenian philosophy in the 27-year war that led to its downfall as a golden democracy: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

What message can we take away from Thucydides for modern times?

“To me,” Professor [Donald] Kagan [of Yale] said, “the deepest message, the most tragic, is his picture of civilization as a very thin veneer. When you punch a hole in it, what you find underneath is hollow, the precivilized characteristics of the human race — animalistic in the worst possible way.”

On a lighter (and tastier) note...

The New York Times > Katz's Delicatessen Restaurant Review > :

To revel in its pastrami sandwich, one of the best in the land, with an eye-popping stack of brined beef that’s juicy, smoky, rapturous. To glory in the intricate ritual of the place: the taking of a ticket at the door; the lining-up in front of one of the servers who carves that beef by hand; the tasting of the thick, ridged slices the server gives us as the sandwich is being built; the nodding when we’re asked if we want pickles, because of course we want pickles.

It’s a ritual unique to Katz’s, an argument, along with Katz’s age, to consider it the king of New York delis, reigning above the Carnegie, above the Second Avenue Deli, which closed a year and a half ago. It may reopen, but not on Second Avenue, a reminder that nothing can be taken for granted.

Katz’s shouldn’t be. At few other restaurants can you feel that you’ve stepped this surely into a living museum, a patch of urban mythology....

“You’ve got to assume it’s not the ‘Sex and the City’ tour,” said a lunch companion.

I remain loyal to Carnegie for deli. When I'm near Houston St., I head for Yonah Schimmel's for a knish. But next time I'm in the neighborhood, maybe I'll drop by Katz's for some tongue.

Return to Arlington

Today we (my mother, brother, sister, nephew and I, and then later, my wife, son, daughter and son in law) returned to Arlington National Cemetery to visit my father's grave and, I guess, to try to take in the place with emotions slightly muted from the funeral itself. Another bright, beautiful, warm Washington day. This time the route was more familiar, without the extra anxieties of the funeral schedule and the caravan of cars--we all squeezed in, and were able to take advantage of the lifetime pass to the cemetery provided to first degree relatives of those buried there.

So many Jewish prayers begin with invocations of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (and today, of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah), asked that their merits in G!d's eyes be conferred on us, who are less deserving of G!d's consideration. So too here--we relatives are given privileges (and treated with a special deference by the many Arlington guards and guides), owing entirely to Dad's merits, and not to our own.

Dad is buried just inside the main gate, in section 33, within a short walk of the Administration Building and Visitor Center, and reasonably accessible via the Metro station, for those better able to walk than I. the Kennedy grave sites (which we visited today) are not too far; nor, we think, are the tombs of the Unknowns. Tour groups walk nearby, but not right at the spot. Most of the graves nearby date to 1955 and 1956, and the grave immediately left of his belongs to a veteran of the Spanish American War. A couple of graves nearby contain veteran, spouse and infant child (one a junior)--heartbreaking to contemplate. We didn't notice other Jewish graves in the immediate vicinity. There were flowers on Dad's newly filled grave, from cousins in California. One of the strange things about yesterday's ceremony, with the military pallbearers and protocols, is that we (my sister excepted) did not actually touch Dad's casket (although we participated in the Jewish ritual of reluctantly shovelling a bit of dirt on it). Today, I lay down next to the grave and bawled.

Back at the hotel, we watched a newly made DVD copy of a video interview my sister conducted with each of my parents 13 years ago (they were 73 then), during a calm and reflective moment when their memories were sharp (my mother's, amazingly so) and their health was better. They each spoke about their families, the journeys to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their growing up experiences during the hard times of the Depression, the War years and experiences, and their early life as a couple, before and just after moving to Miami. Seeing and hearing Dad, so focussed, so compelling as a storyteller, so moving in describing his military training and time in combat, his reflections on both the terrors of war and the lessons--particularly discipline and learning to get along with very diverse others in the most trying circumstances--was incredibly powerful. His reflections on the need for mandatory national service and the benefits he thought that would bring to American life (a position I largely share, although I never realized Dad felt so passionately about it) were really inspiring to me.

Mom has been having a very difficult time, and the combined emotional and physical stresses of recent weeks have taken a heavy toll. My brother decided to take her home a day earlier than initially planned, and my sister to accompany them, so we disbanded shortly after viewing the video as they headed for the airport. We decided to stay, not least because several Washington-area friends were planning to visit at tonight's shiva gathering. We took the "kids", and our new son in law (making his first visit to D.C.--amazing!) on a quick tour of the monumental and governmental city in all its majesty, winding up with a visit to the apartment building on Woodley Place, between the Connecticut Avenue and Calvert Street bridges, where we lived from 1978-82 (leaving almost exactly a quarter century ago, almost to the month), when both our children were born, and where Mom and Dad visited to help us with our newborns and glory in their first grandchildren. Such a wonderful period in all our lives.

Ah, the arcs and cycles of life. Very much present in our lives this week.

R.I.P. (Part One, to be continued)

Today we buried my father and began our shiva, the Jewish formal mourning practice, typically lasting seven days from the date of burial. In our case, the timing has been odd, since Dad died on May 18, eleven days ago. Burial was delayed because of the wait for burial at Arlington, the intervening Jewish holiday of Shavuot (during which Jewish burials are not conducted), and the Memorial Day holiday weekend (during which burials are not conducted at Arlington).

A Jewish burial at Arlington National Cemetery is a distinctive and memorable experience, a blending of disparate cultures and customs, of different modes of honoring and remembering.

The day beckoned bright and warm, with a beautiful, expansive blue sky and the distinctive view of Washington's monumental skyline visible in the distance. We are told the Superintendent of Arlington picked a special spot for Dad, in an established section of the vast military cemetery, amidst other highly decorated veterans of World War II, not so far from the Administration Building where we gathered to complete the initial paperwork. They had his date of death wrong, and were able to correct that on the official record and design for his gravestone marker. They had his rank and medals right, and knew that his would bear a Star (or Shield) of David, rather than the ubiquitous crosses one sees here. Dad wanted his fellow citizens and all others to know that Jews fought and fight for their country, most particularly in the War against Hitler and Nazism.

We were helped through the formalities by a retired Sergeant-Major, an African American man of military bearing and a helpful and compassionate disposition. He first checked the readiness of the gravesite, then returned to lead our convoy to it. No horse-drawn caisson--that is reserved for more senior ranks, and requires a very long wait in any case. With war casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the passing of the Greatest Generation, that can be three months nowadays. How do families cope with that?

So, we made our way by car behind the hearse to the point of roadway nearest the open plot, then made our way across the unsteady ground. The flag-draped casket was borne by military pallbearers, who moved with well-practiced, elegant precision. My brother and I, with some help from the sergeant-major, helped our mother with the difficult and emotional trek. The pallbearers stood to attention, holding the flag taut above the casket, awaiting our slow-paced arrival.

Then began the interdigitation of Jewish and military elements of the ceremony. The rabbi was an old friend of mine, dating to overlapping high school and college careers and overlapping time in Israel in the early 1970s: Gerald Serotta, longtime Hillel rabbi at George Washington University, more recently a congregational rabbi and peace and human rights activist. I have long admired him, and was delighted he was able and willing to assist with Dad's funeral. Gerry introduced the service, explained the unusual sequence of events, and read a favorite passage from Ecclesiastes. Then the military: a firing party, a poignant buglar's taps (bringing my brother, among others, to tears), the ceremonial folding of the flag and its presentation to my mother, "with the thanks of a grateful nation" for my father's service. Quite an emotional moment to live through, however often one has read about it or seen it depicted in the movies. And the note from "the Arlington lady" on behalf of the Army. The military detail marched off, to ready for the next of the 29 burials scheduled for that day at Arlington, leaving us to conclude with the Jewish part of the service.

Goodbye, Dad

Weisbard, Ralph M.
Ralph M. Weisbard died on Friday, May 18, 2007, after an extended illness.

Ralph was born on Nov. 7, 1920, in New York City, the son of Irving and Sadie (Cohen) Weisbard. Growing up in a working-class family (his father was a milkman and grocery worker) during the Depression, he lived in numerous apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan and in Elizabeth, New Jersey. (His uncle, the celebrated Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, who had been scheduled to officiate at Ralph's bar mitzvah in 1933, died during a visit to Palestine some months earlier.)

Ralph worked as a civilian at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the early years of World War II, where he met (and worked under the supervision of) Ruth O. He repeatedly attempted to enlist for military service, but was turned down on medical grounds. He then secretly sought the aid of a physician to treat him and help camouflage his condition, also hiding this surreptitious activity from his mother, who, had she known, probably would have killed him before he met the enemy. He then asked to be reclassified as draft-eligible and entered the army.

Following eventful training as a bespectacled, flat-footed New York Jew at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, he was assigned to the combat infantry ("so he could see the enemy") and sent, as he had desired, to the European theater to fight Hitler. He served heroically with the Seventh Armored Division at the Battle of the Bulge and moved with the lead units into and across Germany during the final year of the War. He was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and other decorations for his valor.

During his time in uniform, he maintained an active correspondence with Ruth. A friendly relationship blossomed into a romance, and they married on his return from the War.

Ralph completed a degree in accounting at NYU and soon thereafter moved with Ruth to Miami, where they began a family. Ralph joined the Miami accounting firm of Weber Thomson and Lefcourt (which subsequently merged into the national firm of Laventhol and Horwath), becoming a CPA and serving as partner until his retirement in the mid-1970s.

Ralph took great pleasure in being with people (including many relatives from the New York area who visited and sometimes retired to Miami Beach and surrounding communities). He enjoyed a variety of athletic activities, including league bowling, tennis, and especially golf. He participated in a number of veterans, Masonic and Jewish activities. He was also a lively story-teller, taking particular pride in recounting episodes of standing up to anti-Semitic provocations during his school years and army service, particularly during his army training in Mississippi. Ralph was proud to be a Jew and an American, and exemplified the promise of American life.

Ralph was a devoted husband and loving father and grandfather, who encouraged and supported the education of his children and grandchildren. He is survived by his wife of nearly 61 years, Ruth (O.); by three children, Alan (Phyllis) of Madison, Marshall (and Donna Rosenblum) of Santa Fe, N.M., and Cheryl Weisbard (Dr. Steven) Foung of Palo Alto, Calif.; by four grandchildren...and two step-grandchildren..., and by sisters, Yvette W. Fields and Helene W. Moldan. Ralph will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on May 29, 2007. Shiva at the Weisbard home on Sunday, June 3, 2007.

Contributions in Ralph's memory may be made to the Holman Weisbard Fund for Adult Jewish Learning at Beth Israel Center in Madison, WI , to the UW Center for Patient Partnerships, to hospice, or to another charity of your choice.

Honoring Our Dead

Arlington National Cemetery
FUNERAL SCHEDULE FOR Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Please report to origin 1/2 hour prior to start time


NAME ORIGIN TIME
1 MARY L. HATHAWAY, 1STLT, USA POST CHAPEL 9:00
2 LLOYD N. HAUGLAND, GMC, USN ADMIN BUILDING 9:00
3 IRA ARTHUR JETT, CAPT, USA MEMORIAL GATE 9:00
4 HOWARD R. WALLS, SGT, USAF ADMIN BUILDING 9:00
5 STARKS HENRY ALLEN, MSG, USAF ADMIN BUILDING 10:00
6 MICHAEL L. STARNES, SR, USN ADMIN BUILDING 10:00
7 ALFRED SYBOT, PFC, USA ADMIN BUILDING 10:00
8 RALPH M. WEISBARD, TSGT, USA ADMIN BUILDING 10:00
9 JAYNE D. COERS ADMIN BUILDING 11:00
10 EDWARD P. FOLEY, CPL, USA ADMIN BUILDING 11:00
11 JOHN NORMAN MEDINGER, COL, USA POST CHAPEL 11:00
12 WILLIAM RUSSELL REDDICK, CAPT, USMC ADMIN BUILDING 11:00
13 HAROLD YOSKIN, LT, USN ADMIN BUILDING 11:00
14 JACK R. LEACH, SFC, USA ADMIN BUILDING 1:00
15 WILLIAM RICHARD MANNING, COL, USAF POST CHAPEL 1:00
16 RALPH ORLANDO MCKIE, CTACS, USN ADMIN BUILDING 1:00
17 CHARLES E. UNDERCOFFER, LTC, USA ADMIN BUILDING 1:00
18 ELLEN B. UNDERCOFFER ADMIN BUILDING 1:00
19 WILLIAM F. BAUER, ENCS(SS), USN ADMIN BUILDING 2:00
20 ALBERT J. GROUX, CPL, USA MEMORIAL GATE 2:00
21 JAMES EDWARD PETERSEN, MSG, USA ADMIN BUILDING 2:00
22 HARRY MEYERSON, MSGT, USA ADMIN BUILDING 2:00
23 ELLEN JANE MEYERSON ADMIN BUILDING 2:00
24 ROBERT JAMES BILLINGTON, COL, USAF ADMIN BUILDING 3:00
25 ERMA L. LAROCHE ADMIN BUILDING 3:00
26 FRANCIS G. MONAN, LTC, USA ADMIN BUILDING 3:00
27 CHRISTOPHER E. MURPHY, CPL, USA ADMIN BUILDING 3:00
28 MAX WILLIAM YANO, SGT, USA ADMIN BUILDING 3:00
29 CATHERINE M. YORAN POST CHAPEL 3:00 The ZIP CODE for Arlington

Directions:
National Cemetery is 22211. Use internet search engines for obtaining maps to the area.

From Richmond:
Drive north on Route 95. Near the Washington Beltway, Route 95 will merge with the Beltway-do not merge with the Beltway. Continue traveling north on Route 395 toward Washington, DC. Take Exit 8-B (Arlington National Cemetery exit). This exit is to Route 27. Stay in the left lane until reaching the circle (on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge). Proceed counter-clockwise around the circle to Memorial Drive.

On Memorial Drive there will be a traffic guide who will be directing all traffic into the pay parking facility. If you are here for a funeral, stay to the right on Memorial Drive and inform the traffic guide that you are here for a funeral (please provide the name of the decedent to the guide). You will then continue on Memorial Drive. At the end of the street, turn left into the cemetery (if you are going to a service at the Administration Building) or turn right into the cemetery and follow the white line (if you are going to the Old Post Chapel on Fort Myer for a chapel service).

From Frederick, Maryland:
Travel south on Route 270. Near the Washington Beltway (Route 495) the lanes will split. Stay to the right and follow the signs to Virginia. You will merge with the Beltway and continue traveling south on the Beltway. Upon crossing the American Legion Bridge (leaving Maryland and entering Virginia), get into the right lane and take the first exit (George Washington Parkway). Travel on the GW Parkway until you start going under bridges. Take the Arlington Cemetery-Memorial Bridge exit. Merge left with the traffic exiting from Route 110. At the stop sign make a left onto Memorial Drive. See the directions above for Memorial Drive.

From Baltimore:
Drive south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway or on Route 95 to the Washington Beltway. You can travel on Route 95 (eastern side of the Beltway) or travel on Route 495 (to the western side of the Beltway). If you follow Route 95, stay on the Beltway to Route 395 north (see directions from Richmond). If you follow Route 495 stay on the Beltway to the George Washington Parkway (see directions from Frederick).

From Western Virginia:
Follow 66East to Exit 73 “Lee Highway.” Follow Lee Highway to Fort Myer Drive. Make a right on to Fort Myer Drive. Follow Fort Myer Drive, immediately after passing over a bridge make a left on route 50. Iwo Jima Memorial will be on your right side. Follow route 50 and stay in your right lane. Exit on to George Washington Parkway. Stay in your right lane. Follow Parkway until you see a sign for Arlington National Cemetery. Take exit to Arlington National Cemetery. Stay to your left. After stop sign make a left turn. Cemetery is straight ahead.

One and only: The Wise Bard quotes Robert Novak

Murtha's Friends - washingtonpost.com:

Jack Murtha, the maestro of imposing personal preferences on the appropriations process, looks increasingly like an embarrassment to Congress and the Democratic Party. But there is no Democratic will to curb Murtha, one of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's closest associates. Nor are Republicans eager for a crackdown endangering their own earmarkers.

So far as I can tell, Jack Murtha's sole redeeming feature is his military credibility as an opponent of the Iraq War. For that, he deserves both kudos and appreciation.

But this old style pol otherwise exemplifies everything wrong with get along, go along politics as usual, especially on the ethics front. Having nearly been elected House majority leader with Speaker Pelosi's strong support, he is, as Novak suggests (even broken clocks are right twice a day) an acute embarrassment to the Democrats' ethics platform in the last election, and, with the cave-in on funding for the War, a threat to the Party's credibility with its own supporters, not to speak of the wider American public.

It is worth remembering that however critical one may be (and I am) of Newt's 1994 contract on America, the Democratic Congressional majority of the time was corrupt and largely ineffectual (think of its fragmented and disastrous performance on health care reform), and richly deserved to lose, as it did, "big time." Too bad there wasn't a better opponent to take charge. (Ralph, where were you then, when we needed you? Actually, if memory serves, Nader was speaking out...)

Bottom line: Dems, get your act together, and keep your promises to your supporters and the American people! No more politics as usual. Leadership should lead, not be complicit. Insist that Murtha, and other opponents of meaningful political reform, start to behave themselves-- maybe for the first time in their careers.

The Wise Bard does not hew any party line.

Trust and Betrayal - New York Times

From The New York Times:
By PAUL KRUGMAN

“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness....

The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

A World Apart Within 15 Minutes

Israel and the Price of Blindness

From The New York Times:

...The documentary, called 'A World Apart Within 15 Minutes' and directed by Enas Muthaffar, captures the psychological alienation that has intensified in recent years and left Israelis and Palestinians worlds apart, so alienated from each other that a major Palestinian city has vanished from Israelis' mental maps.

Never mind the latest flare-up in Gaza. What matters in the world's most intractable conflict is the way the personal narratives of Israelis and Palestinians, coaxed toward intersection by the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, have diverged to a point of mutual nonrecognition.

Ramallah is about 10 kilometers north of Jerusalem. For most Israelis, it might as well be on the moon. It is not just the fence, called the 'separation barrier' by Israelis and the 'racist separating wall' by Palestinians, that gets in the way. It is the death of the idea of peace and its replacement by the notion of security in detachment....

But detachment is an illusion. Life goes on behind the physical and mental barriers Israelis have erected. Or rather, it festers. As Itamar Rabinovich, the president of Tel Aviv University, remarked to me: "Palestine is a failed pre-state."

For that failure, Palestinians must take responsibility. But this aborted birth is also Israel's work....
The West Bank, after 40 years under Israeli control, is a shameful place. If this is the price of Israeli security, it is unacceptable. Power corrupts; absolute power can corrupt absolutely. There are no meaningful checks and balances in this territory, none of the mechanisms of Israel's admirable democracy. The result is what the World Bank this month called a "shattered economic space." ...

Israel has an obligation to open its eyes and do some wall-jumping. The country has just been shaken by the Winograd Report, a devastating look at last summer's war against the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. It is now time for a report of similar scope on Israel's West Bank occupation.

I can see no better way to arrest the cycle of alienation. Time is not on the side of a two-state solution.

Critical Care Without [Individual] Consent

Critical Care Without Consent - From washingtonpost.com: By Rob Stein

The federal government is undertaking the most ambitious set of studies ever mounted under a controversial arrangement that allows researchers to conduct some kinds of medical experiments without first getting patients' permission.

The $50 million, five-year project, which will involve more than 20,000 patients in 11 sites in the United States and Canada, is designed to improve treatment after car accidents, shootings, cardiac arrest and other emergencies.

The three studies, organizers say, offer an unprecedented opportunity to find better ways to resuscitate people whose hearts suddenly stop, to stabilize patients who go into shock and to minimize damage from head injuries. Because such patients are usually unconscious at a time when every minute counts, it is often impossible to get consent from them or their families, the organizers say.

The project has been endorsed by many trauma experts and some bioethicists, but others question it. The harshest critics say the research violates fundamental ethical principles.

My colleague at UW, Dr. Norman Fost, was a leading proponent of the regulatory changes that permit such research. I have been of mixed mind on this topic.

Petro-Bleak House

adn.com | money : U.S. appeals court tells Exxon to pay fishermen:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday denied Exxon Mobil Corp.'s request for another hearing, letting stand its ruling that the energy giant owes $2.5 billion in punitive damages for its 1989 oil spill in Alaska.

The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is a milestone, ending a ping-pong cycle of decisions and appeals between the California court and the Alaska district court.

Now only the U.S. Supreme Court can consider any further appeals.

An Exxon spokesman said yes, the company will appeal...

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say about 20 percent of their clients in the extensive class action have died waiting for payment. The class now stands at about 33,000 commercial fishermen, cannery workers, landowners and Natives, local governments and businesses.

Reveal your favorite fonts...

From Slate Magazine:
This is fun, sort of. Take a look if so moved.

Fitzgerald on Libby sentencing

From Salon.com:

'While the disappointment of Mr. Libby's friends and supporters is understandable,' Fitzgerald writes, 'it is inappropriate to deride the judicial process as 'politics at its worst' on behalf of a defendant who, the evidence has established beyond a reasonable doubt, showed contempt for the judicial process when he obstructed justice by repeatedly lying under oath about material matters in a serious criminal investigation.'

Fitzgerald continues: 'Mr. Libby's prosecution was based not upon politics but upon his own conduct, as well as upon a principle fundamental to preserving our judicial system's independence from politics: that any witness, whatever his political affiliation, whatever his views on any policy or national issue, whether he works in the White House or drives a truck to earn a living, must tell the truth when he raises his hand and takes an oath in a judicial proceeding, or gives a statement to federal law enforcement officers.'...

"The judicial system has not corruptly mistreated Mr. Libby; Mr. Libby has been found by a jury of his peers to have corrupted the judicial system."

Bill Maher ends season in full suck mode

From Salon.com:

... But I was up all night on Wikipedia doing an exhaustive study of former presidents, and while other presidents have sucked in their own individual ways, Bush is like a smorgasbord of suck. He combines the corruption of Warren G. Harding, the abuse of power of Richard Nixon and the warmongering of James K. Polk.

I mean, who would you rank lower than George W. Bush? Nixon got in trouble for illegally wiretapping Democratic headquarters; Bush is illegally wiretapping the entire country. Nixon opened up relations with the Chinese; Bush let them poison your dog. Herbert Hoover sat on his ass through four years of calamity, but he was an actual engineer. If someone told him about global warming, he would have understood it before the penguins caught on fire. Ulysses Grant was a miserable drunk, but at least he didn't trade booze for Jesus and embolden the snake handlers -- he did the honorable thing and stayed a miserable drunk. Grant let his cronies loot the republic, but he won his civil war.

For some inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman -- a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II. Harding sucked, but he once said, 'I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.' So at least he knew he sucked. He never walked offstage like Bush does after one of his embarrassing press conferences with a look on his face like, "Nailed it." Bush still acts like every failure is just a friend he hasn't met yet.

BTW, Maher also took a good, if less colorfully worded, shot at the Dems before heading for Las Vegas.

I don't Kevork, but he did. Will he again?

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- For nearly a decade, Dr. Jack Kevorkian waged a defiant campaign to help other people kill themselves....


But as he prepares to leave prison June 1 after serving more than eight years of a 10- to 25-year sentence in the death of a Michigan man, Kevorkian will find that there's still only one state that has a law allowing physician-assisted suicide -- Oregon.

Experts say that's because abortion opponents, Catholic leaders, advocates for the disabled and often doctors have fought the efforts of other states to follow the lead of Oregon, where the law took effect in late 1997...

'End-of-life care has increased dramatically'' in Oregon with more hospice referrals and better pain management, says Valerie Vollmar, a professor at Oregon's Willamette University College of Law who writes extensively on physician-assisted death.

Opponents and supporters of physician-assisted death say more needs to be done to offer hospice care and pain treatment for those who are dying and suffering from debilitating pain.

''The solution here is not to kill people who are getting inadequate pain management, but to remove barriers to adequate pain management,'' said Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center for Medical Ethics at the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes assisted suicide....

Kevorkian has promised he'll never again advise or counsel anyone about assisted suicide once he's out of prison. But his attorney, Mayer Morganroth, said Kevorkian isn't going to stop pushing for more laws allowing it.

My father suffered during his final days (indeed, during his final year or more), and we with him. His strong heart held out much longer than anyone anticipated. He was able to avoid being moved from the room at the assisted care facility that he was used to (we brought in a hospital bed and other assistive equipment to help him move about), and we managed to avoid catheters and invasive tubes and machines. He largely stopped eating, although we tried to keep him (naturally) hydrated as best we could. We worked with a superb geriatrician, and reached a consensus in his last weeks that our goal was to make Dad as comfortable as possible, without invasive interventions that would only slow the inevitable. We arranged for hospice care over the final weeks, and the hospice team kept him comfortable with appropriate pain care. They were also excellent in providing psychological support both for him and for us. Although there were some misunderstandings and mis-steps along the way, all those involved in Dad's care brought compassion and dedication to their task. In the hours after his death, many of those involved in his care came by to hold his hand, some to kiss him, and to say goodbye. I'm very glad "doing away with him" was not an option on the menu, for him, for the family, or for the caregivers.

We were, of course, very lucky to have the resources and access to caregivers to make this possible. Others don't.

And, of course, others think differently.

The Moon and the Sun Over Miami

Donna Smith: The Huffington Post:

But on that boat in the bay we were all quiet. The wind blew through our hair as the daylight drifted away, and we were left with our imaginings. The sound of the boat's engine and the flap of the flag droned in the background. What brought us to this spot and this moment was pain. What was easing us into what was to come was an emulsion of nature and wonder and fear and hope. I wanted to tuck the image away somewhere safe in my soul. I wanted it etched there forever. What I did not know was how many moments like it would come in the days ahead.

For me, the past 20 years had been filled with fights about insurance coverage, humiliation about not being able to pay large deductibles and co-pays, and general strain on my marriage and my family that resulted from the financial pressure. Though we never, ever went without insurance, we had been bankrupted by the crushing medical costs not covered by insurance. Few people understood how we got into that financial boat, and we not only faced my husband's heart disease, my cancer and several major medical crises, but also the shame of failing financially. We felt so alone and lost.

I wrote a response to Michael Moore's call for 'health care horror stories' back in early 2006, and here I was nearly a year later as part of this amazing group of fighters and heroes, traveling on this unknown journey together.

What Do You Want to Ask Al Gore?

Arianna Huffington: The Huffington Post:

But it's a Catch-22: the Gore on display in Assault -- and during much of the press he's done in support of it -- is extremely compelling: bold, passionate, knowledgeable, thoughtful, articulate, self-deprecating. Exactly the qualities that have so many Democrats eying him with nothing short of lip-smacking longing.

So far, much of Gore's book tour has been drenched in irony, with his castigation of the mainstream media's fixation on the horserace aspects of politics being met with horserace questions, while his rebuke of our cultural obsession with nonsense like Britney's hair, Lindsay's sex life, and Nicole's weight has been met with stories obsessing about his weight, his double chin, and his love of clam dip.

Was it ever thus, or is all of this new?
I suspect JFK was elected, at least in part, on his looks (and/or Nixon defeated on his jowls, stubble and sweat), and their great debate was far from Lincoln-Douglas. When was the last time a Presidential election was decided on the basis of meaty, substantive debate on the major issues facing the country? One might argue Reagan- Carter, although saying that gives me hives.

I am inclined to think the nature of media coverage has changed things. Newsmen used to at least pretend everyone cared about "the issues"; that is now the exception rather than the rule, and so many of the punditocracy and reporters are bubbleheads.

How Monica Goodling played the "girl" card

By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine:

Let's pretend for a moment that the world divides into two types of women: the soft, shy, girly kind who live to serve and the brash, aggressive feminists who live to emasculate. Not our paradigm, but one that's more alive than dead.

When she was White House liaison in Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, Monica Goodling, 33, had the power to hire and fire seasoned government lawyers who had taken the bar when she was still carrying around a plastic Hello Kitty purse. Goodling, in fact, described herself as a 'type-A woman' who blocked the promotion of another type-A woman basically because the office couldn't tolerate infighting between two strong women. ('I'm not just partisan! I'm sexist, too!') That move sounds pretty grown-up and steely. Yet in her testimony this week before the House judiciary committee, Goodling turned herself back into a little girl, and it's worth pointing out that the tactic worked brilliantly."...

What really shot Goodling into the stratosphere of baby-doll girls were her own whispered words: "At heart," she testified, "I am a fairly quiet girl, who tries to do the right thing and tries to treat people kindly along the way." The idea, of course, was to scrub away her past image as ruthless, power-mad, and zealously Christian....And at the heart of Goodling's ingénue performance? The astonishing claim that while she broke the law, she "didn't mean to." This is the stuff of preschoolers, not cum laude graduates of law school....

But heed the lesson, girlfriends. It works. Republicans on the House judiciary committee had only gentle words and lavish praise for this girlish Monica. Even as she testified to repeatedly breaking the law, these genial uncles lauded her "class" and her courage, falling over themselves to observe how hard testifying must have been for her. Kyle Sampson must be wondering where all this sympathy was when he was on the stand. For the most part, even the Democrats were too bamboozled to be effective. It's no accident that some of the day's most brutal questioning came from Reps. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif.; Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; who may well have been as annoyed by Goodling's Girl Secretary performance as they were by the underlying conduct....

What will happen to Goodling? She'll lay low for a while. She'll leave Washington, maybe. And then she'll re-emerge in another position of power; power that she will cast as reflected glow from greater men. Because to help yourself by playing helpless is the stuff of real smarts and savvy. Goodling's day in the spotlight wasn't exactly a good day for feminism. But in the end, maybe she's bamboozled us, too, because if we ever have to testify before Congress, hand us the pigtails and lollipop.

If this doesn't elicit some comment, I'm not sure what will.

FLASH: Report Says Iraq Problems Were Expected

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. intelligence analysts predicted, in two papers widely circulated before the 2003 Iraq invasion, that al-Qaida would see U.S. military action as an opportunity to increase its operations and that Iran would try to shape the post-Saddam era. The top analysts in government also said that establishing a stable democracy in Iraq would be a long, turbulent challenge.

Democrats said the documents, part of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation released Friday, make clear that the Bush administration was warned about the challenges it now faces as it tries to stabilize Iraq.

''Sadly, the administration's refusal to heed these dire warnings -- and worse, to plan for them -- has led to tragic consequences for which our nation is paying a terrible price,'' said Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

But that's not nearly as interesting as a Republican response:

But some Republicans rejected the committee's work as flawed. The committee's top Republican, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, said the report's conclusions selectively highlight the intelligence agencies' findings that seem to be important now, distorting the picture of what was presented to policymakers.

He said the committee's work on the Iraq intelligence ''has become too embroiled in politics and partisanship to produce an accurate and meaningful report.''

Kind of takes the breath away, that politics and partisanship might result in selective use of intelligence, distorting the overall picture presented to the public. Thank goodness the Republicans in Congress are ever-alert to protect us from such dastardly behavior.

And you can quote me on that!

Former Tour de France Winner Admits to Doping

Fans shocked, shocked...
From The New York Times: By IAN AUSTEN

Topping off a week of doping confessions, Bjarne Riis of Denmark became the first Tour de France winner to admit to the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Speaking at a televised news conference, Riis said Friday that he used the blood boosting hormone erythropoietin, or EPO, from 1993 to 1998, including the period when he rode to victory in the 1996 Tour de France. He said he also used cortisone and human growth hormone.Riis, who now manages the elite cycling team CSC, offered to give up his Tour title, an unprecedented event in the history of the 104-year-old race....

However, given Riis’s offer, McQuaid said that the race records may be altered to show that the 1996 Tour had no winner.

That may be just as well. The second-place finisher that year was Riis’s teammate, Jan Ullrich of Germany, who is now the subject of a doping investigation. Third place went to Richard Virenque, who was the leader of a team that became of the focus of a series of antidoping raids by police in 1998.

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

Sicko!

Film Offers New Talking Points in Health Care Debate -From The New York Times:

Few of them may become Michael Moore fans. But some insurance industry officials and health policy experts acknowledged yesterday that the film documentary “Sicko,” Mr. Moore’s indictment of health care in this country, taps into widespread public concern that the system does not work for millions of Americans.

The movie, which had its first showing at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and received many favorable reviews, presents a series of heart-rending anecdotes meant to illustrate systemic failures and foul-ups under the nation’s insurance industry — even if many of the major pieces of evidence are ones that have been widely reported elsewhere and in some cases date back 20 years...

Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton, said that based on reviews, the movie is “exaggerated, biting, unfair,” but he added that a number of recent books and reports by academic experts had been at least as critical...“My point is we are on the verge of a populist reaction to the health system,” Professor Reinhardt said. “The American people are on the point of being fed up.”...

“They hate the system — it’s too expensive — but we have been hearing about these things for 35 years,” Professor Altman said. “Unless we have a meltdown which affects the middle class — that is nowhere near happening — we will not be willing to fundamentally restructure the system.”...

The conversation turned to whether Mr. Moore planned to back any of the current proposals for health care reform, or whether he would come up with his own plan. Some suggested that he stick to his position that the insurance companies be done away with, replaced by national universal health care system.

“Let’s be honest, no one’s going to support dismantling the private health care system,” Mr. Moore replied. “I don’t think the insurance companies are just going to give up the profit motivation.”

New Machine Keeps 'Heart in a Box' Beating

blog.bioethics.net: Art Caplan on MSNBC:

Now there's a machine that can do what Poe imagined - preserve a beating heart in isolation. And while this might seem to be the yuckiest idea to come down the pike in a long time, it really represents a bold and fascinating advance in trying to save the lives of people with failing hearts.

The 'heart in a box' machine, known as the Organ Care System, is made by TransMedics Inc., of Andover, Mass. Doctors in Pittsburgh recently announced that they used the machine to keep hearts beating for hours on their own after being removed from cadavers. Three patients, a 47-year-old man and two women in their 50s, received these hearts and all seem to be doing very well.

The machine will be tested further in the coming year at five transplant centers in the U.S. - the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, the University of Chicago Hospitals' Cardiac Center and the Cleveland Clinic. The researchers want to be sure that hearts transplanted out of the box really work as well as those preserved by current methods.

A Short American Life

From The New York Times:

I asked Leana about her health insurance coverage, just in case she catches leprosy on the Africa trip.

“Actually, I was going to become one of the 45 million uninsured for the summer,” she said. “The think tank does not provide insurance for ‘temporary’ employees, and my school did not allow extension of health insurance post-graduation. I still haven’t found a reasonably priced insurance plan for this period.”

Aaaaargh! When a newly minted doctor investigating Americans’ access to medical care has no insurance — then you know that our health care system is truly bankrupt....

Even if a single-payer system isn’t politically possible right now, universal coverage is feasible through other mechanisms — as Massachusetts has shown. We need to hold the presidential candidates accountable, for universal coverage is an idea whose time came in the 1920s. We should insist we get it before the 2020s.

Rethinking Old Age

From The New York Times:

Is it any wonder most people dread nursing homes?

The things she misses most, she told me, are her friendships, her privacy, and the purpose in her days. She’s not alone. Surveys of nursing home residents reveal chronic boredom, loneliness, and lack of meaning — results not fundamentally different from prisoners, actually.

Certainly, nursing homes have come a long way from the fire-trap warehouses they used to be. But it seems we’ve settled on a belief that a life of worth and engagement is not possible once you lose independence.

Compared to What?: Palestine

Common Ground News Service:

At this sad juncture, it has become apparent that neither Hamas nor Fatah, alone or combined, have learned the political art of working together in a coalition to serve their public, the Palestinian people. Party politics and the struggle over power have led to killings and almost to civil war. The only way to prevent total disaster is for the Arab nations, with the backing of the UN and acquiescence of Israel, to work together in order to prevent the growing snowball of violence from spreading all across the region.

* Hanna Siniora is the Co-CEO of IPCRI – the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Nobel laureate cancels London trip due to anti-Semitism

From Ynetnews:

An American Nobel laureate has cancelled a planned visit to a London university because of what he perceives to be 'a widespread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic current in British opinion', the Guardian newspaper reported Thursday.

Steven Weinberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had been invited to Imperial College to speak in honor of a Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salam, and to deliver a talk at a conference on particle physics.

Where's the tofu?

Clinton offers plan to control health care costs | Chicago Tribune:

For Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the problems of the American health care system have been a political danger zone since she unsuccessfully tackled the issue as first lady in the early 1990s...

On Thursday, as a candidate for president, [Senator Hillary] Clinton (D-N.Y.) returned to the complicated and contentious topic, acknowledging mistakes and promising that she had learned from the experience.

'Now, I've tangled with this issue before, and I've got the scars to show for it,' Clinton told an auditorium packed with medical students and doctors at George Washington University. 'But I learned some valuable lessons from that experience. One is that we can't achieve reform without the participation and commitment of health care providers, employers, employees and other citizens who pay for, depend upon and actually deliver health care services.'

Clinton delivered a proposal Thursday focused on reining in health care costs, a problem affecting virtually everyone in the United States. Two other proposals are in the offing — one to improve the quality of health care and the other to insure all Americans. She has already introduced legislation in Congress to expand health care coverage to all children.

Global Bioethics: Pakistan

Daily Times :

ISLAMABAD: Shifa Medical College Dean Dr Amin on Thursday said it was obligatory for medical colleges to educate their students about clinical ethics.

Introducing the Clinical Ethics workshop’s aim in his welcome address, Amin said medical students should undergo moral and ethical training.

Amin deliberated in his presentation on the Islamic perspective of biomedical ethics that differed from the practice in the west, particularly the US.

Global Bioethics: South Africa

Legalbrief :

The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics at Wits – SA's only fully-fledged centre for bioethics was launched in February at Constitution Hill.

According to the Sunday Times, the centre which has four full-time staff, has a heavy teaching load across the health sciences faculty at Wits. It also runs a master's programme on bioethics and health law and conducts ethics workshops.

Global Bioethics: Kenya

From allAfrica.com::

The East African Standard (Nairobi) By Steve Mkawale

Scientists, medics and researchers in Africa now have a centre to address ethical issues their professions face.

The first regional bio-ethics centre that was inaugurated at Egerton University on Friday will address ethical issues related to medicine, life sciences and related technologies.

Science and Technology minister, Dr Noah Wekesa, described the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation sponsored project as a milestone.

'The project is a testimony to the confidence the international community has in our training institutions and a complement to Egerton University,' the minister said.

Wekesa advised students and scientists to make use of the centre. He said it would improve ethical conduct in the field of science and technology. The minister challenged students to embrace science and technology as the future of the continent depended on technological advancement.

'Science is the driving force of development that will help in elevation of poverty in Africa,' said Wekesa.

The Pope's Favorite Rabbi

From TIME:

[Jewish studies scholar Jacob] Neusner, 74, lives by the story's moral: confrontation is part of his makeup, take it or leave it. One might expect many Christians to leave it. But at least one has not. In his new book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday; $24.95), Pope Benedict XVI devotes 20 pages to

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus

, a 161-page grenade Neusner lobbed in 1993. In that volume, the professor (now at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) and noncongregational rabbi projected himself back into the Gospel of Matthew to quiz Jesus on the Jewish law. He found the Nazarene's interpretation irredeemably faulty. In his 14-years-delayed response, Benedict not only compliments Neusner as a 'great Jewish scholar' but also recapitulates the thesis of A Rabbi Talks and spends a third of one of his 10 chapters answering it.

There is no real precedent for this. The last time Christianity and Judaism had knockdown debates was during medieval 'disputations' convened by Christian authorities and decisively rigged against the Jews. Although the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 renounced the Roman Catholic teaching that Jews were Christ killers and John Paul II acknowledged Jews' ongoing presence by visiting a synagogue, postwar papal discourse has focused on Christianity's view of Judaism, not the reverse, and steered serenely around fundamental controversies. Jesus of Nazareth takes the next huge step: "a Pope taking seriously what a Jew says--and says critically--about the New Testament," marvels Eugene Fisher, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' liaison for Catholic-Jewish relations. "Wow. This is new."...

Regarding one verse, Benedict writes that "Neusner shows us that we are dealing not with some kind of moralism, but with a highly theological text, or, to put it more precisely, a Christological one." He acknowledges the rabbi's point that Jesus is offering the Jews a transformation rather than a continuation of the Torah but maintains that the trade-off is worth it, provided Jesus is not merely "a liberal reform rabbi" but "the Son." That Neusner and other Jews regard that very Sonship as a deal breaker does not bother him much. "It would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel," he writes, "and thus to appreciate better the great commandments" as universalized by Jesus.

Neusner is not my favorite rabbi (or rabbinic scholar). Then again, Benedict is not my favorite Pope.
Kind of reminds me of Orthodox rabbis, Christian priests, and Muslim imams coming together in their opposition to the gay rights parades in Jerusalem.

How Idol insinuates itself into pop-music history

By Katherine Meizel and Jody Rosen - Slate Magazine

Katherine Meizel is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is writing her dissertation on American Idol.

Oy. Filling a much needed gap in the literature.

Shavuot Reflections

The importance of recognizing the role of our predilections in forming our attitudes toward God and revelation is that they force us to take responsibility for choosing the form of our agnosticism. We can be disengaged agnostics, waiting passively for someone to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that God exists and that the Torah is God’s word. Alternatively, we can become engaged agnostics, taking our not knowing as a symptom of the limitedness of our own understanding and seeking as a consequence to know, understand, and experience more through Torah and mitzvot.

And that is precisely why those of us who doubt God’s existence and/or the historicity of revelation need to celebrate Shavu’ot. We need to allow ourselves to be challenged by the message of Shavu’ot, that there is a God, and God has a will for us individually and collectively. The deep truths of existence lie beyond our individual and collective grasp. We need to return again and again to the study of Torah in an attempt to discover these truths and apply them to our lives.

Perhaps the Torah is literally God’s word... Perhaps it is an imperfect reflection of a supernatural revelatory experience. Perhaps it is the result of a collective effort by the Jewish people to understand God’s will for us here on earth. These are important historical questions that admittedly have theological implications. However, there is a deeply religious question transcending these that faces each of us: how will I respond to the possibility of God and Torah, with indifference or with the humility of human limitedness that leads to encounter? We need your answer by tomorrow.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, JTS

On overdoing it

The Sages said: If a nazirite, who only denied himself wine, is need of expiation, all the more so one who has cut himself off from everything! Therefore, the Sages decreed that one should abstain only from those things banned by the Torah; he should not bind himself with vows and oaths regarding permitted activities. So said the Sages: Is it not enough for you that which the Torah forbade -- you have to enjoin yourself from other things? Those who constantly deny themselves are not on a good path, and the Sages forbade one from tormenting oneself with fasts. Regarding all these and similar things, Solomon decreed: Don't overdo goodness and don't act the wise man to excess, or you may be dumbfounded. (RaMBaM, Hilhot De’ot, 3:1)

Shabbat Shalom is available on our website: www.netivot-shalom.org.il

Transcending "time management"

Althouse: Time management expert does an interview with me and considers it "a bust.":

I'm sure my point was that if you do something that you love, that is intrinsically rewarding, you don't have to think of making time for it. It makes its own time. The trick is to find your way into a life where you do what you love, something with intrinsic value for you. I blog about what interests me; blogging is a process of being interested in things.

'Cowboy up,' Alberto

From The Los Angeles Times: By David C. Iglesias
DAVID C. IGLESIAS was the U.S. attorney for New Mexico from October 2001 to February 2007.

WHAT HAPPENS in a presidential administration when loyalty, to borrow a phrase from 'Star Trek,' becomes the 'prime directive'? What happens when its all-encompassing fog obscures all other values — such as fealty to the Constitution, the rule of law or simple humanity?

What happens is that terrible decisions are made, repeated and then justified by this shibboleth. That's just one of the lessons that has emerged from the U.S. attorney scandal....

What has become clear already is that the "loyalty uber alles" mentality has infected a wide swath of the Bush administration. Simple notions like right and wrong are, in their eyes, matters of allegiance, not conscience....Loyalty is a virtue with limits. That was one of the many hard lessons from Watergate. In that scandal, some of President Nixon's staffers carried their loyalty to the president all the way to federal prison....

And what of the embattled attorney general? Will Gonzales stay on to be the only Cabinet officer to receive a no-confidence vote? I once said that I found Gonzales to be a personal inspiration. No one can deny him his life's story, which is the American dream writ large. It began in Humble, Texas, born of impoverished Mexican American parents. He, like me, is a veteran of the U.S. military. He went to some of the best schools in America, including Harvard Law. Yet, somewhere along the line, he drank the loyalty Kool-Aid. Watching him testify b, efore the Senate and House was painful for me. He had been a trailblazer for the Latino community, and then, in the space of a few hours of tortured testimony, he became just another morally rudderless political operative.

Docs doing, learning abortions

Broadsheet -From Salon.com:

... the Los Angeles Times reports that for every abortion-rights setback, new medical students step up to buck the trend. 'For them,' the article says, 'doing abortions is an act of defiance -- a way of pushing back against mounting restrictions on a right they've taken for granted all their lives.'"...

"Most medical schools barely mention the subject and it's rarely included in ... residencies," says the article. "Just half the nation's obstetrics-gynecology residencies -- and only 20 out of 400 family practice residencies -- integrate abortion into physician training, according to Lois Backus, executive director of Medical Students for Choice. Most residents interested in the field must study on their own, often through after-hours electives in abortion clinics."

"They have to be enormously committed to work it in..."

Letters to the Editor--from a NARAL primer

NARAL Pro-Choice Texas: Letters to the Editor:

To the Editor, re 'A Sharp Turn for the Supreme Court on Abortion' (letters, April 20):

I am a rheumatologist caring for a patient whose lupus nephritis is flaring. Her creatinine is rising as her platelet count falls, and she has failed to improve with pulse methylprednisolone and intravenous cyclophosphamide. I am contemplating using rituximab. I would like to refer this case to the United States Supreme Court for its guidance.
Richard Zweig, M.D.
Santa Rosa, Calif., April 20, 2007

(Letter to the editor printed in the New York Times after the Supreme Court's April 18, 2007 ruling on the Federal Abortion Ban)

I missed this first time around, but am pleased to recirculate now.

Oedipus Wrecks

Marty Kaplan: From The Huffington Post:

I wonder what Bush thinks of us.

I don't mean us as in, left blogistan; I mean us as in, America. Day after day, the president sees polls saying that at least 70% of the country consistently believes that he's, oh, put the country on the wrong course, mired us in a hopeless quagmire, politicized the justice system, handed over the regulatory reins to the corporate sector, transferred massive wealth from the middle to the robber barons, obliterated civil liberties, and so on.

Along with our view of what he's done to the country, we 70-percenters also have our pet theories of his character and psychology, of why he's done it. When pollsters ask Americans what words come to mind to describe the president, terms like 'delusional,' 'ideologue,' 'stubborn' and 'idiot' top the charts, suggesting the kind of explanations that Americans use to account for his behavior, to motivate his disastrous persistence.

But surely, when the president looks at his approval numbers, he, too, must have his own pet theories about why we Americans put him in the cellar. How might he explain our overwhelming rejection of him?...

No doubt the president has additional explanations for Americans' failure to give him 70% support. But looking at this list, I'm struck by how similar it must have been to the theories his own parents developed to explain their son's behavior through the years. How could such a privileged child, born to such an illustrious clan, gone on to be such a disappointment, such a wastrel? He's fallen in with bad friends... he believes what people tell him... those Yale professors have caved to the hippies... he plays cards all day... he's lazy... he doesn't go to church... God knows what drugs he takes... he won't grow up... they say blue blood runs thin...

Marty Kaplan was a college classmate who's done well fo himself. I've been enjoying his columns in the HuffPo, and sharing some excerpts with readers here.

Reflections on THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS and the history of Christianity

By Elaine Pagels, from Edge

..Anyone who joined this movement was aware that he or she could be killed for it, as many had been—Jesus' closet disciple Peter was crucified by the Romans, Paul was beheaded, while other followers of Jesus, like his brother James and his follower Stephen, were lynched by public mobs and riots. It was very dangerous to be a part of this movement. And one of the most troubling problems with anybody associated with it was, what do you do if you're arrested? What do you do, knowing that this could happen? Do you run? Do you accept persecution as if this were something God wanted? There is a Jewish tradition about persecution and about martyrdom which sees dying for God, as they called it, as a way of witnessing God's power. The followers of Jesus argued intensely about that question. And the Gospel of Judas is one of the writings that comes out of these intense, painful arguments involving the threat of violence—arrest, threat of torture and public execution. This shows us what DIDN'T become Christianity—and casts very new light on what did.

For when Jesus' followers tried to make sense of how their messiah died, some suggested that Jesus died as a sacrifice—"he died for our sins." The idea that Jesus' death is an atonement for the sins of the world becomes the heart of the Christian message, for many. It's certainly the heart of the New Testament gospels. There Jesus, before he dies, tells his disciples, when you eat this bread you're eating my body, which I'm giving for you; you're drinking my blood when you drink this wine. Because I'm giving my body and my blood as a voluntary sacrifice for you. So the worship of Jesus' followers became a sacred meal in which people drank wine and ate bread, ceremonially reenacting the death of Jesus.

We call it the Eucharist, the Mass. We're so used to it we hardly see that it's a cannibalistic feast. But whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas has Jesus laughing at the disciples, to say, what you're doing is ludicrous. Turning the death of Jesus into something like an animal sacrifice. Eating flesh and drinking blood ritually, even, is a kind of obscene gesture. This author, this follower of Jesus, sees the idea of Jesus dying for our sins as a complete misunderstanding of the whole message of Jesus.

So, although the Gospel of Judas is an authentic early Christian document, it was early condemned as "blasphemy". We don't know whether this actually IS what Jesus taught—for although New Testament Gospels say that Jesus did teach secret teaching, they don't tell us what it was. But we do have many new texts that show us secret teaching, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Phillip. And probably Jesus, like other first-century rabbis, taught one kind of message in public, with thousands of people listening, and other kinds of teaching in private. We don't think the Gospel of Judas belongs in the canon—but we also don't think it belongs in the trash: instead it belongs in the history of Christianity—a history that now, in light of all these recent discoveries, we now have to rewrite completely.

Time for a new lexicon

From Haaretz :
By Meron Benvenisti

If you study the public discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you will discover a fascinating phenomenon: The concepts that were coined during the 1970s continue to define a reality that has since changed beyond recognition. The old concepts that comprise the dictionary of the conflict have turned into code words that make any argument or clarification superfluous.

Concepts like 'dividing the land,' 'settlements,' 'occupation,' 'separation' or 'a Palestinian state' are perceived as self-evident and those who use them assume the listener attributes an identical meaning to them. The terms, which were meant to simplify reality, have become absolute concepts with qualitative values. When using these terms, a person defines himself as belonging to a particular political camp...

Benvenisti is a longtime Israeli critic of the Occupation, and its negative impact on the prospects for a viable peace. His reflections on political rhetoric (follow link above) are instructive.

"Politics of Fear"

RIGHTS: Amnesty Report Decries "Politics of Fear":

WASHINGTON, May 23 (IPS) - The 'politics of fear' are polarising the world and leading to an erosion of human rights, according to Amnesty International's annual report released Wednesday...

'Fear thrives in myopic and cowardly leadership. There are indeed many real causes of fear but the approach being taken by many world leaders is short-sighted, promulgating policies and strategies that erode the rule of law and human rights, increase inequalities, feed racism and xenophobia, divide and damage communities, and sow the seeds for violence and more conflict,' the report says.

The mouse that roared (well...)

By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine:

...[Monica] Goodling takes complete blame for having 'crossed the line'—even the legal line, i.e., the civil-service rules—by asking 'political questions of applicants for career positions.' In response to a question from Bobby Scott, D-Va., she adds, 'But I didn't mean to.' Oh. Well then, that's OK. For Goodling, this exchange is key, because she has a grant of immunity to testify today, so presumably anything she gets in, she can't be prosecuted for. She cops to breaking the law with enough charm to sway Republicans on the committee into repeatedly thanking her for her noble and selfless service to the nation. I think they want to offer her McNulty's old job....

It's not just that Goodling comes across as better, smarter, and more honest than Gonzales, Sampson, and McNulty put together, although she does. It's that the committee, in expecting to question the Great Exploding Idiot Barbie today, is completely underprepared and overmatched.

Chalk up another one to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Mostly, Lithwick tees off on the Committee. The Republicans were noxious, most of the Dems, pathetic...

Blogging the Bible: Meet the Bible's only Arab

By David Plotz - Slate Magazine:

Let's pause for a moment to observe the entrance of the Bible's first, and I believe only, 'Arab.' Arabia is referred to a few times in passing in various books, and anonymous 'Arabians' are mentioned, but Geshem is the single named Arab. (Geshem is king of part of the Arabian Peninsula, according to a footnote in my Bible.) In what can be seen as a darkly humorous divine joke, the only Arab in the Bible turns out to be 1) an enemy of the Jews and 2) at odds with them over who should control Jerusalem. Given the poison between Arabs and Jews today, isn't it appropriate that their relationship was born in strife?

Of course, when can return to Isaac and Ishmael for a preview. And the Koran tells the story differently.

The whole scene is almost too depressing—or too funny—to believe. Consider the first and only conversation between a Jew and an Arab. When Geshem and his cronies heard that Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall, they 'mocked and ridiculed' him. Nehemiah responds by saying: 'The God of heaven is the one who will give us success, and we His servants are going to start building; but you have no share or claim or historic right in Jerusalem' (emphasis added). That's right, 2,500 years have passed, and it's the same argument!

Cheating Across Cultures

- From Inside Higher Ed :

...the complaints serve to spotlight some of the particular challenges inherent in addressing issues of academic integrity involving international students, many of whom come to American colleges with different conceptions of cheating. As the number of international students has increased in recent years — and the number of academic misconduct incidents involving international students has risen accordingly — educators have increasingly embraced the need to address academic integrity concerns proactively, recognizing in their actions the various cultural influences that can help cause one to cheat.

Most of the concerns surrounding international students and cheating center around plagiarism, a form of cheating that’s all too common among American undergraduates, some of whom say they were never taught what was legitimate and what wasn’t. But while international students certainly are far from alone in cheating, their circumstances are often unique, and international student advisors and experts cite a whole host of specific reasons why international students might knowingly or unknowingly circumvent the system.

Foremost among them is that the Western style of citing sources isn’t universal: Greenblatt points out that many Asian students, for instance, come from educational systems in which the norm is to repeat back a textbook or a professor verbatim (without a citation), as a sign of respect to the source of knowledge. In collectivist cultures, adds Petra Crosby, director of international student programs and a lecturer in the cross-cultural studies concentration at Carleton College, knowledge is often viewed as a shared endeavor, so “copying” doesn’t always encapsulate the same connotation. Not to mention that knowledge itself can be defined differently, at least as far as what’s common and doesn’t need to be cited: What’s common knowledge in Indiana can, after all, be substantially different than what’s common knowledge in India....

Broader Vision for Languages: MLA

From Inside Higher Ed:

Taken together, the [MLA] report says that the definition of successful language training should change. “The language major should be structured to produce a specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence,” the report says. “Advanced language training often seeks to replicate the competence of an educated native speaker, a goal that post-adolescent learners rarely reach. The idea of translingual and transcultural competence, in contrast, places value on the ability to operate between languages. Students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors with educated native speakers in the target language. They are also trained to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture. They learn to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp themselves as Americans — that is, as members of a society that is foreign to others.

Summers strikes again?

Kim Bottomly, deputy provost for science, technology and faculty development at Yale University, has been named president of Wellesley College.

How many women scientist University Presidents will owe their appointments, in some small part, to the loose lips of Larry Summers? Is there a suitable reverse expression (less cliche'd than "every cloud has a silver lining") for "no good deed goes unpunished"?

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

Shark Family Values

Study: Female Sharks Fertilize Own Eggs - From The New York Times:

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.

The joint Northern Ireland-U.S. research, being published Wednesday in the Royal Society's peer-reviewed Biology Letter journal, analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years.

Where is Jerry Falwell now that we need him?

Anonymous sperm donor traced on internet

New Scientist: Anonymous sperm donor traced on internet

LATE last year, a 15-year-old boy rubbed a swab along the inside of his cheek, popped it into a vial and sent it off to an online genealogy DNA-testing service. But unlike most people who contact the service, he was not interested in sketching the far reaches of his family tree. His mother had conceived using donor sperm and he wanted to track down his genetic father.

That the boy succeeded using only the DNA test, genealogical records and some internet searches has huge implications for the hundreds of thousands of people who were conceived using donor sperm. With the explosion of information about genetic inheritance, any man who has donated sperm could potentially be found by his biological offspring. Absent and unknown fathers will also become easier to trace....

"This is the first time that I know of it being done," says Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at the University of Oxford and chairman of OxfordAncestors.com, a genetic genealogy service. The case raises serious questions about whether past promises of anonymity can be honoured, he says...

The news will be especially unsettling for men who donated anonymously before the power of genetics was fully appreciated. Donors were often college students who traded their sperm for beer money. Many have not told their wives or children and have never considered the implications of having a dozen offspring suddenly wanting to meet them. "The case shows that there are ethical and social concerns about assisted reproduction that we did not think about," says Trudo Lemmens, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Can anyone figure this out?

U.S. about-face gives Israel green light for Syria dialogue - From Haaretz :
By Ze'ev Schiff

The Bush administration has changed its position regarding a possible receptive Israeli response to the calls of Syria's President Bashar Assad for peace talks.

The American change of heart is accompanied by several preconditions. Washington emphasized that Israel is, of course, entitled to discuss the future of the Golan Heights, security arrangements and peace with Syria. But Israel should insist on not agreeing to any negotiations, not even indirectly, regarding the United States' positions, and also not about the future of Lebanon.

The new American message says that in possible talks with Syria, there are three 'cards,' or main issues. The first is the Golan Heights card, and this is a matter for Syria and Israel to decide.

The two other cards are Lebanon and the Washington's policies. Israel has been told that it is not in its interest to make promises to the Syrians regarding the way the U.S. will behave. This is a matter to be dealt with only by the U.S. and the Bush administration. Furthermore, Israel was told that the Lebanese question cannot be on the table of negotiations between Syria and Israel.

Let's hope?

From an article on the impact of displaced Iraqis on life in Jordan: Print:

Now he [Firas, a native Jordanian] lives in an apartment he rented with several friends in Amman. Every day he sleeps in a different bed: 'It depends who isn't in the apartment that day.' What about marrying an Iraqi woman, he is asked. 'No, no. The Iraqi women are disrespectful. They're tough and they demand a lot from their husbands. It's the bad education of Saddam Hussein, who granted Iraqi women a high status. Here the women are still polite. Let's hope that the Iraqi women won't ruin them for us.'

Free Haleh!--A Scholar Detained

From Inside Higher Ed::

When news broke that Iran had incarcerated Haleh Esfandiari in a notoriously brutal prison in northern Tehran on May 8, politicians, including the presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, spoke out for the Iranian-American scholar’s release. So did a coalition of faculty members, with a letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And just as academics began stepping up their public criticisms of the Iranian government’s actions on Monday with an additional flurry of letters and petitions, reports surfaced that Esfandiari — director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington — had been charged with “seeking to topple the ruling Islamic establishment.” Despite the escalations and some calls for an academic boycott, no serious plans for the latter seem to be in the works so far.

The Wilson Center said it doesn’t know if the charges are formal. “This is very disturbing,” Lee H. Hamilton, the institution’s president and director, said in a statement. “Haleh has not engaged in any activities to undermine any government, including the Iranian government. Nor does the Wilson Center engage in any such activities. The charges are totally unfounded, and without any substance whatsoever. There is not one scintilla of evidence to support these outrageous claims.” The center, though partially funded by the federal government and nominally a part of the Smithsonian Institution, is nonpartisan and widely considered independent.

The allegations that Esfandiari was somehow backing an American agenda to attack the Iranian government from within also raise academic freedom concerns. Even a presumption that a scholar’s work is not independent and part of a national agenda could undermine academics’ work on the Middle East, suggested Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors, which released a letter to Ahmadinejad on Monday urging Esfandiari’s release.

“Now that view” — that someone is “doing the bidding of the American administration” — “should be very worrying to any scholar who writes an article or affiliates with a project that can be interpreted by Iranian authorities as hostile to them,” Knight said.

Are medical residents "students"?

From Inside Higher Ed: Big Legal Victory for Teaching Hospitals:

Universities and hospitals that train doctors won a potentially huge victory Friday in a long-running, many-million-dollar legal fight with the Internal Revenue Service.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated a lower federal court’s 2005 decision that medical residents are in all cases required to pay Social Security taxes on their wages. The lower court’s ruling — which clashed with a 1998 decision by another federal appeals court that had been seen as the prevailing legal precedent — had been embraced by the Internal Revenue Service in its push to force teaching hospitals to pay tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars in back taxes....

We reject the government’s assertion that courts should defer to a ‘bright line’ rule that medical residents can never be exempted from [Federal Insurance Contributions Act] taxation as students,” the appeals panel added. “Instead, a case-by-case analysis is necessary to determine whether a medical resident enrolled in a [graduate medical education] program qualifies” for a student exemption.

The appeals court directed the lower court to rule specifically on whether “Mount Sinai qualifies as a ’school, college, or university’ and whether the Mount Sinai residents qualify as ’students.’ ” (Florida’s Mount Sinai does not award medical degrees, unlike the similarly named institution in New York with which it is not affiliated.)

Spelling it out...

Untitled Document: "St. Lawrence University President Blasts U.S. Education Secretary in Speech

CANTON, N.Y., May 21 (AScribe Newswire) -- At its commencement ceremony held on Sunday, May 20, St. Lawrence University President Daniel F. Sullivan blasted U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, calling a recent report issued by a commission she appointed 'a national embarrassment.'

In his remarks before 551 graduates and their guests, Sullivan said that the education department is out of touch with what America wants and needs from its educated populace and lashed out at the Spellings' proposed reforms.

'Almost every day we read in the newspaper of efforts by Spellings to dumb down the education for life we seek to provide at St. Lawrence and substitute something that is woefully inferior,' Sullivan stated.

He added that the report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education (the 'Spellings Commission') was 'meant to be a bold outline for how higher education in America should be reformed to meet the needs of students and the nation in the 21st century. Instead, it is in its major thrusts, in my view, a national embarrassment.'

Sullivan said, 'The vision of higher education suggested in the report is a cafeteria 'grab-and-go' system about as far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated and demanding study as one can get. And in the entire document, the word 'faculty' is used only once, in an aside, as if the future strength and vitality of the nation's professoriate were somehow irrelevant to creating and sustaining excellent higher education in the 21st century."

Just in time for Spellings appearance on the Daily Show?
UPDATE: Which was pretty lame.

What If Ruth the Moabite Came to America Today?

From Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Today in America, more and more of us are poverty-stricken like Ruth, outcasts like Ruth; some of us are prosperous, like Boaz. Boaz affirmed that in a decent society, everyone was entitled to decent work for a decent income. Everyone -- even, or especially, a despised immigrant from a despised nation. Everyone -- not just 94% of the people. Everyone had the right simply to walk onto a field and begin to work, begin to use the means-of-production of that era.

And Boaz could not order his regular workers to be economically "efficient." They could not harvest everything: not what grew in the corners of the field, not what they missed on the first go-round. Social compassion was more important than efficiency. No downsizing allowed.

Although Boaz was generous-hearted, Ruth's right to glean did not depend upon his generosity. It was the law.

Ruth was entitled not only to a job, but to respect. No name-calling, no sexual harassment.

And she, as well as Boaz, was entitled to Shabbat: time off for rest, reflection, celebration, love. She was entitled to "be" -- as well as to "do."

Because Ruth and Boaz, the outcast and the solid citizen, got together, they became the ancestors of King David ? and therefore of Messiah, the transformation that brings peace and justice to the world.

Smithsonian toned down exhibit on Arctic

Smithsonian toned down exhibit on Arctic - Yahoo! News:

WASHINGTON - The
Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered 'to show that global warming could go either way,' Sullivan said.

'It just became tooth-pulling to get solid science out without toning it down,' said Sullivan, who resigned last fall after 16 years at the museum. He said he left after higher-ups tried to reassign him.

At least the exhibit doesn't have cowboys saddling up dinosaurs! (See museum of creationism)

Latest US News Survey of Poor Job Prospects: Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers Charge Retaliation; More Protections Sought:
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Report

Career federal employees who report waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in government agencies are routinely subjected to career-ending retaliation, humiliation and legal costs - despite laws that are supposed to protect them, and repeated assurances from the White House, many government agencies and Congress that there is zero tolerance for retaliation.

These are some conclusions of public interest organizations that monitor the federal bureaucracy. They say the incidence of retaliation has increased exponentially during the administration of President George W. Bush, and they are calling on Congress to strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers.

As more than 40 public interest groups marked 'Washington Whistleblowers Week' - a weeklong gathering of whistleblowers from throughout the country in Washington, DC, to share their stories with Congress and the public - Joan Claybrook, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, said, 'Whistleblowers are crucial to the health of democracy and need stronger protections from Congress against retaliation.'...

Science relating to public health issues has also been under severe scrutiny. Emblematic of this problem was the resignation of Dr. Susan Wood, who quit her post as assistant commissioner of women's health at the Food and Drug Administration in protest against the FDA's long delay in approving the so-called Plan B emergency contraception medication for over-the-counter sale, despite the recommendations of agency scientists and outside review panels. Dr. Wood chose to resign after repeated unsuccessful attempts to make her objections heard within the FDA.

Dr. Wood charges that federal health agencies "seem increasingly unable to operate independently, and that this lack of independence compromises their mission of promoting public health and welfare." She added, "Whether it is the environment, energy policy, science education or public health, the American public expects our government to make the best decisions, based on the best available evidence."

"Having spent 15 years working for the federal government, nearly five of which were at the FDA, I care deeply about what's happening in the federal agencies, particularly our health agencies. Nearly twenty-five cents of every consumer dollar is spent on products regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. We count on the FDA for the safety and effectiveness of our medicines, vaccines and medical devices, and for the safety of the blood and food supply. The American public does not want to - nor should it - have to think twice about the quality and reliability of information it is getting from the FDA. Its reputation as the international gold standard for regulatory agencies, and as a body that sets the bar very high when it comes to scientific evidence and integrity, is being put at risk over adult access to contraception. Why would the administration risk such a reputation over this?"

Excerpted from a lengthy original report on Truthout.

Even Harvard LS grads get it right, sometimes

The Harvard Crimson: Former Classmates Criticize Gonzales:

Fifty-six members of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ graduating class at Harvard Law School signed a quarter-page open letter in yesterday’s Washington Post excoriating their former classmate for his “cavalier handling of our freedoms.”

The letter stops short of calling for Gonzales’s resignation, even as the attorney general comes under rising heat on Capitol Hill. But it is a stinging rebuke to Gonzales, just two weeks after the Law School Class of 1982’s 25th reunion.

“Your country and your President are in dire need of an attorney who will do the tough job of providing independent counsel,” the letter says. It calls on Gonzales to “relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”

First good use of a reunion I've heard about in a while.

More Advice to Graduates

MotherPie::

"My favorite quote is still Hillary Clinton's 2001 line to Yale law school grads, “Hair matters,” she said. “Your hair will send significant messages to those around you . . . . Pay attention to your hair.” "

I take it John Edwards was in the audience?

Good morning, graduates...

The Morning News - A Word of Advice by The Writers:

Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll spare me a minute, I’d like to offer a few pieces of advice for today’s graduates…

Ask not, ever. Some people will say your college years are the best of your life—ignore them. I find that, sometimes, when your miss your bus, you can run really fast and catch up to it at the next stop!

Also: Write more letters, especially if you’re in jail. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation. And for God’s sake don’t stomp on flaming paper bags. If you’re bi-curious, experiment now; that window is about to close...

And not everyone needs a blog—I’m just saying...

Obama outlines student loan overhaul

Yale Daily News - Obama outlines student loan overhaul:

Several presidential candidates in recent weeks have suggested that they would change the structure of the federal financial aid system, either in an attempt to make college more affordable or to reduce government involvement in the aid system. But Obama, in a conference call with college reporters this week, made his position on the question of federal financial aid the loudest of all his competitors. He vowed to overhaul the aid system in order to curb corruption by eliminating the middleman between the federal government and students seeking loans.

“One way we can make college more affordable — because a lot of young people have been asking me about this on the campaign trail — is by reforming a wasteful system of student loans that benefits private banks at the cost of taxpayers,” Obama said. “Private lenders are costing America’s taxpayers more than 15 million dollars every day and provide no additional value except to the banks themselves. I think the system needs to be fixed.”

Law in action?

Lecturer suspended after breastfeeding fatwa | Reuters:

CAIRO (Reuters) - Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Atiya's unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

Medical tourism

Sometimes, Sightseeing Is a Look at Your X-Rays -From The New York Times:

For decades, Americans have known they could obtain cheaper health care abroad, and have slipped off to Mexico for small surgeries or Canada for prescription drugs. But more and more people now recognize foreign hospitals can deliver not only cheap but also high-quality health care, and are considering medical tourism even for serious health problems. ...

Now, the United States health establishment may be coming to the same realization I did. To be sure, insurers’ worries about quality control and liability risk at foreign hospitals may still keep them from embracing medical tourism. But with spending on health care in America topping $2 trillion, baby boomers aging and the pool of uninsured rising above 43 million, insurers, smaller employers and individual Americans without insurance are looking at overseas care as an alternative for costly treatments, even for complex procedures like heart surgery and procedures excluded from coverage in the United States. Already, more than 150,000 people travel abroad each year for health care.

According to “Patients Without Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism,” a new book by Josef Woodman, overseas care can trim 60 to 80 percent, or more, off the price of major surgeries...

I first heard of interational medical tourism while visiting a hospital in Havana. How times change. Or don't, according to Michael Moore. Sicko!

APN : Just pehaps...Jerusalem would turn from a problem into a solution

APN:Middle East Peace Reports:RETHINKING JERUSALEM:

An op-ed by Moshe Amirav, who recently published a book entitled Jerusalem Syndrome, suggests that the time might be ripe for Israelis to re-imagine the fate of Jerusalem. He writes that "as a paratrooper who was injured in 1967 in the battle for the liberation of Jerusalem and hoped to combine both objectives – a united city and a city of peace – I now feel disappointment and pain. My city is not united and has become a 'city of dispute.

'Perhaps we should try to accept Jerusalem as it is: A multicultural, inter-religious and bi-national city? Perhaps Jerusalem is secretly laughing in its heart of hearts, mockingly looking from the heights of history upon the new Israelis who seek to make it into something that it is not, and will never be? Perhaps dividing Jerusalem, as a political program, will achieve more for us, the Israelis, than the anachronistic program of unifying Jerusalem? And what would we lose if the Old City were to turn into a place where we are partners rather than owners? How terrible would it be if such a small portion, less than one percent of the capital's area, would be given an international status? What would happen?

'This is what would happen: Jerusalem would turn from a problem into a solution. If we turn Jerusalem into the great key to the conflict, in its broader sense, not only the political sense, new vistas will be opened to us. Jerusalem can be the key to the heart of the Muslim world, to reconciliation with the Arab states, to peace with the Palestinians.'(Yedioth Ahronoth, 5/16/07)

Reflections on the Six Day War, after 40 years

:APN: Issue Briefs:

Major General (ret.) Shlomo Gazit served for 33 years in the Israel Defense Forces. Following the Six Day War, Gazit served as Coordinator of Israeli Government Operations in the Administered Territories. In this capacity, he was the first Israeli ruler of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He later served as the head of IDF Military Intelligence:

...This process cannot proceed without full participation from the Israeli side. The Israeli public is tired of wars and is striving for a political solution. Israelis aspire to achieve a two-state solution and they know that the price they will have to pay for it includes leaving the Golan Heights, evacuating most of the settlements in the West Bank. Further, Israelis know that the adequate permanent border will follow the historic 'green lines,' and it is ready to accept such borders.

Not ready, however, is the Israeli political system. A weak, instable coalition-government, squeezed by domestic partners and fearful of political opposition, is hindering Jerusalem's ability to take the necessary decisions.

Forty years after that war, the conditions are now ripe for obtaining an Arab recognition and reconciliation with Israel's existence. It will be tragic and painful if Israel would be the one that is not ready and not ripe for turning the accomplishments of the war into political achievements...

Gore redux, maybe with Obama?

From The New York Times:

Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate — saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the presidency. He probably won’t — though he might. (“It’s complicated,” he told me, “but it’s not mysterious.”) He says he thinks he’d be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him. Given his druthers, he’d really rather talk about complexity.

Let's hear it for complexity. I could go with Gore-Obama at this point, reasonably happily. Not sure about Gore-Clinton. No, Joe, not you this time.

And then again: Hitchens on Carter

The latest absurdities to emerge from Jimmy Carter's big, smug mouth. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine:

'Worst in history,' as the great statesman from Georgia has to know, has been the title for which he has himself been actively contending since 1976. I once had quite an argument with the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who maintained adamantly that it had been right for him to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 for no other reason. 'Mr. Carter,' he said, 'quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had.'

That Gene McCarthy? He did say and do some surprising things after 1968.

Who's Afraid of Jimmy Carter?

From our home-town boy, writing in The Nation
John Nichols | Who's Afraid of Jimmy Carter? George Bush:

The truth is that [Jimmy] Carter is relevant, perhaps more so now than ever. Even as Bush's fortunes decline, the need of dissenting voices is great. And Carter's dissents go to the very heart of the darkness that this administration has brought down upon the United States. For a body politic sorely in need of the tonic of truth, Jimmy Carter's comments are not just relevant, they are an essential to the renewal of a country and a planet badly battered by the madness of a 21st-century King George.

I have some differences with Carter's rhetoric on the Middle East, but am inclined to agree with the following:

He told the conservative Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper Saturday that, "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history."

Carter Criticizes Bush and Blair on War in Iraq

From The New York Times:

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Mr. Carter, 82, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said in a telephone interview with The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta.

“The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me,” Mr. Carter told the newspaper.

Let's sing a song for John Ashcroft...

Ashcroft's Complex Tenure At Justice - washingtonpost.com

As attorney general, John D. Ashcroft was the public face of an administration pushing the boundaries of the Constitution to hunt down terrorists, but behind the scenes, according to former aides and White House officials, he at times resisted what he saw as radical overreaching.

Testimony last week that a hospitalized Ashcroft rebuffed aides to President Bush intent on gaining Ashcroft's approval of a surveillance program he had deemed illegal provided a rare view of the inner workings of the early Bush presidency and the depth of internal disagreement over how far to go in responding to the threat of terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

According to former officials, it was not the only time that the former Missouri senator chosen for the Bush Cabinet in part for his ties to the Christian right would challenge the White House in private. ...

These internal disputes often put Ashcroft at odds with Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said the officials, who recalled heated exchanges in front of the president. In the end, the officials said, the conflicts contributed to Ashcroft's departure at the conclusion of Bush's first term, when the president replaced him with a close friend from Texas, Alberto R. Gonzales, who presumably would be more deferential to the White House.

None of this meant that Ashcroft was a closet liberal....
Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way and one of Ashcroft's strongest critics over the years, said the incident told more about his successor, Gonzales, who was one of the two Bush aides at the hospital that night.

"I did not think it was even possible to make John Ashcroft into a civil libertarian," Neas said in an interview. "But somehow Alberto Gonzales for at least one moment managed to make John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution."

I had always wondered about this...

From Slate Magazine: How do they figure the payouts for people who were wrongly convicted?
By Michelle Tsai

On Wednesday, Connecticut lawmakers voted to award $5 million to a man who had served an 18-year prison sentence for a rape he didn't commit. How did they decide how much compensation he deserved?

They winged it. Only 21 states have compensation laws on the books, which spell out exactly how much you get for a wrongful conviction. Louisiana, for example, ponies up $15,000 for each year of incarceration, plus job training and help with college tuition. Alabama pays at least $50,000 a year, and California pays $100 per day. Meanwhile, the federal government forks over $50,000 for each year of incarceration for federal crimes, plus $50,000 for each year spent on death row....

Is There a Drug For Broken Credulity?

Is There a Drug For Broken Credulity?My old buddy Art Caplan is on the mark with this. Follow the bouncing links.

Maybe these bozos aren't entirely clueless

VA Bonus Winners Sat on Review Boards - RedOrbit: By HOPE YEN

WASHINGTON - Nearly two dozen officials who received hefty performance bonuses last year at the Veterans Affairs Department also sat on the boards charged with recommending the payments.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press raise questions of conflicts of interest or appearances of conflicts in connection with the bonuses, some of which went to senior officials involved in crafting a budget that came up $1.3 billion short and jeopardized veterans' health care.

The documents show that 21 of 32 officials who were members of VA performance review boards received more than half a million dollars in payments themselves.

Among them: nearly a dozen senior officials who devised the flawed 2005 budget. Also rewarded was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who manages a system with severe backlogs of veterans waiting for disability benefits.

Jailing whistleblowers

Jury: 6 months in prison for Navy lawyer - Yahoo! News (AP):

NORFOLK, Va. - A military jury recommended Friday that a Navy lawyer be discharged and imprisoned for six months for sending a human rights attorney the names of 550 Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted Thursday of communicating secret information about Guantanamo Bay detainees that could be used to injure the United States and three other charges of leaking information to an unauthorized person....

After the first day of his trial Monday, Diaz had told The Dallas Morning News he felt sending the list — which was inside an unmarked Valentine's Day card — was the right decision because of how the detainees were being treated.

"My oath as a commissioned officer is to the Constitution of the United States," Diaz said. "I'm not a criminal."

In early 2005, as he was concluding a six-month tour of duty as a legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Diaz sent an anonymous note to a New York civil liberties group containing the detainees' names.

The Center for Constitutional Rights earlier had won a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that terrorism suspects had the right to challenge their detention. But the
Pentagon was refusing to identify the men, hampering the group's effort to represent them.

"I had observed the stonewalling, the obstacles we continued to place in the way of the attorneys," Diaz told the newspaper. "I knew my time was limited. ... I had to do something."

Steamrolling whistleblowers

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 05/18/2007 | Ruling throws cold water on environmental whistleblowers: By David Goldstein
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The sentence was buried deep within a recent Labor Department ruling, but the message was clear:

Whistleblowers, beware.

More specifically: Whistleblowers relying on the protections against official retaliation contained in several major environmental laws, proceed with caution.

The sentence was in a footnote at the end of a ruling against a federal whistleblower. It said the Labor Department recognized only the protections written into the clean air and solid waste-disposal acts, not laws governing clean water, drinking water, toxic substances and hazardous waste.

'This is the latest attack in a systematic war to gut the environmental whistleblowers' statutes,' charged Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group. 'They are a lifeline so government workers can challenge illegality without engaging in professional suicide.'

We got the diagnosis; what is the Rx?

TomPaine.com - An F In Health Care

The New York-based Commonwealth Fund released a comprehensive cross-border study of health care systems in rich countries and, no surprise, ranks the U.S. as pretty much last. Except when it comes to cost, that is. We pay more overall and get less.

What everyone who cares to look knows is that there are two health care systems in America—one for those with money and for those without. The report spelled it out plainly:

The U.S. ranks a clear last on all measures of equity. Americans with below-average incomes were much more likely than their counterparts in other countries to report not visiting a physician when sick, not getting a recommended test, treatment or follow-up care, not filling a prescription or not seeing a dentist when needed because of costs.

Many people have enough money, or otherwise identify themselves with money, that they’re grateful for what they believe is class-A health care. Thank god, they say, we’re not plagued with bureaucratic stasis and long wait times as are people at public hospitals or in socialist countries like Britain or Germany. They’re wrong. We’re at the bottom in most everything and for everybody.

The Commonwealth Fund does, indeed, say that the poor are in bad shape when it comes to preventable illnesses and chronic conditions. But, even the insured do badly. For instance:

The U.S. and Canada rank lowest on the prompt accessibility of appointments with physicians, with patients more likely to report waiting six or more days for an appointment when needing care.

On the other hand, Canada achieves approximately the same level of waiting using less than half the amount of money as the U.S. What is even more striking is that American medicine, despite the huge amounts of money poured into it, is so poorly organized that much of what would be good care gets negated by the haphazard system. Specifically, the U.S. is technologically behind and organizationally backward.

Baruch dayan emet

My father passed away peacefully earlier this (Friday) evening (in New Mexico).
Burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday, May 29.
Shiva will begin in Washington, DC and continue in Madison, probably on June 1.
Details later.

On Shaha Ali Riza

To Whom It May Concern,

Shaha Ali Riza has worked as an advocate for women's rights and democracy in the Middle East for most of her career, but it's her personal life -- her relationship with World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz -- that's put her in the public eye. As the scandal over the compensation Wolfowitz arranged for her deepens, one longtime colleague, leading Palestinian peace activist and philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, wrote this open letter on her behalf.

I am very happy to have the chance to put in a good word for Shaha Ali Riza, especially in the midst of what seems to be an unfair and vicious campaign against her.

I have known Shaha for the past 15 years, starting when she was still working for the National Endowment for Democracy. Shaha, who had heard of my work as an academic and peace activist, was interested in sounding me out on ideas for projects in the West Bank to promote democracy, empower youths and build civil society organizations. At the time, she did something that I later came to recognize as her professional trademark: digging beneath the surface, questioning and double-checking existing practices in the field. Her uppermost concern was ensuring that there was no malpractice -- no financing that was going to the wrong people or organizations. We kept up our contacts as I became involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and helped work with World Bank officials to draw up plans for Palestine's economic development.

Shaha later moved to the World Bank. Because of the mutual trust that had already developed between us, she soon tried to get bank officials who worked on the Middle East to get to know me. She felt that they had to listen to a "fresh" voice, to the voice of someone who was not part of the existing system. She sought out other such voices and encouraged the bank to hold brainstorming workshops in the presence of nonofficial analysts and grass-roots activists. While at the State Department, she tried to start a program to help Palestinian students study law at American universities in hopes that, upon their return home, they would help develop workable legal institutions in a future Palestinian state.

When widespread violence erupted in 2000, she stepped in again after I started a grass-roots peace effort with an Israeli activist, Ami Ayalon. Shaha introduced me to James D. Wolfensohn, then the World Bank's president, in hopes of soliciting his help. She repeated her efforts as soon as Paul D. Wolfowitz was appointed as his successor, introducing him to Middle Easterners like myself in whom she found a genuine commitment to the betterment of their societies.

These are only some of the landmarks in our relationship, but they reflect an ongoing devotion to providing the best advice to the institutions for which she worked.

Very often, Shaha's perceptions and conclusions were not congruent with those of her colleagues. She knew that she sometimes upset coworkers because of her unconventional methods (notably her strong contacts in the region) and conclusions. Often, she would choose to be absent from a workshop in which we would be speaking with her colleagues -- often meetings that were the result of her own planning -- just so that her colleagues could listen to our voices without feeling "threatened."

Throughout, her guiding principle was this: Let's get the least tainted and least prejudiced advice about how her organization can make the best use of its resources.

I don't believe that the World Bank or the State Department could find a person more devoted to their work in this part of the world than Shaha. Nor, I believe, could underprivileged people from this region hope for a more sympathetic ear in Washington.

Yours truly,

Sari Nusseibeh

President, al-Quds University, Jerusalem

Bloggers on the World Bank scandal

Bloggers on the World Bank scandal. - By Blake Wilson - Slate Magazine:

Wolfowitz may soon be history, but what's next for the World Bank? Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly's Political Animal writes: 'Good news: it looks like Wolfowitz is toast. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Bad news: Can you imagine who Bush is going to nominate as a 'screw you' replacement? Doug Feith? Rick Santorum? Monica Goodling?'

Fragments of Israel, Assembled Into a Whole

From The New York Times:

“What are we waiting for in Israel, all of us? A moment of liberation from this burden that we are living under. And it doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. I see these two pictures as combining anticipation and desperation.”

That ambiguity keeps us looking, along with the eerie sense that we are watching biblical history unfolding in modern garb.

New Yorkers will get a glimpse of this fragmented and multilayered reality when “Barry Frydlender: Place and Time,” a show of 10 recent works, opens Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art.

More on marriage vs. civil unions

Couples Enter New Terrain in Push for Gay Marriage in Connecticut - From The New York Times:

“We want all the trappings that go with the word,” said Ms. Martin, who is raising two children with Ms. Howard in Stratford. “When you walk in some place and say that you are married, that means something. What would we say, that we are civilized? Unionized? It just doesn’t have the same ring.”

Both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage recognize the importance of words in the debate.

William B. Rubenstein, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of “Sexual Orientation and the Law,” said the “symbolic naming” is hard to dismiss.

“In a way, it seems that this is both a harder and easier lawsuit than what has existed elsewhere,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “It is not looking to rework a whole entire system. All that is being asked to change is very minimal, and so you are fighting over wording. But wording has held up legal battles for a long time.”

The Last Temptation of Al Gore

From TIME

Then, suddenly, Gore was laying American democracy itself on the couch, asking why the U.S. has been unable to take action on global warming, why it has made so many other disastrous choices—rushing into war in Iraq, spying on Americans without search warrants, holding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay without due process. "I'm trying to say to you, be a part of the change," he told the crowd. "No one else is going to do it. The politicians are paralyzed. The people have to do it for themselves!" He was getting charged up now. "Our democracy hasn't been working very well—that's my opinion. We've made a bunch of serious policy mistakes. But it's way too simple and way too partisan to blame the Bush-Cheney Administration. We've got checks and balances, an independent judiciary, a free press, a Congress—have they all failed us? Have we failed ourselves?" ...
? What if he could take who he is now, all that he's learned, and carry it back into the maelstrom? Could he stay as he is or would he revert? What if he launched a new kind of campaign: no handlers, just the liberated Gore talking about what really matters to him? Would he seem too squishy? These days he improvises, giving freer rein to matters of the heart and spirit than he ever could as a candidate. He draws from a number of faiths, from philosophy and self-help and poetry and from Gandhi's concept of truth force, the idea that people have an innate ability to recognize the most powerful truths. He often cites an African proverb that says, "If you wish to go quickly, go alone. If you wish to go far, go together."

Million-dollar questions

From Haaretz: "By Ruth Sinai

'Do you think that wealthy Israelis contribute enough to philanthropic causes?' This was the opening question in a provocative and unusual discussion that took place in Jerusalem about 10 days ago between Jewish millionaires from abroad and their Israeli counterparts. The man who posed the question, panel moderator Shale Stiller, president of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation - the largest philanthropic foundation in the Jewish world - intended to get some answers. To his right on the podium sat Israeli industrialist Dov Lautman and American philanthropist Edith Everett; to his left, high-tech entrepreneur Nir Barkat and British businessman Jacob Schimmel, chairman of IDB Holding Corporation and one of the heads of Matan, a nonprofit organization that promotes investment by the business sector in Israeli communal efforts....

Edith Everett, who donates millions of shekels annually to education and welfare institutions - including in Hatzor Haglilit and the Druze sector - angrily disagreed with both men. The government should be more involved, especially when it comes to basic services, she said, adding that it is infuriating that only half of children in educational institutions with a long school day receive lunch there. Everett told of how for three years running, the principal of a school in Hatzor Haglilit has asked her to help pay teachers' salaries. "I'm not willing to pay salaries anymore. It's the state's job to pay the teachers," she declared, adding that money should be donated by other sources - in addition to the government's allocations, not instead of them.

Israeli, U.K. academics meet to discuss proposed academic boycott

From Haaretz :

Dr. Jonathan Rynhold of Bar-Ilan University retorted angrily: 'You are
imposing standards on Israel, and Israeli academe, that you do not demand of any other country, not even British academe, of which you are a part. And you treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as if it were completely one-sided.'

'It is one-sided,' responded Hickey.

Compared to What?: Dismissal of Islamist Professors in Jordan Alarms Government Opponents

From The Chronicle: :

A Jordanian university dismissed 14 Islamist professors last week, many of them affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that has harshly criticized the Jordanian government....

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood accused the university of bowing to government pressure. Tensions have been mounting between the government and the Brotherhood as the country begins to prepare for elections in the coming months. The Islamic Action Front is the main political opposition in Jordan....

"Dismissing professors at universities happens every year," Mr. Arabiyat said. "But you can't ignore the fact that the majority of those who were dismissed are Islamist." The government has singled out Islamist professors at public universities in the past, Mr. Arabiyat said, but the recent dismissals represented an alarming escalation.

Author of New History of Hezbollah Sees an Evolving Party and a Need for Dialogue

From The Chronicle::

In his new book, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton University Press), Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, provides a succinct account of the group's rise from the chaos created by Israel's invasions and occupation of Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which ended only in 2000. Mr. Norton also explores the origins and political orientation of the group, now led by the Shiite cleric Hasan Nasrallah, in a complex web of religious and political identities in Lebanon -- with a special emphasis on the role of Shia Islam in the organization.
Q. The Israeli government recently released a report by an investigative commission that found serious lapses of political and military leadership in its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. It's unlikely that Hezbollah would issue such a report, but what would it say if they did?

A. It bears pointing out that one of the first Arab personalities to respond to the Israeli report was Nasrallah. And he responded very positively, actually.

On the one hand, this report is valuable for [Hezbollah's leaders] as propaganda. They can say, "OK, we won the war and look at what a mess it is on the Israeli side." But to the surprise of many people, Nasrallah went on to say that the commission is something to be admired. He pointed out that it's too bad that Arab societies don't have the same kind of openness. That's characteristic of him. It's obvious he's made some horrible blunders and so on, but there's a degree of candor there that people find very appealing....

I want to say something about the war last year. Imagine the war stopped after four or five days, and the Israelis and Americans were more clever. You would have had many world powers saying that Israel was justified in what it did. You would have had critiques of Hezbollah coming from places like Jordan and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah would have been at a real disadvantage. You would have had a lot of anger inside Lebanon. The tourist industry is very important, and tourists run for the hills when fighting starts.

If the Israelis and Americans had been clever -- and I believe there really was a partnership in the war in a significant way, with giant sales of arms and jet fuel and those kinds of things -- they really could have put this organization at a diplomatic disadvantage. Instead, they sort of played right into their hands, in my view. My take last summer was that we were actually strengthening Hezbollah.

Bush or Nixon, Nixon or Bush?

Whos Worse, Nixon or Bush? - Campaigning for History - Times Select - New York Times Blog: By Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — A favorite pastime of political scientists and pollsters is compiling lists of the best presidents. The results vary widely...

Currently, however, we’re seeing an outbreak of consensus on the worst: George W. Bush. The Internet is awash with academic tomes, blogs and partisan rants, the condemnation coming often from liberal Democrats but also from such varied figures as that eminent historian, Donald Trump.

Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.

From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon.

Cheney claims immunity from responsibility for anything, more or less...

Judge Told Leak Was Part of 'Policy Dispute' - From washingtonpost.com:

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney and top White House officials told a federal judge yesterday that they cannot be held liable for anything they disclosed to reporters about covert CIA officer Valerie Plame or her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

The officials, who include senior White House adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, argued that the judge should dismiss a lawsuit filed by the couple that stemmed from the disclosure of Plame's identity to the media....

Cheney's attorney went further, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates asked: "So you're arguing there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- these officials could have said to reporters that would have been beyond the scope of their employment," whether the statements were true or false?

"That's true, Your Honor. Mr. Wilson was criticizing government policy," said Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil division. "These officials were responding to that criticism."

You just can't make this stuff up

Commerce Inspector General Broke Whistle-Blower Law, Report Finds - washingtonpost.com: By John Solomon and Joe Stephens

The Commerce Department's inspector general, who is supposed to look into complaints of wrongdoing by government officials, committed 'egregious violations' of the federal law that protects whistle-blowers by retaliating against two subordinates, a government investigation has concluded.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel found that Inspector General Johnnie E. Frazier wrongly demoted the two employees during an investigation of his spending, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post. It concluded that Frazier's actions violated the Whistleblower Protection Act.

It’s time to let Napoleon’s penis rest in peace

Collect-Me-Nots -From The New York Times
This is one link you'll have to follow up on your own.
(Reference from Ann Althouse).

French President Names New Cabinet

From The New York Times:

PARIS (AP) -- President Nicolas Sarkozy named his first Cabinet on Friday, radically revamping the government, with nearly as many women as men and humanitarian crusader Bernard Kouchner as France's new foreign minister....

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the conservative-led government was left-wing Kouchner, a co-founder of the Nobel Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders medical charity. Sarkozy reached over the political divide also in selecting Herve Morin, of a rival center-right party, as defense minister.

And in a related NYT story:

Sarkozy Chooses Campaign Aide as New French Premier to Help Smooth Way for Reform Plan:

Mr. Fillon [Sarkozy's choice for Prime Minister] said he would govern “in a spirit of outreach.”

What an instructive contrast with W after his designation as President by a closely-divided Supreme Court in 2000.

Let's warranty that surgery

In Bid for Better Care, Surgery With a Warranty - From The New York Times: By REED ABELSON

What if medical care came with a 90-day warranty?

That is what a hospital group in central Pennsylvania is trying to learn in an experiment that some experts say is a radically new way to encourage hospitals and doctors to provide high-quality care that can avoid costly mistakes...

Geisinger is by no means the only hospital system currently rethinking ways to better deliver care that might also reduce costs. But Geisinger’s effort is noteworthy as a distinct departure from the typical medical reimbursement system in this country, under which doctors and hospitals are paid mainly for delivering more care — not necessarily better care.

Since Geisinger began its experiment in February 2006, focusing on elective heart bypass surgery, it says patients have been less likely to return to intensive care, have spent fewer days in the hospital and are more likely to return directly to their own homes instead of a nursing home....

In almost no other field would consumers tolerate the frequency of error that is common in medicine, Dr. Berwick said, and Geisinger has managed to reduce the rate significantly. “Getting everything right is really, really hard,” he said....

Around the world, other modern industries — whether car manufacturing or computer chip making — have long understood the importance of improving each piece of the production process to tamp down costs and improve overall quality.

But hospitals have been slow to focus their attention on standardizing the way they deliver care, said Dr. Arnold Milstein, the medical director for the Pacific Business Group on Health, a California organization of large companies that provide medical benefits to their workers. Geisinger “is one of the few systems in the country that is just beginning to understand the lessons of global manufacturing,” Dr. Milstein said....

Even Geisinger’s chief executive, Dr. Steele, acknowledges that the effort could prove overly ambitious. “I’m not betting the whole business on it,” he said. He has also pushed Geisinger further into other areas like clinical research and disease-management programs.

But he also says there is an enormous value in simply showing that a hospital system as large as his can successfully standardize care, demonstrating “the benefit to patients and the benefit to buyers” — all backed by a 90-day warranty.

This is a very interesting article, worth reading in its entirety.

The article develops an extended comparison to leading-edge manufacturing techniques and associated quality assurance programs. Another interesting comparison, not made in the article, is to tort theories of strict liability of the sort pioneered by Guido Calabresi (Yale Law professor, former dean, and now federal judge, and my Torts teacher a generation ago). That will be worth a longer posting when time permits.

Middle East reflections

Violence Continues in Gaza - From The New York Times
Following repeated Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets, and an Israeli response:

Hamas vowed revenge on Israel. Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the group’s military wing, said, “The Zionist enemy is launching an open war against Hamas. So reprisal options are open, including self-sacrifice operations.”

His suggestion of a renewal of suicide bombings by Hamas, which has not carried any out inside Israel since 2004, was not confirmed by other Hamas officials.

He added that rocket attacks would continue against “the Zionist settlers.” Sderot is inside Israel proper, but Hamas regards any Israeli as an illegal settler on land that Allah supposedly gave to the Muslims in perpetuity.

For all the focus on Israel as occupier--and there is no good occupation--the problem is more fundamental, and leftist anti-Zionist critics of Israel are mostly reluctant to own up to it. Hamas, and like constituencies, really do not want "to all get along." Their goal is not two states living in peace alongside one another, following an end to the occupation. Any real-world assessment of Israel's situation must start there. I continue to favor, and hope for, movement toward a two-state solution, but cannot abide woolly-headed (and often disingenuous) assertions that all problems flow from Israel's post-67 occupation. Some do, but far from all.

W "looks forward", Daily Show scores

John Hodgman, The Daily Show, on W's "compulsion" to "look forward":
"If he were to look back, he might see the trail of devastation he's left behind him"

Updated: Egg Freezing Gets Chilly Reception

From blog.bioethics.net: Egg Freezing No Longer Experimental? By Andrea Kalfoglou

Additionally, even if egg freezing does work, it's only going to be financially feasible for the wealthiest in society. It's a technological fix for social problem. Wouldn't it be better if we had more reasonable family policies that supported women in their desire to have both a career and a family? So ladies, think long and hard before you drop 10 grand to put your eggs on ice. It might buy you the time you need to establish your career or find that elusive partner, but it could also be nothing more than a great marketing ploy to get you to gamble with your hard earned cash.

Changing social institutions and practices in ways that would make for a better and fairer society always seems so much harder than a "technological fix"--even one that is intrinsically expensive, conducive to inequality, and often morally problematic. Bioethics does not do well enough with such issues.

Updated: Marriage vs. Civil Unions/Domestic Partnerships:principles and strategies

From The Courant (Hartford):

Connecticut in the spring of 2005 became the first state in the nation to pass a civil union law without being ordered to do so by a court, and only the second to offer such status to same-sex couples.

Two years later, the creation of civil unions here is being used as ammunition by both sides in a monumental legal battle over same-sex marriage that will be argued today before the state Supreme Court.

The article provides some interesting historical perspectives, some specific to Connecticut, some national:

When the jurisdiction of Connecticut was established in 1638, marriage was deemed to be exclusively a civil function. Only a magistrate could join two people in marriage. Clergy were not permitted to officiate over marriages "as an agent of the state" until 1694.

A brief filed by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers emphasized that "like any successful institution, marriage has been resilient, changing to reflect and embody evolving societal norms of individual liberty and equality."

It wasn't until 1877 that married women in Connecticut were permitted to own property apart from a spouse. While Connecticut was among the few states that had no laws barring interracial marriage, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia as recently as 1955 upheld a ban on marriage between whites and African Americans to prevent "corruption of the blood" and "a mongrel breed of citizens." In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down any remaining bans on interracial marriage.

Connecticut's highest court ruled in 1905 that the right to enter into marriage "is part of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" guaranteed by the constitution.

Advocates of (eventual) recognition of gay marriage in some jurisdictions have decided to pursue an evolutionary strategy, avoiding the "M" word in favor of concrete political progress on "domestic partnerships" (with specific tangible benefits in the near term) or civil unions. Presumably "equal protection" lawsuits like this one in Connecticut will provide ammunition to those opposing even such grudging progress. Tough choices on principle and strategy, with varying possible "lessons" to be drawn from the histories of litigation advocating civil rights and reproductive rights objectives.
My own view, at a principled level: the state should (only) recognize civil unions ( a legal status for all couples desiring to formalize their relationships), and leave "marriage" as a religious/cultural concept to be recognized by non-state actors (such as, but not limited to, religious groups). In practice and politics, that is probably a fantasy. But the early Connecticut history is kind of interesting on this...
Comment warranted, and invited.

Parashat B'Midbar

The Israelites portrayed in Numbers are not irredeemable, a fact that gives us hope, though they are — again like us — often frightened and perhaps even traumatized: they by slavery, we by Holocaust. Desire often gets the better of them as it does of us. Farce sometimes is succeeded by tragedy. And yet along the way there are occasions of true nobility, signs of genuine holiness, and at the end there are palpable signs of redemption. The children of the people Israel are getting somewhere. Israel will heed “the commandments and regulations that the Lord enjoined upon [them] through Moses” (Numbers 36:13), at least some of the time. Normalcy and covenant will coexist and even strengthen one another, as the Torah had imagined. This is perhaps the best that politics can offer. The beginning, as always, is to raise our heads and be counted.

Shabbat shalom,
Arnold M. Eisen

Winograd Report: No Winners

By Leonard Fein (Peace Now)

And then the Labor party, the pathetic Labor party, unable to decide whether to cling to power (such as its power is) by remaining in an Olmert government or to quit. Peretz wants to stay, Yuli Tamir wants to stay (and I always take Yuli seriously, even when I don’t understand her), Isaac Herzog wants to stay; others, including Ayalon, want out. Barak? One day “yes,” the next day “no.” The latest rumor? If Labor quits, Olmert and Kadima will offer the Defense ministry to Netanyahu, and Likud will replace Labor in the coalition. The mongers of that one evidently believe that Defense is an offer Likud will be unable to refuse. After all, that would mean that in the next election, whenever it takes place, Netanyahu will be running as the incumbent MofD. The ploy seems transparent; it is not meant to tempt Likud so much as to force Labor to stay. Labor has much twisting to do, but hey, why not? Twisting has become a Labor specialty. Labor does not want to face Netanyahu in a general election, not yet, but it cannot force Kadima to replace Olmert with Livni. Complicated? Not really. It is enough to know that, true to its recent past, Labor has neither policy nor plan.

And Shimon Peres, who says he wants Olmert to stay but that he is prepared to take on the burden of being interim prime minister should Olmert fall and Kadima, now his party, decide to turn to him. Too coy, by half. Peres is an immensely gifted man who is on the verge of becoming a caricature. That is not because he is well into his 80s; it is because something trips inside him when he gets close to power. The visionary statesman becomes, unbecomingly, a ward heeler. Over the course of the more than 40 years I have known him, there has been much that has been dazzling – and too much that has been off key. No living person has contributed more to Israel, in more arenas, than he – yet every time he tries to present himself as a man of the people, he comes across as a schemer. And now he, too, disclaims responsibility for last summer’s war. It is unpleasant to behold him in his current stance.

And this from a friend.
Good time to contemplate "b'midbar"--in the desert. See posting (up one) from Arnold Eisen of JTS.

Comments from (former?) friends and political allies

From Bloomberg.com:

"The country doesn't believe George W. Bush, it doesn't trust him, and with 19 months to go it's only going to get worse," predicts Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist who ran Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign. "There is nothing the president can do to get his (poll) numbers back up."

Bush is reviled around much of the world, has precious little political capital at home, and seems surrounded by hacks or the forgettable and faceless.

One does worry that comments like this end up being replayed as "famous last words."

Would that we had more of a tradition of resignation after "loss of confidence" motions.

Does anyone really think Bush will be another "Truman"? Anyone out there able to comment, from memory or careful study?

Reason and Faith at Harvard

From Inside Higher Ed : Harvard Moves Ahead on Curricular Reform:

One of the proposals in the October draft that received considerable attention was the requirement for study of reason and faith, which would have required in some way study of religion. That was amended — first in December and finalized Wednesday — to a requirement on culture and belief. The proposal to focus on religion drew criticism from some prominent Harvard professors, such as Steven Pinker, who wrote in The Harvard Crimson that the proposal was flawed in logically and rhetorically.

“First, the word ‘faith’ in this and many other contexts, is a euphemism for ‘religion,’ ” he wrote. “A university should not try to hide what it is studying in warm-and-fuzzy code words.”

Pinker, a professor of psychology, added: “Second, the juxtaposition of the two words makes it sound like ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith — believing something without good reasons to do so — has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these. Imagine if we had a requirement for ‘Astronomy and Astrology’ or ‘Psychology and Parapsychology.’ It may be true that more people are knowledgeable about astrology than about astronomy, and it may be true that astrology deserves study as a significant historical and sociological phenomenon. But it would be a terrible mistake to juxtapose it with astronomy, if only for the false appearance of symmetry.

While the final report of the Harvard panel did change the name and broaden the category, the report still includes a strong argument for the study of religion. “Religion has been, and continues to be, a force shaping identity and behavior throughout the world. Harvard is a secular institution, but religion is an important part of our students’ lives,” the report says. “When they get to college, students often struggle to sort out the relationship between their own beliefs and practices and those of fellow students, and the relationship of religious belief to the resolutely secular world of the academy.

Harvard (finally) enacts new curricular reform

Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences: News and Events:

The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a motion that sets the stage for the implementation of the first complete overhaul of general education for undergraduates in nearly 30 years. By voting to put in place a new program in General Education, the FAS is replacing the Core Program established in the late 1970s.

The goals of the new General Education curriculum are to prepare students for civic engagement; teach students to understand themselves as products of -- and participants in -- traditions of art, ideas, and values; prepare students to respond critically and constructively to change; and to develop students' understanding of the ethical dimensions of what they say and do.

The new program requires students to take a semester-long course in each of the following areas:

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding to help students develop skills in criticism, that is, aesthetic responsiveness and interpretive ability.

Culture and Belief to develop an understanding of and appreciation for traditions of culture and belief in human societies.

Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning to teach the conceptual and theoretical tools used in reasoning and problem solving, such as statistics, probability theory, mathematics, logic, and decision theory.

Ethical Reasoning to teach how to reason about moral and political beliefs and practices, and how to deliberate and assess claims about ethical issues.

Science of Living Systems to introduce concepts, facts, and theories relevant to living systems.

Science of the Physical Universe to introduce key concepts, facts, and theories about the physical universe that equip students to understand better our world and the universe.

Societies of the World to examine one or more societies outside the United States.

The United States and the World to examine American social, political, legal, cultural, and/or economic institutions, practices, and behavior, from contemporary, historical, and/or analytical perspectives.

Good to know some folks aren't homeless after losing their jobs

Severance pact for former Harvard president Summers includes $1 million home loan, salary deal - From The Boston Globe:

The former Harvard University president, Lawrence H. Summers, received a severance package that could be worth up to $2 million or more, including a $1 million home loan, according to the university's annual Internal Revenue Service filing....

Summers's compensation in 2005-2006, his final year as president, was $611,226, including base pay of $580,115.

Summers, who resigned amidst controversy after five years in office, declined to comment last night. A university spokesman said Harvard does not comment on compensation beyond what it is required to report to the IRS.

"Harvard had a need to make a change, so they did what they did to make it amicable, as distinct from adversarial," said Robert Atwell, former president of the American Council on Education. "I'm not prepared to say this is a bad settlement."...

Summers and his wife, Elisa New, a Harvard English professor, bought a 6,541-square foot Colonial in Brookline last year for $2.53 million.

Launder your vision

dove evolution

Royal reflections

Link to Slate Magazine for cartoon.

More on Tenet

From Consortiumnews.com: By Ray McGovern

Here in Washington we are pretty much inured to effrontery, but [former CIA Director George] Tenet’s book and tiresome interviews have earned him the degree for chutzpah summa cum laude. We are supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic soul, who could not muster the integrity simply to tell the truth and stave off unspeakable carnage in Iraq.

Rather, when his masters lied to justify war, Tenet simply lacked the courage to tell his fellow citizens that America was about to launch what the post WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression.

Tenet’s pitiable apologia demonstrates once again not only that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but that the corruption befouls all those nearby.

McGovern is a former CIA senior official--one of many outraged by Tenet's behavior. None of which justifies Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc. Maybe they are all right, at least insofar as they criticize one another...The circular firing squad has its appeal with this gang.

And that's REALLY weird

A Giant Takes On Physics' Biggest Questions - From The New York Times:

The culprit is quantum weirdness, one principle of which is that anything that is not forbidden will happen. That means the Higgs calculation must include the effects of its interactions with all other known particles, including so-called virtual particles that can wink in and out of existence, which shift its mass off the scale.

As a result, if the Standard Model is valid for all energies,... “then you are in deep doodoo trying to explain why the Higgs mass isn’t a quadrillion times bigger than it needs to be.”

From a fascinating, and VERY long, effort to make modern particle physics somewhat intelligible to a lay audience.

Labor Law Reform and progressive politics

TomPaine.com - Labor Law Reform Not Just For Unions:

A bill now moving through Congress to expand workers' rights could be the most important legislation in decades to advance the concerns of environmentalists, public schools, higher education, senior citizens, universal health care, housing, women's and gay rights, and civil rights.

The bill—called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—is understandably the top priority for America's labor unions. It would mean better wages, benefits and working conditions for all employees. It would also make it more likely for unions to win organizing drives in workplaces.

But why should other constituencies rally behind this effort to reform the nation's labor laws? The reason is simple. The labor movement is still the most effective political force for electing liberal candidates at the local, state and federal levels. Once in office, pro-labor politicians are typically also the strongest advocates of strong environment laws, funding for public schools and higher education, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, universal health insurance, affordable housing and protection of Social Security. A strong labor movement benefits these other agendas and causes, which have been under attack by conservative forces in recent years.

Big Pharma and Med Students

The Chronicle: Daily news: 05/11/2007 -- 07: Medical Students' Group Gives 40 Schools an F on Policies Regarding Access by Drug Companies:

A majority of medical schools have no policies in place to prevent pharmaceutical companies from marketing drugs directly to students, according to a report released on Thursday by an advocacy group representing medical students from around the country.

For its '2007 PharmFree Scorecard,' the group, the American Medical Student Association, assigned medical schools a grade based on whether they had either initiated policies to prevent pharmaceutical companies from marketing on their campuses or were discussing establishing such a policy. Of the 117 schools that responded, only 14 received an A or B, and 40 received an F, meaning they neither had such a policy nor were discussing adopting one, or they actively encouraged students to interact with industry representatives.

'What we're calling out, and what we're upset with, are the marketing practices of the pharmaceutical industry...'

UW Med School is assigned a D on this scale.

End-of-Life Logjam

End-of-Life Logjam - New York Times: "Editorial: End-of-Life Logjam

Among the more pressing tasks facing Gov. Eliot Spitzer in his first legislative session involves breaking an absurd 15-year-old stalemate over a humane and practical measure that by now should be uncontroversial, even in Albany.

The measure, the Family Health Care Decisions Act, would allow family members to act as decision makers for patients unable to direct their own care, bringing New York law into line with that in most other states and the District of Columbia.

I have some concerns and hope to be able to comment in more detail later...

My father is leaving us, day by day

As I've written previously, my father is dying, and my mind is elsewhere, and very preoccupied and fragmented. I'm still very fatigued from my most recent trip to visit him--I really can't handle the elevation in New Mexico, not to speak of the emotion and stress of what is happening. So it goes.

Posting clips from published sources (with minimal personal commentary) keeps me busy and somewhat diverted, and I'm not really up to doing much better with the blog right now. (As if it matters).

I just drafted an obituary notice, with date of death to be filled in later, for my family to review, and am working on some of the funeral arrangements. He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, as is his due. Business there is good (that is, very busy), what with Iraq and the passing of the "greatest generation," of which Dad is very much a part. What strange, painful tasks. How we cope with grief, including its anticipatory forms, through these quotidian activities. I've written about my Dad elsewhere, on this blog and elsewhere, but this feels very different in its finality.

And connecting this once proud, powerful man to what he has become in his final days, so frail, vulnerable, confused, often in his own world. Dementia reaches far beyond the individual patient.

We have taken turns with visits. (My brother, who lives relatively nearby, has been the stalwart; today is his birthday, a very sad one. My sister spent several nights sleeping in his room, to protect him from falls if he tried to get up.) Although Dad doesn't remember very much anymore, mostly he knows who we are, and usually he recognizes our voices. For that we are grateful. And for the opportunity to hold his hand, to stroke his feet and head, to tell him we love him. Such an inversion of forms, of parent and child.

A hospice team is working to keep him comfortable, but he is suffering, and watching that is a torture--for us, and for him. We talk daily. He has, in his way, asked us for permission to let go. We have given it, with varying degrees of tears, then and later. It will come soon. I think he knows, and is ready. The nurses are surprised he has held on this long.

How will the experience of this prolonged death vigil change me when I next teach bioethics? I'll be watching myself to find out. Maybe I'll learn something new about the elusive/illusory distance between supposedly objective intellectual analysis and the prism of subjective experience through which each of us perceives the world...Whether I can successfully communicate that to my twenty-something students remains to be seen.

Rich Pickings: Earth to G.O.P.: The Gipper Is Dead

From The New York Times: By Frank Rich

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it....

But it isn’t just the divisive Bush-Rove partisanship that led to scandal. The corruption grew out of the White House’s insistence that partisanship — the maintenance of that 51 percent — dictate every governmental action no matter what the effect on the common good. And so the first M.B.A. president ignored every rule of sound management. Loyal ideologues or flunkies were put in crucial positions regardless of their ethics or competence. Government business was outsourced to campaign contributors regardless of their ethics or competence. Even orthodox Republican fiscal prudence was tossed aside so Congressional allies could be bought off with bridges to nowhere...

Bemoaning an unprecedented “lack of a policy apparatus” in the White House [in 2002, before Iraq], [Conservative intellectual John] DiIulio said [on leaving a post in the Bush Administration]: “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”...

Meanwhile, most of the pressing matters that the public cares passionately about — Iraq, health care, the environment and energy independence — belong for now to the Democrats. Though that party’s first debate wasn’t exactly an intellectual feast either, actual issues were engaged by presidential hopefuls representing a cross section of American demographics. You don’t see Democratic candidates changing the subject to J.F.K. and F.D.R. They are free to start wrestling with the future while the men inheriting the Bush-Rove brand of Republicanism are reduced to harking back to a morning in America on which the sun set in 1989.

I'm not so sanguine about that last paragraph's description of the Democrats--it seems to me more aspirational than accurately descriptive. Too much like comparing Clinton's Bridge to the 21st Century (where is that, exactly?)to the Republicans' Bridge to Nowhere.
Let the wrestling (with ideas and policies, not just with potential donors' wallets) begin.

This week in poverty

Behar-B’hukkotai & Economic Radicalism: By Mordechai Liebling, in JSpot

This week there is a double Torah portion Behar-B’hukkotai beginning with Leviticus 25. It contains the most economically radical practices in the Torah, the shemitah –sabbatical year- and the yovel- the jubilee year. To briefly recap: the shemitah year requires that in the land of Israel every seventh year the farmer is to leave the land fallow for one year and to share whatever produce grows wild with all others. The landowner and the poor have equal rights to the produce (in the book of Deuteronomy the shemitah year is characterized by the forgiving of debt and this is not mentioned in Leviticus).

The jubilee year is powerful warning against the concentration of wealth and a reminder the land does not ultimately belong to us, we are the stewards. The torah recognizes that societies will become unequal in time and that we have to create laws to recreate that equality.... The United States today is experiencing the greatest inequalities of wealth in its history and it is worsening daily. ... The authors of the Torah understood that the concentration of wealth harms a society. We need to remember that wisdom and begin to create mechanisms for wealth redistribution.

The Millions Left Out

From The New York Times: By Bob Herbert

The number of poor people in America has increased by five million over the past six years, and the gap between rich and poor has grown to historic proportions. The richest one percent of Americans got nearly 20 percent of the nation’s income in 2005, while the poorest 20 percent could collectively garner only a measly 3.4 percent.

A new report from a highly respected task force on poverty put together by the Center for American Progress tells us, “It does not have to be this way.” The task force has made several policy recommendations, and said that if all were adopted poverty in the U.S. could be cut in half over the next decade....

[Peter] Edelman, an adviser on social policy in the Clinton administration, stressed that there is no one answer to the problem of poverty, and that in addition to public policy initiatives, it’s important to address the “things people have to do within their own communities to take responsibility for themselves and for each other.”

But he added, “It is unacceptable for this country, which is so wealthy, to have this many people who are left out.”

Building Democracy and Gulliver's Troubles

Speaking of "Nixon nostalgia" and comparisons with the current crop: Here is an eloquent, and passionate, plaint cross-posted (with permission)from my college classmates list:

From: Ezra Gottheil [email:ezra@gottheil.com]

I agree that the Bush administration is qualitatively different from everything that came before. This isn't a right-wing conservative administration; it's a criminal enterprise. These people are no more conservative than I am. In fact, they're far less conservative. They don't want to conserve anything. Not our government. Not our nation. Not our democracy. Not our environment. Not their precious "market economy." Not our values, which for many people are based on their religion. And not even the political party that gave them everything they have.

This is the big con. Fool the yokels and pluck them. Bush is yokel in chief. Offer the religious yokels their Supremes. They're primed by the televangelist con artists and megachurch con artists who get rich on people's fears and hopes and anger. Offer the Jewish yokels greater Israel. Offer the Republican yokels the majority and the big donations. Offer the racist yokels code words. Offer the media yokels leaks and invitations to play poker with the big boys. And offer the fearful majority of yokels assurances about power and strength and safety.

This isn't just politics, just a more efficient version of the game everyone else plays. This is qualitatively different. Everybody uses limited versions of these tactics, but everyone except that drunken decompensated wreck, Nixon, had limits. And everyone served, or thought they served, the good of the people. Is it the conscious
villainy of an evil genius or just a mutually reinforcing circle of rationalizers and self-justifiers? I don't care. It's different from before.

In fact, the idea that it's just more of the same is one of the myriad myths that fuel this train wreck. This monstrosity, which does, I believe, threaten our democracy, grows out of the very real Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, one tenet of which is, "Always make fun of people talking about the VRWC."

The VRWC is a systematic well-funded program to make us stupid, fat and happy. I don't believe the funders ever planned to use the government to scare people out of voting, or kidnap people and torture them. They just wanted lower taxes and more corporate welfare. But they succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams. As a people, we tossed the Constitution like a MacDonald's wrapper. Until a year or two ago, most of us couldn't figure out that "We're fighting them there so we won't have to fight them here," made absolutely no sense. And even PBS and NPR "balance" reason with lies, and thinkers with shills.

I agree with [...] that the pendulum will swing back toward the left, which is what we used to call the center. Polls always indicated that most of us knew they were robbing us to make their rich friends richer. But how do we recover our intelligence? How do we stop being chumps?
******************

I think we spoke more frankly back then. Some of us still do. Thanks, Ezra! AJW

Lest Nixon nostalgia overcome us...

I do think Bush & Co. are worse than the Nixon Gang. But that should mean something.
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
From The New York Times Book Review:

But fundamentally, Dallek shows, the two were remarkably alike. Both wanted desperately to leave a deep imprint on history. Both were ruthless pragmatists who disregarded decorum, principle and sometimes the law to get what they wanted. And both were insecure loners who distrusted, deceived and abused just about everyone, including each other. For these troubled men, Dallek writes, politics offered “a form of vocational therapy” — an arena where they could exercise control and find approval.

Shared neuroses led to jealousy and hostility. Kissinger privately assailed Nixon as “that madman” and “the meatball mind.” Nixon returned the favor, demeaning Kissinger as his “Jew boy” and calling him “psychopathic.” He fretted incessantly that Kissinger was getting too much credit for the administration’s accomplishments and repeatedly considered firing him. Still, Dallek writes, their common characteristics did even more to bond the two men, who formed “one of or possibly the most significant White House collaboration in U.S. history....

Nixon and Kissinger’s cynicism and unreasonable fear of defeat interacted to produce some of the administration’s ugliest moments. Above all, the two men needlessly prolonged and expanded the Vietnam War in a disastrous attempt to stave off a Communist victory at a moment when most Americans and most of the world wanted the fighting to end. ... Their fear that a leftist government in Chile might inspire radicals throughout Latin America was, Dallek charges, “nothing more than paranoia.”

What’s more, Dallek presents a devastating account of irresponsibility and dysfunction within the White House as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Desperate to save their careers, Nixon and Kissinger schemed to manipulate foreign policy to distract attention from the deepening domestic crisis. ...

The ideas of Nixon and Kissinger, not just their characters, have languished in disrepute ever since.

Jeopardy: The answer is Jan. 20, 2009

A Feeble Performance - New York Times:

...it is part of a long chain of evidence that Mr. Gonzales does not have the ability or the moral compass to do his vitally important job.

It was a reminder that Mr. Gonzales’s record was deplorable before the prosecutor purge. He was an architect of policies in the war on terror that the Supreme Court has held to be illegal and unconstitutional. He has defended President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping operations with a zeal terrifying in the head of an agency that is supposed to uphold the Constitution — not manufacture excuses for the president to trample on it. There is also evidence that he allowed ideologues to pack career positions at the Justice Department with thinly credentialed hires, chosen for their party affiliation.

AND THE JEOPARDY QUESTION: When will it ever end?

Mr. Gonzales can cling to his office as long as the president supports him and Congress does not impeach him.

More significantly, Bush can cling to his office as long as Cheney supports him and Congress does not impeach him.

Prescribed Reading - Literature and Medicine

Prescribed Reading - New York Times

Medicine engages life’s existential mysteries: the miraculous moment of birth, the jarring exit at death, the struggle to find meaning in suffering. But medicine is practiced in the mundane world and involves concrete issues like the imbalance of power between physician and patient; the role of quackery, avarice and ego in molding a doctor’s behavior; and the demand for perfection in the face of human fallibility. No insight into its more existential aspects is found in clinical textbooks, properly devoted to physiology, pharmacology and pathology. Rather, it is literature that most vividly grapples with such mysteries, and with the character of physician and patient.

Each spring, I address these nonscientific dimensions of medicine with 12 freshmen at Harvard College in a seminar called “Insights From Narratives of Illness.” We read about a dozen works, from short stories by Turgenev to Samuel Shem’s Rabelaisian hospital novel “The House of God.” The students are generally surprised to learn how the experience of illness touches every corner of human emotion and behavior. But they are even more surprised to discover that even as they read the assigned books, they are often reading, in the background, one of the world’s oldest books. That book is the Bible. Whether read as revealed truth or as a literary work, the Bible is a sourcebook of human psychology and an enduring inspiration for authors trying to capture the drama and dilemmas of medicine....

Some of the students will go on and become doctors, others journalists and teachers, mathematicians and financiers. All will one day be patients. They will then consult clinical textbooks or the Internet to learn about their disease, and some may also turn to self-help books. But it is in literature that they will find the sharpest revelations about the dilemmas of physicians and the yearnings of a patient’s soul. And, for believer and atheist alike, the Bible should be a book to turn to.

I teach in a Medical School Department called "Medical History and Bioethics". We have some superb historians and bioethicists. My colleagues have been reluctant to consider transforming ourselves into a broader "Medical Humanities" program. There are competing arguments on that question. Groopman, a brilliant writer on medicine, powerfully reminds us of the potential contribution of literature to the enduring questions at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship and the experiences of healing and illness.

The latest cultural Rorschach

If you must, see: Joan Walsh - Salon

The video clip of an earlier Colbert Report with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem cooking has apparently been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim by Viacom. I couldn't find a clip on the official Comedy Central Motherload site. Maybe someone else will be more successful.

G!d: So, just how great is Hitchens?

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
From The New York Times Book Review:
By MICHAEL KINSLEY

Observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon have been expecting a book about religion from him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear is not the book we were expecting....

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either playing the contrarian at a very high level or possibly he is even sincere. But just as he had us expecting minus X, he confounds us by reverting to X. He has written, with tremendous brio and great wit, but also with an underlying genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects of religion. Sometimes, instead of the word “religion,” he refers to it as “god-worship,” which, although virtually a tautology (isn’t “object of worship” almost a definition of a god?), makes the practice sound sinister and strange.

Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church. The book is full of logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever....

Although Hitchens’s title refers to God, his real energy is in the subtitle: “religion poisons everything.” Disproving the existence of God (at least to his own satisfaction and, frankly, to mine) is just the beginning for Hitchens. In fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God — and not even the most important. If God would just leave the world alone, Hitchens would be glad to let him exist, quietly, in retirement somewhere. Possibly the Hoover Institution....

But speaking of foxes, Hitchens has outfoxed the Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike most of those clamoring for his attention, Hitchens treats him like an adult.

From a very entertaining review of both book and Hitchensiana by Michael Kinsley. Note that Jack Miles, in a work of a different sort some years back, posited that G!d had gone into retirement (one might say, absentee landlordship) quite some time ago. The Hoover Institution adds a nice touch.

[I'm trying out the "G!d" formation for the first time here--borrowed from some recent uses in Jewish renewal contexts. I kind of like it. Thoughts and reactions?]

A handy reference guide to GOP scandals

By Holly Allen, Christopher Beam, and Torie Bosch - From Slate Magazine:
Bushies Behaving Badly: A guide to GOP scandals.

Study of Human Papillomavirus and Oropharyngeal Cancer

From The NEJM :

The public health implications of our findings are underscored by the annual increases in the incidence of tonsillar and base-of-tongue cancers in the United States since 1973.36,37 The widespread oral sexual practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.38 Our results and those of other studies provide a rationale for HPV vaccination in both boys and girls — since oropharyngeal cancers occur in men and women. If vaccination is as effective in preventing oral HPV-16 infection as it is in preventing cervical infection,39 a substantial reduction in the incidence of oropharyngeal cancer in vaccinated populations would provide the ultimate evidence of causality.

Judith Miller's review of Tenet's book

From The New York Sun:

The real subject of this book is Mr. Tenet's wounded pride. 'At the Center of the Storm,' like its author, is blunt and occasionally profane, witty, deeply combative, emotional, defensive, and scornful of its critics, several of whose attacks on the 506-page book appeared within 48 hours of its publication.

Instantly and universally attacked by both the left and the right, and even by some of his own CIA colleagues, Mr. Tenet rails against the concoction of a mythical history by administration critics that the road to war was paved with lies rather than by incompetence, myths which have become gospel mainly though their endless repetition in the mainstream press and the blogosphere. As a result, he laments, often justifiably, that both he and the agency he led have been smeared.

But Mr. Tenet's book is ultimately unsatisfying, and not, as some critics say, because he and his co-author and a former CIA colleague, Bill Harlow, cashed in on an estimated $4 million book advance and told secrets — since precious few have been divulged here. Rather, the book disappoints mainly because it fails to explore the systematic intelligence crisis that puts us all at risk....

This is an angry book, written after the White House blamed him for the mess it created. Mr. Tenet portrays himself as the latest in a series of "fall guys." But where was he when those policies were being adopted and implemented? Why did he do and say so little at the time? And why, if he could not bring himself to criticize the president he served, did he not quietly resign? He contemplated resigning earlier, he now says, but the president asked him to stay. Only those who remain silently loyal, or at least avoid a ruckus when they go, receive Medals of Freedom.

Ms. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, writes on national security issues.

Talking Turkey (sorry)

TomDispatch : By Dilip Hiro, Head-Scarf Politics in Turkey:

For Americans, whose view of Islam and Islamic politics is, to put the matter politely, less than complex, it's worth being reminded of just how complex, how unexpected, politics (religious or otherwise) can turn out to be anywhere on this planet. With that in mind, Dilip Hiro, Tomdispatch regular and author most recently of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, turns to a country that Tomdispatch has (to my regret) seldom focused on -- Turkey -- and a situation, balanced between democracy and autocracy, in which secularists and Islamists don't come down in the obvious, comfortable places....

The present confrontation between the AKP and the secularist establishment, with the military at its core (originating with the founding of the Republic in 1923), is rooted as much in political power and class differences as it is in Islam.

On one side is an affluent, university-educated, westernized elite, popularly known as "the White Turks," which dominates the military, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the Education Ministry; on the other, a coalition of the urban underclass and a rising group of prospering entrepreneurs from (Asian) Anatolia, which covers 97% of Turkey. Both groups are devoutly Muslim and socially conservative. Both have come to value democratic rights and governance.

For old times' sake: Alberto Gonzales, Zen master

By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Magazine:

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

Gonzales seems to have made his peace with this. No more angry outbursts, no bitter attempts at self-justification. Instead, the AG answers some questions with a giggle and most others with the same old catchphrases we've heard so often. ...

Robert Wexler, D-Fla., finally loses his temper and starts hollering: 'You did not select Iglesias for the list.' (No). 'Did Sampson select him?' (No). 'Did Comey?' (No.) 'Did McNulty?' (No.) Did the president? (No.) 'Did the vice president? (No).' Then Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., follows up with one of the best queries of the day: 'If you don't know who put Iglesias on the list, how do you know the president or the vice president didn't?'

Long silence. Pause. 'They wouldn't do that,' hems Gonzales. 'The White House has said publicly that it was not involved in adding or deleting people from the list.' Someone needs to tell that to Kyle Sampson. And as for Gonzales, he has made himself immortal by merely willing himself to be so. That must be what accounts for his Zenlike state today. It's an ingenious strategy. Instead of letting the president throw him under the bus to protect Karl Rove, Gonzales just lies down in the road, then giggles as the bus runs over his head.

Can you process this?

U.S. official: Peace effort aimed at lessening Arab, EU pressure - From Haaretz :

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams on Thursday told a group of Jewish Republicans that the efforts the United States is now investing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is aimed at lessening the pressure from Arabs and the Europeans, who weren't happy with the United States in its past approach.

Abrams was quoted by sources present at the meeting as saying Arab and European states want to see that there's at least an attempt or energy being exerted by the U.S. to move the peace process forward.

Abrams explained that the talks are sometimes not more than 'process for the sake of process.'

That's the same Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame. What does it take to put a stake through his heart?

Compared to What? Until they accept responsibility

From Haaretz :

...With all due understanding and empathy to the Palestinians' suffering, the way the Nakba, the 'catastrophe,' is presented in the Palestinian and pan-Arab narrative raises several questions. It is portrayed as something terrible and evil that happened to the Palestinians. There is not even an iota of introspection, self-criticism and readiness to deal with the Palestinians' own contribution to their catastrophe.

We can understand - without justifying it - the Palestinians' rejection of the partition plan, just as we can understand - without justifying it - the Revisionist Zionist position negating the partition. But most of the Jewish community accepted the idea. And if most of the Palestinians had accepted it, then an independent Palestinian state would have risen on part of Mandatory Palestine in 1948, without war and without refugees.

The Palestinians are not prepared to deal with this complex reality. After 1948 quite a few books were written in Arabic about the Arabs' defeat in their war against Israel. To this day no book has raised the question of whether, perhaps, the Arabs erred in rejecting the compromise - painful as it may be - of the partition? Perhaps they would have done better if, like the Zionists, they had gritted their teeth and accepted the half-full glass?...

Shlomo Avineri is a professor of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Avineri is, in my view, one of the most acute and seasoned realist Israeli thinkers on "ha-Metsav"--the situation. With all the Israeli reflection and self-criticism (the best of which I try to reference here)--it would be nice to see some self-criticism emanating from "the other side." Today's NYT op-ed by Lebanon's prime minister does not make much of a contribution in that direction.

Impeachment Watch: forms of accountability

Powell's Chief of Staff Proposes Impeachment |From AfterDowningStreet.org:

On Thursday, May 10, 2007, Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking on National Public Radio, proposed impeaching President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.[Wilkerson is a Retired Army Colonel, the former Chief of Staff at the State Department from 2002 to 2005 under then Secretary of State Colin Powell.]...

Wilkerson said in early comments on the show: 'This administration doesn't know how to effect accountability in my opinion.' But he did not raise the possibility of impeachment until after a member of the audience had phoned in.

The first caller who was put on the air demanded an investigation of the lies that launched the war, and asked for accountability 'all the way up.' In response to [neocon Ken] Adelman's claims that history would hold people accountable, the caller said 'I would love to have a job where, worst case scenario, my historical record is flawed.'

[Moderator] framed the question in terms of alleged limitations of the U.S. political system, and Wilkerson replied: 'Well I do think that that's a reality of our system. However, let me back up just a minute and say that I really do think that our founding fathers, Hamilton, Washington, Monroe, Madison, would all be astounded that over the course of our short history as a country, 200 plus years, we haven't used that little two to three lines in Article II of the Constitution more frequently, the impeachment clause. I do believe that they would have thought had they been asked by you or whomever at the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia 'Do you think this will be exercised?' they would have said 'Of course it will, every generation they'll have to throw some bastard out'. That's a form of accountability too. It's ultimate accountability."

Part of the solution: Amos Oz

From Common Ground News Service
By Amos Oz

BE'ER SHEVA, Israel - Each time we Israelis hear the words "the 1948 refugee problem", our stomachs flinch out of anxiety and objection. In our parts, the refugee issue has turned into a synonym for the right of return, and the right of return spells Israel's demise.

Perhaps it's about time we put our thoughts in order, and learn to make the distinction between the refugee problem and what is termed the right of return. The refugee problem can and must be resolved, but not by returning refugees to Israeli territory within its peaceful borders. The call to allow refugees to return to Israeli territory must be rejected because if it is realized, there will be two Palestinian states here and not even one for the Jewish people.

However, the problem of the 1948 refugees must be resolved. Moreover, resolving the refugee problem is a vital interest for the State of Israel because as long as this problem remains unresolved - as long as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees are rotting in inhumane refugee camps - we shall have no rest. ...

The time has come to openly admit that we are partly responsible for the plight of the Palestinian refugees; not exclusive responsibility or exclusive guilt, but our hands are not entirely clean. The State of Israel is mature and strong enough to admit its partial guilt and to also accept the inevitable conclusions: We would do well to take upon ourselves part of the effort to settle these refugees outside of Israel's future peace borders, in the framework of future peace agreements.

Israel's actual admission to part of the responsibility for the Palestinian refugees' plight, the actual preparedness to bear part of the solution's burden - is likely to send an emotional shockwave through the Palestinian side. It will serve as an emotional breakthrough of sorts that will significantly facilitate the continuation of talks - because the tragedy of the 1948 refugees is an open and bleeding wound in the flesh of the Palestinian people. ...

Perhaps Israel's leadership should initiate a discussion on the Palestinian issue and suggest Israeli participation in resolving the problem such as removing all the refugees from the camps in which they are rotting and providing housing, work and citizenship to any refugee that so desires within future Palestinian borders....

I love the smell of sliming blogs in the morning

The Opinionator - New York Times Blog:

Maybe Giuliani has an outside chance at the G.O.P. nomination, but could a pro-choice Republican win the general election? The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat doesn’t think so: “Frankly, if Giuliani being the Republican nominee doesn’t prompt a third-party run by a pro-life candidate that cuts into his general-election support, then social conservatives ought to retire from politics out of sheer embarrassment.”

Giuliani isn’t the only Republican candidate whose candidacy is suffering because of an abortion-related controversy. One prominent conservative blogger ruled out supporting Mitt Romney after learning that Romney’s wife, Ann, gave $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. “It is not because Ann Romney gave money to Planned Parenthood,” writes Erick Erickson at RedState. “It is because this is the straw that broke the camel’s back — one light piece of straw piled on a mountain of political opportunism and reckless vacillation.”

Giuliani to Support Abortion Rights

From The New York Times:

After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday....
Mr. Giuliani’s aides were concerned both because the responses [to his performance in the recent Republican "debate"] opened him up to a new round of criticism from abortion critics, who have never been happy with the prospect of a Republican presidential candidate who supports abortion rights, while threatening to undercut his image as a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate on tough issues.

Indeed, "a tough-talking iconoclast who does not equivocate" on following his political strategists and their positioning advice.

It's the Constitution, Stupid

Marty Kaplan, The Huffington Post:

"Okay, this is a lightning round. How many of you believe in evolution? Raise your hands. Thank you. Now how many of you believe in the Rapture? Is that hand up or down, Senator McCain? Okay, thanks. Now this is multiple choice, so please listen to the whole question first. How many pairs of chromosomes do you think people should have: 23, less than 23, or more than 23?
Ready? Okay, who says 23? One, two, three, four, five, six hands. Less than 23? I'm sorry Mayor Giuliani, you can only pick one. All right, who says more than 23?'

Can you think of a stupider way for a great nation to choose its leader than the one we have?"...

Here's the most important thing we can learn from any of these candidates: Do they believe in the rule of law? I don't care whether it means we have to hear again, and probably over and over, about Bill Clinton's lying under oath about sex. That's worth the price of finding out what every candidate believes about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers and every other element of American democracy that we used to count on to safeguard us from tyranny. And since it's a Republican president and his Congressional enablers who have treated their oath-taking -- their swearing to defend the Constitution, to take care to enforce the laws -- like a horny teenager at an abstinence-only ring ceremony -- it's Republicans in particular who should be forced by these debates, by the media, and by the public to answer the only real questions that turn out to count.

The real issue is Bush

Gonzales Is Said to Seem Confident He Will Stay - From The New York Times:

“For anybody to be suggesting that this matter is over or closed is pretty far off base,” Mr. Conyers said, adding, “My experience is when the president says he’s standing behind you, that’s when you should really be concerned.”

Pope Opens Trip With Remarks Against Abortion

ALSO SAYS HE'S CATHOLIC?
From The New York Times:

The Brazilian church’s senior cleric, Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo, also condemned government policies on reproductive health, which have won praise from international public health groups. He singled out sexual education and condom-distribution programs, which have helped cut AIDS transmission rates.
“This is inducing everyone into promiscuity..."

Updated: OxyContin Maker Pleads Guilty, Says It Downplayed Risk

From The New York Times:
By BARRY MEIER

ABINGDON, Va., May 10 —The company that makes the narcotic painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives pleaded guilty today in federal court here to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused.

To resolve criminal and civil charges related to the drug’s “misbranding”, the parent of Purdue Pharma, the company that markets OxyContin, agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines. That is the third-highest amount ever paid by a drug company in such a case.

Also, in a rare move, three executives of Purdue Pharma, including its president and it top lawyer, pleaded guilty today as individuals to misbranding charges, a criminal violation. They agreed to pay a total of $34.5 million in fines.

And in case you missed this piece:
The Blotter
OxyContin: The Giuliani Connection
By Brian Ross, Richard Esposito and R. Schwartz
ABC News

Wednesday 09 May 2007

Rudolph Giuliani and his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, have served as key advisors for the last five years to the pharmaceutical company that pled guilty today to charges it misled doctors and patients about the addiction risks of the powerful narcotic painkiller OxyContin.