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.