Abstinence Only : Epic Fail

guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 July 2009 17.18 BST

Chris McGreal

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

In addition, about 16,000 pregnancies were reported among 10- to 14-year-old girls in 2004 and a similar number of young people in the age group reported having a sexually transmitted disease.

"It is disheartening that after years of improvement with respect to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we now see signs that progress is stalling and many of these trends are going in the wrong direction," said Janet Collins, a CDC director.

This little piggy went across the border.

The H1N1 virus has escaped the pages of serious medical journals and left is cloven hooves all over the nation’s psyche. Swine flue has become a porcine Rorschach test for all our national obsessions.

For the Nativists amongst us it is just one more example of the brown menace streaming across the Southern border. Michel Malkin, who life’s theme is “no more anchor babies after me,” of course was totally without irony banging away at the threat of the brown masses that do not happen to come from the Philippines like dear old mum and dad. Jay Severin chimed in with an even more over-the-top anti-Mexican rant on WTTK radio. Jay did not jump the shark he jumped a blue whale using the possible H1N1 pandemic to strike out at “millions of leaches” and “primitives” that are bringing down the USA. We have not heard this kind of vituperative rant about our neighbors to the south since, well, the 1930's and the depths of the Great Depression. Thus a nation of almost one hundred and ten million people and with a culture that predates Columbus by a millennium gets reduced to so many typhoid Marys; or is that typhoid Marias?

Not that H1N1 could care about the citizenship of its victims or their political affiliations or the national borders they may draw, it is just looking for some warm bodies to infect. Once H1N1 escaped its factory-farm breading ground it used our interconnected transportation and economic system to spread itself around. It was not Mexico or Mexicans that was the cause of the spread; it was the fact that our entire globe has become so interconnected. H1N1 could have originated from a pig farm in China or from some other point of the globe. The arteries of commerce help to infect the arteries of humans. Case in point the first infections in the USA were not linked to undocumented workers crossing the border surreptitiously but from school children from New York City who had all their papers in order. The school children had the bad luck to be in Cancun, Mexico when the virus first broke out.

But the fear of the Brown terror was not the only bit of over-the-top fear mongering that was aided by H1N1. The danger of the virus has been hyped into the stratosphere by our good friends at the corporate media. Granted this virus' great-great-great grandfather the “Spanish Influenza” of 1918 was ruthless killer of multiple millions. Still its more recent scion, the swine flu of 1975, was an underachiever. Poor Gerald Ford’s snake-bitten presidency had to deal with that strain. The response, some would say over reaction, is still hotly debated by public health policy wonks to this day. At least back in 1975 no one took agriculture lobbyist concerns as seriously as they do today. Today we are forced to talk about H1N1 lest the pork producers become upset. Granted some ill-informed people are avoiding “the other white meat” lest they somehow get the contagion of "swine flu" but that is more a reflection of our pitiful general knowledge about how biology works. More than that, it is a reflection of the ignorance of or failure to retain the simple home economics courses we took in high school. Is our children learning? Apparently not.

So back to the biology course we slept through in High School. Viruses are odd little pathogens. They have been around for several billion years or so the men in the lab coats surmise. Unlike the oldest form of life (blue-green algae or cyanobacteria) they have left behind no fossil evidence. Still the men in lab coats think that viruses are almost as old, around three and a half billion years old give or take a few hundred million years. This gives viruses an intimidating head start against modern humans who only go back some two hundred thousand years. This makes them incredibly difficult beasts to corral or kill. They are highly adaptable and readily mutate. This is why every year the medical profession is forced to come up with a new inoculation to combat the flu.

Influenza is a moving target. It is in constant flux. A strain may start up as mild irritant but then evolve, yes dear reader the bug evolves over time, in to a fearsome killer. A virulent killer can adapt to a less potent form over the same amount of time. Yet another possibility is that an outbreak will be typical, killing its “normal” yearly allotment. Influenza is Mother Nature’s way of informing mankind of what little we really know. Still the hairless apes are not totally bereft of responses.

President Obama’s actual responses have been both typical and little disjointed. His overarching response, that of calm and measured response has been spot on. The world medical community still has not gotten the true measure of this particular greased pig. It is worried that H1N1 could be a fearsome threat, that is why they have placed their worry meter up to a five on a scale of six. Is WHO over-reacting like it may have back in 1975 or is this bug the real deal? Prudence would dictate that the federal government treats the threat seriously. While there is a thing as too much caution it is usually better than not enough. One can always scale back too vigorous a response, one can not take back an oops-aw-shucks. If there was one administration official who failed to set the appropriate note it was Mr. foot-in-mouth disease himself Joe Biden.

Anyone who has observed Joe Biden will know that the man has a tendency to play fast and loose with his messaging. Sometimes it is endearing, he talks from the heart, other times it is embarrassing. The president himself was spot on with his don’t panic messaging. Critics fail to mention that Obama stepped into this issue not with just one shoe on but in his stocking feet. Republicans had blocked his HHS nominee to pointlessly posture with their base. Shocking that a Democrat would nominate both a woman and a pro-choicer for HHS when that is exactly what he promised to do if elected. So the Republicans pandered to the pro-life portion of their base and left the nation without leadership at HHS when a possible global pandemic broke out. The other shoe Obama was missing was that of the Surgeon General. As the head of the public health infrastructure of the USA the Surgeon General would be the point man for the preventive health measures and messaging of the federal government. Note to troglodyte Republicans trying to score cheep political points: obstructionism can have serious consequences; it can leave the nation exposed to real threats from the most unlikely places.

While we are talking about the serious unforeseen consequences of playing politics with our public health infrastructure, a few words about the stimulus bill. Please note that the stim had funding in it for such a public health emergency. Please note that the original tab for bulking up the public health system was around nine hundred million. Please note that the cost of delay, the new tab for responding to H1N1, is now one point two billion dollars. Because “moderates” like Olympia Snow and Charles Schumer thought that they could score cheap and easy political points by cutting “wasteful pork spending” the tax payers got dinged an extra three hundred million dollars and the nation was needlessly under prepared for the present outbreak. That is the problem with playing the percentages. It is easy to mock science, to portray the men in lab coats as ivory-tower nerds wasting time and tax payers money on pie-in-the-sky projects. It is far too easy with our ill-informed and sometimes willfully ignorant electorate. It takes real leadership to explain to the tax payers that spending on preventive medicine is almost always a superior investment. In the end it almost always cost the nation much more to pay for curative medicine than it does for the up-front cost of preventive medicine. It’s a cliché but an ounce of prevention still beats a pound of cure.

Because of the vagaries of the mechanics of viruses especially those of the myriad of influenza viruses out in the wild it is anybodies guess how this pathogen will play out. Obama’s responses to the virus are by their very nature limited. Other than issuing the common sense directives that come with the territory we are very much at the mercy of this particular virus’ make up. Some are flogging the benefits of Tamiflu, but that drug may not be as efficacious as it was in the past. Viruses do evolve and some viruses have shown a possible resistance to Tamiflu. It would be a very good idea to find out if Tamiflu actually works against this strain of H1N1 before deploying it. Again the president’s natural caution, his insistence of gathering all the facts before making a decision is pitch perfect for the present situation. In the short time that H1N1 has been part of the news cycle it has gone from killer plague to overhyped threat and that is in just one week.

Obama on the other hand will at least come up with a sensible policy that is most likely to be in the dead center of our medical art. The proposal will have the stamp of approval of just about every public health expert worth the name. That unfortunately is no guarantee that it will be a success or in hindsight will be judged an appropriate response. This little piggy may be the runt of the litter or he could be one mean tusker, it is hard to say. It depends much more on imponderable and uncontrollable aspects of this particular outbreak than what the government does. The late arrival of this particular outbreak may have limited its propensity for harm more than anything the government does. The bug may law low until the arrival of winter and then strike or it may totally fizzle as the 1975 outbreak did or it may just be as big and bad as the WHO thinks it is. Only time will tell. So for now we wait for the CDC to come up with a better idea of what we are up against and we act like Lady Macbeth and keep those hands spotless with washings of 20 seconds or more. Hand washing is a good thing. Finally if you are a lover of the “other white meat” by all means indulge in your passion. Cook it until it is at least pink through and through and has no sign of red, meat thermometers are your friend. Be safe, and be happy.

Crazy Like a Foxx

Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC5) got her fifteen minutes of fame this week in the worst possible way. The lady really stepped into a economy size bear trap on the floor of the house with her comments on the Matthew Shepard hate crime bill. For those who have been living under a rock the money quote:

“The bill was named after a very unfortunate incident that happened, where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn’t because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it’s, it’s really a hoax, that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.” Extra compassion points for delivering said speech while Shepard’s mom was in the gallery of the House.

This is what the Republican Party or at least a portion of it has devolved to. Ms. Foxx’s speech was completely off kilter. At best she was totally ignorant of the facts of the case. The authorities in Montana declared that the motives of Matthew’s killers were mainly driven by anti-gay hostilities. The robbery was secondary to the assault and eventual death of Mr. Shepard. Please remember that this Montana Law Enforcement making tease claims not ACTUP or other gay rights organizations

But that is neither here nor there for Republicans like Ms Foxx. She is obligated by Party politics, especially the politics of Republican Primary to pander to the Evangelical right. Of course there is pandering and then there is pandering. Ms. Foxx forgot that because she works in the House of Representatives she is also a national figure. Thus by pandering to the biases of NC-5 she offended the rest of the United States.

Ms. Foxx has tried to back pedal as best she can. But the shear ignorance of her comments leaves her in a deep hole. Let’s strip away the politics and go straight to the personal, the basic human decency, the Miss Manors quotient. Matthew Shepard’s death was appalling, it was gruesome and most importantly it was cowardly. If Mat were not gay and the particulars the same the good people of Montana would have been demanding rough justice on the perpetrators. Leaving that man sitting out on a barb-wire fence to suffer a long painful death was the most salient fact of the case. Robbers, even in Montana, don’t routinely leave their victims in such extremis. The very act displayed an extraordinary viciousness not common to most robberies. To belittle the craven act as just some kind of robbery gone awry was the height of bad manners. It was petty, it was small, it was needlessly hurtful and unfortunately it was absolutely essential for Ms. Foxx’s anti-gay bone fides.

This is because one Ms Foxx and her ilk are forced to concede that people do commit awful crimes against other people because of fear and bigotry it is game over for their obstructionist cause. Let’s get down to reality, homophobic males have been queer-bashing with impunity since before the founding of the republic and hate crimes legislation would put an end to that. The homophobes and other bigots want to continue to be thugs without consequence: they want to be able to beat up on queers, dikes, fairies, or any other person that does not fit their version of proper macho correctness. In short they want to continue to act like thugs without any consequences. That is why it is so important for Matthew Shepard’s death to be the result of a robbery instead of what it was, a grievous assault perpetrated on a man who’s only offense was to be an outed gay.

In a way it’s a shame, there is a good rocked ribbed law-and-order way to oppose hate crimes legislation. Instead of creating a “specially protected class” of people one could argue that the law should only look at the end results of the crime and nothing else. This way we would not have to guess the motives and motivation of the perpetrators. Just look at the facts of the case. If an aggravated assault leads to the death of the victim then that very fact could lead to much harsher penalties. Ditto for the case where there are multiple assailants. In the case of multiple assailants the leader of the group could be singled out for harsher punishment. Society at large could simple state that it will not tolerate assault and battery for any reason and will punish such act severely. Simply put the societies bottom line could be “we don’t care why you beat up another citizen, when you do so we will toss you in jail and let you rot there.” Such an attitude would be forceful, consistent and logical; thus it does not have a prayer of getting past the legislative sausage maker.

Unfortunately for sweet reason there are too many culturally ingrained “justifications” especially for males to settle matters with fists. Thus we are burdened with the codification of these “justifications.” We are forced to explain in law when protecting our macho priorities end and when protecting a pacific society begins. This whole conundrum begins at the kindergarten playground and never truly ends. Should the boy (or girl) buck up and take the bully on his (or her) own or should the school impose order via policies and procedures? The school does have to impose some sort of order or chaos will ensure- the kids will quickly devolve into a Hobbesian struggle of the all vs. the all. How much control is enough?

What is true for the school playgrounds it written larger for the general society. Hate Crimes legislation is basically trying to control the behavior of the grown-up school yard bullies. The bullies have not truly changed; they still prey on the week, the easy marks, the disliked, those least able to defend themselves. The bullies are still the craven, vicious, small minded thugs they always have been. The bullies still gather with like minded souls to better harass their victims. The only thing that has changed is the stakes of the game. It is no longer about bloody noses on the playground, it now about lives. It is about the lives of millions of people who are harassed, beaten, and abused. It is about people who can not go about their lives with out some chucklehead feeling he has the “right” to administer a beat down on them. It is about the use of excessive force to impose conformity for conformity’s sake.

In the end that is the very confrontational conformity that Ms. Foxx is attempting to defend.. She and the people she represents are upset that the larger society no longer supports their brand of conformity. They are upset that the larger consensus is moving toward acceptance of difference vice suppression of difference.

It is said a gaff is saying something one truly believes that is not politically popular. Ms Foxx was providing a small view into her real opinions. Mat Shepard's case is a hoax to her because Mat Shepard deserved what happened to him. It was only a robbery because thumping on the dreaded gay is perfectly acceptable. Those silly cowboys just got a little out of control. We certainly don’t need a law to protect people like Mat Shepard (read "evil, deviant, gays") so we will use any bogus argument that comes to mind. And when we are called out on our crass bigotry and appealing to the worst instincts of our constituents we will offer some lame non-apology apology because any real act of contrition will ruin our chances for reelection in 2010.

One wonders if the good people of NC-5 will ever find the minimal decency or compassion to realize that even if you have solid reason to object to the gay lifestyle there is still no justification for allowing independent actors taking "justice" in their own hands. There is no justification for beating a young man to death just because he is gay. There is no justification for beating him at all. There is no good reason to try to sweep the particulars of Mat Shepard's death under the rug. The punishment did not meet the crime; thus the federal government is attempting to rectify that shortcoming via legislation. Those who object are no friends of law and order; they are nothing more than modern day Visigoths trying to escape the consequences of their behavior.

Mr. Bush Gets Schooled on History

Now that the Presidency of George W. Bush has finally ended we can actually start to evaluate his claim that history will be much kinder to him than current opinion. Mr. Bush is very fond of the notion that this anthropomorphic entity will somehow someday fly in and say “heck of a job Bush!” But history is not and never has been such a clear cut entity.

It would be helpful to have some sort of running definition of history. Is history “more or less bunk” as Henry Ford proclaimed or is it “the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity” as Cicero would have it. At base history asks the facile question of how we arrived here.

From this one question spouts many different answers, quite often the past is not a simple as it may seem. In history as in much of life the answers one gets depend on the question being asked. Huge patches of the past were not even investigated until scholars started to ask the right questions. Also new tools and new disciplines also affect our view of the past. The science of demography plus the advent of computer science combined to give a whole new type of history, not of kings and queens but of ordinary people.

Still History does reside in the sourcing; it welded to the archive and to the written word. Simply put: no documentation—no history. History depends on the sourcing, it depends on the data.

Ironically history also depends on time. While Americans may gleefully declare the Bush Administration “History” it really is not; it is merely current events. Serious history really does not occur until at least a generation has transpired. Only people who have not actually lived through the Bush years or have no living memory of it can give it a more honest appraisal. When present day kindergarteners are writing their Doctoral theses then we will have the first real histories of Bush and Cheney. This is the real first draft of History. To talk of the rough draft of History being written as of January 20th 2009 is foolish in the extreme; we not even at the stage of drunken scribbles on the back of cocktail napkins. Actually we were at that stage, to a fashion, with the Bush Legacy project run by that political troll extraordinaire Carl Rove. The Bush Legacy Project though was more like the scribbles made in crayons by the members of an insane asylum after a few hits of very bad LSD.

So what will the scholars writing in 2030 or there about be looking at? Will they echo our current crop of historians who rate Bush Jr. as one of the worst presidents ever or will W. some how rise up from the ashes like Harry Truman? Let’s try to leave bias behind and take a Joe Friday approach. Good ol’ Joe wanted “just the facts.” Let us attempt to do the same.

We begin with Bush’s actually capturing the office in 2000. His claiming of the office was to put it mildly—different. Bush was the candidate with the second best vote total. Vice President Albert Gore found out the inconvenient truth about how the president is actually elected via the Electoral College. Not since the election of 1876 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876) had candidate with the popular vote majority managed to loose the election. That election also turned on the vote in Florida (as well as Louisiana and South Carolina) and also on ballot issues. The big twist in 2000 was the intervention of the Supreme Court in the election process. On a clear party-line vote the Supreme Court went with the Republican. The only vote that really counted in the end was not 105,405,100 cast by U.S. Citizens but the 9 votes of the Supreme Court.

Upon his elevation to the office Bush was neither shy nor cautious as he began almost immediately to forward a conservative agenda. First up was a massive tax cut. Bush had inherited a surplus from Clinton; instead of applying that surplus to federal deficit he returned the surplus and more via the cut. Bush was especially generous to the top tier of tax payers slashing their bill to Uncle Sam enormously. Over the eight years of Bush 43 the national debt nearly doubled in dollar terms from 5.8 trillion dollars to 10.7 trillion dollars and increased from 57.4% of GDP to 74.5% of GDP. What that money purchased will be discussed later under the heading of Iraq.

But before we turn our eyes abroad let us look at domestic policy, specifically energy policy. Early in the Bush Administration his Vice President was entrusted with creating the U.S. energy policy. As the V.P. was the former CEO of a major energy corporation this was a very dicey proposal. The V.P. then increased the concerns of the watchdogs by enveloping the discussion in a dark cloud of secrecy. When the former head of Halliburton only invites other members of the petroleum elite to brainstorm on energy policy and then refused to disclose what those discussions were about it raises all sorts of troublesome questions. As both Cheney and Bush were denizens of the oil patch it is no real surprise that the Administration tilted to a very petro-friendly axis. Cheney’s obsession with undercover machinations would eventually deeply harm the Administrations’ ethical standings with the general public and lead to all sorts of wild speculations about what really went on behind the closed doors of the White House.

It was however the intersection of domestic and foreign policy where Bush’s first term is defined. Specifically it was National Security and the ideological biases that informed policy in this area that became a recurring issue with team W. Much ink has been spilled by numerous political players on the subject. Most of these books tend to be self-serving tomes who sole purpose resides in shifting the blame on other parties. Still a pattern can be observed.

The Bush Administration at first was clearly focused on SDI to the exclusion of all other National Security Issues. The development of more and better nuclear weapons was a secondary and reinforcing aspect to this theme. Foreign policy revolved around developing and deploying a missile defense shield and little else. Bush foreign policy and National Security heavyweights talked of little else. Russia was not happy with these developments. They did not put much store in the explanation about defending the U.S.A. against “rouge nations” like Iran or North Korea. From the Russian perspective SDI looked exactly like a US first strike weapon aimed right down their collective throats. Despite Russian objections Bush scrapped the ABM treaty and other longstanding bi-lateral treaties to pursue his defensive shield. The European Union was not exactly thrilled by the Bush proposals either. Eventually Bush would have to deploy the missiles in the “New Democracy” of Poland vice the old democracies that had been part of the U.S. national security structure since the Marshal Plan.

While Bush, Cheney and Rice focused on Ronald Regan’s dream other areas fell by the wayside. One of those was terrorism. Specifically the ideological blinders of the Bush administration caused them to not see the threat posed by non-state actors. This was not accidental, it was policy. The Administration was wrapped up in what it saw a great power politics and geo-strategy. Al Qudea was not on intellectual radar. Bush’s contemptuous dismissal of his PDB briefer just before 9/11 was a clear indication of where his mind was at.

Thus when four planes guided by jihadi operatives of Osama Bin Laden’s Al Queda network slammed into their targets or into the earth (flight 93) the Bush Administration was blind-sided. While they where thinking grand thoughts about missile defense, while they mused about highly complex weapons systems, 19 men armed with box cutters pulled off the worst loss of American lives since Pearl Harbor.

After the initial confusion the Bush Political team righted itself. Bush climbed the rubble of the former WTC and vowed to make things right again. The nation was behind him; more than that the whole world was behind him. No President had an opportunity for greatness thrust upon him like Bush right after 9/11. World opinion was behind Bush to a degree never seen before. We are still too close to that moment and the inevitable disappointments such events will cause; still it is hard to see future historians being anything but harsh on Bush. It is hard to see how 9/11 can be seen as anything other than a missed opportunity. Bush was off kilter from the very start. When the nation was begging to reengage in a noble cause all Bush could offer was to go shopping.

Bush did use 9/11 to enact a series of laws that had been on the Conservative back burner since the Nixon glory days. The enactment of the PATRIOT ACT and other bills like it gave vast powers to an already swollen police state. But despite this growth or perhaps because of the act the Bush Administration in the form of Vice President Cheney decided to go even further. Thanks to the V.P.’s obsession with secrecy we still have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes. We do know that is was so bad that an arch-conservative in good standing, John Ashcroft, threatened to resign over the abuses of power.

After 9/11 the Bush Administration had a new lease on life. Bush’s popularity zoomed from the mid 50’s to a 90% approval rating. Only hard-core lefties and the perennially undecided that show up on every poll demurred. With this backing Bush embarked on his first military adventure, that of Afghanistan.
…
To be Continued

Why Can't Priests Keep Their Cassocks Zipped?

43 more allege sex abuse by Catholics

Church leaders are accused of negligent supervision

By LISA DEMER
ldemer@adn.com

Published: January 14th, 2009 11:36 PM
Last Modified: January 14th, 2009 11:37 PM

A group of 43 Alaska Natives who say they were sexually abused by Catholic priests and church volunteers have sued the Jesuit order, alleging that remote Alaska villages became a worldwide dumping ground for clergy with histories of abuse.

The 78-page lawsuit filed this week in Bethel Superior Court is the latest in an Alaska clergy scandal that involves more than 300 victims and about 40 accused perpetrators, according to Patrick Wall, a former monk and priest who works for a California law firm as an advocate for sex abuse victims.

This week's lawsuit is on behalf of 35 men and eight women, and another one is in the works with another 60 or so victims, said Anchorage attorney Ken Roosa, who is one of the lawyers representing the group.

People keep coming forward, he said.

Some of the events alleged in the stream of lawsuits stretch back into the 1940s, and others happened as recently as 2001. But much of the abuse took place in the 1960s and 1970s, Wall said.

The new suit contends that pedophile priests unsuited to serve anywhere else were dumped on Alaska and put in remote villages with little or no law enforcement, making it virtually impossible for anyone to report them.

There was a calculated effort at the highest levels of the Jesuit order to "'dump' these 'problem priests' in a location in which the priests could avoid detection and continued to sexually abuse countless Native children," the suit says.

Planned Parenthood Strikes Back