Year: 2005

A major academic group in Britain, the Association of University Teachers, readies itself to ban Israeli lecturers, unless they sign an affidavit condemning their own government’s actions.

Last night on Hardball, I said what I think needs to be said. Under John Paul II (and his predecessors), the Roman Catholic church presided over the rape and molestation of thousands of children and teenagers. Under John Paul II, the church at first did all it could to protect its own and to impugn and threaten the victims of this abuse. Rome never acknowledged, let alone take responsibility for, the scale of the moral betrayal. I was staggered to see Cardinal Bernard Law holding press conferences in Rome this week, and appearing on television next to the man who announced the Pope’s death. But that was the central reaction of the late Pope to this scandal: he sided with the perpetrators, because they were integral to his maintenance of power. When you hear about this Pope’s compassion, his concern for the victims of society, his love of children, it’s important to recall that when it came to walking the walk in his own life and with his own responsibility, he walked away. He all but ignored his church’s violation of the most basic morality – that you don’t use the prestige of the church to rape innocent children. Here was a man who lectured American married couples that they could not take the pill, who told committed gay couples that they were part of an “ideology of evil,” but acquiesced and covered up the rape of minors. When truth met power, John Paul II chose truth. When truth met his power, John Paul II defended his own prerogatives at the expense of the innocent. Many have forgotten. That’s not an option for the victims of this clerical criminality.

Good for him. Just ignore the blather about being taken out of context. He wasn’t. He contributed to anti-judicial emotionalism; and he has retracted his inflammatory remarks.

Glenn adds his voice to the growing chorus. The more I mull over John Cornyn’s disgusting remarks about violence directed toward judges, the more outrageous they seem. Shouldn’t Cornyn be required to retract his comments? Can’t the blogosphere do something to keep up the pressure? Here’s hoping that even the judicial critics at conservative websites can draw the line at this poison. How must Judge Lefkow be feeling right now?

Sorry for the lack of insta-analysis. It’s taken me a while to sort out my conflicted mess of feelings and ideas about him. I’ve written a short piece for TNR on his legacy – a deeply mixed one, in my view. I’ll post it once it’s available.

BAITING JUDGES: Josh Marshall links to Senator John Cornyn’s extraordinary diatribe about the judiciary. Yes, Josh, you’re right to be appalled. Just not shocked. Money quote from Cornyn:

I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in – engage in violence.

Over to you, Mr DeLay.

BLAIR’S LEAD NARROWS: Several polls show a fast tightening British electoral race. The gap between Blair and the Tories has narrowed to two or three points. Labour should still win, but it no longer looks like a shoo-in.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I don’t own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone needs to get a hold of me they just say “Mitch,” and I say “What?” and turn my head slightly …” – comedian Mitch Hedberg. Those were the days.

DANCE, WHITE BOY: Another Internet star is born.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE VERSUS GAYS: BoyfromTroi makes an interesting point. Wealthy spouses are allowed to contribute an indefinite amount to their spouse’s campaign. But gay candidates are not allowed legal spouses. Isn’t this a formal form of electoral discrimination?

A new, liberal-leaning, internationalist foreign policy blog.

MORE ON SCHIAVO: Whatever happened to theological moderation? My take in the Sunday Times.

SUPER-HIV: Since the mainstream media has been doing such a piss-poor job of understanding or even explaining the alleged case of super-HIV, with the New York Times leading the pack in reckless, dumb reporting, I thought it would be worth posting the technical details we now have. Some of this stuff is available online only to doctors subscribing to certain websites. One of them at NIH sent me this analysis:

The results of genotyping studies to ascertain the drug susceptibility of the patient’s HIV-1 revealed broad resistance to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTI), non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTI), and protease inhibitors. The genotype was confirmed by further testing done at ViroLogic with one notable difference: the detection of a mixture of M184V/I in reverse transcriptase (RT). The researchers interpreted the collection of mutations to confer resistance to thymidine analogues, lamivudine and emtricitabine, reduced susceptibility to abacavir and tenofovir, high-level resistance to nevirapine, possibly an attenuated response to efavirenz, and broad resistance to protease inhibitors. They also noted low degrees of reduced susceptibility to lamivudine and emtricitabine. Superficially, these findings suggest little evidence of drug resistance to these agents. However, given the presence of mixtures of viral species detected at aminoacid positions 184, 210, and 215 in RT – all resistance-conferring substitutions for NRTI – a discordance between the genotype and phenotype results was predicted. Additionally, the results of the phenotyping assay showed the virus was highly resistant to nevirapine and all commercially available protease inhibitors. The virus tested sensitive to two NNRTI, efavirenz and delavirdine, and to enfurvitide, an inhibitor that blocks HIV-1 entry into cells.

Treatment options for the patient are therefore limited. His virus is resistant to all protease inhibitors and nevirapine, and is sensitive to efurvitide and efavirenz. The phenotype data for NRTI show susceptibility to various drugs in this class. However, viral mixtures with aminoacid substitutions at positions 184 (conferring resistance to lamivudine and emtricitabine) and with thymidine analogue mutations at 210 and 215 (conferring resistance to abacavir and thymidine analogues) suggests that most NRTIs are unlikely to be effective. Furthermore, the presence of M41L together with mixtures reflected at positions 210 and 219 in RT predicts an attenuated response to tenofovir. Therefore efurvitide and efavirenz are the only two antiretroviral drugs that can possibly provide full activity against the virus in this patient. As I understand it HAART has been initiated, including efurvitide and efavirenz, and possibly fuzeon. I hope that he responds, and that efurvitide and efavirenz do prove effective – if they do, he’s got a fighting chance.

I know many of you will not be able to follow much of this, but those of us who have learned to understand some of the science can glean something useful. First: this is how sophisticated HIV treatment now is – specific genetic analysis of everyone’s own viral strain and a callibrated response. Second: this patient is treatable. In fact, his options are far greater than they would have been, say, five years ago. Notice that resistance to various drugs is not binary. There’s a spectrum, and skilled doctors can provide very precise combination options to target viral replication. I’ll make a rash prediction: this guy will have a much improved immune system in a few months. As long as he doesn’t touch any more crystal meth.

My apologies but the Weekly Standard has already gone a long way toward answering my “What If?” question. In a subtle but ultimately very radical piece, Eric Cohen argues that the will of the vegetative person to be allowed to die, even if expressed in a living will or supported by all her family, is not the real issue here. People cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs’ to revoke:

[T]he real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are … [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.

So if we reject the “autonomy regime,” what replaces it? The moral obligation to keep even people in PVS in permanent medical care, regardless of her own wishes or that of the family. But Cohen is somewhat vague on how this new regime can be imposed. The only possibility, it seems to me, is that the law state emphatically that living wills are not dispositive, that family wishes are not relevant, and that the law set a series of medical or moral criteria to determine whether to keep someone alive indefinitely. Doctors and families would be obliged to obey such laws. The state would be obliged to enforce them – through the police power if necessary. What if the family could not afford the care? Presumably the state would be required to provide it. So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My “what if?” is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the “autonomy regime.” They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom – autonomy over one’s own physical body – is now under attack. And if a theocon government won’t allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?

Here’s another version of the question I posed this morning. It’s an email I just received::

What if the situation were exactly the same, with the exact same people hearing the exact same things that she supposedly said? Except her side of the family agreed that removing the tube would be the best thing because they agreed her quality of life and her hope for recovery was zero. Not because they could point to a like expression of her wishes.
Then this would never have gotten to the courts, but the moral arguments for not killing her, and for violating her civil rights would be exactly the same.
The only solution in such a situation would be that lawyers and the government would have to get involved at that point, in EVERY similar situation. Fine. Is that what society wants?

It’s what the religious right logically must want: a huge expansion of government power to ensure that all life is held sacred at every point of the process that they consider relevant, i.e. no abortion, no living wills, no scintilla of a right to die. That agenda isn’t explicit now. But it is implicit. And what happens when a person on life support, legally required to be kept alive, doesn’t have the resources to maintain the care? Of course, the government must step in, to provide the funds necessary to keep someone from being murdered. When you think of the religious right vision of the benevolent, big “Christian” state, is it any surprise that Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader are on their side?

That’s the big question about Sandy Berger’s theft and destruction of classified documents – and subsequent porkie pies about it. The MSM media have a great story to pursue. Will they?

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “It infuriates me that we’ll never see those [Abu Ghraib] pictures, but here’s something that disturbs me more. The other day my husband and I went to see our lawyer to sign new Wills, Living Wills, etc. Friendly chitchat and the lawyer said he was a Republican, I said I was a Democrat. This led to a discussion of politics, nothing unpleasant until Iraq came up. I mentioned I was shocked by the torture. Immediately my husband and the lawyer jumped on me, “That’s war, it’s always the way in war.” I tried to object, but the lawyer looked at my husband and said, “The victor writes the history, right?” They smiled knowingly and I gave up.
Andrew, my husband wouldn’t hurt a fly, hates violence and has never served in combat. I have every reason to believe the lawyer is cut from the same cloth. They’re a couple of middle class suburbanites. Neither of them gives a damn.
I felt sick but I’m trying not to dwell on it as it will make me crazy.”

Here’s a question I can’t get out of my head. What if Terri Schiavo had had a living will saying she wouldn’t want a feeding tube to keep her alive for decades with no reasonable hope for recovery? Legally, of course, there’d be no issue. She’d get her chance to die in peace. But morally? The arguments of the proponents for keeping the feeding tube in indefinitely suggest that removing the tube is simply murder. If that is the case, then how can removing the tube ever be justified – even if she consented in advance? Murder is murder, right? Isn’t a “living will” essentially a mandate for future assisted suicide? It seems to me that the logic of the absolutist pro-life advocates means that this should be forbidden too. They should logically support a law which forbids the murder of anyone, regardless of living wills. In a society that legally mandates the “culture of life,” the individual’s choice for death is irrelevant, no? Or am I missing something here?

WHERE ARE THE PICTURES? We tend to think that everything gets out in the media eventually. But not the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib. Why? Because the photos were selectively leaked to create the impression of high jinks or mere “abuse” rather than the officially sanctioned torture that was actually taking place. Matt Welch investigates. Bottom line: you don’t have the right to know what your government is doing.