Month: November 2013

20% Of Obama’s Pardons Have Gone To Turkeys

presidential-pardons

Plumer hates the turkey pardon:

Obama will have “pardoned” 10 turkeys in all (turkeys that, as best we can tell, haven’t actually committed any crimes). By contrast, he will have only pardoned or commuted the sentences of 40 actual living human beings. The latter is a record low for modern-day presidents. At the same point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had pardoned 313 people. Harry Truman had pardoned 1,537 people

Emma Roller thinks that the “statistics of presidential pardon ratios as of last year—that is, the ratio of pardons granted to the number of human pardon applicants—speak for themselves”

Ronald Reagan: 1 in 8

George H.W. Bush: 1 in 19

Bill Clinton: 1 in 16

George W. Bush: 1 in 55

Barack Obama: 1 in 290

Does A Company Have Religious Rights?

SCOTUS is going to have to answer that question:

The Supreme Court will hear two challenges to the requirement that all employers provide birth control coverage to their workers. One comes from craft store chain Hobby Lobby and the other from Conestoga Wood Specialties, a custom cabinet-making company in Pennsylvania.

The owners of both companies have argued that the requirement to provide employers with contraceptive coverage is a violation of their religious liberty. And, in Hobby Lobby’s case, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed: The craft store won a preliminary injunction against the health law requirement this past summer. The Department of Justice then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, leading to today’s granting of cert for the case.

Dahlia Lithwick examines the case:

The court will need to address several questions here, beginning with whether a for-profit corporation can be a “person” capable of exercising religion freedom. Citizens United taught us that corporations count as people when it comes to campaign speech. Does this weird concept of personhood extend to their religious rights? The 10th Circuit said yes. The 3rd Circuit said no. More questions: Does the birth-control coverage benefit substantially burden a company’s exercise of its religious rights, if it has them? Is the contraception mandate nevertheless justified by compelling government interests because it is a vitally important element of affording women equality in health care?

Schwartzman and Tebbe find no precedents:

Never has the Supreme Court suggested that profit-seeking companies may exercise religious freedom rights. In contrast, many Supreme Court cases before Citizens United had indicated if not outright insisted that corporations do enjoy speech rights. These corporate religious freedom cases are truly without precedent, yet they are coming to be viewed by the media and the courts as though they are part of a natural legal progression.

Jeffrey Rosen worries the case could have major consequences:

The case has huge significance because, if the broad version of the constitutional challenge is accepted, any for-profit corporations whose owners claim that they are organizing their businesses to further religious principles could claim exemption from a host of federal regulations. As Judge Illana Rovner pointed out in her dissent from the Seventh Circuit case granting a religious exemption to the health care mandate to for-profit corporations, a ruling along these lines “has the potential to reach far beyond contraception and to invite employers to seek exemptions from any number of federally-mandated employee benefits to which an employer might object on religious grounds.” For example, Judge Rovner noted, an employer who is a Methodist and objects to stem cell research might refuse to cover an employee’s participation in a clinical trial of stem cell research for Lou Gehrig’s disease; an employer who is a Christian scientist might insist that the ACA’s mandate of coverage for traditional medical care is a violation of his religious beliefs; and an employer who is a Southern Baptist and objects to gay marriage and surrogacy might refuse family leave to gay employees that would otherwise be required under federal law.

Finally, Sargent sizes up the politics of the case:

A Bloomberg poll last March found that more than six in 10 Americans, and nearly 70 percent of women, rejected the GOP’s rationale for opposing the contraception mandate, seeing it as a matter of women’s health, and not religious liberty, with more than three quarters saying the topic shouldn’t even be part of the debate — suggesting that the middle of the country soundly rejects the GOP’s framing of the issue. And so, Dems will use this news to try to shift the argument over Obamacare on to cultural and health care turf that has already proven favorable to them.

How Do You Say …

This embed is invalid


Katherine Wells captions the above video:

Former Harvard professor Bert Vaux asked tens of thousands of people across the U.S. these questions and released the results as the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey. The data are fascinating; they reveal patterns of migration, unexpected linguistic kinships between regions, and the awesome variety of words we say and how we say them.

The study has wormed its way into popular consciousness and periodically morphs into a meme (just search “accent tag” on YouTube). Last summer, North Carolina State University graduate student Joshua Katz turned Vaux’s geographical data into a set of stunning heat maps that went viral.

For the video above, we called people across the country to ask them a few of Vaux’s questions, then layered the answers with maps based on Katz’s. You’ll hear what Philadelphians call a group of people, the many ways of pronouncing “pecan,” and what Southerners mean when they say “the devil is beating his wife.”

Kottke chimes in:

It’s one thing to read the difference between the pronounciations of “route”, it’s another thing entirely to hear them. I haven’t lived in the Midwest since 2000 and I have since transitioned from “pop” to “soda”, “waiting in line” to “waiting on line”, and am working on switching to “sneakers” from “tennis shoes” (or even “tennies”). But I was surprised to learn that I still pronounce “bag” differently than everyone else!

The Pity Of War, Ctd

A reader just finished listening to my conversation with two-time Iraq vet Mikey Piro (available here for subscribers):

Oh man, the way he described his friends being killed, and how it’s clearly still affecting him emotionally, was pretty startling. It sorta revealed how much I previously viewed soldiers as almost mechanical. I never conceived of them expressing that kind of emotion. I honestly pirowondered whether you were experiencing technical difficulties or what else could be causing the silence. Then I realized he was crying. I definitely cried once myself.

That detail about the Abrams tank’s soft underbelly and how the bomb would’ve ripped through that and – hopefully, he adds – killed his buddy instantly also stuck with me. That’s a tragically-apt metaphor for the war. And the entire narrative arc of the interview nicely captures our country’s experience since that fateful September morning. The sheer rage and eagerness for payback. The panic when we realized we may have gone too far. And the resignation and bitter disappointment at the Bush administration, warring Iraqi factions, and even at humanity itself once the sectarian war is unleashed.

And nice tie in with your experiences during the AIDS crisis. That frustration when people around you don’t understand – indeed, are incapable of understanding – what you’re going through is something that I think will broadly resonate with many people. I had a similar situation, albeit at a less intense level, with respect to my underemployment during the Great Recession. I was deathly afraid of letting my friends – most of whom were getting along fine – know how underemployed and desperate I was. And it was on my mind constantly, leading me to act in objectively inexplicable ways towards others. I have greater stability in my life now. But I wonder whether I’ll always be a little more guarded.

Anyway, great interview. You continue to make me a happy subscriber! Happy Thanksgiving!

All readers can listen to two clips of the conversation here.  If you want to hear the whole thing and haven’t subscribed yet, click here for full access to Deep Dish and daily Dish. Read more about Mikey here. He’s a hero of mine and still doing all he can to help his brothers grappling with the psychic aftermath of intense, prolonged, brutal trauma.

The End Of DIY DNA Testing? Ctd

Gary Marchant covers the FDA’s crackdown on genetics company 23andMe:

[T]he FDA was not required to take this heavy-handed and drastic action. We know this because many of the exact same genetic tests are already being provided to consumers through their physicians, without any FDA approval. There are approximately 3,000 genetic tests now commercially available through your doctor, of which only a handful have received FDA approval. So it is apparently now unlawful for 23andMe to sell you a genetic test but OK for your physician to order the exact same test, at a much higher cost to the consumer. This is an unjustified and unwarranted double standard.

There are important reasons why at-home genetic testing may be preferable to consumers.

To many, their genetic information is very private, and they prefer to get the results privately at home rather than through their physician, who will likely put the information in the patient’s medical record. It is much cheaper to get tested through 23andMe, which is currently offering its entire battery of genetic tests for only $99. It would cost many hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get the same tests through one’s physician, and health insurance does not cover the cost of most genetic tests presently. As a practical matter, most physicians are unlikely to order the complete set of genetic tests offered by 23andMe, so those who are interested and curious to get as much genetic information as possible will be blocked from doing so if they must go through their doctor.

Drum admits that he’s “sort of agnostic about the issue of whether personal genome services should fall into the category of highly regulated diagnostic tests”:

[W]hile your genome may be medical information, interpreting your genome and explaining whether it puts you at risk for different diseases is very close to medical advice. And not just general medical advice, of the kind that Dr. Oz purveys on television. It’s specific, personal medical advice, of the kind that only licensed physicians are allowed to provide.

That’s the argument, anyway. If 23andMe is going to perform a lab test and then send you a personal letter suggesting that you, personally, are or aren’t at high risk for some disease, it’s acting an awful lot like a doctor.

Reihan joins the conversation:

One gets the impression that the FDA is now seeking to protect us from hypochondria, in which case it will have to do more than regulate harmless saliva testing kits. Perhaps the FDA should redefine internet-enabled devices as medical devices, as these devices are used to access WebMD and Yahoo Answers, where all kinds of information is shared about medical conditions, not all of which is relevant or reliable.

Nick Gillespie thinks the FDA’s rules are outdated:

Peter Huber of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has an important new book out called The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century Medicine.. Huber writes that whatever sense current drug-approval procedures once might have had, their day is done. Not only does the incredible amount of time and money – 12 years and $350 million at a minimum – slow down innovation, it’s based on the clearly wrong idea that all humans are the same and will respond the same way to the same drugs.

Given what we already know about small but hugely important variations in individual body chemistry, the FDA’s whole mental map needs to be redrawn. “The search for one-dimensional, very simple correlations – one drug, one clinical effect in all patients – is horrendously obsolete,” Huber told me in a recent interview.

From Brushstrokes To Books

Reviewing The Letters of Paul Cézanne, Colm Toibin highlights the many writers who took inspiration from the French painter’s innovative style:

Cézanne was a voracious reader, familiar with the contemporary French novelists as with classical literature. While his life inspired Zola, the work itself began to intrigue novelists and poets. The dish_cezannebrush strokes with the look of textured sentences, and Cézanne’s ability to paint a section of the canvas in great rich detail and then leave other sections undernourished or even blank, would interest writers such as DH Lawrence (“Sometimes,” Lawrence wrote, “Cézanne builds up a landscape out of omissions”) and Hemingway.

In a deleted passage in Hemingway’s story Big Two-Hearted River, he wrote: “He wanted to write like Cézanne painted. Cézanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do … He … wanted to write about country so that it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting … He felt almost holy about it.” Some of the most beautiful and perceptive writing about Cézanne’s work was by the poet Rilke.

“The artist,” Cézanne said, “must avoid thinking like a writer.” By this I understand him to mean that the painter must avoid narrative in a picture, or taking sides, however briefly, for one tone against another, or offering moral truth or even ironies, or allowing mere feelings to interfere with a picture, including a portrait. It is perhaps for this reason that writers, who much of the time believe also that writers must avoid thinking like writers, have been so interested in Cézanne, and why his work and the legend of his life, as dramatised in these letters, have endured.

(Image of The Card Players by Cézanne, 1892, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

A reader writes:

One of your readers noted the link between experiencing miscarriage and being pro-choice. I want to add another thought to that. I had two early miscarriages and one child who almost died at birth. I obviously don’t speak for all women, but for me, the grief I felt at losing my pregnancies in the first trimester was nothing – and I mean NOTHING – compared to the fear and grief I felt when my daughter lay dead in my arms at birth, before she was revived. It seems to me that losing a pregnancy at two months is different from losing it at seven months is different from losing a born child. The experience of loss changes as that life progresses inside you, and to me that reveals the simplistic thinking behind the idea that an embryo or fetus is no different than a born child.

A PhD in genetics writes:

I don’t mean to minimize the sadness people feel when they lose a pregnancy, but there’s an important issue here that is being ignored in your thread: for the vast majority of early miscarriages, what the couple lost was not, and never could have been, a “baby”. For some reason, maybe because the human genome is full of repetitive junk that mis-pairs easily, the rate of spontaneous abortions (i.e., miscarriages) due to chromosomal abnormalities is quite high. When something is very wrong with the genetic makeup of the embryo, it doesn’t develop properly and the body rejects it, as it should. It is not the case that if, somehow, that fetus could have stayed in the uterus, a healthy baby would have been born.  I wish there was more education about this; I think people would have an easier time accepting this outcome if they understood.

Another reader:

I have been reading this thread with great interest and, like another thread you have published, it is “so personal.”  I lost my first, very wanted and very planned pregnancy to miscarriage.  I had an ultrasound at eight weeks and my husband and I saw the heartbeat.  We were assured that our chances of miscarriage were very slim at that point.  Nevertheless, unbeknownst to me, the baby died within days.  It wasn’t until I was nearly twelve weeks pregnant and had told all of my friends and family that I started to bleed.  An ultrasound revealed that I had had a “missed miscarriage,” one where the body fails to detect fetal demise.

The idea of waiting for my body to figure out what had happened was far too painful to bear.  I had a D&C the next day.  It was truly the saddest period of my entire life thus far.  I was deeply depressed.  I was quite certain I would never carry a baby to term.

Fast forward four months and I was pregnant again with what would be my first child.  One of your readers said of her three early miscarriages: “Those ‘babies’ (mushy bunch of cells, really) were as real to me though as my lively 17-month-old son is now.”  My own experience of miscarriage was the opposite.  My child (and her younger sister who followed) is a person I know.  She has a personality and opinions.  Losing her or her sister would destroy me forever.  In contrast, I think of my miscarriage only when someone I know is pregnant or when I read a thread like this.  I never wonder what that child would have been like.  I was never mourning the death of that baby; I was always mourning the demise of that pregnancy at a time when I so desperately wanted to have a child.  Carrying a pregnancy to term was all the closure I needed.

I also can’t help but wonder if the early pregnancy tests available now create unnecessary grief.  I learned of my pregnancies before I even would have missed my period.  Knowing you are pregnant, even for a few days or a few weeks, is impossible to unknow.  Losing that pregnancy probably would not have been a known miscarriage for our mothers or our grandmothers.  While infertility is its own misery, it is probably of a different kind than repeated miscarriages.

Another:

Long-time reader, first-time writer. Your thread on miscarriage has been fascinating and heartbreaking to read, and I wanted to share a bit of my experience and perspective. When my son was 2.5, we decided to try for another baby. I got pregnant quickly, but at the 7-week ultrasound, we discovered that the embryo had not developed at all – a “blighted ovum.” The pregnancy test was positive, but there had never been an embryo or fetus. However, this still requires waiting for the body to miscarry naturally (which can take up to several more weeks), or a D&C. We scheduled the D&C.

On the day of the D&C, we went to the office for the procedure. It was affiliated with a hospital, but was a special maternity office. They rushed me in pretty quickly once I arrived. I like to think they were being conscious of women in the process of miscarrying sitting in the waiting room with very obviously pregnant women, new moms, and newborns, but maybe I was just lucky.

I asked the physician why I had been referred to her for the D&C, and why my regular OB/GYN didn’t do it. She paused, as if trying to figure out the best way to answer me, and then said, “Well, this procedure is basically the same as an abortion. And many OB/GYNs are not trained to do this, because of political issues around abortion – many medical schools don’t provide training in abortion, and so women are referred to the few doctors who can perform the procedure.”

I’ve been active around issues of reproductive health and rights for years – volunteered with Planned Parenthood, attended rallies and marches for choice, I have a master’s degree in public health – so I’m not unfamiliar with the politics and debate around abortion. And I knew that it was the case that many physicians were not trained in abortion procedures and that there is a shortage of qualified physicians to perform abortions in many areas of the country. But I’ve been fortunate – not only did I live in New York at the time, where the politics around reproductive choice are decidedly more liberal than in most other areas of the country – but I’ve also been lucky enough to not experience any of these restrictions, etc., first hand.

And then, as a few days and weeks passed after the D&C procedure, and some of my emotions and feelings about the experience settled a bit, I started getting – angry? Confused? It was crazy to me that at a time when a woman and her family needs comfort, familiarity, support, that it would be necessary to refer her to a brand new physician at a brand new facility for the D&C procedure, based solely on the politics around abortion. Regardless of one’s feelings about abortion, the D&C is a legal medical procedure, done for many reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the choice to remain pregnant or have a child – and the fact that there are OB/GYNs who are not qualified to perform it because of ideological objections to one circumstance in which the procedure is performed (i.e. elective abortion) is INSANE – detrimental to women’s health, detrimental to women’s autonomy, and (maybe least worrisome, but still a problem) logistically ridiculous.

Anyway, please keep sharing others’ stories. One of the most memorable things about my experience was that as I shared it with a select few friends and family members, nearly every woman had a “me too” story. It helped me immensely to feel I wasn’t alone in the experience, but also amazed that so many women I’d felt close to had never shared this particular part of themselves. Silent suffering, indeed.

The F-Word

Alec Baldwin calls me a “fundamentalist” in gay advocacy. A lot of gay activists must have just spluttered into their morning coffee. I just believe that explicitly homophobic slurs directed at actual human beings as a way to degrade them doesn’t have a “but-he’s-a-liberal” exception. It’s ugly and would not be tolerated if directed against any other minority group. MSNBC did the right thing. But it was their choice not mine.

A Collision Course

Prospero’s J.P. gives a rave review to “Collider,” a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC):

Admirably, the curators do not shy away from the notoriously complicated science the LHC was designed to shed light on—not just the Higgs boson, but also other outstanding physical puzzles like how matter and antimatter differ or what dark matter, of which there is six times as much as the atomic variety, is made of. To their credit, they do not make it feel like a textbook. Throughout the exhibition the physics is clearly explained on computer screens, faux white boards and nifty multimedia features (an explanation of the make-up of the atom, projected onto an uneven, white table-top, is particularly mesmerising). The explainers steer mercifully clear of analogies, which often serve to obfuscate rather than illuminate the unintuitive world of quantum physics. Instead, they describe as much as is possible without resorting to actual equations.

There is more to the show than the science, however. The museum pulled off the even harder trick of depicting CERN’s character. Depictions of the accelerator itself include plenty of chunky, complicated-looking gubbins, mostly spares shipped in from CERN. The museum’s walls are lined with photos of CERN’s corridors, complete with assorted notices and warning signs (in English and French). There is a (yellow) Renault bicycle used by Roberto Saban, the LHC’s head of hardware, to potter round the 27km tunnel. And the exhibition recreates the physicists’ offices in Building 1, CERN’s oldest block. Bulletin boards contain posters advertising conferences and seminars, but also recruitment to the CERN choir. Geeky cartoon strips abound, along with a notice for a lost cat. (“If found please return to Erwin Schrödinger. Dead or alive.”) The only thing missing from this replica of the Geneva compound is the sticky formica floor.