Tag Archives: responsibilities

Fake Apologies

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) has been accused Thursday of sexually harassing a woman while the two were on a USO tour in Afghanistan 11 years ago.  He’s apologized for it.

He was also quoted in a 1995 New York Magazine article about his generating a “joke” for Saturday Night Live, where he worked at the time, that centered on drugging and raping then-journalist Leslie Stahl.  He apologized for that, too.

Then he said about that apology during his 2008 campaign for Senate that he

didn’t think he should have to apologize for the cracks, which his opponents were taking out of context. “To say I was sorry for writing a joke was to sell out my career, to sell out who I’d been my entire life,” he writes [in his book]. “And I wasn’t sorry that I had written Porn-o-Rama or pitched that stupid Lesley Stahl joke at 2 in the morning. I was just doing my job.”

But…”I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.” And so Franken took a deep breath and told a little white lie: “I’m sorry.”

Little white lie.  Franken still wants to be a Senator.  With his clearly stated position that apologies are just lies to be mouthed in order to get what he wants, how is it possible for anyone—let alone the woman who accused him last Thursday—to believe his apology for that Afghanistan harassment?  Or any other apology he might pretend to offer for any other transgression?  Or anything at all he might say on any matter?

And lest there be any question about that USO incident, understand clearly: the existence of Franken’s pseudo-apology stands as his blithe confession that he did the thing of which he’s accused.

And he’s still a Senator.

Sexual Harassment

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The stampede to call out sexual harassment is growing, and actionable complaints are being made.  These need to be carefully investigated, and the hides of those convicted nailed to the outhouse wall.

However, there also is a growing number of accusations made against unnamed harassers—just claims of workplace harassment devoid of useful specifics.  The latest round (eliding Al Franken, who’s the subject of a nearby post) is claims of harassment in Congress.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D, CA) said she knows of two current members of Congress who “have engaged in sexual harassment,” while another congresswoman, Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (R, VA) recounted a member who exposed himself to a female staffer.

The members were not named.

And

Senator Claire McCaskill (D, MO) told reporters that she had been harassed when she interned on Capitol Hill, but she did not report it.

And

[Former Congressional Black Caucus Fellow] M Reese Everson said that a member of Congress asked if he could flirt with her “in order [for her] to excel in [her] career.”

The problem with this sort of accusation is that there’s no reason to believe them, certainly there’s no way to check them out, and most importantly, there’s no way to go after the harassers if they do exist—they get off scott free.

That’s unacceptable in both ways.  Name names.

PRC Censorship

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…is reaching into other nations to deprecate their free speech.

Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University has written a book, Silent Invasion, that details the breadth of influence the People’s Republic of China has achieved within Australia.  His publisher, Allen & Unwin, has decided to “delay” release of the book because the PRC is threatening “defamation action” against the publisher.

What defamation, exactly (and how does a private citizen defame a foreign government, anyway)?  Hamilton says his book is

“very factual, very deeply researched,”…the “first comprehensive national study of Beijing’s program of exerting influence on another nation.”

He said he had documented the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on Australian political parties, universities and cultural organizations, as well as on Chinese living in Australia.

Apparently, on private enterprises, as well.

As Hamilton put it, Allen & Unwin’s decision to acquiesce to the PRC’s threats is

a watershed moment in Australia, when Beijing can suppress free speech.

Hamilton has said he’ll get another publisher, and it would seem he has another instance of PRC “influence” within Australia to describe.  Along the way, I have to wonder why, in future, any author would want to do business with so unreliable a publisher.

Death Panels?

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The Affordable Care Act required Medicare to penalize hospitals with high numbers of heart failure patients who returned for treatment shortly after discharge. New research shows that penalty was associated with fewer readmissions, but also higher rates of death among that patient group.

Because sometimes readmission is necessary for quality care—whether that readmission was driven by later complications, by too-soon original discharge in the Medicare (which is to say Government) pressure to hold down costs first, or by some other factor—but that Government pressure to push the patient out the door also pushes against the patient’s return.  Even when necessary.

Here are a couple of numbers from a study soon to be published in JAMA Cardiology:

One in five heart failure patients returned to the hospital within 30 days before the ACA passed. That dropped to 18.4% after the penalties. Mortality rates increased from 7.2% before the ACA to 8.6% after the penalties….

In other words, an 8% drop in readmissions is associated with a 19% rise in death rates for heart patients.  That’s not a favorable trade-off.

There is a legitimate interest in improving the quality of care for all patients, including those for whose care us taxpayers are paying, but readmission rate is not an accurate measure of that quality.  Readmission rate can only measure…readmission rate.  That metric addresses neither the reasons for readmission nor the reasons for the prior discharge.

Government pressure to hold down readmissions doesn’t quite amount to death panels, but the outcomes seem dismayingly similar.  To be clear, the results of the study do not establish a causal relationship, for heart patients, between the lowered readmission rate and the higher death rate.  However, the magnitude of the apparent association between the two desperately wants further investigation.

Cornell Professors

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…apparently support racism and racist stereotyping.

Recall that George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, routinely says it’s whiteness, white victimization, all things white that are at fault for mass shootings and violence generally. For instance, this in an interview with Democracy Now!

Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres despite the fact that whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.

What makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior?

And his tweet a year ago, All I want for Christmas is white genocide.

Cornell University’s professoriate demurred from Drexel’s decision to discipline Ciccariello-Maher ever so lightly (he’s on paid vacation leave) for his inflammatory and racist remarks (over Twitter proximately), wherein he blamed white victimization (and, of course, “Trumpism”) for the Las Vegas mass murder.

Seventy professors signed a letter on Wednesday protesting the university’s decision to take disciplinary action against George Ciccariello-Maher, saying it infringes upon academic freedoms, reported The Cornell Daily Sun.

Of course they do.  It’s entirely appropriate for college professors to “stereotype” groups of Americans of whom they disapprove.

Never minding that their favored groups of Americans became favored through precisely that “stereotyping.”

And Cornell, the school, is silent about it.

Hmm….