President Barack Obama is reportedly close to announcing a way forward on Afghanistan, vowing yesterday to “finish the job” and allowing aides to say (without attribution) that a decision could be out early next week. For students of history, such as Bill Moyers–who was White House assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson during the time he escalated the Vietnam War–Obama’s words will be listened to especially carefully:
I was 30 years old, a White House Assistant, working on politics and domestic policy. I watched and listened as LBJ made his fateful decisions about Vietnam. He had been thrust into office by the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963–46 years ago this weekend. And within hours of taking the oath of office was told that the situation in South Vietnam was far worse than he knew.
What will Obama say about the conflict, now that campaign talk has given way to hard realities? What will he commit to and refuse to do? Will he propose to pay for any new troops with tax increases, spending cuts? How do the plans fit into the strategic vision for that region? Is Afghanistan linked in some way to Pakistan (as a modern-day “domino” in the larger Global War on Terrorism that cannot fail) or viewed in narrower terms? Will Obama level with us or give us spin?
For a look back at how one president made a similarly fateful decision, watch “Path to War,” a two-parter on “Bill Moyers Journal.”
Frontline on PBS and The New York Times team up tonight on a program exploring the credit card industry. From the press release:
It took the economic collapse in the fall of 2008 to set the stage for potentially historic change in the consumer credit business. President Obama and his team pushed through a credit card reform bill in May, and they’re now looking to establish a new Consumer Finance Protection Agency. But the banking and financial services industries contribute huge amounts of money to Congress — and the jury is still out on whether the new regulations can pass. “It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a modest step,” says Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren. “It’s a set of very discrete new laws. And the credit industry instantly set to work on how they could run around them. By itself, that set of rules won’t change the game.”
Watch a preview the whole show below (but remember, this isn’t cheap):
Tonight on “Surviving the Holidays with Lewis Black,” the cantankerous curmudgeon we all know and love gets us through the holiday in one piece. On the History Channel tonight.
Heritage turkeys, unlike the commercial breeds, haven’t been selected for growth traits and thus grow slower. They are older when they are eaten, are fattier (flavor is stored in fat), and taste quite different. (And, perhaps because they are perceived as being organically and humanely raised, they sell for a higher price.) Gobble up below or here.
I’ll be spending the day in the bowels of one of the least attractive buildings in D.C. Fun, fun!
But which (witch?) is worse, actual jury duty, or this, which took place yesterday from 2:30 p.m.-4 p.m.:
The University of New Haven (UNH) Legal Society will sponsor a lecture on the history and importance of jury duty with Jammy Davis from the Connecticut Jury Outreach Program. Davis will provide a brief history of jury duty dating back to the Salem witch trials and discuss the jury selection process, jury trials and the importance of participating in jury duty. A question and answer session will follow the presentation. This event is open to UNH students, faculty and staff.
I wonder how many university students blew off sleeping for that. Probably had them begging for a summons.
The text of the Senate health care bill, more than 2,000 pages, was released today by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). This is the measure he’ll take up on the floor, try to pass after a lengthy amendment process, and then reconcile with the House version (summary), which passed Nov. 7.
“As the recession hit, the number of Americans in households struggling against hunger skyrocketed to one in six last year, and it’s likely that the number is even higher today. Millions have lost jobs or seen their wages reduced over the past two years. While many more people are turning to the federal nutrition programs for help, those programs don’t reach enough people and their benefits often aren’t enough to stop hunger.”
— Statement by Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action Center.
No more routine breast exams for women in their forties who are not at risk for breast cancer? That’s what the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now recommends in an opinion endorsed by some and condemned by others.
Recommendations: The USPSTF recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years. The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take into account patient context, including the patient’s values regarding specific benefits and harms. (Grade C recommendation)
The USPSTF recommends biennial screening mammography for women between the ages of 50 and 74 years. (Grade B recommendation)
The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the additional benefits and harms of screening mammography in women 75 years or older. (I statement)
The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the additional benefits and harms of clinical breast examination beyond screening mammography in women 40 years or older. (I statement)
The USPSTF recommends against clinicians teaching women how to perform breast self-examination. (Grade D recommendation)
The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess additional benefits and harms of either digital mammography or magnetic resonance imaging instead of film mammography as screening modalities for breast cancer. (I statement)
Later, the guidelines say:
“This recommendation statement applies to women 40 years or older who are not at increased risk for breast cancer by virtue of a known underlying genetic mutation or a history of chest radiation.”
More on the task force here, which says its recommendations are considered the “gold standard” in clinical preventive services.
This article about the courts’ purported tendency to be lenient on parents convicted of faith-based criminal negligence that results in their children’s deaths caught my eye.
Writing in yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook section, Jonathan Turley, public interest law professor at George Washington University, compares a handful of cases of parents convicted of non-religious neglect with those of parents who say their faith made them withhold lifesaving medical care, and finds that judges are apt to throw the book at the former and slap the wrists of the latter—even when absolutely no remorse is shown.
Turley focuses in particular on a case out of Wisconsin, a state that, he says, has an “exemption for faith-based neglect under its child abuse laws.” He goes on:
“Leilani and Dale Neumann were sentenced for allowing their 11-year-old daughter, Madeline Kara Neumann, to die in 2008 from an undiagnosed but treatable form of diabetes. The Neumanns are affiliated with a faith-healing church called Unleavened Bread Ministries and continued to pray with other members while Madeline died. They could have received 25 years in prison. Instead, the court emphasized their religious rationale and gave them each six months in jail (to be served one month a year) and 10 years’ probation.”
Next Turley focuses on the Washburn family, whose toddler died “after hitting his head at home in Cross Lanes, W.Va.”
“His parents, Elizabeth Dawn Thornton and Christopher Steven Washburn, said the boy fell a lot and hit his head on the corner of a table and his chin on a toilet. […] The court sentenced both parents to three to 15 years in prison.
“So the Neumanns got one month in jail for six years and kept custody of their children, and the Washburns got up to 15 years in prison and agreed to give up their kids.”
Later, Turley cites another disparate sentence in a case of “lifestyle” neglect: two vegan parents who in 2007 were given life in prison after being convicted of malice murder (among other crimes) in a Georgia court. They’d deprived their child of animal-based products that the court said led to his malnourishment and death.
In an online discussion about the article, Turley argues that laws such as Wisconsin’s that essentially allow parents to use faith as a mitigating factor may “facilitate such deaths by not only imposing low sentences but prevent[ing] the other children from being removed from the household.”
Still, it’s hard to determine from Turley’s article if courts in states without specific religious exemptions are routinely softer on faith-based parental neglect or if the lack of uniformity of state child abuse laws might be a contributing factor (indeed, Turley notes that the Supreme Court has left such cases to state law). And the only national data he cites—a relatively low number of 300 child deaths from lack of care since 1975—is from Children’s Health Care Is a Legal Duty, which advocates against religious-based medical neglect.
Regardless, it’s a provocative topic and one certainly worth raising. For more, read an August 2009 discussion on Faith Healing and the Law from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which discusses, among other things, how a key federal regulation led to the state-based exemptions that Turley references:
“[B]efore 1974, very few states had explicit statutory exemptions from criminal prosecution for parents who relied on faith healing rather than traditional medicine to treat a child’s illness. These statutes became very common, however, in 1974 after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services enacted an important regulation on the subject. This regulation required that states receiving funds for child abuse prevention programs adopt exemptions for parents who practiced faith healing. Although this federal regulation was rescinded in 1983, by that time the vast majority of states had enacted some kind of exemption from prosecution for parents who practiced this type of spiritual healing, and most of these states still have such exemptions.”
Apparently, there is a Museum of Animal Perspectives, which is where today’s video is from. According to the Science Friday website, “… the footage comes from cameras implanted in the landscape or strapped to the backs of animals.”
I’ll be spending the day in the bowels of one of the least attractive buildings in D.C. Fun, fun! 
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