A Catholic hospital's convenient hypocrisy

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Thursday January 24, 2013 · 8:24 AM PST

2013/01/24 · 08:24

Hey, remember last year's fake right-wing outrage over Obamacare's "threat to religious liberty"? How it would force health care institutions, such as Catholic hospitals and health plans, to provide services contrary to their beliefs? Such as birth control?

Well, the moral objections vanish when money is at stake. Case in point: A Colorado man filed suit against a Catholic hospital chain after his pregnant wife died of a blood clot and the hospital didn't try to save the seven-month-old twins she was carrying.

The husband did not contest his wife's care, but filed a wrongful-death suit over the loss of the twins. He claimed they were viable and could have been delivered. The hospital chain's defense?

There was no wrongful death, because seven-month-old fetuses are not persons.

As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”

The hospital chain won the case at trial and in the Colorado Appeals Court; the state Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case.

And the chain's mission statement promises...

...to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”

Yes, unless it's financially inconvenient.

F*cking hypocrites.

Manti Te'o and "sports journalism"

jvwalt

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Wednesday January 16, 2013 · 3:21 PM PST

2013/01/16 · 15:21

Last fall, the college football world watched the unexpected return of Notre Dame to national prominence, captained by linebacker and inspirational leader Manti Te'o. In addition to his football prowess, Te'o was celebrated for overcoming personal tragedy: the deaths of his grandmother and girlfriend in quick succession. In spite of his losses, Te'o led his team to the national championship game and -- partly due to his inspirational story -- almost won the Heisman Trophy.

Except for one small detail: there was no girlfriend. Deadspin.com reported today that the girlfriend never existed; the only discoverable traces of her are online, and the only known photos are actually of someone else entirely.

Many questions remain to be answered. Who was responsible? Did Te'o know? (How could he not?) This story will reverberate for a while, if only because of its utter strangeness. But my immediate reaction, as someone with a lengthy journalism background, was:

Why didn't anyone check this out earlier?

The most prestigious outlets in sports journalism told and retold the story of a star football player's heroic struggle to overcome adversity. And none of them bothered to go beyond what Te'o had told them -- to look into the girl's background, speak with her family, or simply see if they could find her college records (she supposedly went to Stanford), hospital records, or her obituary.

Or if they did do some checking, they certainly didn't take it far enough, nor did they let it get in the way of a damn good story.

Isn't this Journalism 101? Always check out a story? Get more than one source? Get documentation? And if you can't, then find out why before proceeding any further?

jvwalt

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Sunday December 16, 2012 · 7:16 AM PST

2012/12/16 · 07:16

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, we have lots of this:

The tragedy in Connecticut will convince communities across the country to cut other spending in favor of funding greater security measures, including adding armed guards at schools, said Peter Pochowski, the former executive director of the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officers.

Okay, then. In order to preserve the NRA's sweeping claims of Second Amendment gun rights, our schools (and public buildings, and shopping malls, and mass-transit systems, and places of worship, and and and) will almost certainly feel compelled to add new security on top of the childhood-killing shit we're already doing:

Since the Columbine shootings in Colorado, schools across the nation have increased security. Burlington [Vermont] schools hold lockdown drills and evacuation drills on a regular basis, and keep only one door open to the public.

Well, we're apparently unable to do much about gun ownership laws because politicians are completely cowed by the gun lobby. But if we do face increased social costs because anyone who wants an assault rifle can have one, then how about this: We figure out how much security our schools need, and how much it costs (for the stuff we're already doing plus the new stuff), and create a security tax on gun sales?

The tax could be restricted to the most dangerous weapons -- anything with rapid-fire capability, cop-killer ammunition, etc. -- if you're concerned about placing a burden on someone who just wants a handgun or standard hunting weapons. But the tax should be high enough to hold our schools (and malls and buses and subways and churches) harmless for the security costs of being an armed society.

Fair enough? All we're doing is correcting a flaw in the market: assigning the true costs of gun ownership where they belong.

So Mitt Romney is a terrible candidate. Mitt Romney has ALWAYS been a terrible candidate.

jvwalt

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Saturday September 22, 2012 · 10:37 AM PDT

2012/09/22 · 10:37

As the Mitt Romney campaign careens through a truly horrific week, featuring one self-inflicted wound after another followed by feeble attempts to explain or deny, sometimes both, the punditocracy has looked on in a state of despair (conservative), wonder (centrist), and amusement (liberal). Plus an undercurrent of surprise that Mitt Romney has suddenly turned into a truly terrible candidate.

Well, I'm not surprised. When I look back at Romney's political career, I see a consistently lousy candidate, capable of winning only when the circumstances are stacked overwhelmingly in his favor.

His first foray was 1994's attempt to out-liberal Teddy Kennedy. Yep, Mitt's masterstroke was to try to position himself to the left of the most famous liberal in the U.S. Senate. Didn't go too well, and it left behind a barrel of embarrassing video that would establish his reputation as a waffler with no real convictions.

His image as a canny pol derives entirely from his run as Governor of Massachusetts. Winning the top office in a notoriously blue state was taken as a sign of political merit. But wait; his candidacy and Governorship coincide with the darkest hours of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which was caught in a seemingly bottomless well of corruption, incompetence and cronyism. Plus, after all, he didn't take the office away from the Dems; he succeeded not one, but two Republican Governors.

After the jump: Standing on the shoulders of nonentities, leaving a party in shambles, and bumbling his way through two Presidential campaigns.

jvwalt

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Tuesday July 17, 2012 · 6:41 PM PDT

2012/07/17 · 18:41

(Two invaluable political lessons in one little story.)

You wouldn't normally think of Vermont as a font of anti-Obama racism. Hey, this is the state of Ben and Jerry, isn't it? The state that sends Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy to Washington? The state of ex-hippies munching granola and smoking their not-so-secret stashes?

Well, yes. But you never know where the poison is going to start seeping out, and it happened here in green, socialist Vermont. On Sunday, one of our regular readers at Green Mountain Daily (left-leaning group blog) noticed that the Rutland County Republican Committee had a Facebook page, and on the page was the following "joke":

Just wanted you to know - today I received my 2012 Social Security Stimulus Package. It continued two tomato seeds, cornbread mix, a prayer rug, a machine to blow smoke up my butt, 1 discount coupons to KFC, an "Obama Hope & Change" bumper sticker, and a "Blame it on Bush" poster for the front yard. The directions were in Spanish. Watch for yours soon.

Our reader, pen name ntoddpax, had written to the keeper of the Facebook page to complain, and received a series of replies that defended the "joke" as "comedy…based in reality," "not too far from the truth," and "funny and scary at the same time."

After the jump: Two days of Republican squirming, followed by abject surrender.

jvwalt

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Friday June 08, 2012 · 2:55 PM PDT

2012/06/08 · 14:55

So, the two most popular personalities in public radio have announced their retirement.

Garrison Keillor and Scott Simon? Nina Totenberg and Sylvia Poggioli? Robert Siegel and Ira Glass?

Nope. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of "Car Talk," will stop recording original shows this fall after celebrating their 25th anniversary on NPR.

"Car Talk" is the adorable little goofball of a show that draws huge ratings and has turned Saturday mornings ("Weekend Edition Saturday," "Car Talk," "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me") into the highest-rated and most lucrative daypart of the entire week for public radio.

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