Otter Pup Arrives

Alexandra Calvert Otter was born at 6:21pm on April 11th. She weighs 8 pounds, 4 ounces, is stunningly healthy, and has a full head of reddish brown hair. We here at Respectful of Otters are well, but very tired.

Expect to see photos soon, but probably not any political posts for a while.

Respectful Of Beavers

We here at Respectful of Otters don't normally take requests - especially given our current bowling-ball-strapped-to-the-pelvis stage of pregnancy, which makes it awfully hard to sit at the computer. But some people could convince us of anything, especially given that they'd get indicted if they tried to post about it themselves... so here it is, a post about recent developments in the Canadian sponsorship scandal.

If you don't read either the Canadian press or (in the past week or so) certain conservative American weblogs, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Briefly, the sponsorship scandal involved the diversion of more than $100 million of federal money from its intended purpose (promoting Canadian nationalism in Quebec) into the pockets of the Liberal Party and its supporters, via several pro-Liberal advertising agencies. The scandal has been a hot issue since February of 2004, and the continuing investigation caused problems for the Liberals in the June 2004 elections.

What's happened lately? The official investigative body for the scandal, the Gomery Commission, has been hearing testimony from one of the implicated advertising executives, Jean Brault. Because Brault is also facing a criminal trial for fraud, Justice Gomery placed his testimony under a "publication ban," a rarely-used Canadian legal procedure which attempts to prevent the contamination of potential jurors by forbidding the media to publish or broadcast information about the case before trial. Weirdly - or at least it seems weird to me - the proceedings themselves weren't secret. The press was allowed into the hearings, as was the public. Pretty much everyone in Parliament reportedly knew all the details of the testimony. But until the ban was lifted yesterday, no one was allowed to print articles or commentary about it - including, according to the commission, bloggers.

Last weekend, Brault's testimony was leaked to a conservative American blogger by an unnamed "Deep Throat" figure who appears to have been directly connected to someone in the hearing room. Subsequently, a few Canadian websites linked to the American blogger and CTV mentioned the name of his blog. Since then,

Mr. Morrissey saw the traffic on his website increase tenfold as Canadians clicked on to read the testimony from Quebec ad executive Jean Brault.

By midday, 131,000 people had visited the site. In just one hour before lunchtime, he had 26,000 hits and by the end of the day he estimated he was on track for about 300,000 hits, many from Canadians. He averages 22,000 visits a day.

So the case was a real windfall for Morrissey (a.k.a. "Captain Ed"), in terms of vastly increased blog traffic, blogosphere influence, and interviews with the traditional media. But it was also a windfall for Conservative Party interests in Canada. Until the publication ban was lifted, just about the only coverage of the banned testimony occurred in conservative U.S. weblogs. The mainstream Canadian media, of course, respected the publication ban. Liberal and left-wing blogs in the U.S. have been largely silent - other than a brief mention by Kos in which he misses the point completely by casting the story as attempted government suppression of "citizen media." (In fact, this is a case in which the "citizen media" was treated in precisely the same way as the professional media.) So a strongly conservative slant dominated the only coverage Canadians saw. If Morrissey's "Deep Throat" is a Canadian Conservative, as seems likely, then leaking the testimony to him was a brilliant political ploy.

U.S. conservative commentary on the scandal has involved two primary threads. Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of American First Amendment triumphalism:

The fact of the matter is that while Western Canada has close similarities to the rugged individualism of the American West, Canada, as a whole, is a smarmy country filled with spineless liberals who allow a corrupt government to clamp down on freedom.
We in the United States have the First Amendment to protect our freedom of speech and freedom for churches to take moral stands. Canada has no such protection and Canada's Queen has long since abdicated any responsibility she has for her subjects to the hands of a corrupt government.

(An even more ludicrous example of this argument can be found here.) Yes indeed, America is a country in which the press can say whatever it wants about governmental and judicial activity - which is why we all know exactly what's been happening in the Valerie Plame case and what the grand jury testimony has been. ("But that's different," because... um, because it's conservatives who have been accused of wrongdoing, as far as I can tell.) Even Howard Kurtz got into the act:

You often hear about dictatorships cracking down on Internet news to maintain censorship as tightly as possible. These are generally the kind of regimes that not only try to choke off free expression but are fighting a losing battle against technology in the process.

And the latest offender is . . . Canada?

There are two problems with this line of reasoning, not counting its inaccurate portrayal of America's perfect First Amendment freedom. In order to cast the Gomery publication ban as the oppressive quashing of political criticism by a banana republic-style totalitarian government, one has to ignore the fact that the ban was not put in place by the Liberal government, but by an independent judicial commission charged with rooting out corruption in the Liberal government. As the Canadian blogger Kevin Brennan says at Tilting at Windmills:

I'm becoming increasingly annoyed by the weird partisanship displayed by some in this case. People are talking like Gomery is an agent of the government all of a sudden. Funny, I don't remember many of those people making that claim before, say, Monday. If Gomery cannot be trusted to fully investigate this matter then we have a much bigger problem than the publication ban, and that's what we need to be talking about. [...] The publication ban was not requested by the federal government or by the Liberal Party. It was requested by individuals who are facing criminal charges who are concerned that it could affect their trials.

The obfuscation regarding just who imposed the ban is helped along, perhaps intentionally, by the fact that the word "government" means something quite different to Canadians and Americans. In the U.S., the word "government" typically applies to all three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary. Using this definition, it makes sense for an American blogger to say that the "Canadian government" imposed the publication ban. However, in Canada, "government" is a much narrower term applying to the prime minister and the cabinet of the ruling party - in this case, the Liberals. A Canadian reading U.S. weblog commentary might therefore come away with the impression that the Liberal Party is directly responsible for the publication ban. Thus, the fact that the story was broken by U.S. commentators using U.S.-centric terms strongly increased the appearance of corruption underlying the ban.

In order to portray the ban as an effort to cover up government corruption, one also has to ignore the fact that the ban was clearly defined as temporary, intended to last only until Mr. Brault went on trial in May. (It has now been mostly lifted because Justice Gomery ruled that Brault's testimony was unlikely to affect his fraud trial.) Members of the opposition parties heard the banned testimony. The press heard the banned testimony. There was simply no way for it to be permanently suppressed - nor was there any indication that it would be. It was a temporary secrecy measure, much as the secrecy surrounding grand jury deliberations in the U.S. is temporary, or the Pentagon-imposed embargo of certain information known to the press (for example, embedded reporters) during wartime.

So the need to whip up a froth of outrage about the publication ban despite its temporary nature led to the other main thread of U.S. blogger commentary: the suggestion that the Liberal Party would deviously attempt to hold a "snap election" to further their hold on government power before the Gomery Commission released Brault's testimony. So, for example, Captain Ed: "The potential damage of their testimony has so unnerved the Liberal Party that they have reportedly started working towards a snap election so that they will not have to face the voters once the facts surface from the record."

Let's try to imagine how that might have worked. It was widely known throughout Canada that Brault's testimony to the Gomery commission was going to involve very bad things about the Liberal Party. No one knew the details, but it was clear from the commentary surrounding the hearings that Brault's testimony was expected to be very damaging indeed. Here's Canadian blogger James Bow:

As expected, the testimony delivered by these individuals has been explosive. How explosive? Explosive enough that the Liberal Party has sought (and received) official standing at the commission to cross-examine the witnesses. Explosive enough that the Conservatives are seriously considering tossing out the government and running the next election on an anti-corruption platform.

Thing is, we can’t tell you what the witnesses have said because of the publication ban. When Canadians look to the opposition parties, all they get is: “we’re thinking of throwing out the government.” / “Why?” / “Because of recent testimony at the Gomery inquiry” / “Why? How big were the revelations?” / “Big.” / “How big?” / “Trust us: BIG!”

Can anyone really look at that situation - besides, apparently, Captain Ed and his fellow U.S. conservative bloggers - and think, "Gee, what a perfect political situation for the Liberals! Boy, I wish I could stand for election under a cloud of racy and unspecified accusations!"? In fact, the only cited evidence that the Liberals wanted an election appears to involve the fact that the Liberals, like the other three Canadian parties, were beginning to prepare for an election - as you would expect them to do, given declarations by the Conservatives that the government should be brought down.

In the post cited above, Bow went on to suggest that the Brault testimony would be most damaging to the Liberals under the ban, when rumor and innuendo could drive the coverage: "How disappointed are people going to be when the publication bans lapse and the Canadian public just shrugs its shoulders? That’s what’s going to happen, folks. For a number of reasons; not the least of which is that all the speculation over the fall of the government has raised expectations over just how bad the revelations are going to be." That seems about right to me - the greatest Conservative Party advantage was during the period of time that the Brault testimony was banned from legitimate news media commentary, and yet widely discussed in coverage driven by U.S. conservatives.

Honestly, although the right-wing blogosphere seems to see this story as one more example of mighty blogs triumphing over corrupt mainstream institutions, from my cynical viewpoint it looks a lot more like U.S. conservative bloggers were used, via Captain Ed's "Deep Throat," to further the political agenda of the Canadian Conservative Party. What made a bunch of American conservatives - including Michelle Malkin , for Lord's sake - sudden experts on Canadian politics? I suspect that they didn't just get fed Brault's testimony - they got fed background and interpretation as well. In many cases, their ignorance of Canadian politics (for example, on the exact nature of the publication ban) served Conservative interests much better than the facts would have. All I'm saying is: both the ban and its violation by Americans have worked out very conveniently indeed for the Conservative Party.

Wow.

Everyone already reads the brilliant Amanda Marcotte of Mousewords, who is now permanently at Pandagon - right?

She took my breath away today:

I have also noticed that two values that BushCo likes to fling around are "life" and "freedom", but I have also noticed that the two are opposite values in their rhetoric. You can have freedom or life, but not both. They are pretty consistent in this viewpoint, and if they evoke freedom, you can be sure they are covering up for someone's death, and if they evoke "life", you can be sure they are trying to take away your freedoms.

Thank you, Amanda. It chills me to say that I think you're exactly right.

I Swear This Is My Last Schiavo Post

I've given my opinion about the Terri Schiavo case at length, and I don't necessarily want to keep contributing to the media frenzy. (As of this morning, Respectful of Otters is the number one hit on Google for "Terri Schiavo CAT scan." The next few links are to Alas, A Blog and Abstract Appeal. Fortunately.)

Through my referrer logs, I found a link to some additional information which does seem worthy of Yet Another Schiavo Post. The blogger who writes Pekin Prattles wrote to Ronald Cranford, one of the examining neurologists from the original Schiavo trial, inviting him to respond to the National Review article condemning the medical handling of Schiavo's case. Among other things, Dr. Cranford's reply addresses the questions about additional scan techniques:

An MRI was never recommended because, in this case and other patients in a permanent vegetative state, the CT scans were more than adequate to demonstrate the extremely severe atrophy of the cerebral hemispheres, and an MRI would add nothing of significance to what we see on the CT scans. Plus the MRI is contraindicated because of the intrathalamic stimulators implanted in Terri's brain. A PET scan was never done in this case because it was never needed. The classic clinical signs on examination, the CT scans, and the flat EEG's were more than adequate to diagnose PVS to the highest degree of medical certainty.

Pekin Prattles also reproduces a lengthy journal article by Dr. Cranford (it's mislabeled "Dr. Cranford's complete Terri Schiavo report," but it's obviously a summary article, not a medical report). It's well worth reading. He discusses the series of CAT scans taken between 1990 and 2002 (not just the 1996 one which has been widely reproduced on the net), the EEG evidence over the same time period, and Schiavo's clinical records from her attending physicians - correcting the widespread misapprehension that Schiavo's neurological condition has not been re-evaluated since the 1998 trial. The article also provides this searing dismissal of the parents' "experts" who testified that there were treatments which could restore Terri Schiavo's brain function:

The following is a sample of the completely fallacious opinions rendered about Terri’s medical condition by Drs. Maxfield and Hammesfahr. Twelve years after an hypoxic-ischemic insult, and serial CT scans showing extremely severe atrophy of the cerebral hemispheres, both doctors said there was a “chance for recovery,” with the potential for response to treatment. Dr. Maxfield testified that “abnormal brain dissolves, so what’s left [as seen in the CT scans] is “normal, functioning brain.” He further stated that the most recent CT scan shows “improvement.” They gave no published data to support their opinions on their proposed treatments of HBO and vasodilator therapy but instead presented an infomercial style approach of anecdotal cases of dramatic responses to their therapies. There are no credible articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature on HBO or vasodilator therapies as effective treatment for patients with chronic brain damage. The articles on the internet on vasodilator therapy, including those by Dr. Hammesfahr, are extremely poorly written, and only a cursory examination of these articles would tell any medical professional that they could not have possibly been peer-reviewed.

"Abnormal brain dissolves, so what's left is normal, functioning brain." Well, no problem, then. She didn't need her cerebral cortex, it was abnormal. If this is the best the Schindlers' experts could do, it's no wonder the trial and appeals courts have found so consistently for Michael Schiavo.

Terri Schiavo's Freedom Of Religion

I am relieved to see that the U.S. District Court was unimpressed with Congressional grandstanding in the Schiavo case. But I found something unexpectedly chilling in the arguments presented by the Schindlers' lawyer. Among the expected due process claims was the argument that Schiavo's rights to the free exercise of religion were being trampled:

Gibbs said that "fairly dramatic developments," including a statement by Pope John Paul II that removing a feeding tube would be a sin except in rare instances, are proof that Schiavo's constitutional rights to freely practice her religion are being infringed upon. Refusing to resume her tube-feeding would "jeopardize her eternal soul," Gibbs said.

Law professor Ann Althouse paraphrases the argument succinctly:

The federal religion claims assume that she must now want what the doctrine of the Catholic church requires, because, when she was able to think about such things, she was a Catholic.

The Schindler family is arguing that, regardless of what has been determined in court about Terri Schiavo's actual wishes, the courts should be required to place a higher weight on what the Catholic Church wants her to have wished. If the Appellate Court agrees with them, it sets up an enormously disturbing precedent in which religious doctrine is presumed to trump individual conscience.

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. Catholics have Living Wills - would they be rendered legally invalid if they include provisions to refuse artificial nutrition? What about cases in which a Catholic minor seeks judicial bypass to obtain an abortion without parental consent? Would the judge be required to take the Catholic Church's position into account, if it is indeed a violation of religious freedom to allow someone to make a choice which "jeopardize[s] her eternal soul?" It's hard to imagine anything so theocratic happening in the United States, and yet the argument is being made, in federal court, that the Vatican's opinions should be allowed to intrude upon personal family decisions.

Needless to say, the proposition that "she must now want what the doctrine of the Catholic church requires" is entirely specious. American Catholics widely disagree with the church on a broad number of social positions, including the use of artificial contraception (90% believe that it is acceptable, and as of 1988 59% of all Catholic women of childbearing age were using methods of birth control other than periodic abstinence), abortion (31% of U.S. women seeking abortions are Catholic), the death penalty (48% support it), and - as a matter of fact - the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube (pdf). The last link is to a recent ABC news poll which found that 63% of American Catholics supported removing the feeding tube. So much for the Schindler's argument that, because Schiavo is Catholic, the court is required to determine that her wishes are identical to the Pope's.

Terri Schiavo, Part II: The Ethical Post

(Read Part I: The Medical Post.)

People who have been reading Respectful of Otters since the start know that I am strongly opposed to euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Because the concepts of "euthanasia" and "killing" (as in, "so now it's okay to kill someone just because they have a mental disability?") are being thrown around a lot in the Schiavo case, I wanted to write about where I see the differences.

What is at issue in the Terri Schiavo case is not whether it is legitimate to kill her or actively promote her death (for example, by an overdose of morphine), but whether it is legitimate to refuse medical treatment intended to prolong her life. (Make no mistake about it: nutrition and hydration are medical treatment, when they're supplied through a stomach tube.) While the distinction between active promotion of death and witholding lifesaving medical treatment may seem like hair-splitting, in fact they are critically different.

No one has the responsibility to submit to everything that medical science could potentially do to prolong life. As individuals who own and have sovereignty over our bodies, we have a fundamental right to bodily integrity. No one has the right to invade our bodies without our consent, even if their purpose is apparently benign. If we are competent adults, we have the right to refuse medical treatment at any stage of an illness. That might mean opting out of a second round of chemotherapy after a first round of cancer treatments has failed, preferring to focus on preserving quality of life for the time we have left. It might mean deciding to die of a terminal illness at home, even if hospitalization could add a few extra hours or days. It might mean requesting aggressive pain management, knowing that it might depress respiration and shorten our lives. We have the right to say "enough," and let the natural dying process take its course. We have the right to have the integrity of our bodies unviolated by unwanted medical treatment - just as we have the right to insist on aggressive efforts for life extension. We have the right to choice. And when we are no longer able to exercise that right ourselves, we have the right to designate our closest others to do so on our behalf.

To define the exercise of that right as "killing" is to pervert the end of life unimaginably. My grandfather died at home at the age of ninety, after a slow decline from Alzheimer's disease. He died in his own familiar bed, surrounded by people who loved him. He was not in pain. His breathing slowed and slowed, and finally stopped. If it is "killing" to refuse life-preserving medical treatment, then my grandmother murdered my grandfather when she failed to call the paramedics. The others present at his death were accessories to murder. But who would have benefited had my grandfather been forced to squeeze out a few extra days in an intensive care unit, on a respirator, confused and disoriented? In what way would that have furthered a culture of life?

The natural course of life ends with death. To allow that natural process to take its course is profoundly different than hastening it along. Asking others to refrain from interfering with nature is profoundly different from asking them to make, or be complicit in, the decision that nature is not progressing quickly enough - as in euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Euthanasia asks the physician to play God, to decide whether another person's life is sufficiently without value that it should be actively terminated. The cessation of life support asks the physician to stop playing God, to refrain from intervening further in a disease process which has its natural terminus in death.

Terri Schiavo is under no moral or legal obligation to stay alive at whatever the cost to her bodily integrity, in order to assuage our fears of death or nuture her parents' unrealistic hopes of a miraculous recovery. A court has determined, based on the testimony of several witnesses, that Schiavo's wish would have been to remain unviolated by a feeding tube if she had no hope of recovering. That ruling has been affirmed and re-affirmed. It is our best estimate, our only estimate, of what Terri Schiavo would have wanted. If we want our own rights to bodily integrity preserved, we have no choice but to uphold hers.

Update: Whoa. Never mind me; go read Hilzoy.

Science And Lies

One of my favorite women called my attention to the obscene fraud perpetrated by Dr. Eric Poehlman, who falsified data in order to pump up his federal grant applications. Grant reviewers typically rely heavily on the "Preliminary Studies" section of the application, in which researchers describe prior data supporting their current hypotheses. It's common to include the results of studies conducted so recently that the data hasn't yet been published (and thus subjected to peer review), so it's easy to see the potential for fraud. Not that peer review alone would have been likely to uncover a fraud so egregious:

Dr. Poehlman represented in the 1995 Annals Article that he had tested 35 healthy women for basic metabolic characteristics and retested the same women six years later for the same characteristics. In fact, Dr. Poehlman falsified and fabricated test results for all but three of the 35 women in the study. [...]

In 1996, Dr. Poehlman initiated a new project where he planned to recruit subjects who had previously been tested at UVM from 1987 to 1993 and retest them for the same and additional physical and metabolic characteristics over time. [...] Dr. Poehlman exaggerated the number of subjects tested and changed the values for the physical characteristics of the subjects and the test results for these subjects (often reversing the values from the initial test and the retest) in order to create trends during the aging process that were not reflected in the actual research data. [...]

Dr. Poehlman used data purportedly from the Prospective HRT Study in two grant applications to NIH seeking federal funding for additional HRT studies. In fact, Dr. Poehlman did not have access to the data and just fabricated the preliminary test results in the grant applications.

As far as I can tell from a quick Medline search, the main thrust of Poehlman's "research" appears to be that women get fat when they hit menopause, that this poses enormous health risks, that hormone replacement therapy should be used more widely, and that menopausal women should be encouraged to diet. Just to add a feminist outrage component to my scientific outrage.

I admire Walter F. DeNino, the research assistant who blew the whistle. DeNino must have known that he might be ending his own research career forever. A research assistant typically doesn't survive going up against a tenured professor. Fortunately, now that Poehlman's been so conclusively brought down, DeNino shouldn't suffer any worse consequences than the loss of his Poehlman-related publications from his vita.

As someone who makes her living off grant-funded research, I admit that I take considerable satisfaction in seeing the Hammer of God descend on Poehlman, via the federal Office of Research Integrity:

Dr. Poehlman has agreed to pay $180,000 to settle a civil complaint related to numerous false grant applications he filed while at UVM. In addition, Dr. Poehlman will pay $16,000 in attorney's fees to counsel for Walter F. DeNino, a research assistant whose complaint of scientific misconduct spurred an investigation by UVM. Also, Dr. Poehlman has agreed to be barred for life from seeking or receiving funding from any federal agency in the future, including all components of the Public Health Service, and to submit numerous letters of retraction and correction to scientific journals related to his scientific misconduct. Dr. Poehlman also agreed to be permanently excluded from participation in all Federal health care programs.

That last line means that not only is his research career over, but so is his clinical career. You can't be a practicing physician in the U.S. if you're barred from accepting Medicaid or Medicare reimbursement - unless you become a private practitioner to the wealthy, and how likely is that if you're burdened by a fraud conviction?

But there's more. "He's also facing criminal charges," I announced to my Significant Otter. "He could go to prison for five years."

"But that settlement sounds like a plea bargain," he said, sounding surprised.

"It is. In exchange for Poehlman doing all those things, the U.S. Government has agreed not to give their opinion on whether or not Poehlman should get a more lenient sentence."

That's all his deal got him - not an agreement to seek a lesser charge, but simply a "no comment." That's what I mean by the Hammer of God.