Month: December 2010

Ethics and Altzheimer’s Testing: An Easy Call

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes I think bioethicists spend too much of their time looking for new ethical dilemmas rather than giving thoughtful guidance on the dilemmas we already have. A recent example: the New York Times wrote about a supposed ethical dilemma appearing in the wake of new tests that reveal the likelihood of whether an individual will get Alzheimer’s at some point in the future. As the article put it:

“Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?…It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms. At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?”

My question is: “What’s the dilemma?” Continue reading →

CREW’s Top Ten Scandals of 2010

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The government ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has announced its list of the top ten ethics scandals of 2010. You can read about them here.

For the most part I like the list, though notable for its absence is the Charley Rangel matter,  the ommission of which reinforces my conviction that CREW is marred by a pro-Democratic bias.  Strangely, the list also fails to include the unfortunate incident where CREW’s former executive director, Melanie Sloan, jumped ship to take a lucrative job with a lobbying firm whose clients CREW had been vigorously supporting for months.

Go figure.

Lindsay Lohan Has Privacy Rights Too

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Lindsay Lohan brings enough problems on herself. She doesn’t need unethical professionals to make her life even more chaotic by violating her privacy rights. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sen.Tom Coburn

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has become the main villain in the battle over the  9/11 First Responders Bill, which will grant over 7 billion dollars in health care assistance to those who have become ill as a result of their heroic work in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. He is leading Republican opposition to the bill, on the grounds that it still needs to be paid for despite its worthy purpose and its undeniably deserving beneficiaries.

Coburn is one of the most dedicated deficit hawks in the Senate, which means that he realizes that the federal deficit will never be brought under control if feckless House members and Senators can always be shamed and bullied into spending money the government doesn’t have, or into rejecting necessary cuts, through the use of one or more predictable refrains: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, Christmas Division: Jill Patella

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The last Christmas gift Jill Patella got from her late husband, who died in 2007, was a six foot tall plastic statue of Santa Claus that loudlysings Christmas songs in a jolly baritone. In his memory, Jill decided to put the singing Santa on her front lawn this year, where he has been singing around the clock, driving her neighbors Lorillard Avenue in Union Beach, New Jersey to consider Santacide.

Jill explained her intentional infliction of the holiday noise pollution by telling reporters, “This year was the time. He [her late husband, not Santa] would have wanted me to live life again.”

She did not explain why she believes that her departed husband’s definition of “live life” was “show utter disregard for the neighbors.” Even if Mr. Patella was the kind of selfish, irresponsible person who believes that his tastes and desires trump the right of the people around him to enjoy their holidays without having to listen to a giant mechanical singing Santa, that would not excuse her for carrying on his unethical ways.

There is such a vast area of reasonable Christmas conduct between the insane poles represented by NPR’s Nina Totenberg apologizing for using the term “Christmas” on TV, and the in-your-face Christmas celebration represented by Jill Patella’s lawn concerts. Why do so many people have such a hard time locating it?

America’s Ignorant Public: What’s Worth Reporting?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

John Avlon’s dubious conversion from the author of a best-selling book labeling politicians who disagreed with John Avlon as “wingnuts” to a “No Labels” champion reminded me that he was one of many commentators to draw great significance from a Harris poll last spring that revealed what he called “scary” beliefs held by Republicans. There were several such polls this year about Republicans, conservatives and Tea Partiers; expressing alarm at how ignorant right-leaning Americans are became something of a media fad. For a news media largely dominated by reporters, producers and editors desperate to stave off the erosion of support for Barack Obama, the polls were perfect ammunition: they were genuinely newsworthy; reporting them undermined the credibility of those “scary” Tea Party rallies; they created an opportunity for the news media to bolster its own credibility by explaining why, for instance, the President was not the Anti-Christ, and perhaps best of all, it reinforced the conviction of the majority of newsmedia reporters who self-identify as liberals that they belong to the smart side.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, that only a few news outlets and even fewer commentators chose to feature the results of a recent Harris poll showing that 40% of the U.S. public thinks that Karl Marx’s signature phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” originates  from one of the America’s founding documents. Continue reading →

As Winter Strikes, Inconvenient Truths…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the midst of what is being called the coldest winter in Great Britain since records began being kept, some wags have been unkind enough to tweak the “you’re all idiots for not agreeing that only world government can save us” climate change zealots by circulating a 2000 article that ran in the Independent, the nation’s most enthusiastic pro-global warming newspaper. Some excerpts: Continue reading →

Lying to Mom

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The call was from my mother’s case worker at the hospital.

The night before, my mother, 89, had fallen in her apartment, the seventh fall in ten days and, like the others, a direct result of her stubborn refusal to use a cane or a walker despite her unsteadiness. This time she had not been able to dissuade me from taking her to the emergency room, where we both lingered until nearly 6 AM as she was X-rayed, CAT-scanned, and given a battery of tests. The staff felt she needed to be checked-in to stay for a couple of days, especially since she was hallucinating. I agreed, over Mom’s protests; it would also provide me some more time to figure out how to prepare my home for her to move in, at least temporarily. There is no way I am going to let her fall again.

Now the case worker was calling to tell me that my mother was resisting treatment. She wanted to go home, she said, and was physically resisting efforts to give her an M.R.I. Would I please come over and persuade her?

The hospital was only fifteen minutes away, and as I drove there, I pondered various strategies. With my mother, you get one shot. If your first argument doesn’t persuade her, nothing will. I could explain why the M.R.I. would help the doctors clear her for release, but that one could backfire if the test revealed something that in fact led to a longer stay. One ploy kept pushing itself to the front of the line: Continue reading →

Ethics Fouls and Julian Assange’s Rape Case

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Well, well, well, Mr Assange!

How does it feel to have your own embarrassing and confidential information leaked to the media and publicized to the world?

On the sound ethical principle that two wrongs doesn’t make a right, The Guardian acquiring and publishing the leaked police report relating to Assange’s rape charges in Sweden is no less unethical because Assange is a smug foe of confidentiality. Nevertheless, it is hard to recall an instance when seeing the tables turned on someone was so satisfying. Ethics foul: Whoever leaked the records, and The Guardian for printing them. But thanks anyway.

It is satisfying for reasons other than delicious irony. Continue reading →

Hypocritical Quote of the Year: John Avlon

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“That’s why it’s a little absurd to hear Limbaugh point out disapprovingly that my book Wingnuts itself uses a label to describe the use of fear and hate by hyper-partisans. Its funny how quickly people who throw around labels for a living (“feminazi,” for example) cry foul when a term like “wingnut” is directed at them. But bullies are always shocked when you punch back.”

—Author and “No Labels” co-founder John Avlon, in his essay, “My War With Rush Limbaugh”

John Avlon has recently joined with a mostly moderate Democratic group to launch the “No Labels” movement, supposedly dedicated to moving political debate away from uncivil name-calling and personal demonization. This is awkward for a pundit who has thus far made his reputation with a book called Wingnuts, which is a dismissive and derisive L-A-B-E-L he attaches to politicians he disagrees with, mostly Tea Party members and any elected official who opposes abortion. Continue reading →