The Rundown with David Loftus

Over the past five months, “American Currents” commentators have written about dozens of political, economic, social, and cultural subjects and particular breaking news events, from health care reform and Obama’s job performance to homicides committed by children and the peccadilloes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards.

Many of these events have come and gone (and good riddance to them), but some have continued to develop beyond the date on which we happened to take a verbal snapshot. I thought it might be interesting to check on what’s happened to some of these stories since we looked at them. We have provided links back to our original commentaries so you can compare what we wrote to subsequent developments.


March 25 – HEALTH CARE REFORM BECOMES LAW

Despite the claims its opponents made about Democrats passing health care reform “against the will of Americans,” various polls taken since Congress voted suggest a majority of citizens are not upset about the new law. In fact, some Republicans have dared to wonder in public whether trying to make the issue the center of the 2010 election might possibly backfire on them.

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that a poll it conducted with the University of Southern California found that 46 percent of Californians surveyed said they would vote for a candidate who had supported health care reform, versus only 29 percent who said they would not.

Of course, more polls continue to claim that half or more of Americans disapprove of the law, but often they fail to separate those of us who believe it didn’t go far enough from those who reject health care reform altogether. The USA Today/Gallup poll released last week did indicate that 51 percent said the law doesn’t go far enough in regulating health insurers, and 52 percent said a public option insurance plan should be available to all, which suggests the opponents who say most Americans reject the law are either being stupid or mendacious.

The attorneys general of at least 15 states have said they will challenge the law in court on the basis of the Constitution’s commerce clause, which limits the regulatory powers of Congress to matters that involve interstate commerce. The challengers, which include Florida, Alabama, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Colorado, will argue that health care does not meet the legal definition of interstate commerce, and that to require all Americans to have health insurance is unconstitutional.

Other states, including Kansas and Kentucky, have explicitly announced that they don’t see a firm basis for a constitutional case against the new law and they will not join the legal challenge. My state of Oregon (which has been ahead of the curve in providing free or inexpensive health care to poorer families), not only disagrees with the legal challenge, but will file friendly briefs in support of it.


March 23 – A WEIGHTY GOAL

Donna Simpson, 42, who weighs 604 pounds and already has the world record for the heaviest woman ever to give birth (she was 532 pounds at the time and needed 30 doctors to assist with delivery) is attempting to eat her way to 1,000 pounds and a new world record. I wrote that this was a form of genteel despair and slow suicide, and that Guinness should immediately announce that they will not recognize or publicize any such record.

So far, they’re weaseling. “Guinness World Records no longer monitors heaviest pet records as we do not wish to encourage owners to overfeed their pets for a record,” a Guinness spokeswoman said. What about encouraging people to overfeed themselves in search of records? “These heaviest records exist and we are impartially reporting on some of the extreme superlative records of the world,” she said, which is just another proof that people care more about animals than they do about the suffering and stupidity of other people.


March 22 – CATHOLIC CHURCH ABUSE SCANDAL

Further stories have come out that Pope Benedict may have done too little about abusive priests, and maybe even covered up for them, when he was German archbishop Joseph Ratzinger. But the most ludicrous response came on Good Friday, April 2, when a senior Vatican priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the world’s outrage at sex abuse scandals in the church to the persecution suffered by Jews.

He claimed to quote from a letter from a Jewish friend that said: “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.” Whether the outrage and bad publicity might sometimes overstep the bounds of reason and respect for the church and its officers who are personally blameless in the scandal, the analogy is imperfect at best, and scurrilous at worst.

Jews suffered violence, loss of property, and death by the thousands, even millions, over centuries for what the Vatican itself finally admitted was a theological lie: that they were responsible for the death of Jesus and many subsequent crimes of which they were innocent. They had done nothing to deserve their persecution. Catholic priests who abused children definitely committed crimes, and other church officials who covered up for them did, too.


March 16 – LOUISIANA PROM CONTROVERSY

Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old lesbian, wanted to bring her girlfriend to the senior prom at her high school in Fulton, a town of 3,900 in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Rather than allow that or have to bar her from attending, the school simply canceled the prom altogether. Naturally, classmates blamed her. The ACLU swooped in to fight for her rights in court.

The ACLU pushed for a fast decision, and it got it less than a week after we talked about it here. A U.S. federal judge ruled that the school district had violated McMillen’s rights, but the school board did not have to reschedule the dance because parents had sponsored a “private party” for the kids (it happened this last Friday at the Fulton Country Club). A few other private parties were organized by kids around the community.

This may be a case of the girl winning the battle but losing the war, because:

1)her girlfriend, a sophomore, shied away from the limelight so McMillen decided to attend with a different date
2)it’s not clear whether the school district’s policy of banning same-sex dates from school events and requiring girls to wear dresses or slacks has been effectively overturned for future classes

There were other interesting developments. Ellen Degeneres had McMillen as a guest on her show and gave her a $30,000 scholarship. The American Humanist Association forwarded a $20,000 gift from Raleigh, NC philanthropist Todd Stiefel to pay for a proper prom, but the ACLU rejected the gift, fearing that the donation from the overly secular source would create more controversy and bad publicity. (Apparently, “atheist” is a far more scary word to Mississippians than “lesbian.”)

In my March 16 commentary I hazarded a guess that McMillen would probably be leaving town as soon as she graduated, so that fighting this battle in court was not in the best interests of the gays and lesbians to follow if she didn’t plan to stick around and continue to provide an example. On this, I’m pleased to report I was wrong. According to a story in last Thursday’s Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, ACLU attorney Christine Sun said that McMillen, who maintains a 3.9 GPA, intends to stay in Fulton after graduation and attend Itawamba Community College for a couple of years before transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi. “She wants to be close to her family,” Sun said. “This is the only community she has ever known.”


March 2 – SEAWORLD TRAGEDY

Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year-old veteran marine trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando, Fla., died before a horrified crowd of onlookers when a 12,000-pound orca named Tilikum grabbed her by the ponytail and dragged her underwater and tossed her about. The medical examiner’s autopsy report was released last week, and revealed that Brancheau died of drowning and blunt-force trauma to her head, neck, and torso. Her spinal cord was severed, and she sustained fractures to her jawbone, ribs, and a cervical vertebra. The toxicology report found no drugs in Brancheau’s system.

Tilikum had previously been involved in two other deaths: the drowning of a trainer at a marine park in Victoria, British Columbia in 1991, and another at SeaWorld in 1999. Although the creature has not been killed, contrary to confused reports shortly after the recent tragedy, the killer whale has been removed from the daily shows, trainers have been ordered to keep their distance, and a two-foot extension has been added to the water pick with which they brush his teeth three times a day.

An ongoing development in this story is the family’s fight to keep videos of the woman’s death from being released to the public. Two SeaWorld video cameras recorded at least part of the tragedy: one posted on a pole over the stadium and one under water. Attorneys for media outlets want the videos released, arguing that being able to review them would help keep law enforcement and SeaWorld in check, but I find this a bogus rationale. Rather the way I argued in the case of the Winter Olympics accident that killed Georgian luge team member Nodar Kumaritashvili in mid February, this is something the public doesn’t need to see, and the family’s privacy should override our morbid curiosity.

Circuit Court Judge Lawrence R. Kirkwood issued a temporary injunction and has given the parties until April 5 to submit their arguments over a permanent ban.


February 26 – GLOBAL WARMING

In a development that came to be called “Climate-gate,” more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents belonging to climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in England surfaced last November, just before the world climate summit in Copenhagen, and suggested the scientists may have fudged their data or pushed it in a certain direction to harden their claims for the speed and reality of global warming. Critics and doubters of the theory that humans are speeding up the changes in the world’s climate were quick to yell “cheat” and dismiss the entire theory.

Last week, the report of a 14-member parliamentary committee that investigated the situation cleared the scientists of any un-scientific wrongdoing. They did criticize the researchers for maintaining a culture of withholding information (behavior that I called understandable in my Feb. 26 commentary, given media misinterpretations and firestorms much like the very one that popped up in this instance), but found nothing to challenge the “scientific consensus” that global warming is occurring and influenced by human activity.

Phil Jones, the head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, admitted to the committee that he had written some “awful” e-mails and stepped down from the director’s position, but the committee delared his scientific reputation remains intact.

Conservative publications and blogs continue to write about the “slow death of global-warming alarmism” and refer to the theory as “hysteria” and “a cult,” as well as “the extreme misconduct (if not criminality) of leading climate scientists” … the language I found in a March 30 essay at www.thenewamerican.com. On the other hand, bestselling British novelist Ian McEwan firmly believes in the reality of global warming, and his new novel Solar concerns a scientist in that field.