You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
Happy birthday, Bob.
Note: Multiple updates on this post. Scroll down to see them all.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation released a statement moments ago that many are greeting as a reversal of their decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood. On Twitter, the Breaking News feed called it a “pledge to continue funding Planned Parenthood,” while Glenn Greenwald called it “an amazing, Internet-driven victory.”
But it’s not.
The new statement does not pledge Komen to reverse its funding decision, and it does not promise Planned Parenthood any new funding. Let’s look at the relevant passage (emphasis mine):
“We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”
Komen had never intended to renege on its existing grant commitments to Planned Parenthood, as PP themselves noted in their press release announcing the break between the two organizations (again, emphasis mine):
“In the last few weeks, the Komen Foundation has begun notifying local Planned Parenthood programs that their breast cancer initiatives will not be eligible for new grants (beyond existing agreements or plans).“
Komen’s statement that Planned Parenthood will be “eligible” for new grants is a new development, but it commits Komen to nothing. There’s no reversal of the funding cutoff here, and no promise to reinstate Planned Parenthood funding.
This isn’t a victory. Not yet.
Update | I want to be really clear about what’s going on here. Obviously, Komen has taken a huge amount of heat in the last few days, far more than they’d anticipated, and they’re scrambling to contain the damage. They’re in disarray, and trying to keep this from becoming an even bigger problem for them than it already is. This statement is a reflection of that, and in that sense it’s a good sign. But what they’re hoping this will do is take the spotlight off, and if it has that effect, they’ll have a lot of room to maneuver later. So folks who want to see Planned Parenthood refunded need to be extremely skeptical, and extremely loud in voicing their skepticism, in the near future. Keep the pressure on, keep pushing for concrete concessions. That’s the next step.
Second Update | Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards has released a response to the Komen announcement. An excerpt:
“In recent weeks, the treasured relationship between the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation and Planned Parenthood has been challenged, and we are now heartened that we can continue to work in partnership toward our shared commitment to breast health for the most underserved women. We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers.”
Richards is claiming victory, in other words, without suggesting that PP has been given any specific assurances on funding. All the more reason to keep the heat on.
I’ll be sticking with this story as it develops. Feel free to follow me on Twitter for all the latest.
Third Update | A little more explication. First, on the eligibility question: yes, Komen has restored Planned Parenthood’s “eligibility” to apply for grants, but all that means is that PP can submit a request for funding. Without knowing what criteria Komen will use for evaluating those grant requests, and whether they’re actually committed to restoring the PP revenue stream, it’s impossible to say what significance this has. Again, yes, it’s a victory, but so far it’s a victory of spin and messaging, not of actual dollars and cents.
Second, there’s the question of whether the new Komen position indicates that PP is likely to be reinstated as a Komen grantee. I don’t have any particular inside info, but from where I sit, yes, it’s likely, particularly given the media (mis)reading of the statement as well as PP’s (very savvy) response. It seems clear that cutting off PP down the line would be a PR disaster for Komen, and my guess is they’d rather put this behind them. But likelihood isn’t certitude, and things can change. We just don’t know what Komen’s plans are. All we have is what they’ve said. And what they’ve said so far is carefully crafted to leave the option of defunding PP very much alive.
Fourth Update | The president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute calls Komen’s statement “nothing new. We have known and have reported that they are continuing five grants through 2012. This is a reference to that. The second clause about eligibility is certainly true. Any group can apply for anything. It does not mean they are going to get anything.”
Fifth Update | It’s worth remembering that according to one Komen staffer, the group’s new “grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood.”
Sixth Update | Greg Sargent of the Washington Post got a Komen board member on the phone, and he said that “it would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization that doesn’t go through a grant process that shows that the money we raise is used to carry out our mission. … Tell me you can help carry out our mission and we will sit down at the table.”
“It would be highly unfair to ask us to commit to any organization.” That’s pretty cold, particularly in contrast with Cecile Richards’ “we look forward to continuing our partnership.”
Seventh Update (Saturday morning) | Several commenters have suggested that it would be inappropriate for Komen to promise to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, given the nature of their funding process. A few things about that.
First, whether Komen should have made such a pledge or not is a separate question from whether they did, and many in the media are still incorrectly reporting that such a pledge was made. Right now, for instance, the front page of the New York Times website declares falsely that “the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation apologized for its decision to cut grants to Planned Parenthood for cancer screening and said it would restore the funding.”
Second, there’s plenty Komen could do short of making a formal commitment to circumvent the application process to indicate that their intention is to work to restore the funding. They could say “we look forward to supporting Planned Parenthood’s work in the future.” They could say “our relationship with Planned Parenthood remains important to us.” They could say number of things, none of which they’ve said so far. In fact, and I think this is worth underscoring, their initial statement yesterday included nothing positive about Planned Parenthood at all. Not a word. As far as I’m aware, no subsequent official statement has either.
Eighth Update | Lindsay Beyerstein and John Aravosis respond to this post.
This is totally off topic, but it’s burning up my Twitter feed and I just need to get it off my chest.
A bizarre video was recently posted to YouTube of Bishop Eddie Long being “crowned” at his church in a truly weird ritual. In the video, a “rabbi” named Ralph Messer wraps Long in what he describes as a 300-year-old “Holocaust scroll,” then drapes him in a shawl and hoists him in the air before declaring him a king.
It’s all very strange, not least because Long, the pastor of an Atlanta megachurch, was disgraced last year in a scandal involving his sexual relationships with at least four underage parishoners. (Long has been vocally anti-gay throughout his career, and the parishoners were male.)
There’s nothing that’s not creepy about the whole thing, and it’s been greeted with the mockery it deserves, but there’s one piece of the story that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention but should:
Rabbi Ralph Messer isn’t Jewish.
Messer is a proponent of so-called Messianic Judaism, a religious movement founded in the 1960s that wraps evangelical Christian theology in Jewish cultural trappings.
Put simply, it’s a Christian movement. Messer is a Christian minister.
And despite Messer’s claim to be acting “on behalf of the Jewish people and the land of Israel,” there’s nothing Jewish about the performance he put on at Long’s church. Neither the ritual nor the language of Messer’s act have any basis in Jewish traditions, while his repeated references to the divinity of Jesus and quotations from the Christian bible make his actual theology clear.
Also, the “priceless” Torah scroll Messer wraps Long in is almost certainly a fake. As you can see at 5:15 in the video, the thing is held together with scotch tape.
Oh, and one more tip for “Rabbi” Messer, if he’s reading this. The name of the Nazi concentration camp where you claim you found that scroll? It’s Auschwitz-Birkenau, not “Auschwitz and Birkendal.”
Update | A bible scholar lists 27 ways in which Messer’s performance misrepresented Jewish and Christian religious tradition.
Second Update | The “Messianic Judaism” movement repudiates Messer too: “Ralph Messer is not affiliated with the mainstream Messianic Jewish movement, nor is he a legitimately ordained Messianic Rabbi.” (More here and here.)
A bill in the Arizona legislature would bar the state’s university system from providing scholarships that reduced out-of-pocket tuition to less than $2000 a year.
Republican John Kavanaugh says that keeping tuition low creates “perverse incentives” for students to enroll in college. His bill, which has 24 co-sponsors in Arizona’s 60-member House of Representatives, would restrict all grants, scholarships, and awards administered by the university, even those funded by private donors.
Students on full academic scholarships would be exempted from the regulation, as would those on athletic scholarships. Asked why athletes were exempt, Kavanaugh said “they contribute to school spirit, and those on football and basketball teams also generate a lot of extra revenue.”
The athletic and academic loopholes, of course, mean that the bill’s largest impact would be on need-based aid.
February 22 Update | The tuition bill, HB 2675, has just been approved by the Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives in what Anne Ryman of the Arizona Republic described as a “narrow” vote. On Twitter, Ms. Ryman described exchanges between committeemembers and students testifying against the bill as “heated,” giving the following example:
University of Arizona student James Allen: “You’re making it harder to achieve a higher education degree.”
Representative Michelle Ugenti: “Welcome to life.”
Ouch.
An obscure academic publishes a strange paper in a no-name journal. Scholars uniformly repudiate it as worthless. Some speculate that the author is mentally ill. But in the meantime the theory attracts huge attention online, and even makes it into some mainstream news outlets, lauded as a potentially earth-shaking discovery.
How does this happen?
University public relations departments.
The academic in question is biochemist Erik Andrulis, and the paper is called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.” It was published in the premiere issue of a minor new journal called Life last week, and if that had been all the exposure it received, it likely would have sunk without a trace.
But Andrulis is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, and six days ago the CWRU public relations department issued a press release declaring that the paper presented a “revolutionary … transdisciplinary theory” with the potential to “catalyze a veritable renaissance.” Andrulis, they said, “resolv[es] long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, … unifies quantum and celestial mechanics,” and “confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature.”
In actuality, Andrulis has done none of those things. Respected biologist and science writer PZ Myers, for instance, describes the paper as “unreadable, incoherent, bizarre, and completely lacking in evidence or mathematical support.”
But a university press release is a university press release, and most people who read them have none of Myers’ ability to tell good science from bad, so the CWRU announcement was quickly picked up by various sites. Indeed, a number of science news aggregators simply stripped the original attributions, slapped on their own bylines, and published the press release itself as news.
As the extent of the paper’s problems became known, CWRU pulled the press release from their site, and a growing number of Life editors tendered their resignations, but by then the paper was out in the world.
In this particular case, the flaws of the original paper were so extreme and so obvious that the story didn’t make it too far before the backlash began. Today, much of the discussion around Andrulis consists of debates as to whether he has committed a hoax or is suffering from mental illness. (PZ Myers tends toward the second explanation, describing the event as “a developing personal tragedy” and expressing the hope that Andrulis “gets the care he clearly needs.”)
But most bad research isn’t anywhere near this bad, and so most press-release-driven journalism never gets properly debunked. I’ve written a bunch of posts about bad academic research on students, and in almost every instance my attention was drawn to the shoddy work by breathless media coverage of somebody’s overheated press release.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments