More Politics vs. ScienceFollow

Can I drop it when you make up arguements about things being illegal? Executive Order 11140 (1987) essentially put the office of Surgeon General under the Secretary of Health and Human Services and gave the Secretary the right to determine whatever roles and functions he or she may wish for the Surgeon General to have through Chapter 6A, 203 of the Public Health Service ActChapter 6A also later defines duties and roles of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, including education.

In other words, the Surgeon General has the role of educating the public regarding health issues because the Secretary of Health and Human Services gave him that job. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was fully authorized give him that job because President Reagan issued an executive order saying that Secretary of Health and Human Services could do so. We know that the Secretary of Health and Human Services gave him the job because the website for the Department of Health and Human Services says so.

Not that it's really important to the discussion as a whole but maybe now we can put to bed the whole "It's not really his job 'cause it's not in the law" bit.

I only do so because I've been confused as to what you're arguing for or against, though I do have a better understanding now. As for strawmen, that description is thrown around too much when sometimes the actual problem is a lack of comprehension. People trying to deduce intent aren't creating strawmen, they're trying to figure out what in the hell a discussion is about.



Nice find. But, the issue I was having is whether not being suppressed is in his job description. But as you say that's not important now as you weren't arguing that. G'night!

Wow I hope I'm not the only one who had "SG agent man" going through my head right there.

Although oddly enough, with Carmona that would have been less of an issue then with other Surgeon Generals.


What ever his job description (aI conceeded that enlightening the public is probably part of it), lying about the science under oath would be illegal and doing so not under oath would still be highly unethical. Withholding information on the other hand is a little more gray, but I definitly agree that it is a bad call. However if you think that Carmona or any other SG under any other president can operate without having to deal with politics in some way right now you are being a little obtuse.

And I emphasise "Right Now" because after the hearings earlier this week, legislation is being introduced by the estemed alky from Mass to make the Surgeon General's roll more independant (as well as not specificly selected by the president). Of course given that the president would have less say in who holds the position, and thus less influence over said person, the SG role could then lose some of its policy influencing ability within the administration as a side effect.

One of the duties I noticed of the SG which apprears fairly ambiguous at best, and in all probability was wordsmithed to be that way:

"To elevate the quality of public health practice in the professional disciplines through the advancement of appropriate standards and research priorities"

So, if the current adm felt that the SG waa about to (via pulbic statemnts during his 2002-2006 appt) attempt to elevate the quality of public health practice in the professional disciplines with statments that do not meet the adm's appropriate standards or that go beyond the adm's research priorities...then he should be muzzled as he appears to be going beyond his own statement of duties.

or

Does his mission statement supercede his duties, in which case he feels he can say what he wants if, in his opinion, it's in the publics best interest to be advised?

or

Does the terminology professional disciplines even incorporate the stem cell research fields?

Always seems to be more questions than answers, however, the wording of research priorities and appropriate standards is sticking in my craw, as standards are set in place by Administrations via the governing bodies they put in place to create/enact/enforce/monitor those standards.

So is it within the scope of the SG to advance publically a better or even just different standard, and to make a determination himself as to whether it is an appropriate standard?

Ugh. I'm getting a headache. Whoever posted that they are re-writing the SG's duties, I'm really glad to hear that. It's needed.

No one is getting too hung up on stem cell research in this thread; my own complaints are more in the abstinence realm where we have statistical data on both abstinence & contraceptive effectiveness which is being mis-used. But I don't know why stem cell research wouldn't be a professional discipline. It's a legitimate branch of medical science, acknowledged by the NIH.I'll admit to not knowing the specifics of the proposed changes (or really anything beyond what you've told me). I would still hope that the Pres/Sec would be willing to accept advice from a well-qualified and appointed independent medical specialist.

Well, since it was giving me a headache anyways the abstinence/contraceptive effectiveness debate may produce a lesser throb.

1. For whatever reasons teen pregnancy rates, and abortion rates are down in the USA from almost any source I looked at spanning GW's terms, and his abstinance as the priority pushed theme are what I'm sure he must trumpet for success. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The unpredictability of teens and statistical manipulation on short range bar charts doesn't do a lot to convince me it's all about an abstinance only theme within two terms of an adminitration.

2. STD's, teen pregnancy rates and teen abortions could be pushed to a further degree of success if the President was not so absolute in a abstinance only theme.

3. He's holds this position given his own moral convictions and to protect his fundy base support.

4. The left seems bent on smearing him whether his programs have made gains or not. They can call it anything they want, from a citizens right to address any and all of his programs and initiatives or freedom of the press and all that that entails, but the real bottom line is they hate his ******* guts and they want him discredited to the nth degree. It's how things work on both sides of the political fence.

So, regarding what I don't know:

a] Are individual states allowed to have condom vending machines in schools, despite anything the President pushes as a national agenda of abstinance only?

b] If so, are there any states implementing condom vending machines in their schools, and what are the statistics of those teens regarding STD's, pregnancy and abortion?

c] Is part of the Dems 08 platform to bring about condom vending machines in schools as either a National program or a state by state decision?

I'm mostly focusing on the vending machines since that seems to be the most effective and fiscally sensible measure to take.

I have been looking, but nothing concrete, just a test case in Seattle quite a few years ago, that displays limited information about limited results.

/shrug

Well, that was risky. What if you'd been overcome in the heat of the moment to dress an abrasion?

It's good that we can at least agree that his position is a political appointment. That does have some significance, wouldn't you agree? I'd also point out that your being very subjective here. You believe he's being forced to allow "misleading" health information, but that's based on your position on those issues, which are ultimately political in nature.


I think one of the points being missed here is the nature of political appointments. This is a topic that's gotten a fair bit of attention recently, most notably with the whole firing of federal prosecutors thing.

The creation of a policy is a group thing. The president has lots of staff and lots of advisors. A *good* president will have advisors with varying opinions on things. That way he's being presented with as many options and angles on any given issue as possible. Somewhat by necessity this means that any decision that results from this proces will be opposed by one or more of the advisors involved. It's somewhat amusing that so many on the Left will bash Bush anytime any current or former advisor or political appointee does something or says something that disagrees with Bush's policies, and then when Bush reacts by appointing more people who agree with his policies he's accused of cronyism...

Um. Pick one. Bashing him when everyone around him agrees with him, and then also bashing him if anyone around him disagrees with him is somewhat meaningless, don't you think?

I do...





Case in point. On this matter the SG is *advising* the President (and his own boss) based on his/her views on different public health issues. That's great. But that's *one* source of information upon which the Secretary and the President will generate any given policy. The SG is not constitutionally granted the power to make that policy. The President is. The SG is an *advisor*.

That's really the critical issue here. We can elevate the SG to some almighty position in our eyes and master and knower of all things about health, but at the end of the day he's just another political appointee who presents an opinion to his bosses. Those opinions may appear in policy somewhere down the line, but he doesn't get to decide that himself. Complaining because the President choose not to follow your advice on any particular issue is silly.


Bashing a president because he choose to set policy somewhat differently then what *one* of his advisors suggested is equally silly. Making a big deal out of this is silly as well. It's not like Bush suddenly broke a centuries old tradition of allowing the SG to set his own policies all on his own or anything. SGs have historically be "muzzled" and many of them far more then what Bush did.


And on the topic of muzzling, that's not unusual either. In my job we make lots of decisions about how to do something. This is done by many people putting in input and ultimately a decision being reached. It's not always going to be the decision I liked and endorsed. However, it's my job to implement that decision regardless of whether it was the one I wanted. If I fail to do that, I can expect to be shown the door. This isn't some evil thing that Bush invented. It's how things are done universally. The second you have more then one person involved in a decision making process, you will have people who didn't agree with the final decision.

And certainly, someone who's working for the president shouldn't be openly attacking his policies and expect to keep his job. Nothing evil or conspiratorial there, just common sense. The SG doesn't set policy. The president does. If you don't like the result, you're free to leave. Or you can implement that policy. Either way, that policy is what it is. Agree with it. Disagree with it. It's still the "legal" policy on the issue.


I just think making big hay out of something like this is ridiculous. It's meaningless. In the political context, finding advisors who's advice wasn't followed is pretty darn common. Kinda like finding some retired generals who disagreed with a given strategy. Always going to be able to. Not a big deal. But some want you to think it's significant...




Again. His job is not to decide what the policy is. His job is to advice his bosses within his area of expertise.

Are you seriously arguing that every single political advisor should broadcast his advice to the public so we can all have a referendum on it? Isn't that a bit silly? Ok. It's a lot silly. Not only would it be impractical, but it's also not how the executive branch works. You're trying to insist that the executive branch operate like the legistlative branch (where "the people" are much more acitively involved in influencing the decisions that are made). Those two branches exist with different rules for reasons Joph. In this case, the executive branch does not work that way specifically to avoid the kind of "mob rule" and "mob demand" process that tends to massively influence congress.


It's a bad idea. The executive branch is structured such that the president sets the policy and makes the decisions. All those other people are advisors. Although many of them of course make their own decisions within their own areas, those decisions have to follow a general policy that the president sets and any decision they make can be overruled by the president if he so desires. We elect one president, not a slew of appointees. That's not by accident.





Valid argument. However, those areas aren't free of polics either. The moment government gets involved in public health and science those things become political. It's the nature of the beast. Maybe if we adopted a more classical conservative approach and simply stopped funding any of those things, then the scientists would be free to do what they wanted? But the second we involve the government, they aren't anymore.

I'd seque that whole thing into a more general "this is why socialism sucks" argument, but that would just be predictable, now wouldn't it?...

Which studies Joph? The ones that all show a decline in teen pregnancy rates since the early 90s? The Guttmacher study that clearly states the reason being "both increased abstinence and changes in contraceptive practice".

Now maybe they're abstaining at a higher rate because of the same old approach to sex education that we had back in the 70s, but I somehow doubt it. While I agree that the so-called "absitinece-only" programs aren't great ideas, I also note that there's a lot of misapplication of that term to programs that are "abstinence in addition to regular sex education" programs.

It seems like when this topic is discussed, many people tend to lump any/all Bush administration programs that include any focus on abstinence into the "abstinence only" catagory, when the reality is that I'm not aware of any school that actually teaches abstinence only. Sure. A single funding program may provide funds if abstience is tought, but that's typically going to be in addition to the curriculum on the subject already being taught.

That odd merging of terms tends to make this issue very difficult to discuss specifically because you may be talking about the negative effects of one program if it's applied all by itself, but I'm talking about the negative effects if that program isn't included alongside existing ones.


The point being that the statistics show that teens are abstaining from sex more today then they did 15 years ago. Ever consider that it's the inclusion of abstinence education that's responsible for that? And that most of what people bash as "bad health science" is exactly those programs that have helped this rate decrease occur. But I guess it's just easier to paint all programs that include the word "abstinence" in them with the same broad brush...




And yet, it's partially the fact that teens have been fucking less often that the teens pregnancy rates have dropped over the last decade or so. Hmmm...



Certainly. But it's the combination of the two that is important. See. I'm perfectly ok with accepting that a portion of the decrease in teen pregnancy rates comes from better use of birth control. Um... Can you please accpet that increased rates of abstinence *also* have had an effect?


See. Cause if we're talking about being objective and scientific, it seems absurd to ignore half of the explanation for something simply because it's not politically convenient for you.

See how this become political very quickly?




See comment above. If you truely believed this, you'd acknowledge that abstinence has been responsible for a portion of the reduction in teen pregnancy rates. You need *both* in an education program. I'll clarify this again. When a program is labeled "abstinence only", that does not automatically mean that the program requires that nothing but abstinence be taught at the school in question. That's a deliberately created false interpretation of the meaning. It means that that program funds only education in abstinence. If you know anyone in the education fields, you know that schools recieve grants for numerous programs for any given set of curriculum. So the sex education program for a given school may recieve funding from a dozen different federally funded "programs", each of which provide specific components of the whole.


What the Bush administration (and really conservatives in general for the last couple decades now) are trying to do is add abstinence programs to the existing school programs for sex-ed. And the statistics show this has been working. The fallacy is when you pretend that these programs all exist in a vacuum and conclude that they don't work.



This is all beside the point in terms of the SG, but it's important to make the point that just because the SG holds a viewpoint that you agree with doesn't make him right. He may be 100% correct in terms of his medical opinion, but that doesn't automatically mean that the policy recomendations he's made were the right ones though. They really are two different things.

Oh, and in further response to the Guttmacher study, abstinence only advocates give its findings far more impact than they actually deserve. I quote for you "Explaining Recent Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States: The Contribution of Abstinence and Improved Contraceptive Use" published in the Jan 2007 issue of American Journal of Public HealthGasp! But who could have wrote this scandalous material?Huh. So the Guttmacher Institute agrees that abstinence-only prgrams don't delay intercourse and may prove detrimental to contraceptive usage. And that the bulk of the decrease in sexual complications has been due to contraceptive use and that even the decrease due to less sexual activity isn't linked to abstinence only programs.

Also from the Guttmacher site, we get this little bit in regards to your "No! Abstinence programs really mean you teach both!" argument.There's also a nifty bit talking about funding for abstinence programs and the requirements thereof.

Edited, Jul 13th 2007 11:00pm by Jophiel

You completely misseded the point Joph. That's the definition of a single "program". From the perspective of the government. Do you know anything about how funding is handled in the public schools? A teacher creates a curriculum and applies for funding under as many "programs" as possible. For example, a schools sex education class might get funding because it meets the criteria for "teaching condom use". It might get more funding because it meets the criteria for "teaching pre-natal care" (the egg exeriments we did. Today, they use realistic dolls for the same thing). It might get yet more funding for "teaching abstinence".

All of those "programs" can (and typically do) exist independantly of eachother, are granted via application separatly, but can all exist inside the same classroom. Obviously, a school can choose to teach "only abstinence", but that's the school's choice.

I'll point out that none of the requirements above require that the school not *also* teach other forms of sex education. It means that the particular curriculum for that section must meet those requirements. This bit is really more aimed at the textbooks and such. When this process filters down to the actual teachers teaching the classes, they're not hampered by having to pick one type of education and that's all they can do.

Again. Nothing in there prevents teachers from teaching a class in which half of the semester teaches from the "abstinence" handbook, and the second half teaches from the "how to use birth control" handbook. You're looking at this backwards. The funding is based on meeting those requiremments, but does not restrict what other programs a given class can qualify for.


Your example is also flawed. That grant is about the curriculum, not those who use it. Read the first part. They anticipate a whopping 45-55 awardees. That's kinda small given the number of schools in the US, don't you think?

This isn't the grant a teacher applies to for a class. This is a grant for writing a textbook and handbooks and such that can then be provided to classrooms. The requirements for this program are that it teaches only abstinence. There is no restriction at the classroom level though.


Your first clue would have been reading the list of who can apply for the grant:




No teachers. Funny that.

The scare over "abstince only" education plays on the fact that most people don't understand how the process of an "education program" ends up becoming an actual class taught in an actual school. Yes. The program funds the creation of curriculum that teaches "abstinence only", but I'm not aware of any public school that uses *only* curriculum from such programs in their actual sex-ed classes.

It's semantics based on ignorance.

I wont accuse of you "making **** up" because in this case, I'm sure you just have no clue how the public school system works.


Find me a public school in which the only sex education available to students teaches abstinence only. That might be a start.

Well, no. Since federal grants for contraceptive education currently equal zero dollars.

* County governments
* City or township governments
* Special district governments
* Independent school districts
* Public and State-controlled institutions of higher education
* Private institutions of higher education

Public school districts are generally units of their respective local governments. Ones that aren't are called "independent school districts". Hey look! Local governments and independent school districts are both eligible for funding! Fancy that! So are higher education facilities, both public and private!

That's ignoring the fact that I grabbed a single grant opportunity. You'll also notice that the linked grant isn't for the $170mil allocated for abstinence programs.You know, it's funny. Every time you claim to know exactly how the school system works, you prove yourself to be dead wrong. Shit, you didn't even make the connection described above? I mean, c'mon now... feel free to tell me about how your second cousin's housekeeper's aunt's dog-walker's wife is the Queen of All Teachers or somesuch. It won't change the fact that you didn't even know that a grant available for a township government is, de facto, available for the township's school district.Not surprisingly, most districts don't list their entire sex ed curriculum online. Luckily however, Mathematica recently completed a study on abstinence-only education which included...So, in Powhatan, the students' options were to attend the My Choice, My Future! classes (an abstinence-only program) or to forgo sexual education entirely. In the Clarksdale school, the even more strict Teens in Control program was offered or, again, no sex education at all. The other two schools mentioned had some sort of additional information available for the control group, but there's two schools anyway.

Since you liked Guttmacher, here's another report backing my previous statement that about 25% of districts teach abstinence-only (23% to be exact). Note that they have additional catagories for "Abstinence as preferred" and "Abstinence as one option in a broad selection" so there's no need to read "Abstinence only" as anything but exactly that. The April 2003 issue of NEA Today and Jan 2007 issue of Education Digest say the same thing but you'll have to look it up yourself -- I got that from the journal search.

It's also worth noting that California, Wisconsin and New Jersey have all rejected federal sex ed funds because of their restrictions. Strangely, none of the states thought to just get more grants for the sex-ed programs with contraceptives.

Funny that.