Army Contract Official Critical of Halliburton Pact Is Demoted

The NYTimes reports:

A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.

Not exactly a surprise, although when you dig down into the article it becomes a lot of he said, she said:

"[The official, Bunnatine H. Greenhouse] is being demoted because of her strict adherence to procurement requirements and the Army's preference to sidestep them when it suits their needs," [her lawyer, Michael Kohn] said Sunday in an interview. He also said the Army had violated a commitment to delay Ms. Greenhouse's dismissal until the completion of an inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general.

Carol Sanders, spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said Sunday that the personnel action against Ms. Greenhouse had been approved by the Department of the Army. And in a memorandum dated June 3, 2005, as the demotion was being arranged, the commander of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said the administrative record "clearly demonstrates that Ms. Greenhouse's removal from the S.E.S. is based on her performance and not in retaliation for any disclosures of alleged improprieties that she may have made."

Known as a stickler for the rules on competition, Ms. Greenhouse initially received stellar performance ratings, Mr. Kohn said. But her reviews became negative at roughly the time she began objecting to decisions she saw as improperly favoring Kellogg Brown & Root, he said. Often she hand-wrote her concerns on the contract documents, a practice that corps leaders called unprofessional and confusing.

In October 2004, General Strock, citing two consecutive performance reviews that called Ms. Greenhouse an uncooperative manager, informed her that she would be demoted.

A touching concern for patient privacy

Dad's eye doctor just sent a postcard to remind him that it's time to have his eyes examined. The postcard is considerately stamped PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.

It's a girl!

Ron's niece Ashley and her husband Philip are the happy and proud parents of Dylan Casey (not sure about the spelling yet), 6 pounds 14 oz. Dylan's great-grandma Jenny says she's just beautiful and her head is perfectly shaped.

Haven't seen any pictures yet, but she's only about two hours old.

Truth in advertising?

A semi-local bank is promoting online banking. "So what?" I hear you scoff, "What bank doesn't?"

Surely not; but this bank signs off all of its advertising "Banking the way it used to be." Apparently that's one of those statements that's not meant to be taken literally.

You sycophantic stooge!

Random Insult Generatorfrom NK News.

Reparative therapy: Dobson's view

A rather lengthy (and somewhat amusing) article by Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson is rippling through the portion of the blogosphere I read—Matthew Yglesias, on The American Prospect's TAPPED blog, got to it through Bradford Plumer, who in turn credits two others.

The article, dated June 2002 and titled "Can Homosexuality Be Treated and Prevented?" claims no less than to provide "a definitive explanation…regarding the origins of homosexuality." Dobson explains that homosexuality is a disorder that generally isn't chosen; on the other hand, he dismisses the notion that there's a genetic component. If there were, he claims, no one could ever change their orientation, but in reality "there are eight hundred known former gay and lesbian individuals today who have escaped from the homosexual lifestyle and found wholeness in their newfound heterosexuality."

(Golly, a whole eight hundred? Out of how many? Hmm, a little less than 400 million people in the US and Canada…let's be reeeaal conservative and say no more than two percent are gay or lesbian, giving us 8 million. So that's, um, a hundredth of one percent, if my arithmetic is correct. Not the best odds.)

Anyway, if it's not chosen or genetic, that leaves what? Well, Dobson relies on the word of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist who, Dobson believes, is "the foremost authority on the prevention and treatment of homosexuality today." Dobson quotes from Dr. Nicolosi's book A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality at considerable length. Turns out, it's the old distant father, smothering mother thing:

In 15 years, I have spoken with hundreds of homosexual men. I have never met one who said he had a loving, respectful relationship with his father.

(Not ever? What about the zillions of straight guys who'd say the same thing about their dads? Where do they fit in this?)

Elsewhere, Nicolosi says,

If [a father] wants his son to grow up straight, he has to break the mother-son connection that is proper to infancy but not in the boy's interest after the age of three. In this way, the father has to be a model, demonstrating that it is possible for his son to maintain a loving relationship with this woman, his mom, while maintaining his own independence. In this way, the father is a healthy buffer between mother and son.

Nicolosi errs by conflating masculinity and straightness (lesbians are scarcely mentioned in the material Dobson excerpts). Also, he's awfully, awfully therapy-centric:

Recalling the words of psychologist Robert Stoller, he said, "Masculinity is an achievement." [He] meant that growing up straight isn't something that happens. It requires good parenting. It requires societal support. And it takes time. The crucial years are from one and a half to three years old, but the optimal time is before age twelve. Once mothers and fathers recognize the problems their children face, agree to work together to help resolve them, and seek the guidance and expertise of a psychotherapist who believes change is possible, there is great hope.

That's pretty compressed; maybe Nicolosi doesn't really mean to suggest that your kid's apt to grow up gay unless you really work hard to make him straight, with generous applications of therapy to ensure the desired result.

For a guy who unquestioningly accepts that homosexuality is intrinsically wrong, Dobson is surprisingly sympathetic; I hardly expected him to say that homosexuality isn't chosen: "Homosexuals deeply resent being told that they selected this same-sex inclination in pursuit of sexual excitement or some other motive. It is unfair, and I don't blame them for being irritated by that assumption. "

Nor did I expect Dobson to grasp that gay people often have to deal with common life issues such as "loneliness, rejection, affirmation, intimacy, identity, relationships, parenting, self-hatred, gender confusion, and a search for belonging" in ways that straight people don't (though he's patently wrong to say that those issues are what homosexuality's really all about), and goes on: "This explains why the homosexual experience is so intense—and why there is such anger expressed against those who are perceived as disrespecting gays and lesbians or making their experience more painful. I suppose if we who are straight had walked in the shoes of those in that 'other world,' we would be angry too."

Holy Freudian cliche, Batman!

Via Obsidian Wings, who in turn got it from Pandagon, Men overcompensate when masculinity threatened:

Threaten a man's masculinity and he will assume more macho attitudes, according to a study by a Cornell University researcher.

I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq War more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle,' said Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell. Willer is presenting his findings Aug. 15 at the American Sociological Association's 100th annual meeting in Philadelphia.