DL Open Thread: Friday, Dec. 22, 2023

A Preview Of Our Holiday Programming:

Dec. 26:  DL’s MVP’s Of 2023

Dec. 26-30:  ‘Bulo’s 50 Fave Tunes Of The Year.  10 each day.

Dec. 31:  2023: The Good, The Bad, The Ridiculous.  The only look-back on the year in Delaware you will ever need that you’ll want to read.  It’s epic(ally long), or will be, once I’ve finished it.

The Only Article You Need To Read About Bethany Hall-Long.  Great reporting doesn’t rely solely on uncovering the facts–it means presenting those facts in a manner that makes a complicated story easy to understand.  That’s what Cris Barrish has done here.  Read it and we’ll all be on the same page.

Israel Bombed Areas Where It Had Ordered Gazans To Go.  John Sigler couldn’t have done it any better.  None dare call it genocide, though.  Even though 20,000 are now dead in Gaza.  OK, I will. The Israeli Defense Force is committing genocide in Gaza:

The number of deaths is far higher than in any conflict in Gaza in recent history. And it is higher than the estimated 15,000 Palestinians killed in the violence that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians call that mass displacement the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.”

Neta C. Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which tracks the toll of conflicts, said the rate of death among the population was similar to that of 20th-century wars.

“This is, in the 21st century, a significant and out-of-the-norm level of destruction,” she said.

“Hey, hey

ho, ho

Feckless Joe

has gotta go.”

Just reliving the Vietnam War protests of my youth.  I needed that.

Mike Johnson And His Daughter At The Purity Ball. “Eternal girlhood” is the best descriptor I’ve seen:

“This looks like a wedding,” a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. “But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and … daughter,” the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.

The German news segment documented Johnson and his family preparing for and then attending a purity ball, a controversial formal dance event, popular among some conservative Christians, that gained notoriety in the early 2000s. At a typical event, fathers and their teenage daughters dress in formal ball attire for a night that involves dinner and dancing and culminates with the daughter signing a pledge to her father to abstain from dating and to remain sexually abstinent until marriage.

In one brief interview clip, Johnson’s wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, “We don’t talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question.”

Since growing in popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, purity balls and purity pledges have faced increased scrutiny from both inside and outside the Christian community, ranging from criticism that the practice places too much of a burden on young women to accusations that the balls themselves objectify young girls.

Linda Kay Klein, author of the book “Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free,” told ABC News that purity balls are not as common as other hallmarks of the purity movement, like purity rings, and that they tend to be more popular among more conservative Christian factions.

“In my book I talk about eternal girlhood,” Klein said. “There’s this way in which purity culture attempts to create this eternal girlhood among girls — you never really grow up, you never really have headship over your own life. You ultimately are there to be guided by and to support and to champion and to be led by somebody greater than you: a man.”

And here I just thought they were keeping ’em pure to serve as prey for the religious leaders who minister to the flocks.  Still do.

ChristianaCare To Pay Out $47 Mill To Settle Whistleblower Lawsuit.  They were engaged in some sneaky shit:

This is believed to be the largest False Claims Act settlement in Delaware history and the first in a series of cases that are likely to be brought against other hospitals across the nation.

“This case involves a revolutionary legal theory,” said Dan Miller of Walden Macht & Haran — the law firm representing the whistleblower, Ronald Sherman. “To my knowledge, this is the first FCA settlement — ever —based on a hospital allegedly providing private physicians with free services in the form of hospital-employed nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Any other hospital in the country which operates under that model that led to this settlement should consider changing its practices immediately, or risk a whistleblower lawsuit.”

Sherman’s suit, which was unsealed more than a year after it was filed, charges that between 2010 and 2014 the hospital system engaged in a “kickback scheme,” by allowing doctors from a private practice called Neonatology Associates to bill insurances, primarily Medicaid, for care that had been provided by the hospital’s own staff.

In exchange, Christiana Care received lucrative patient referrals from those physicians, the suit claims.

“To fill the gap left behind by residents, many hospitals hired mid-level providers such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants,” Miller said. “At ChristianaCare, we alleged that services performed by mid-level providers were billed for by private attending physicians who were in a position to make future referrals to the hospital.

“Put differently, we alleged that ChristianaCare paid kickbacks to the private physicians in the form of free employees.“

What do you want to talk about?