Ex-Surgeon General Accused of Abusing Staff

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

Source: The New York Times

ALBANY — Gov. George E. Pataki’s appointment of Antonia C. Novello, a former United States surgeon general, as state health commissioner in 1999 was something of a coup for New York.

An appointee of President George H. W. Bush who was the first woman and first Hispanic to serve as surgeon general, Dr. Novello was praised even by the Clinton administration for her “vigor and talent” and promised to bring new attention to pediatric health.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/nyregion/27novello.html?ref=nyregion

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woah... this is some story

[EFerrari]

1. Now, why would you go to Troy, NY, to buy a statue of the Buddha?

lol

[hedgehog]

2. Because Troy is across the Hudson River from Albany.

My guess is that she was shopping with friends from her Albany days.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

3. she is from the Bronx

maybe she thought that was where Buddha was from?

[hughee99]

4. Why would you go to Troy, NY for anything?

I went to college there and don't miss that town at all. The bars weren't so bad, though.

[CatWoman]

5. I'm quite sure you guys have read about morale and employment problems at the CDC

Well, a lot of division and center directors were just like her.

And I know this from personal experience.

[Robbien]

11. Bushies saw some Bushie getting away with it so they feel it is okay to do themselves

Soon the entire government's standard operating procedure is that corruption is okay and government services die while Bushies party on.

This corruption is going to take a very loooong time to reverse as it has permeated the very air that DCers breathe.

[hyphenate]

6. Can anyone say

Jane Swift? I wasn't back here in MA when dear Jane was fucking around with the citizens of the Commonwealth, but it sure does sound like she, too, abused her "Office" in a similar fashion.

My question is this, though: is this isolated to women in power, or for some reason do people find it worse when women are doing it? Let me rephrase that: do people accept it when their boss is a man and asking the same favors, as in a double standard, or is it truly more blatant when a woman makes a demand?

I ask because this goes back a lot of years, but we rarely see headlines except when a woman is the "boss." Think, for example, of Leona Helmsley, or of the movie, "9-5" which was one of the very first times when sexual/gender harassment was really brought to the fore. And the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings were such a huge deal, and that was not really that long ago. We still have a LONG way to go when it comes to equal rights in the workplace, and it's stories like this which seem to place a huge bias on the work ethic, just enough to keep women from breaking that glass ceiling any time soon.

And FWIW, this woman really does sound like a bitch; that's not the point I'm making, just whether the double standard is at work in its reporting.

[acmavm]

7. Nah, I once had a male boss who would make people go pack

his kids belongs when they moved, clean out his gutters, paint his house. And the gutless fools did it.

[tom_paine]

8. Typical Bushie behavior.. Of all people in power, really, but the Bushies are by far our most

horribly corrupt.

Why not? All around them, mid-level Bushies see that there IS NO LAW for Upper Bushies.

But America has not yet been dismantled to the point where your mid-level Nazis get the same protections as Bush-level Nazis.

[Blue_Tires]

9. why couldn't she drive her own ass around?

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

10. harrrrumphhh driving and parking is for

little people, don't ya see?

[Peace Patriot]

12. Interesting. I get the feeling there has been a lot of this in Bushville--

bullying, staffers abused, career/professional gov't employees disrespected. There were spontaneous eruptions of joy and celebration when Hillary Clinton went to the State Dept., the other day. One staffer referred to it as "the Glinda party"--meaning the "Wicked Witch" was melted, gone. And I don't think that that joy was all about the objections to Condi Rice that I read about. One was that Rice used the State Dept. web site for personal puffery, for instance. While bad, that kind of thing wouldn't be enough to cause such happiness at her departure--just symptomatic of a bad attitude that must have bled over into bullying, disrespect, ill treatment of staff. Clinton made a point of saying something like, 'I want your best work' (--can't remember exactly, but encouraging the professionals, the knowledgeable, the competent; no more ideology-driven reports).

At the DoJ--U.S. attorneys actually fired for not goose-stepping to orders for political prosecutions.

At the EPA--scientists complaining that their reports were edited and changed to fit ideology (corporate agenda).

NASA--ditto.

The US military--a general fired for giving his best advice on the Iraq War. (And can you imagine how ideology must have oppressed honest military people down the line, with their having to obey assholes and even criminals promoted by Rumsfeld?)

Guantanamo Bay--I know of at least one, Lt. James Yee, the chaplain, who was shackled and jailed for months, and persecuted with false charges, merely for insisting on minimal humane standards for the prisoners.

Military jag lawyers--I know they suffered consequences for their brave stands against torture.

FEMA--the best emergency services in the world turned into a symbol of incompetence--and we can be sure that the competent professionals there took abuse, demotion and other ills, for daring to try to do things right.

And of course the all-time most famous backstabbing of excellence: the outing of Valerie Plame.

----------------------

John Dean wrote a whole book on authoritarianism, as it applies to Bushwhacks. Can't recall the title. About the kind of personalities that bully people, and get promoted by bullies, and what this does to a political party and a country.

The trouble is we let them do SO MUCH DAMAGE--before we caught onto their stolen elections, and nazism--and we're still not out of the woods on stolen elections ('TRADE SECRET' code still in place, in all of our voting machines). We can easily--EASILY--be visited with this shit again. We build up competent government and prosperity, and they come in and tear it down and loot it. This see-saw is not the norm in our history. It is abnormal, and we need to think long and hard about how it happened.

[goforit]

13. So many Gods an Goddesses and not enough worshipers.