Month: October 2014

So what would Rand Paul do about Ebola?


by digby

If you were wondering what the libertarian solution to dealing with highly contagious disease might be … keep wondering.  All you’re going to get is this:

Sen Rand Paul in NH on #Ebola: It’s all over the place. You want to trust your gov’t but..gov’t is not very good at most things
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 16, 2014

In other words:

Carla Howell, National Libertarian Party Political Director, says “governmental bureaucracies” involved with epidemic control are ineffective compared to private and voluntary efforts, in addition to costing too much money and violating individual rights.

“The sole purpose of government is to protect our life, liberty and property from harm caused by others in those few instances where the private sector cannot do a better job,” Howell writes in an e-mail to Newsweek. “Containing Ebola in Africa is best left to private charities such as Doctors Without Borders rather than the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or the CDC. 

Screening is better handled by airlines and private hospitals that are both liable for damages and fully free of government red tape. (Sadly no such hospitals exist today in the United States).”

To be fair, some other libertarians who are running for office in Texas reluctantly agreed that as much as they loathe “government bureaucracies” like the CDC, they have “bigger fish to fry.” Others recognized that quarantines enforced by the proverbial men with guns might be necessary. Overall, they seemed to be more uncomfortable with implications of their belief system in this instance than we usually see. In fact, they remind of the anti-abortion zealots when confronted with the inconvenient fact that if they consider abortion murder they are morally required to arrest the women who have them. The spokesperson for the national Libertarian party is the only one who is unashamedly willing to spell out the solutions their philosophy truly requires.

Update:  This piece by Ben Adler delves into the Paul’s ideas about public health and they’re very interesting since they’re both doctors.

More alarming, however( for Rand Paul’s patients anyway) is that he’s apparently an “Ebola Truther” — one who thinks the government is lying about the mode of transmission and that it can actually be transmitted by air.

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Please all, please none


by digby

I’ve been saying that “you can’t be all things to all people” for years out of frustration at the Democratic Party’s insistence that politicians use language designed to put anyone who listens into a coma, especially in an off year election. Here’s evidence that this is true from language expert Anat Shenker-Osorio and pollster Celinda Lake:

The objective in November for every party is turnout — not persuasion. There are very few mid-term voters who don’t already feel strongly about their party; no pithy phrase is going to make them change teams at the end of the season. Politics is tribal — if you show up in the off-season you’re here to root for the home team, not to assess the field.

Further, sophisticated analyses of voter turnout indicate that messages that rile up the base — that get them passionate about a politician — are required, no matter what side of the political aisle. Not a toothless appeal to the greatest number, no matter their political leanings. Republicans have long understood and employed this approach. Democrats need to catch up. This means that even if “economic growth for all” rated most highly with everyone asked, this still wouldn’t necessarily make it the go-to message for engaging a partisan base.

In fact, it’s deeply fitting that the animal in Aesop’s “Please All, Please None” fable was a donkey. This kind of, let’s meet people where they are and actually say nothing, approach is the best summation of current Democratic strategy.

Unlike Republican voters, where many potential Democratic voters are during mid-terms is at home watching television. We need to figure out where they’re capable of going and what it takes to get and keep them there.

Our own recent research on economic issues tells us a progressive approach is in order. What voting skeptics need to hear is recognition that their vote would mean appreciable differences in the economic struggles most Americans are facing.

Messages like “every working parent should get paid enough to care for their kids” and “Americans deserve more than a decent living, they deserve a decent life” test through the roof with our base and persuade that hotly desired middle.

This is in response to the Party’s insistence  that  the “big winner” of a message is to pimp the idea of “growth” rather than kvetch about “inequality”, the problem being that we’ve had plenty of “growth over the past few years all of it leading to more inequality. The whole approach leads to policies that make the lives of average people worse. And as the authors point out it reinforces a very conservative worldview.

The truth is that nobody’s against economic growth. That’s daft. But average people aren’t benefiting — that rising tide is only lifting the top 1% of boats and everyone else is being shoved underwater. Simply talking about growth is basically lying to people about what needs to be done to make their lives better.

Shenker-Osorio and Lake also make what should be the obvious point that it’s important to appeal directly to your own base voters in these off-year elections rather than swing voters.  If they stay home your sunk no matter how many swing voters find your nice, bland messaging about “growth” to be pleasantly inoffensive and non-threatening.

Needless to say, the Republicans aren’t going in that direction.

Wrapping themselves in the flag

by digby

I’m seeing a lot of this cropping up again:

And these young men also make us proud. #Service #Country pic.twitter.com/INZIeXpphY
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 16, 2014

Commenters are very worried about our troops because the CDC is playing politics.

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Gaming democracy

by Tom Sullivan

Last night, judges once again struck down another state’s photo ID law. This time in Arkansas:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas’ highest court on Wednesday struck down a state law that requires voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot, ruling the requirement unconstitutional just days before early voting begins.

In a decision that could have major implications in the Nov. 4 election, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that determined the law unconstitutionally added a requirement for voting.

The high court noted the Arkansas Constitution lists specific requirements to vote: that a person be a citizen of both the U.S. and Arkansas, be at least 18 years old and be lawfully registered. Anything beyond that amounts to a new requirement and is therefore unconstitutional, the court ruled.

Similar rulings have occurred with Republican voting laws in Pennsylvania (January), Wisconsin, and Texas, although the Texas ruling by the U.S. District Court was overturned yesterday by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The day before the Wisconsin ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed North Carolina to implement its ban on same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. The state’s sweeping voting bill goes to trial next summer. The mixed rulings may have more to do more with timing than principle:

Despite the flurry of high court rulings, many legal analysts and some judges say the Supreme Court’s actions are less about broad voting rights principles than telling federal judges to butt out, particularly so close to Election Day. In each of the cases where the justices acted, lower federal courts had issued orders that would have changed the rules for elections just weeks away, potentially causing confusion among voters and election officials.

You have to wonder when (and if) the light bulb will come on in the public consciousness. Our moneyed lords and their Republican vassals oppose the very idea of democracy for fear of the peasants peeing on the furniture. The succession of court challenges overturning photo ID laws and marriage equality bans follows a pattern seen in Republican-led states across the country, certainly here in North Carolina. GOP legislatures feel empowered (and directed) to push the constitution and established rules to the limits and beyond, and they dare anyone to stop them. As president-elect George W. Bush quipped, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” Was that a Kinsley gaffe?

Charlie Pierce in Esquire on the GOP mining democracy [emphasis mine]:

Simply put, the Republican party deliberately has transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of I’ve Got Mine, Jack. And it rarely, if ever, gets called to account for that. As a result, and without substantial notice or paying a substantial price, and on many issues, individual Republicans have been able to justify the benefits they’ve received from government activity that they now oppose in theory and in practice. This is not “hypocrisy.” That is too mild a word. This is the regulatory capture of the government for personal benefit. That it makes a lie, again and again, of the basic principles of modern conservatism — indeed, that it shows those principles to be a sham — is certainly worthy of notice and debate. It is certainly worthy of notice and debate that the conservative idea of the benefits of a political commonwealth means those benefits run only one way. Modern conservatism is not about making the government smaller. It’s about making the government exclusive.

They are bent on gaming democracy the way they game capitalism.

 Pls Fwd! How The Right Spreads Fear For Profit. Ebola, ISIS, EV-D68, Dirty Immigrants Fund Raising Letter 

 by Spocko

Yesterday I got a fund raising email from Phyllis Schlafly, conservative activist, author, and founder of the Eagle Forum titled Stop Disease at the Border (link to Townhall version) 

We all get millions of fund raising letters every day. Recently letters from certain groups on our side of the aisle have been especially dire. “THEY WILL KILL YOUR DOG IF ELECTED! So as Luke Russert would proudly say, “Both sides do it!”

But I found this letter interesting because of the conflation of multiple threats in one brightly colored missive.

The letter starts out quoting Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-CA) debunked claim that 10 ISIS thugs crossed our southern border–which earned a “PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim” award from Politifact.  Next she quotes Rep. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) bogus claim that the Islamic State collaborates with Mexican drug cartel. That got Four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact checker.

 Then she launched into the dirty foreigners and their “disease problem.”

The problem of invasion across our border is no longer just a jobs problem. It’s a national security problem, a welfare problem, a public school problem and a dangerous disease problem.

It’s not a problem of accepting a few lost teenagers who arrived unannounced and demanded admission. It’s a problem of our public schools suddenly being invaded by thousands of young adults who have never been to any school, who are not familiar with basic hygiene, who can’t read or write, who don’t speak English or even familiar Spanish (but speak one of 21 different Spanish or Indian dialects) and who may carry new diseases such as EV-D68.

I hadn’t heard of EV-D68, and since she was 0 and 2 with facts, I figured she would get that wrong as well.

Interestingly EV-D68, a polio-like enterovirus, IS a problem. Here’s a CDC link with details. However, it appears it’s not coming from the recent influx of Central America kids. Snopes knocks down this claim as probably false here. She is 0 and 3 fact wise before she even gets to Ebola.

Since Ebola is hot and EV-D68 is not, she is going to use the most outrageous Ebola  “fact” she can so she quotes Marine Corps General John F. Kelly, commander of the Southern Command, speaking to the National Defense University in Washington, DC  saying that if Ebola comes to Central America there will be mass migration to the US.

That is followed by this dozy where he claims someone at the Centers for Disease Control reported that “By the end of the year, there will be 14 million people infected with Ebola and 62 percent of them dying.”

Now I’m searching for the background on this quote expecting another swing and a miss when I find a non-right wing story link. The quote is from an article by Jim Garamone in DoD News. General Kelly is quoted as saying that exact line.

Since no one else had debunked this one yet, I wrote to the head of communications at the National Defense Univesity asking for a transcript or video for context. I’ll let you know what I find out. I expect something like, ‘So I asked this CDC guy, “Okay, what’s the worse case? Let’s say Ebola gets airborne and nobody does anything at all. How bad could it get? What’s the World War Z scenario? And the unnamed CDC analyst says, “Welllll. when you put it that way…”

Being a rational Vulcan who has been watching the right wing for years, I expect the out and out lies, fear mongering and immigrant bashing shaped in the form of a claim to “protect our families.”  Also, Phyllis Schlafly has made some obtuse and offensive comments about Latinos in the past (Here she is talking to David Pakman) So I think we should just blow her off, as a non-creditable source.

But one of the things I think it’s important to remember is that the people these fund raising letters are targeted to aren’t going to do what I just did. That letter is going to work. Being sucked into fact checking them might be fun for some and lets us prove how dumb and gullible they are.

But instead of standing back and smirking, is there anything more we can do? What if that letter got forwarded to you from your right-wing sister-in-law? Would you be able to talk her down? Then what?

This is an opportunity to address the fake fears and deal with the real fears. Like, “Yes, our public health care system DOES need help, but not because of ebola. Because of a possible bird flu, so do  you think we should spend some more money on public heath programs and training nurses?”

You can also talk about the non-novel food-borne pathogens that kill thousands every year.  Stop disease at the border? “You bet! Did you know that only 1 percent of the food imported from Vietnam is checked by the FDA at the border?  And that the billionaires running the food industry want to remove inspections all together under the Trans Pacific Partnership scheme?”

Or “Speaking of the CDC, did you know that they keep track of the hundreds of people who die each year from salmonella, yet the chicken industry has denied the rise of  people getting sick from tainted chicken?”

 Late last year I was advising an organization about what messages might work to difference audiences about the Trans Pacific Partnership. I explained to the group that you can’t use the same sources, methods and messages to reach the right that you use on the left. Some messages work for both, but I would need different sources for the same info.

We know what stories and methods people use to ramp up fear, part of our challenge is determining ways to deescalate the fear and help people focus on the real problem that have real solutions.

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QOTD: Shep Smith

by digby

Going off the reservation again:

Smith’s moment came after a report from his colleague Doug McKelway, who concluded that Ebola has caused “widespread panic across the country.”

Smith jumped into his soliloquy.

“Oh my god. Doug, I appreciate it, but I think we both know there’s no widespread panic across the country,” Smith said before turning to face the camera. “But I think we know that. And I think we also know that if there’s widespread panic, it’s not based in fact and it’s not based in reason. And I think more than anything, those are just words that people on TV sometimes use.”

Smith said the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the cases treated in the U.S. are “very serious” but that “the rest of this (media coverage) should stop because it’s not productive.”

The anchor continued: “And it’s not worth ratings and it’s not worth politics and we all need to stop it because some day there may be a real panic.”

I hope Smith doesn’t run into O’Reilly in the hallway. He’s likely to get an earful.

If you haven’t been watching Fox you can’t know just how outrageous this is. It’s bad enough on CNN where it’s wall to wall. And MSNBC had people like Russert doing remotes from the airport for no good reason. But it’s nothing compared to Fox which is completely over the top on this issue.

You don’t even want to know what they’re saying on hate radio. Here’s a taste from Limbaugh:

Limbaugh: Highest Levels Of Our Government And Media Think Americans Deserve To Get Ebola

Limbaugh: U.S. Will Never Take Steps To Stop Ebola “Because That Would Have Deleterious Effects On The President’s Political Agenda”

Limbaugh Suggests “Political Correctness” May Have Played A Role In Allowing Ebola To Reach The U.S.

Limbaugh: Media Will Try To Make Ebola Victim Thomas Duncan A “Martyr” In Order To Pass Amnesty

Missing the point

by digby

The NY Times reported today:

The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.

An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.

Yeah, that’s all well an good but it’s completely irrelevant. The point of “arming the rebels” or the “freedom fighters” or the “anti-communists” or whatever is to get the US into the war. It’s just a first step. Then you need advisors and bombing support and finally full scale intervention. I doubt anyone has ever believed that arming rebels anywhere would be the end of it.

I wish I could have heard the sputtering when those who had been making the case for it heard this since I’m sure they had been adamant that this was not a commitment for more military involvement. And yet, what else could it be? What else has it ever been?

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Full blown crazy

by digby

Well at least he wants the president “taken alive” so there’s that:

Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman has filed a lawsuit against President Obama for “providing material support and aid to international terrorism and facilitating terrorism” by not implementing a travel ban on people from countries facing an Ebola outbreak.

Health experts have advised against enacting a travel ban, explaining that such a move might actually increase the risk of an outbreak, but Klayman has his own idea as to why the Obama administration hasn’t enacted a ban: anti-white racism.

Klayman writes in his weekly column that “Obama has favored his African brothers over the rest of us by allowing them free entry into this country” and “relegating whites and others who are not black or Muslim to the back of the bus has become an invidious form of reverse discrimination. This was not right when blacks were subjected to this treatment, and it is not right now – particularly given its deadly implications.”

“I do not advocate violence, and I want Obama to be taken alive to be deported and pay for his inadequacies under the rule of law,” Klayman writes. “But he must be forced from office as soon as possible, before all is lost.”

And this is the loon civil libertarians are forced to work with on the NSA cases. Good God we are screwed.

And the next time anyone says that the left is just as nuts at the right point them to Klayman and ask who his corollary on the left might be.

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The patented PC whine

by digby

Ed Kilgore has a good piece up about Ben Carson and absolutely nails what constitutes his appeal — and his danger:

In a column for the Washington Times after he got some rather natural heat for calling Obamacare “the worst thing to happen to America since slavery,” Carson offered a vague and circular defense about the law representing “a profound shift of power from the people to the government.” He then spent the rest of the column bitching about, well—it’s not too clear what he’s bitching about unless it’s just people making fun of his empty conspiracy theories.

[T]hose who want to fundamentally change America would much rather demonize someone who is exposing this agenda than engage in a conversation that they cannot win. Others join in the fray happily marching in lockstep with those who are attempting to convert our nation to something we won’t recognize, having no idea that they are being used.

Being made fun of (which is what Carson calls “demonizing”) is at the heart of his idea of “political correctness,” and it infuriates him …

Political correctness is antithetical to our founding principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Its most powerful tool is intimidation.

If it is not vigorously opposed, its proponents win by default, because the victims adopt a “go along to get along” attitude. Major allies in the imposition of PC are members of the media, some of whom thrive on controversy and others who are true ideologues.
The true believers would be amusing if it were not so sad to behold them dissecting, distorting and repeating words in an attempt to divert attention from the rise of government control.

Kilgore observes:

None of this makes a lick of sense to the non-wingnut mind. But to the kind of people who are hailing Ben Carson as a potential president, hearing an African-American man tell them it’s their duty to defy “political correctness” is, whatever Carson intends by the term, an invitation to spout all kinds of racist and sexist nonsense. If anyone so much as frowns at them, well, they are agents of tyranny and not really Americans. And anyone who finds the premises of their world view not worth taking seriously is trying to “intimidate” them into silence—the silence of the grave!

I hadn’t thought about the implications of all those white conservatives being invited to spout racist and sexist blather by an African American man. Yikes.

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Dreaming of a ferocious man who likes confrontation

by digby

Howard Fineman says that all over the world people are disappointed and asking “What happened to Barack Obama?” He goes on to list everything that’s disappointed people about him and why he thinks it happened.

I think this is probably the one that has led to these questions more than anything else:

Sky-High Expectations. Obama arrived on the stage with Kennedy cool, youthful optimism, Ivy League credentials and self-evident proof that America was overcoming its “original sin.” His life story was a triumph of multiracialism and internationalism. By his very nature, he would end wars, make peace with Islam, help the downtrodden and save the U.S. and world economy. These expectations (which he did his best to stoke) were impossible to meet. He hasn’t met them. No one could.

There was a messianic quality to his first campaign that was inevitably going to result in disillusionment since he is just a mortal man, however accomplished and intelligent he might be.

And many of Fineman’s other reasons were things that could have been predicted to lead to that disillusionment — like the inability to “change Washington” and “transcend bipartisanship.” The piece isn’t wrong. It’s just that few people would have normally expecte a president to deliver on all those things unless they had believed he was somehow super human.

But this I just find creepy, however predictable it might be:

His thoughtful, soothing, hopeful nature got him elected… But the world is under siege today, making it easy to conclude that ferocity and confrontation are required. His leadership will be tested in his last two years in office as never before. The U.S. does not lead the way it once did, but its role remains central and indispensable. “What happened to Obama” in the past matters much less than what happens to him now.

Is it really “easy to conclude that ferocity and confrontation are required” or is the Village searching for their more familiar kind of hero? Here’s Fineman after 9/11:

(11/27/01): So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ‘80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform—whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ‘60s—but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

Can you sense the desire for more of that clap-trap among the Villagers? I can …

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