Month: October 2014

Can David Brooks see what’s wrong with this picture?


by digby

How do you suppose the “conservative intellectuals” rationalize this to themselves?

Basically, this means that the liberal equivalent of Breitbart and Limbaugh is Slate and the New Yorker. And Fox News is the conservative equivalent of the New York Times.

Also note the sad fact that the numbers who read Daily Kos, Think Progress and Mother Jones are too small to measure . Not so with nutcases like the Glenn Beck show and Breitbart.

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Everyone calm down. If Nigeria can contain Ebola the US can too.

by digby

This observation from Vox seems to me to be important:

Amid the panic and fear about Ebola sweeping the US, let’s be clear about one fact: as far as we know, two nurses who cared for Duncan got the virus — but no one else. Not the passengers who sat next to Duncan on his flights or touched the same surfaces as him in airports. Not the school kids and friends he met in Dallas. Not the Texas Presbyterian hospital staff who met him on his first visit, when he was misdiagnosed and sent home. Not the ambulance drivers who brought him to the hospital on his second visit, when he was vomiting with a high fever.

Most importantly, his fiance, Louise Troh, didn’t catch the virus either. She shared a cramped apartment with him and several other family members while he was already contagious, and then stayed in the same contaminated space, cooped up for days in a quarantine, after Duncan was admitted to hospital.

So far, all these people have been declared virus free. And the dozens of suspected cases of Ebola across the US have turned out to be negative, except for three — Duncan and his two nurses, Amber Vinson and Nina Pham. The fact that they got sick while caring for Duncan should also remind us of the science of this virus: that fits what we know of the science of the virus, which is that people are most contagious late in the infection.

This is really important: part of what makes people so afraid of Ebola is that people infected with the disease can mistake it, in its early stages, for a normal flu, and, say, board a plane. But at that point, the disease just isn’t very contagious yet.

Ok, all the data aren’t in and maybe somewhere somebody was infected in that chain from Duncan. Time will tell.

But this should give everyone pause — and comfort:

Ebola-free Nigeria hailed as ‘success story’ in battling outbreak

It was an epidemiologist’s worst nightmare: one of the world’s deadliest contagious diseases loose in one of the world’s most densely populated and sometimes chaotic megacities — Lagos, Nigeria.

With its teeming slums, bogus pastors selling miracle cures, six-hour traffic jams and street vendors hawking goods at car windows, some feared an apocalyptic urban outbreak and the spread of Ebola into Nigeria’s highly mobile population of 170 million, which could entrench the disease in West Africa for years.

But in an extraordinary success story, Nigeria contained the Ebola outbreak and was declared free of the virus by the World Health Organization on Monday, after 42 days without a new case (double the incubation period for Ebola). Nigeria confirmed 19 cases, according to the WHO, seven of them fatal. That survival rate of 63% is more than double the 30% average in other West African countries

The top-down effort took political determination, the redeployment of doctors and facilities from Nigeria’s polio-eradication campaign, a vast contact-tracing operation involving members of the State Security Service, tens of thousands of text messages sent out to educate people on prevention, and some hefty donations from wealthy Nigerians.

They had 19 cases. We’ve had 3. They believe they’ve managed to track down all the cases in this particular outbreak which is key. And I’d venture to say that our education on the virus has been equal to Nigeria’s even if our media has been running around like a bunch of hysterics scaring the hell out of people. If they can do it it seems likely the US can too. Duh.

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The weight and counter-weights at the far end of both parties

by digby

I’ve always seen partisan politics in America as a tug of war where the weight of the truest believers, the activists, the hard core ideological members of the two main parties weight the ends of the political rope. When they are not equally engaged and pulling equally hard, one side has a built in advantage.

Anyway, Pew has another poll about polarization that I’ll delve into in more detail over the next few days. But this is interesting for starters:

Overall, the study finds that consistent conservatives:

Are tightly clustered around a single news source, far more than any other group in the survey, with 47% citing Fox News as their main source for news about government and politics.

Express greater distrust than trust of 24 of the 36 news sources measured in the survey. At the same time, fully 88% of consistent conservatives trust Fox News.

Are, when on Facebook, more likely than those in other ideological groups to hear political opinions that are in line with their own views.

Are more likely to have friends who share their own political views. Two-thirds (66%) say most of their close friends share their views on government and politics.

By contrast, those with consistently liberal views:

Are less unified in their media loyalty; they rely on a greater range of news outlets, including some – like NPR and the New York Times– that others use far less.

Express more trust than distrust of 28 of the 36 news outlets in the survey. NPR, PBS and the BBC are the most trusted news sources for consistent liberals.

Are more likely than those in other ideological groups to block or “defriend” someone on a social network – as well as to end a personal friendship – because of politics.

Are more likely to follow issue-based groups, rather than political parties or candidates, in their Facebook feeds.

And yet the news media persists in presenting conservatism as “mainstream” and liberalism as “fringe.” You can make a case that both are fringe but I don’t think you can make a case that conservatism if mainstream when they rely on openly partisan, often crackpot media for their information and only talk to each other.

Now it’s true that liberals tend to “unfriend” people on Facebook, and are somewhat intolerant of conservative views. I think that’s human on both sides. But the information flow really seems to be different between the two and I think that requires those who talk about trends and factions to be specific.

An, by the way, there are a lot of reasons why the hard core conservatives are more successful in party politics than the hard core liberals (even though, according to Pew’s definition there are actually more of the latter) but one of the reasons has to be this:

They vote in primaries more often than we do. Liberals could bring a lot more weight to bear in this whole thing if they just bothered to do that.

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Testing the attacks for 2016

by digby

I’m fairly sure that in addition to the obvious current scare stories, a lot of the GOP strategists are keeping an eye on this for use in the next presidential campaign:

More than in any election in the past decade, Republicans are counting on terrorism fears to win votes — especially in races against female Democrats.

At least 60 terrorism- or national security-related ads have aired in congressional contests in such states as Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina. They’re running with the most intensity since President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, when the airwaves were full of ads depicting Democrat John Kerry as weak on national security, data provided by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group show.

Of the top five Democratic targets, four are women.

“There is a phenomenon that I haven’t seen in my lifetime, and that is this fear factor, whether it’s Ebola or the wars,” said Ed Rollins, a Republican who directed Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential re-election campaign.

“If there wasn’t the overarching fear out there, you couldn’t run this without being painted as anti-woman,” Rollins said. “It’s a subtle or not-so-subtle way of saying: These candidates are not as strong as they should be.”

One ad attacking Democrat Michelle Nunn, who is running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, says she has admitted that a foundation she ran for six years gave money to groups linked to terrorists — a claim deemed “pants on fire” false by Politifact Georgia.

Here’s a question: How do we think that a Democratic woman presidential candidate will react to such a campaign?

Yeah.

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Warren on message
by Tom Sullivan

Not unlike ghosts in The Sixth Sense, The Village hears just what it wants to. Itself, mostly, and the jangle of coins. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson hears in Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts something different, something many Democratic politicians lack: a clear message.

Stumping for Democrats across the country, Warren has a powerful message that ordinary persons can hear if the Village cannot. Like South Dakotan Rick Weiland’s
prairie populism, Warren (born in Oklahoma) gets traction from a
populist narrative:

There once was consensus on the need for government investment in areas such as education and infrastructure that produced long-term dividends, she said. “Here’s the amazing thing: It worked. It absolutely, positively worked.”

But starting in the 1980s, she said, Republicans took the country in a different direction, beginning with the decision to “fire the cops on Wall Street.”

“They called it deregulation,” Warren said, “but what it really meant was: Have at ’em, boys.”

Americans who have been had by the boom-and-bust economy that resulted (and which Democrats abetted) are tired of being lectured about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps by a Wall Street elite wearing golden parachutes. Warren says plainly what the faltering middle class knows in its gut, “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it.” Warren is ready to fight when it seems many Democrats — including the incumbent president — just want to go along to get along.

Robinson writes:

So far this year, Warren has published a memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” that tells of her working-class roots, her family’s economic struggles, her rise to become a Harvard Law School professor and a U.S. senator, and, yes, her distant Native American ancestry. She has emerged as her party’s go-to speaker for connecting with young voters. She has honed a stump speech with a clear and focused message, a host of applause lines and a stirring call to action.

A Democratic candidate with a stirring message derailed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid eight years ago, Robinson concludes. It might just happen again.

The Village parachute riggers are on notice.

Hey, remember that ban on embryonic stem cell research?

by digby

Yep::

ACTION ALERT! Developing Ebola vaccines use aborted fetal cell lines – moral options exist

(Largo, FL) Children of God for Life announced today that several Ebola vaccines in development for use worldwide are made using aborted fetal cell lines despite the fact that moral alternatives are reported as equally effective.

Glaxo SmithKline (GSK) and NIAID are jointly developed their ChAd3 vector for delivering the Ebola virus gene using HEK-293 (human embryonic kidney) cells. Likewise, NewLink Genetics of Iowa used HEK-293 cells for their VSV-EBOV Ebola vaccine in Canada, while Johnson and Johnson/Crucell developed theirs using PER C6 cells, derived from retinal tissue of an 18 week gestation aborted baby.

“There is absolutely no reason to use aborted fetal cell lines,” stated Debi Vinnedge, Director of Children of God for Life. “At least two other Ebola vaccines in development by the University of Texas and GeoVax are using either Vero cells or chicken eggs. Likewise, therapeutic products such as ZMapp(LeafBio) and TKM-Ebola (Tekmira) are using plant or Vero cells”

Vinnedge wrote to the Department of HHS, the NIH, the FDA and NIAID pointing out that even the US Department of Health listed other options such as yeast, insect, plant, bacteria, CHO, BHK, heLa and OS cells, in their own patent, stating, “The attenuated [ebola]virus can replicate well in a cell line that lacks interferon functions, such as Vero cells.”

“It is completely irresponsible of this Administration to put these problem vaccines on fast-track for approval and ignore the fact that a massive number of people may very well refuse them. Why not fast track a product that everyone can use in good conscience?” asked Vinnedge.
Children of God for Life is urging the public to contact US government agencies and their members of Congress requesting that they expedite the morally acceptable alternatives.

You It’s tempting to say that if people refuse an Ebola vaccine simply because it was developed from embryonic stem cells they are free to take their chances. Unfortunately, vaccines depend on the herd effect and everyone would need to do it.

I suspect there would be very few to refuse. But who knows? Then what?

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Republican doctors are dangerous

by digby

It must be Rand Paul day…

Just arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire. First stop: @DunkinDonuts cc: @MichelleObama pic.twitter.com/6CpMlpe8vC
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) October 16, 2014

And yes, it’s fine for Paul to eat as many donuts as he likes.  But for a doctor to be a smart assed jerk about Michelle Obama’s very mild healthy eating and exercise campaign to get kids to eat their vegetables and go outside to play is just idiotic.

Note Kentucky:

But sure, let’s make fun of anyone who is concerned about this public health crisis. (And be sure to stoke panic about Ebola while you’re at it.)

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Is the US Government going to reaffirm the torturer’s right to immunity?

by digby

I don’t know how I missed this. Marcy Wheeler reports:

Yesterday, the New York Times reported (though the newspaper buried the story on page A21) that Obama Administration lawyers are debating whether the US has to comply with the Convention Against Torture’s prohibition on degrading treatment overseas.

It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

[snip]

The administration must decide on its stance on the treaty by next month, when it sends a delegation to Geneva to appear before the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations panel that monitors compliance with the treaty. That presentation will be the first during Mr. Obama’s presidency.

State Department lawyers are said to be pushing to officially abandon the Bush-era interpretation. Doing so would require no policy changes, since Mr. Obama issued an executive order in 2009 that forbade cruel interrogations anywhere and made it harder for a future administration to return to torture.

But military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad. They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts. They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture, although courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits brought by detainees held as terrorism suspects.

In other words, in the next month or so, the Obama Administration will decide how serious it really is about Obama’s 5-year old promise to end torture.

Marcy’s analysis follows. It’s not clear what’s going to happen. Which is bad news because it should be.

No white hood? No rebel flag? Then you aren’t discriminating on the basis of race. Carry on.

by digby

My piece in Salon today is about an upcoming Supreme Court decision about the Fair Housing Act. I recount some of the history of how it came to be:

In his epic history of the 1960s, “Nixonland,” Rick Perlstein observed something that few people remember: The price was very, very high for politicians who backed these civil rights laws and that’s because there was a furious white backlash. It’s common knowledge that some of that backlash was formed by the urban riots of the period. But there was something else, which he explored in greater depth in this article:

[Whites were in] terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as”open housing”—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South.

He recounts the confrontations that took place in Chicago, then the most segregated city in America, in “Nixonland”:

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city’s seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be”sold to ni**ers”) ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in”apartments” subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks…. In neighborhoods where they were allowed to”buy” houses, they couldn’t actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from which they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

He published some of the constituent letters he found hidden in the archives of a congressman who lost his seat in 1966 over civil rights, protesting those “Open Housing” provisions in the bill before the Congress. Here’s just one example:

I am white and am praying that you vote against open housing in the consideration of Equal Rights. Just because the negro refuses to live among his own race–that alone should give you the answer. I was forced to sell my home in Chicago (‘Lawndale’) at a big loss because of the negroes taking over Lawndale–their morals are the lowest (and supported financially by Mayor Daley as you well know)–and the White Race by law. Please don’t take away our bit of peace and freedom to choose our neighbors. What did Luther King mean when he faced the nation on TV New Year’s day–announcing he will not be satisfied until the wealth of America is more evenly divided? Sounds like Communism to Americans. ‘Freedom for all’–including the white race, Please!

Martin Luther King and his fellow marchers were met with vicious anger, hostility and violence from whites in Chicago that summer culminating in MLK making his famous quip, “I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” It was very, very ugly.

The case coming before the Supremes has to do with the “disparate impact rule.” That rule holds that you don’t have to be a an outright racist to discriminate. Recent rulings indicate that the conservative majority is convinced that unless you’re wearing a white hood and burning crosses you cannot be accused of discrimination. So, this is likely to go down the same drain in which they flushed the Voting Rights Act.

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Crackpots ‘O the Day

by digby

And no, they aren’t Louie Gohmert and Michelle Bachman. One is a highly respected conservative columnist and one is a serious presidential candidate:

In the weeks since news broke of the first Ebola case in the United States, government officials have stressed that the disease cannot spread through the air, by water, or in food. George Will, however, doesn’t think that’s true.

On Fox News Sunday, the conservative columnist came head to head with his fellow panelists — and even host Chris Wallace — in his attempt to spew misinformation about Ebola.

“The original problem was that you need to have direct contact, meaning with bodily fluids, because it’s not airborne,” Will said. “Now there are doctors saying we’re not so sure that it can’t in some instances be transmitted airborne.”

Will later added: “Well, when you get on an airport perhaps you should clean the armrest and the tray. There are some doctors saying in a sneeze or cough, some of the airborne particles can be infectious.” Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, appeared on the show alongside Will and immediately challenged his claims. “Where are you getting the doctors who are saying it’s not airborne?” she asked, pointing out that medical experts have repeatedly said that the virus can only be transmitted through close contact with bodily fluids.

Indeed, Will made his comments minutes after Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, assured Wallace that the likelihood of an Ebola epidemic in the United States remains slim, despite the infection of two health care workers who treated patient zero Thomas Eric Duncan.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees. According to the federal agency’s website, humans come into direct contact with Ebola through the blood and bodily fluids of the infected and medical equipment that has been used. Experts say that means that the virus essentially poses the highest risk to health care workers caring for Ebola patients and family members of the infected.

This is a man who doesn’t believe in climate change so this makes some sense.

And then there’s this crackpot who makes Will sound like Albert Einstein:

In 2010, before winning his Senate seat, [Rand] Paul sat for an interview with Luke Rudkowski, a libertarian YouTube personality who specializes in quizzing political leaders about the plot to establish a “one-world socialist government.” Rudkowski asked what Paul knew of the Bilderberg Group, a collection of government and business leaders whose annual conference is a favorite target of conspiracy-mongers. Paul replied, “Only what I’ve learned from Alex Jones.” That’s right: Alex Jones, the radio host who claims that Bilderberg is a key part of a global plot to create a “scientific dictatorship” that will exterminate the “useless eaters,” a.k.a. 80 percent of the human population.

Paul described the group to Rudkowski in unequivocally Jonesian terms, as “very wealthy people, who I think manipulate and use government to their own personal advantage. They want to make it out like world government will be good for humanity. But guess what? World government is good for their pocketbook.” The previous year, Paul had appeared on Jones’ radio show, noting that he had watched his host’s videos and expressing support for the effort to “expose people who are promoting this globalist agenda.” (In turn, Jones urged his listeners to send money to Paul’s Senate campaign.)
[…]
Paul also has embraced one of the conspiracy theories promoted by his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul: that leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico are seeking to merge their countries into a socialist megastate that would issue the “Amero” currency to replace US and Canadian dollars and the Mexican peso. (Anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Schlafly and Jerome Corsi, who led the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, are among the key proponents of this idea.)

At an appearance for his father’s 2008 presidential campaign in Bozeman, Montana, Rand Paul was asked what steps his dad would take to thwart the scheme to impose a North American superstate. The first thing to do, he said, was “publicizing that it’s going on” and pushing Congress to “stop it.” He insisted the Amero push was “a real thing” but cautioned, “If you talk about it like it’s a conspiracy, they’ll paint you as a nut. It’s not a conspiracy, they’re out in the open about it. I guarantee it’s one of their long-term goals—to have one sort of borderless mass continent.” He did not specify who “they” were.

And that’s not all. There’s more at the link.

He’s running away from all this looney stuff now, but this wasn’t that long ago. It’s not like his father’s racist newsletters from the 1980s.

How about this:

Contrast the fate of Duncan’s family, which was locked in a small apartment saturated with Duncan’s bodily fluids, with what Senator Rand Paul told Bloomberg News while campaigning for Scott Brown in New Hampshire last week.

I think from the very beginning they haven’t been completely forthright with us. They’ve so wanted to downplay this that they really I don’t think have been very accurate in their description of the disease. For example, they say, “Don’t worry, it’s only mixture of bodily fluids through direct contact.” So what are you thinking? I’m thinking like AIDS, you don’t get AIDS at a cocktail party, so my level of alarm goes down. And if I am treating somebody or looking at them around, I’m thinking, oh no it’s like AIDS, I am not going to get it. But it really isn’t like AIDS. And then they’ll say in a little lower voice, “Oh, but direct contact can be three feet from somebody.” But if you ask any American on the street, “Do you think direct contact is standing three feet from somebody?” Because they so much wanted to downplay that “We were in charge, we know everything about this,” I think they made mistakes in not really being accurate about talking about the disease.

He said something similar to a group of college students, to whom he described Ebola as “incredibly contagious.” This is a strange statement in many ways, because the AIDS comparison is a straw man, and Paul basically admits it’s a straw man. He never quite puts the words in the mouths of government officials, and instead sets up his own false interpretation of their statements in order to knock it down.

Time Magazine calls him the most interesting man in politics referring to him as “a visionary determined to reinvent the conservative Republican story line.”

I’ll say.

Update: Oh, I forgot Bill Maher who rent his garments and practically ran screaming from the stage on Friday over Ebola. Between that and the 1.6 billion Muslims who want to kill us all in our beds, I’m afraid poor Maher is going to have a full blown nervous breakdown on national television. He was completely uninformed, of course, repeatedly screeching incomprehensibly about “shit piled to the ceiling”, which was based upon an anonymous report from a Dallas nurse and refused to listen to the one person who had experience dealing with the disease (as usual) instead insisting that the sky is falling.

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