dan_c00000
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Why Ebola triggers massive right-wing hysteria
- Thread starter KingOrfeo
- Start date
RobDownSouth
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I'd wonder where Ishmael had gotten his "Central Murica refugee kids are bringin' Ebola to Murica" talking point. Should've known it was Phyllis Schlafy...
Still crazy after all these years . . .
richard_daily
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No, if thats' all the article was doing, I'd agree... however, they're over-inflating the fear of Ebola in the article as well.
And that said, the surgeon general's job isn't to put his own personal opinion on guns into the public eye, anymore than your rabbi or priest should be telling women whether or not to get an abortion.
NeverEndingMe
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oh sugar, you are one of the mental defectives. Thank God, your welfare kind can play on GB all day. inside your cell away from civilization
Of course it is, to the extent that guns constitute a public-health problem, which is considerable. It is the SG's job to advise the public on matters of health.
And, don't rabbis and priests counsel women (in their congregations) about the abortion decision?
phrodeau
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What in your opinion is the Surgeon General's job, and why are we OK not to have an official one?
richard_daily
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Yes, and they shouldn't. A person's private health should be their private concern.
I seriously fail to see how guns are a "considerable public health problem". Can you explain it to me?
I'm not justifying the hold up of the SG. I am simply stating that both sides are taking asinine stands for political posturing. The dems are using the SG as a backdoor to gun control, and the pubs are being their usual boorish, idiotic selves.
Gunshot wounds damage the health. Rather the point of them, actually.
richard_daily
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The point of gunshot wounds is to damage health? Or are you trying to declare what the intent of an intimate object is and attempting to anthropomorphize them into something "evil"?
Does the surgeon general have a stance on knife wounds? Broken legs from car crashes?
If you can't admit that he made politically charged statements to bolster and cater to a specific base, then you're blinded by the dazzle of politics.
There's another?! I'm not saying it's never a justified goal, but the point of shooting a person (or animal) is of course to kill or wound him.
It has noting to do with " the intent of an intimate object." The widespread private ownership of firearms in the U.S. is demonstrably a public health problem in that it results in a lot more gunshot cases in America than in countries where such ownership is less widespread or is forbidden. You might argue that your conception of "liberty" or your interpretation of the Constitution should trump that problem in public-policy decisions, but a public health problem it definitely is.
Probably.
Why can't you allow for the possibility that he was just giving his honest and earnest opinion about something that matters to him as a doctor? And obviously it did him no good politically.
phrodeau
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What base is he catering to? The "I hope nobody in my family gets shot" base?
NeverEndingMe
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lets face reality, you obama lovers are lovers of the welfare
richard_daily
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So what about the guns that have never shot any living creature? I guess they're not doing "their job", huh? specious argument is specious.
Wait, are you trying to tell me that accidents happen? Clearly the surgeon general needs to inform the public of this fact!
It's not a public health problem, in any way, shape or form, any more than wasp attacks are a public health problem. I'm looking at the data from 2010 and 2011, and you know what... firearm related deaths doesn't even crack the top 100. I can't even find it on the charts. So if public health is the real concern, then perhaps more focus should be placed on accidental drowning and bronchitis, because they kill way more people every year than firearms do.
Time for some real priorities, don't you think?
He has every right to have his own personal opinion about things that have nothing to do with his job. Just like I'm sure most people do. The issue was, he chose to make it political and very public. If you can't realize that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Democrats like Bloomberg and Feinstein, and people who are so scared of guns that the mere mention of them sends them into a panic.
Beco
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KingDickFace, man o man. How about err on the side of caution .....they did that for Y2K, why not Ebola?
Sean Renaud
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Because that was fantastically stupid too.
Edit: And yes, guns that are not at the very least intended to shoot and kill animals and people are not being used properly. That's like asking is a car in a museum being used properly. FUCK NO ITS NOT. It's a goddamn means of transportation. The fact that you can do what you want with your property or sometimes things become to rare and valuble to us in their original plan doesn't change the original plan. If you beat someone to death with a Frying Pan you're using it wrong also. Why do people even make statments that fucking retarded?
Edit: And yes, guns that are not at the very least intended to shoot and kill animals and people are not being used properly. That's like asking is a car in a museum being used properly. FUCK NO ITS NOT. It's a goddamn means of transportation. The fact that you can do what you want with your property or sometimes things become to rare and valuble to us in their original plan doesn't change the original plan. If you beat someone to death with a Frying Pan you're using it wrong also. Why do people even make statments that fucking retarded?
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From Salon:
Monday, Oct 13, 2014 10:39 AM EDT
The right’s scary Ebola lesson: How anti-government mania is harming America
It's time to admit the truth: People who cut health funding and don't like government have not helped this crisis
Joan Walsh
If not for serial budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine and we would certainly have better treatment, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins tells the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. This comes on the heels of reporting that the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by half since 2006, and new revelations about how botched protocols at the Dallas hospital that turned away Thomas Eric Duncan and then failed to treat him effectively also led to the infection of one of Duncan’s caregivers.
Yet most of the media coverage of the politics of Ebola to date has centered on whether President Obama has adequately and/or honestly dealt with the disease. “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. Cruz is probably the wrong guy to talk about seriousness: his government shutdown forced the NIH to delay clinical trials and made the CDC cut back on disease outbreak detection programs this time last year.
I find myself wondering: When, if ever, will the political debate over Ebola center on the way the right-wing libertarian approach to government has made us less safe?
My fans at Newsbusters and other right-wing sites were outraged last week when I raised questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry shared some responsibility for the nation’s Ebola crisis with President Obama, since the outbreak occurred in his state on his watch. Now that a second person has been infected there, I think the question is even more relevant.
The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”
“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.
But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.
That agenda, however, has been disowned by the modern GOP. Sarah Kliff got lots of attention for her Vox piece starkly depicting how the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by more than half since 2006. The chart she used actually came from a piece in Scientific American last week, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s must-reading: it dispassionately explained the way we’ve underfunded and degraded our public health infrastructure. And again, it made me think about the Republican policies that have hampered our ability to fight this crisis.
Isn’t there a fair way to say that cutting 45,700 public health workers at the state and local level, largely under GOP governors, was irresponsible? As was slashing the CDC’s prevention budget by half since 2006, or cutting the Affordable Care Act’s prevention budget by a billion? Sen. John McCain wants an “Ebola czar,” but the Senate is blocking confirmation of the Surgeon General. Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?
It seems relevant to me that Texas is 33rd in public health funding. It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”
When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.
As the great science writer David Dobbs concluded last week: “So the richest country on earth has no team to contain the first appearance of one of the most deadly viruses we’ve ever known.”
I’ve found myself wondering if Ebola is unquestionably a plus for Republicans three weeks before the midterm, as everyone (including me) has assumed. Certainly Republicans think it is; that’s why vulnerable Senate candidates, from Thom Tillis in North Carolina to Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are fear-mongering about it.
But if Democrats are the party of government, and thus seen as culpable by voters when government does wrong, aren’t government-hating, budget-slashing Republicans politically vulnerable when we need government to do something right, and the cuts they’ve pushed have compromised its ability to do so? Or does IOKIYAR mean the media just shrugs when the GOP fear-mongers, but would punish any Democrat respond in kind?
Blogger Kevin Drum likes to complain about a Democratic “Hack Gap” – the fact that liberal pundits are too willing to criticize Democratic leaders, while GOP pundits more often line up behind theirs. I don’t agree with Drum – in the end, Chris Matthews and I didn’t cost the president his re-election in 2012 – but it’s an interesting debate. Personally I think Democrats have a “Brilliant and Ruthless Campaign Operative Gap,” when it comes to shamelessly exploiting the other side’s political weakness.
The GOP’s anti-government crusade has hampered our ability to face the Ebola challenge. In an election year, there’s nothing wrong with Democrats saying that clearly. Campaigns should be cutting ads right now spotlighting the way Republican budget cuts have devastated the public health infrastructure we need to fight diseases like Ebola. Here’s one such ad from the Agenda Project.
Monday, Oct 13, 2014 10:39 AM EDT
The right’s scary Ebola lesson: How anti-government mania is harming America
It's time to admit the truth: People who cut health funding and don't like government have not helped this crisis
Joan Walsh
If not for serial budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine and we would certainly have better treatment, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins tells the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. This comes on the heels of reporting that the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by half since 2006, and new revelations about how botched protocols at the Dallas hospital that turned away Thomas Eric Duncan and then failed to treat him effectively also led to the infection of one of Duncan’s caregivers.
Yet most of the media coverage of the politics of Ebola to date has centered on whether President Obama has adequately and/or honestly dealt with the disease. “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. Cruz is probably the wrong guy to talk about seriousness: his government shutdown forced the NIH to delay clinical trials and made the CDC cut back on disease outbreak detection programs this time last year.
I find myself wondering: When, if ever, will the political debate over Ebola center on the way the right-wing libertarian approach to government has made us less safe?
My fans at Newsbusters and other right-wing sites were outraged last week when I raised questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry shared some responsibility for the nation’s Ebola crisis with President Obama, since the outbreak occurred in his state on his watch. Now that a second person has been infected there, I think the question is even more relevant.
The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”
“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.
But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.
That agenda, however, has been disowned by the modern GOP. Sarah Kliff got lots of attention for her Vox piece starkly depicting how the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by more than half since 2006. The chart she used actually came from a piece in Scientific American last week, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s must-reading: it dispassionately explained the way we’ve underfunded and degraded our public health infrastructure. And again, it made me think about the Republican policies that have hampered our ability to fight this crisis.
Isn’t there a fair way to say that cutting 45,700 public health workers at the state and local level, largely under GOP governors, was irresponsible? As was slashing the CDC’s prevention budget by half since 2006, or cutting the Affordable Care Act’s prevention budget by a billion? Sen. John McCain wants an “Ebola czar,” but the Senate is blocking confirmation of the Surgeon General. Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?
It seems relevant to me that Texas is 33rd in public health funding. It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”
When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.
As the great science writer David Dobbs concluded last week: “So the richest country on earth has no team to contain the first appearance of one of the most deadly viruses we’ve ever known.”
I’ve found myself wondering if Ebola is unquestionably a plus for Republicans three weeks before the midterm, as everyone (including me) has assumed. Certainly Republicans think it is; that’s why vulnerable Senate candidates, from Thom Tillis in North Carolina to Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are fear-mongering about it.
But if Democrats are the party of government, and thus seen as culpable by voters when government does wrong, aren’t government-hating, budget-slashing Republicans politically vulnerable when we need government to do something right, and the cuts they’ve pushed have compromised its ability to do so? Or does IOKIYAR mean the media just shrugs when the GOP fear-mongers, but would punish any Democrat respond in kind?
Blogger Kevin Drum likes to complain about a Democratic “Hack Gap” – the fact that liberal pundits are too willing to criticize Democratic leaders, while GOP pundits more often line up behind theirs. I don’t agree with Drum – in the end, Chris Matthews and I didn’t cost the president his re-election in 2012 – but it’s an interesting debate. Personally I think Democrats have a “Brilliant and Ruthless Campaign Operative Gap,” when it comes to shamelessly exploiting the other side’s political weakness.
The GOP’s anti-government crusade has hampered our ability to face the Ebola challenge. In an election year, there’s nothing wrong with Democrats saying that clearly. Campaigns should be cutting ads right now spotlighting the way Republican budget cuts have devastated the public health infrastructure we need to fight diseases like Ebola. Here’s one such ad from the Agenda Project.
From Salon:
Monday, Oct 13, 2014 09:31 AM EDT
Erick Erickson: “Fat lesbians got all the Ebola dollars”
The conservative commentator excuses the GOP's cuts to research funds by launching another homophobic attack
Luke Brinker
Conservative pundit Erick Erickson knows just who’s to blame for the dearth of research funds devoted to combating Ebola: “fat lesbians.”
In a post for his RedState.com blog this morning, Erickson assails a new ad highlighting the GOP’s support for budget cuts that crippled the agencies charged with leading the response to Ebola. Over the weekend, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins told the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein that 10 years of stagnant spending on the agency has “slowed down” critical research. As Stein reports, the NIH’s budget in fiscal year 2004 was $28.03 billion. In 2013, it was just $29.31 billion — “barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation,” Stein notes. A Democratic bill to boost the NIH’s budget to $46 billion by 2021 isn’t likely to advance anytime soon.
But Erickson pooh-poohs the budget cuts to agencies like the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control. All the evidence you need that the agencies have plenty of cash, he argues, is in some of the research items they’ve funded.
Erickson’s post, titled “Fat Lesbians Got All the Ebola Dollars, But Blame the GOP,” cites an NIH-funded study examining why lesbians confront higher rates of obesity; the research is in line with other demographic studies examining public health challenges, but Erickson seized on the study to wage a demagogic attack on the agency for frivolously “studying the propensity of lesbians to be fat.” He also attacked CDC research on gun violence and smoking cessation.
Erickson ranks among the most obnoxiously homophobic conservative commentators. The Fox News contributor has asserted that gay people are on the “road to hell” and accused businesses that serve LGBT consumers of “aiding and abetting” sin.
Monday, Oct 13, 2014 09:31 AM EDT
Erick Erickson: “Fat lesbians got all the Ebola dollars”
The conservative commentator excuses the GOP's cuts to research funds by launching another homophobic attack
Luke Brinker
Conservative pundit Erick Erickson knows just who’s to blame for the dearth of research funds devoted to combating Ebola: “fat lesbians.”
In a post for his RedState.com blog this morning, Erickson assails a new ad highlighting the GOP’s support for budget cuts that crippled the agencies charged with leading the response to Ebola. Over the weekend, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins told the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein that 10 years of stagnant spending on the agency has “slowed down” critical research. As Stein reports, the NIH’s budget in fiscal year 2004 was $28.03 billion. In 2013, it was just $29.31 billion — “barely a change, even before adjusting for inflation,” Stein notes. A Democratic bill to boost the NIH’s budget to $46 billion by 2021 isn’t likely to advance anytime soon.
But Erickson pooh-poohs the budget cuts to agencies like the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control. All the evidence you need that the agencies have plenty of cash, he argues, is in some of the research items they’ve funded.
Erickson’s post, titled “Fat Lesbians Got All the Ebola Dollars, But Blame the GOP,” cites an NIH-funded study examining why lesbians confront higher rates of obesity; the research is in line with other demographic studies examining public health challenges, but Erickson seized on the study to wage a demagogic attack on the agency for frivolously “studying the propensity of lesbians to be fat.” He also attacked CDC research on gun violence and smoking cessation.
Erickson ranks among the most obnoxiously homophobic conservative commentators. The Fox News contributor has asserted that gay people are on the “road to hell” and accused businesses that serve LGBT consumers of “aiding and abetting” sin.
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
I can hardly wait to see our Libs dripping their lives out their assholes.
phrodeau
Literotica Guru
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Absolutely. We need a Surgeon General. Fuck your politics.
CNYCarol
Literotica Guru
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They already did, the American Ebola Outbreak was just blamed on "the Republican Sequester".
Sean Renaud
The West Coast Pop
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It would be dishonest not to and frankly we're tired of lying to cover up your fuck ups.
