I TOLD YOU THEY NEVER LEARN

Via The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, I see that Kansas governor Sam Brownback is telling Christian journalist David Brody of CBN that if he loses his reelection bid, it's the evil liberals' fault:

Governor Sam Brownback: "I think they (the mainstream media) want what's happening in this state to fail that they're shopping for a factual setting to back that up because it’s working."

Governor Sam Brownback: I think the left is just so desperate. They want this model to fail so bad that they can't wait for it to and they just want to get me electorally before we get on through this and prove that this is working."

Here's what Brody says to elicit the first answer:

There's good news from the Kansas economy standpoint and then there's some bad news as well. There's always a kind of a mixed bag. It seems like the mainstream media, though, wants to take all of-- basically craft a narrative, if you will, with some of the negative news coming out of this state economically. Why do you think that is? What do you think's going on exactly? Is this kind of an out-to-get-you campaign 'cause you're a conservative-type guy?

Now, I'm not a professional journalist or anything, but that strikes me as sort of a leading question. You?

Cillizza does a good job of rebutting this nonsense, but it doesn't matter. If Brownback loses, this will become conventional wisdom on the right.

Two weeks ago, Ed Kilgore wrote that Republicans and their backers would learn a lesson from a Brownback loss: that you can't force the full Koch agenda on the public (even in the Koch brothers' home state) without inviting a backlash from voters who want government and the economy to work. But I was already seeing a litany of excuses from the right -- Brownback would have won but was sabotaged by Republican turncoats, who presumably persuaded an otherwise perfectly contented electorate to reject Brownback, and did so because they wanted the liberal media to be nicer to them. The list of excuses will just longer and longer. (I guarantee that someone will say Brownback wasn't conservative enough.)

Right-wingers never learn. They are certain that conservatism can never fail -- it can only be failed.

CAN'T IMAGINE WHY DEMOCRATIC MEANIES HAVE TO POISON OUR OTHERWISE DELIGHTFUL POLITICAL ATMOSPHERE

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib tells us that the advertising in this year's Senate races is nasty, and it's primarily because of Democrats:

... Analyses of Senate ads over most of September by the Wesleyan Media Project show that negative ads are far outweighing positive ads, and airing at a higher rate than in recent elections.

And Democratic groups, fighting to defend more Senate seats and keep control of the chamber, have been more negative than their Republican counterparts, that independent analysis shows.

... relatively more negative ads are flowing out of all Democratic sources, not just outside groups, the analyses show. In that early September period, for example, 70.5% of ads run on behalf of Democrats from all sources were rated as negative, while 39.3% of those run on behalf of Republicans were negative. Among outside groups, 91.4% of ads backing Democrats were negative, while the figure was 77.9% among groups backing Republicans....

Why do those awful Democrats have to be so mean and unpleasant?

Well, please note that as I type this, the front page of the Drudge Report has this:



More from Ben Shapiro's Truth Revolt:

... President Obama [was] on the minds of many Southern California drivers as bumper stickers began appearing on area cars featuring the word Ebola with the Obama logo replacing the letter "o."

... at least some Southland drivers seem convinced that the President's policy on stopping the virus to-date have not inspired confidence.

Democrats are launching negative attacks in this campaign, but Republicans launch negative attacks like this all the time, whether it's campaign season or not, whether or not they're referring to a candidate who's currently on the ballot. They do it on the air and they do it off the air. Negativity toward Democrats is the air conservatives breathe. It's not just an occasional topic of discussion at politically charged moments , it's a lifestyle. Right-wingers wake up, turn on Fox and/or talk radio, and never turn them off until bedtime. This is true when an election's coming up and it's true when the next election is a year away.

Democrats aren't exceeding Republicans in negativity -- it just seems that way if you limit your analysis to on-air campaign ads. The right-wing conversation is one long negative ad -- and that conversation has gone on for years without interruption.

The Democratic Party and outside Democratic groups have to reach a public that doesn't think about politics incessantly, so the negativity is concentrated in ads. The Republican Party and its groups don't have that problem. For Republican voters, anger at Democrats is a permanent condition.

There's a huge anger gap in American politics. It's understandable that Democrats are trying to close it.

CATHOLIC LEAGUE FOUNDER APPARENTLY FORGETS THAT HE DOESN'T PARTICULARLY LIKE JEWS

Thr Catholic League's Bill Donohue doesn't get much mainstream media attention these days, so he brings his act to venues like Steve Malzberg's show on NewsmaxTV, where we got this from him to day, in the midst of a discussion about Bill Maher and Ben Affleck's recent disagreement on the subject of Islam:

Liberals are afraid to criticize Muslims, but that is not the only reason they support the Islamic faith, Donahue claimed.

"I think there is also a sense here, a lot of these people really don't like America," he explained. "What does Islam have in common with the left? Maybe not in terms of ideology, but in terms of an animus against this country, and I think it's palpable, and they don't like Jews either."

So Ben Affleck and other liberals defend Islam because they don't like Jews -- says the man who, in 2004, told us this, on Joe Scarborough's Scarborough Country, while defending Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ:

WHollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That‘s why they hate this movie. It‘s about Jesus Christ, and it‘s about truth. It‘s about the messiah.

Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost.

You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins. Frankly, Michael Moore represents a cult movie. Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America.

In 2012, when a progressive rabbi, Artur Waskow, criticized the Vatican for its stance on birth control and its response to pro-contraception nuns, Donohue replied: “Jews had better not make enemies of their Catholic friends since they have so few of them.” (He claimed he was quoting former New York mayor Ed Koch, but Koch replied that Donohue's "references to me and my remarks were inappropriate and different in substance and tone than what I said on an earlier occasion.")

In 2013, when Chris Cuomo of CNN interviewed Donohue and brought up his 2004 remarks about Jews controlling Hollywood, Donohue was livid:

"Is it the Vietnamese who are making movies in Hollywood? Is it the Puerto Ricans who own Hollywood?" Donohue said.

"Do you understand how that sounds?" Cuomo asked. "Do you think that that's good for Catholics to be represented by this?"

Donohue said that the only thing he was doing what stating the obvious. "If I mention that the Chinese live in Chinatown, am I considered now a bigot? To point out the obvious?" Donohue said.

But Ben Affleck is the anti-Semite. Right. Got it.

THE GOP WON'T HAVE A HUGE GAY MARRIAGE FIGHT, BECAUSE THE CRAZIES HAVE RAGE ADD

A lot of pundits think that the Supreme Court's decision to allow gay marriage to proceed in several states presents a risk for Republicans, primarily because Ted Cruz won't let it go. Here's The Washington Post's Greg Sargent:

Republicans eying the 2016 presidential race appear to hope that this will hasten the fading of the issue from the national agenda. Ted Cruz has other ideas....

Senator Cruz has released a statement railing against the Supreme Court's refusal to interfere as lower courts trample on state legislatures' rights to define marriage in a way that excludes gay and lesbian couples. This is only the latest sign that Cruz intends to mount a rearguard action against the cultural change sweeping the nation for as long as he is able, or at least through the 2016 GOP presidential primary. He has very clearly telegraphed this intention.

Sargent's right-wing Post colleague Jennifer Rubin worries that something like this actually going to happen:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is fast becoming the king of useless fights and empty gestures.... now Cruz is pushing a constitutional amendment to prevent federal courts from vindicating the rights of individuals who challenge state bans on gay marriage. (Consider how he would holler if the left came up with an amendment to prevent Second Amendment claims against gun bans from being heard.) And where would the states come from to pass such an amendment? Wouldn't state courts still overturn anti-gay marriage bans -- or is he running roughshod over those as well? Never mind -- it is all about fighting.

Bloomberg's Jonathan Martin and Annie Linskey think the anger of zealots like Cruz "means gay marriage may become an issue in the midterms -- and maybe 2016." Danny Vinik of The New Republic thinks it's certainly a 2016 problem for the GOP:

Don't expect Cruz to back down, though. As we've seen with Obamacare and immigration, when Cruz finds himself on the wrong end of public opinion, he doubles down on that position. That's because conservative voters -- the ones that will have an outsized impact on the GOP's 2016 presidential candidate -- are heavily opposed to Obamacare, to immigration reform, and, yes, to same-sex marriage. Cruz has reasoned that his best chance of winning the Republican nomination is to stake out positions as far to the right as possible. Whether or not he's right, he will pull the entire Republican field to the right and make it even harder for his party to retake the White House.

And at The Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore writes about how this could play in Iowa in 2016:

... the Iowa problem is real for Republicans: it became, because of a relatively early state judicial ruling allowing same-sex marriage, Ground Zero for conservative resistance to marriage equality. As recently as two years ago, I attended an Iowa political event, along with four or five former (and possibly future) presidential candidates, that was heavily focused on removing the judges responsible. I don’t think the majordomo of that event, Bob Vander Plaats (often called a "kingmaker" thanks to his timely support for the last two Iowa Caucus winners), is about to cave anytime soon. And so long as there is an opportunist or two in the presidential field who’s frantic for right-wing support (I’m looking at you, Bobby Jindal!), the odds of this issue being "off the table" in Iowa are very low.

But Jindal, for all his presidential hopes, isn't going full-metal wingnut on this:

Jindal reiterated his opposition to same-sex marriage but added, "Look, the ball is certainly in the courts. The ball is the court's court."

And, yes, Vander Plaats backed the last two GOP winners of the Iowa caucus, but don't forget, they were Mike Huckabee in '08 and Rick Santorum in '12. Even Republicans have a learning curve, and I think they know that Iowa is no longer a bellwether for their party.

Yeah, but won't Ted Cruz still be stirring up the rubes on this subject? Maybe, maybe not.

Cruz is angry about this now because this is in the headlines now. As the voting approaches in Iowa, what's he going to be angry about? Whatever's on the front page of Breitbart.com at the moment, that's what. It could be ISIS or Ebola or Putin or immigration or taxes or the IRS or, God help us, still Benghazi. It could be something that's not even on our radar right now. That's because Cruz and the base he represents have rage attention deficit disorder. They'll get angry about anything, then get angry two days later about something else, then something else a week after that, then circle back to an earlier subject of rage, then work ten or eleven more rage items into the mix over the course of three weeks or so, then circle back to a few of those, in a mystifying pattern. They could be fixated on gay marriage in January 2016, but they could just as easily be downplaying it in favor of President Obama playing golf at some moment he shouldn't be, or Vice President Biden mispronouncing a word, or Hillary Clinton having said some previously unreported left-wing thing in 1970.

In his final, unpublished Village Voice column, Roy Edroso (hire him, somebody!) explains how right-wing media types keep the base crazy and unable to maintain focus:

You have to remember that rightbloggers have a lot of chips on the table at all times, from Benghazi to Umbrellagate. If, for example, outrage over Bowe Bergdahl (remember him?) doesn't play out for them, then there's still ISIS; and if that doesn't play out, there's Obama the Tyrant, and if that doesn't, there's Obama the Weakling, etc.

They can do this all day, and if one or two stick with the voters, or at least are remembered by them as negative events, that's good enough....

In 2016, Cruz will go with whatever's working at the time. That will change -- perhaps daily.

THERE'S CONTAINMENT, AND THEN THERE'S "FREEDOM CONTAINMENT," I GUESS

The current lead story at Fox Nation is this:



There's a clip at the link if you want to watch it, but here's the (wordy) key quote from Charles Krauthammer:

There was agreement among the top advisers of Obama himself, his top notch security advisers, that he was indecisive, that he let opportunities pass, the most important one of course is the one that Obama disputes, and that is the abandonment of Iraq, the withdrawal of all our troops, when the military and all the advisors, including two Democrats and one Republican, his highest advisors were telling him to leave behind a residual force so that we could influence the government in Iraq as we had before and to prevent the sectarianism which led to the renewal of the civil war, and the renewal of involving us again. That was all predictable.

So this a way of his advisers saying he made the wrong choices at a time when we were at a crucial crossroads and he has been afraid. I think what we're seeing now with his inability and unwillingness to help in the fight in Kobani, to a very critical fight where ISIS now has the upper hand, Obama seems to want to contain the situation until the end of his term and then hand it off.

Okay, here's what I don't get: What's the difference between leaving a "residual force" in a country (presumably for up to a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, as John McCain said in 2008) and "contain[ing] the situation" until the end of your term, after which you "hand it off"? I guess it's Kenyan Muslim Socialist Containment if we do it Obama's way, but if we do it the Republican way it's Reagan Containment!, or Freedom Containment!, or something like that, so it's totally different.

Krauthammer, of course, is echoing that great military theorist Sarah Palin, who said this recently on her cable channel:

If we do decide that ISIS is a direct threat to our security, then of course we must go in -- we must defeat them over there. But we have to be in it to win it!

... We defeat them, and then we get out. Only this time, let's listen to those on the ground, top brass of military, the experts, who are saying, mmm, we do need a residual force, staying there to make sure this doesn't happen again.

As Wonkette's Dan Weber says:

How would we both "get out" and also leave behind a "residual force, staying there?" Jeez, you Dumbocraps just don't get it, do you? That you could even ask such a question shows the depth of your contempt for the military.

Damn straight! FREEDOM! MOLON LABE! BREITBART LIVES!

DID AUSTERITY SPREAD EBOLA IN SPAIN?

More Ebola news from the BBC:

The Spanish health minister has confirmed that a nurse who treated a victim of Ebola in Madrid has tested positive for the disease.

The nurse is said to be the first person in the current outbreak known to have contracted Ebola outside Africa.

Health Minister Ana Mato said the woman was part of the team that treated Spanish priest Manuel Garcia Viejo, who died of the virus on 25 September....

Manuel Garcia Viejo died in the hospital Carlos III de Madrid after catching Ebola in Sierra Leone....

According to The Guardian, some Spanish health care workers warned at the time of an earlier repatriation of an infected missionary that Spain might not be ready for Ebola because of austerity-linked health-care cutbacks:

In August, 75-year-old Spanish missionary Miguel Pajares died in Madrid after being repatriated from Liberia five days earlier. He was the first patient in the current, fast-spreading outbreak to be evacuated to Europe for treatment.

Pajares' repatriation to Madrid prompted concern among health professionals who said that Spanish hospitals were not adequately equipped to handle the Ebola outbreak. Amyts, a trade union that represents physicians, called the repatriation risky, and its president, Daniel Bernabeu, asked Spanish news agency Efe if "anyone could guarantee 100% that the virus wouldn’t escape".

Bernabeu compared Spain to the US and pointed out that the Americans had 10 hospitals with the highest level of biosafety possible. Spain, in contrast, had just one suitable hospital, with biosafety levels that were much lower.

Here's more from an August story in The Local, an English-language news site focused on Spain:

... medical groups have criticized the "improvised" and "rushed" preparations for Pajares's arrival, saying facilities weren't ready and staff are unprepared.

"Even the choice of which hospital to use was a problem," Amelia Batanero with Madrid's Independent Health Workers Union (AME) told The Local.

"Initially, the health ministry was looking at Madrid's La Paz hospital where a couple of false-positive Ebola results were seen earlier this year. Instead they chose the smaller Carlos III hospital, where it is easier to isolate someone, and which has quarantine facilities."

But, as Batanero explained, there was a stumbling block. The ministry actually began stripping facilities from Carlos III last year, with many patients being sent across to La Paz. The hospital is also short of staff.

"It's not the hospital it used to be," said the spokesperson for the union which has grown out of opposition to cuts to Spain's health sector as part of the government's austerity drive....

Of more concern to AME's Batanero, however, is the lack of staff training when it comes to Ebola.

"... hospital staff are not adequately trained to deal with Ebola -- partly because of cuts to Spain's health system. In fact, they are being given accelerated courses right now.

"All it takes is one health worker or a cleaner to make a mistake with the isolation protocols and you have a public health problem."

To make matters worse, because the Carlos III hospital is actually short-staffed, doctors and nurses from La Paz hospital will also be doing shifts at the hospital.

"This means there is always a risk, however small, that they will expose healthy patients at La Paz to the Ebola virus," said Batanero....

I don't know what happened in Spain, but there was concern. Maybe austerity was at fault -- or maybe health-care workers inevitably have trouble following an unfamiliar set of procedures without error the first time they're faced with Ebola. We certainly saw that in America.

YOU WANT TO GET HYSTERICAL ABOUT EBOLA? GET HYSTERICAL ABOUT THIS

One (1) Ebola-infected person has made his way from West Africa to the United States, and his case was initially mishandled by the U.S. medical system and by public health officials seeking to decontaminate the place he was staying before he was hospitalized. Mow, however, he's receiving appropriate treatment, contact tracing is well under way, as is cleanup. The system is working.

If you want to get upset about government mismanagement of Ebola, get upset about this:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone -- It has been sitting idly on the docks for nearly two months: a shipping container packed with protective gowns, gloves, stretchers, mattresses and other medical supplies needed to help fight Sierra Leone's exploding Ebola epidemic.

There are 100 bags and boxes of hospital linens, 100 cases of protective suits, 80 cases of face masks and other items -- in all, more than $140,000 worth of medical equipment locked inside a dented container at the port since Aug. 9.

Hundreds of people have died of Ebola in Sierra Leone since then, and health workers have endured grave shortages of lifesaving supplies....

The supplies were donated by individuals and institutions in the United States, according to Chernoh Alpha Bah, who organized the shipment. But Mr. Bah wears another hat, as well. He is an opposition politician from President Ernest Bai Koroma's hometown, Makeni....

A recent surge of cases there quickly overwhelmed health workers, with protective gear so lacking that some nurses have worked around the deadly virus in their street clothes....

The government official who pleaded for the shipment to come in said that the political tensions may have contributed to the delay, to prevent the opposition from trumpeting the donations....

The shipping company, as a good-will gesture in a moment of crisis, had agreed to send the goods without being paid first, Mr. Bah said. But no more. Three other containers of similar value await shipment from the United States, he said, halted by the government's long refusal to pay....

What we should worry about with regard to Ebola is not that ISIS and the Zeta drug gang will conspire to send infected bioterrorists across the Rio Grande, or whatever the hell it is Fox viewers fear. What we should worry about is that the outbreak in West Africa won't be contained soon despite the fact that we know how to contain Ebola outbreaks.
If the delivery of protective gear is being delayed by petty bureaucrats engaged in partisan politics, those petty bureaucrats are multiple murderers.

The political class here seems to include a lot of the same sorts of petty sleazebags you have in politics the world over. It's not clear that an epidemic would change their ways:

Twenty-nine of the country's top health officials were indicted last year in connection with the misappropriation of a half-million dollars in vaccination funds. The leaders were all acquitted. A free health care program set up by foreign donors has been damaged by corruption problems, with nurses illegally selling drugs and doctors charging for services. In 2010, a former health minister was convicted on corruption charges. This year, the health minister was pushed aside during the Ebola crisis amid questions over her competence.

Do other governments, including those in the West, have any sway in this situation? Is there pressure they can exert to get these supplies unloaded? Because this is the sort of thing that makes this outbreak scary, not temporary mismanagement of one isolated case in a country that clearly has the infrastructure to handle it.

MARK HALPERIN: STILL A REPUBLICAN-FLUFFING HACK

I'll save you the trouble of reading Mark Halperin's 2,228-word article addressing the question of whether Jeb Bush will really run for president in 2016: Um, Halperin's not sure. It might happen -- or it might not. Political insiders aren't certain. Wow, thanks, Mark! I'll definitely keep returning to the new Bloomberg Politics site if it continues to deliver breaking news like this!

It's clear that Halperin wants to believe that Jeb will run. Breathlessly, he explains what a formidable general-election candidate Jeb would be in a race against Hillary Clinton:

Finally, the most macro significant question for any Republican putting him or herself forward to beat Clinton is this: what states can you win that Romney lost? For Bush, the easy answer includes Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Virginia. If he runs a strong campaign, Bush could perhaps compete in California and possibly New Jersey and Michigan.

No, that's nuts.

Let's start near the end of that list: New Jersey? Seriously? Quinnipiac polled Jeb vs. Hillary in New Jersey late last month, and Hillary beat Jeb 53%-32%. A Fairleigh Dickinson poll earlier in September had Hillary beating Jeb 51%-32%. (Hillary's so strong in Jersey that she beats Christie by double digits.)

Um, Michigan? Early last month, Public Policy Polling had Hillary beating Jeb 49%-38%. Wisconsin? PPP in April had it as Hillary 50%, Jeb 39%. Ohio? Quinnipiac in July had it Hillary 48%, Jeb 37%. Oh, and California? I can't find a Hillary-Jeb poll, but Obama won there 60%-37% in 2012 (after winning 61%-37% in 2008).

I'm pulling all these numbers from a Wikipedia compilation of state head-to-head polls. Almost as ridiculous is Halperin's notion that Jeb helps close the gap in states where other Republicans are less competitive. In Florida, yes, that's true (though Hillary still beats Jeb). But in Colorado, Rand Paul actually does better against Hillary than Jeb does, and Mike Huckabee, Christie, and Cruz do about as well. In Virginia, Christie and Paul do much better than Jeb.

Halperin's claiming insider knowledge when he hasn't even bothered to Google the relevant polls. Buthe's being exactly what you'd expect him to be: a cheerleader for the pre-Tea Party GOP establishment. He's not going to let facts stand in the way of being a fanboy.

MEDICAL-SPECIALTY-PRONUNCIATION-GHAZI!

The latest unspeakably evil thing the folks at the American Thinker have found Obama doing is this (via Weasel Zippers):

Another weird Obama pronunciation

What on earth is an ohbee-guynee? Apparently it is a weird Obamaspeak pronunciation of OB/GYN (pronounced oh-bee-gee-why-en).... When President Obama announced the departure of Eric Holder from his position as attorney general, he also mentioned his "good friend," the AG's wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, and he called her an "ohbee-guynee." Don't believe me? See for yourself.



... This is such a downright strange phenomenon, it almost seems as though someone raised in a fantasized USSR training camp for deep cover agents was inserted into the identity of Barack Obama and loosed upon America, a highly trained faux American. But they forgot to teach him the pronunciation of OB/GYN. Like those WW II movies where the German spy is caught because he doesn't know who Babe Ruth is....

That's right, folks: this is proof that Barack Obama is a foreign agent.

Well, as it happens, Reason's Nick Gillespie brought this up back in 2009, when Obama used the same pronunciation in an online town hall. But a reader responded:

As a physician, I can assure you that "O B Guy Knee" is an alternative pronunciation. "O B Gine (rhymes with wine)", "O B G Y N" [and] "O B Gin" are also heard.

And that's true. Here's a 2006 discussion at studentdoctor.net that was prompted by a similar experience not involving Barack Obama:

I was wondering if there are any regional or age-related trends for how OB/GYN is pronounced. I grew up hearing Oh Bee Gee Why Enn. Then, in med school it was Oh Bee Gyne. Now, I also hear Oh bee Jin, especially from older people. Does anyone know?

Some responses:

I've heard it so many ways at this point ~ OB/Gyne and Ob Gee Why Enn are probably the more common ones.

****

I'd heard from several people from the UK during a formative part of my education "obs and gynie" (pronounced guy-knee), and that's what I say. Pejoratively, in Brooklyn, I'd heard "obs and gobs".

****

The Texans appear to like "Jin"- we have an intern in surgery who is from TX and that is what she says. But everyone else I have ever heard (SE and E Coast) said "Gyn".

Also see this, from the message boards at the Straight Dope:

In my part of the country, we say "Oh Bee Gin's" or just "Oh Bee's" as the practice of Obstretrics and gynocology are two separate specialties, although somewhat related.

****

I work with physicians who focus on fertility and women's health. It really varies, but folks in the biz refer to them as "OB's" "obee-gynee's" "O.B.G.Y.N's" and "referring physicians" ;)

****
My father used to have some association with a magazine called "Contemporary Ob/Gyn" and he always pronounced it "OB-GYNE". Workplace was in New Jersey near NYC.

****

Huh. My dad's a doctor (family practice) and we've always pronounced it "O-B-gin." So you say the O, you say the B, then you add a "gin" at the end (like the liquor). Never "gyne" (to rhyme with "wine.")

Differences - it's what makes the world go 'round!

Yeah, that's true about differences -- EXCEPT WHEN IT'S OBAMA WE'RE TALKING ABOUT!!!! THEN WE NEED TO IMPEACH!!!!

THE DOCTORS MISSED IT. I'M NOT SURPRISED.

On Thursday, I had an experience-based hunch about the Dallas Ebola case:

Who missed Ebola? I assume nurse entered travel history into electronic record & doctor didn't grasp significance. Will any reporter ask?

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) October 2, 2014

Easy to blame nurse (see, e.g.: http://t.co/doLd65s5kT). But docs often act as if info is less important than their instincts @nomoremister

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) October 2, 2014

Also, docs are taught "When U hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." Leads them to dismiss possibility of rare conditions. @nomoremister

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) October 2, 2014

Then we learned -- or thought we learned -- that the intake software didn't present Thomas Duncan's travel history to the doctors. Now we find out that wasn't true:

Dallas Hospital Alters Account, Raising Questions on Ebola Case

... the hospital that is treating the patient and that mistakenly sent him home when he first came to its emergency room acknowledged that both the nurses and the doctors in that initial visit had access to the fact that he had arrived from Liberia.

For reasons that remain unclear, nurses and doctors failed to act on that information, and released the patient under the erroneous belief that he had a low-grade fever from a viral infection....

Let me venture a guess as to what happened, based on recent (and not-so-recent) experiences with the health care system.

It's true that a lot of medical professionals are still getting used to electronic record-keeping. They probably haven't developed an instinct for where to look on the screens for the most important information.

On the other hand, long before electronic record-keeping in medicine, I noticed that doctors barely read any patient information before seeing someone. Quite a few times over the years I've been asked to get a test of some kind -- usually a blood test -- and then, when I showed up for a follow-up visit, often weeks after the test results were sent to the office, I watched the doctor skim the results in a few seconds just after entering the examination room to see me.

Doctors don't familiarize themselves with written information before seeing patients. To me it seems that they diagnose on observation, experience, and instinct far more than on data.

Plus, they've been told since med school to diagnose following the dictum "If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." This advice is supposed to tell them: Consider common conditions first, before considering rare ones. In practice, I believe most doctors interpret it as: Don't trouble your head with rare or unusual diagnoses.

I may be misinterpreting how doctors work, but I've had a couple of long periods in my life when low-level but nagging conditions were repeatedly misdiagnosed, and this is what I've seen: not much attention paid to data, and not much willingness to consider less obvious diagnoses.

I think that's what happened in Dallas -- the doctors didn't read, and Ebola was assumed to be a zebra. That mustn't happen again.

*****

(More responses to this story at Memeorandum.)

THE ADMINISTRATION HAS TO EXPLAIN IN DETAIL WHY WEST AFRICA IS NOT LIKE AMERICA

It worries me when I see a Fox News host using a retweet to encourage trutherism about the spread of Ebola, merely because cynical scaremongering is good for ratings (and for the GOP's prospects in November):



Granted, this tweet is expressing general doubts about government reassurances, not specific doubts about established science. It's not saying explicitly that everything we're being told about how Ebola is transmitted and contained is wrong.

But it encourages that sort of thinking.

There are two main issues right now with regard to Ebola and the administration. One is the decision not to suspend air travel from West Africa. That's what many Republicans are upset about, and at least their concern is consistent with science. Obviously, asymptomatic people can get through screening and arrive here infected. If we can have a discussion of this that isn't primarily about political point-scoring, fine.

But implying that we don't have well-established protocols for containing the virus and that the transmission process is poorly understood is dangerous. Unfortunately, this line of thinking is plausible to a lot of people -- not just because we're seeing a confirmed case here in America, but because we're seeing a failure to contain the disease in Africa.

Maybe if government officials made clear that Ebola's spread in Africa is because protocols aren't being followed, not because those protocols are in question, they could draw a contrast to the U.S. that would seem intuitive to ordinary Americans.

As The New Republic's Rebecca Leber notes:

The reason for the different odds here and there is obvious: In U.S. hospitals, patients are isolated in hospital rooms specially set up for biocontainment, they receive specialized care and hydration, and have access to an experimental vaccine. That's not happening in West Africa. In order to end this epidemic there , the CDC estimates, at least 70 percent of patients must be isolated in hospitals. In Liberia, the figure is just 18 percent.

And as I've previously noted, there's this:

Health care workers in poor nations often do not have enough protective gear to keep them safe from being infected with blood-borne viruses such as Ebola and HIV, a new study shows.

... the study was conducted before the current Ebola outbreak began in West Africa last spring...

In Liberia, only 56 percent of hospitals had protective eyewear for doctors and nurses and only 63 percent had sterile gloves. In Sierra Leone, those figures were 30 percent and 70 percent, respectively, the researchers found....

I'm convinced that people think we could have West Africa's experience. This is why we won't. We have plenty of isolation wards and protective gear.

And while average Americans probably wouldn't find this reassuring, I do:



Ebola spreads less readily than many other contagious diseases -- and if you reduce its transmission with careful isolation and effective contact tracing, eventually you contain the disease completely. It's worked in every past outbreak in Africa, with much weaker medical infrastructure. It would work here.

Americans need to grasp the fact that we understand this disease. In this situation, implying that everything the experts tell us is to be mistrusted is very dangerous. But that's the world Fox made, and we're stuck in it. So the administration has to push back harder than it has so far.

A POLITICAL COMEBACK? TOM DeLAY MIGHT AS WELL AIM HIGH

Via Right Wing Watch, I learn from Jerome Corsi at World Net Daily that Tom DeLay might attempt a political comeback. If he plans to do it, he certainly seems to have the red-meat rhetoric pretty well mastered:

After learning the overturning of his felony conviction had been upheld by an appeals court, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay told WND he is considering bringing charges against the Travis County District Attorney's Office for prosecutorial misconduct and he might run again for political office.

DeLay said the Democratic Party's attempt to destroy him over the past 11 years because of his conservative political views is a direct reflection of the Marxist philosophy that shapes the political forces controlling the party....

"What the Democrats did to me is right out of the pages of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals,'" DeLay said. "People don't understand, but it's the politics of Karl Marx that drive the far left in control of the Democratic Party."

DeLay argued that incompetence alone was not sufficient to explain the crises and scandals that have developed under the Obama administration. They include, he said, from the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, the Department of Justice gunrunning scandal in Fast and Furious, the IRS discrimination against conservative groups, the rise of ISIS and now the Ebola epidemic coming to the U.S.

"The point is that in Barack Obama the American people are getting to see a radical Marxist with a worldview that makes him happy with the chaos that's going on," he said. "This is exactly what Obama wants done, and people are finally seeing Obama for who he really is." ...

"The worldview of the left that has destroyed America is what we should be fighting," he stressed. "The radical culture of the left is why 60 million babies have been killed in the United States since Roe v. Wade. Yet, the Republican response is to say, 'Well, I want the Keystone Pipeline.'" ...

Are there any boob-bait rallying cries DeLay left out? (Although he's going to be careful about downplaying the Keystone Pipeline.)

If DeLay wants to reenter electoral politics, he should probably just shoot the works and run for president in 2016. A guy who was convicted of irregularities involving corporate campaign cash, something Republicans voters think should be categorically impossible, because all campaign giving should be utterly legal and unregulated? The base would love that! He'd be like Tupac or Johnny Cash.

You say if he ran for president he'd be regarded as a washed-up old has-been? You did notice that the strongest challengers to Mitt Romney in 2012 were Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, right?

I'm not saying DeLay could win the nomination, much less the presidency. But who cares? On the right, a presidential run is a great resume-builder. Look at Santorum! He became semi-relevant on the right again! He got the opportunity to run a Christian movie studio! How cool is that!

I don't know how well DeLay would do, but I'm pretty sure he'd outdo Lindsey Graham, and he's talking about running. So why not? Why not the worst?

THE RIGHT WANTS US TO FIGHT EBOLA WHILE NOT TRUSTING ANY NATIONAL AUTHORITIES

National Journal's Alex Roarty seems surprised That Ebola is now an issue in the midterms:

Ebola Scare, Secret Service Enter Campaign Politics

It's either tactically smart or desperately silly, but a North Carolina Republican is trying to use the week's biggest news items to attack President Obama.

The Secret Service's public humiliation and the country's first Ebola diagnosis -- topics that would appear at least one step removed from partisan warfare -- aren't ready-made issues for the campaign trail. But in roughly 24 hours, one candidate has managed to insert both into his own race.

Thom Tillis, the Republican Senate nominee from North Carolina, on Thursday called on President Obama to ban travel from Ebola-stricken countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, arguing that people from those countries could be vectors for the deadly disease. Just a day earlier, Tillis chided his opponent, Sen. Kay Hagan, and Obama for the Secret Service's litany of recent mistakes.

In both instances, the criticism made essentially the same point: The president can't keep America safe.

"How on earth can you protect the nation if you can't protect the White House?" he asked, according to an account of his speech Wednesday....

Roarty obviously hasn't noticed that turning Ebola, in particular, into a partisan issue is now utterly mainstream, as The Hill's Sarah Ferris reports:

Ebola is becoming an issue for the midterm election campaign, with several Republicans using the spread of the virus to the United States to criticize President Obama's leadership.

Republican lawmakers are accusing Obama of underplaying the threat. They say the national response to the discovery of an infected patient in Dallas has been woefully inadequate.

"I am concerned about it, and it's a big mistake to downplay it and act as if it's not a big deal," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. He said Obama officials are putting "political correctness" ahead of public health.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are hammering Obama for saying two weeks ago it was "unlikely" that Ebola could ever reach America....

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) is pushing for the government to question all passengers coming to the United States from countries where Ebola is spreading to ensure they haven’t been exposed to the virus....

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) told The Hill on Thursday that the Obama administration could have prevented Ebola from entering the U.S. if State Department officials had been more vigilant against the threat....

Until a few minutes ago, the lead story at Fox Nation was a Washington Free Beacon rant by Matthew Continetti titled "The Case for Panic"; FN used the Beacon's subtitle as a title: "Incompetent Government + Corrupt Elite = Disaster." A sample:

Deadly, irrational, and determined, the intruder snuck across a weakened perimeter. Eluding capture, the intruder was detained only after missteps and close calls. The spin began soon after the threat was isolated. Information was selectively leaked. Half-truths and untruths were uttered. Responsibility was avoided; privileges and credentials asserted; authority reasserted. Trust us. Remain calm. Don’t panic.

This is the template of recent events. A mental case jumps the White House fence. He makes it to the East Room before he's tackled by an off-duty Secret Service agent. Initial statements turn out to be misleading or false. We discover that lapses in security are much worse than previously understood, that in recent memory the White House was sprayed with bullets, and that an armed man with a criminal record rode in an elevator with the president....

The elevator? It was in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where the president told the American people that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is not a threat to our country. President Obama said the chances of Ebola appearing in the United States are "extremely low." If a carrier somehow finds his way to the 50 states, "We have world-class facilities and professionals ready to respond. And we have effective surveillance mechanisms in place." Two weeks later, as Byron York points out, the president was proven utterly wrong.

... Not only do I disagree with the constant stream of soothing and complacent rhetoric from ... government and media. I also believe it is entirely rational to fear the possibility of a major Ebola outbreak, of a threat to the president and his family, of jihadists crossing the border, of a large-scale European or Asian war, of nuclear proliferation, of terrorists detonating a weapon of mass destruction. These dangers are real, and pressing, and though the probability of their occurrence is not high, it is amplified by the staggering incompetence and failure and misplaced priorities of the U.S. government. It is not Ebola I am afraid of. It is our government's ability to deal with Ebola....

I think, in a lot of these circumstances, we get into a toxic cycle. Republicans launch a full-scale partisan nuclear attack every single time there's a real or perceived lapse by this administration. The administration, playing defense, downplays the problem. Eventually, in some cases, the downplaying of the problem blows up in the administration's face. And the GOP transmits the nuclear launch codes again.

I think you have to separate the administration's ultimate actions from these moments of defensiveness. The White House tries to solve problems, and it does learn from mistakes. But by that time, Republicans have undermined the public's belief in the administration's trustworthiness to the maximum extent possible.

And now we're entering a period when we may have a number of cases of Ebola, and we may need to trust the authorities and take any warning they issue seriously. But Republicans don't want us to trust the authorities. And yet they want Ebola stopped. How will that happen with Republicans goading the public to a stance of non-cooperation?

I'm not saying the administration should be exempt from criticism. But there's a way to go about this. If you're just saying we need to restrict flyers coming in from West Africa, fine. (I'm generally a partisan, but I see a lot of merit in doing that.) But if your argument is "Barack Obama Bans Flights to Israel, But Not Flights From Ebola Affected Countries" (to quote a RedState headline), then you're not arguing on the merits -- you're trying to score cheap political points. (I should point out that that Israel flight ban was lifted a day and a half after it went into effect.)

Back in the Cold War days, we used to ask ourselves if we and the communists would stop fighting if aliens or a huge asteroid threatened to wipe out all life on Earth. In our current Cold Civil War, I think we see the modern, intramural answer to that question: no, in that case, we in the U.S. wouldn't stop fighting amongst ourselves.

****

UPDATE: What was I just saying? This guy writes for Breitbart:

In light of WH on #Ebola here's Reagan: "9 most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

— Matthew Boyle (@mboyle1) October 3, 2014

SHELDON ADELSON MUST BE OFFERING TO WRITE MASSIVE CHECKS TO PRETTY MUCH ANY GOP HAWK WITH A PULSE

Seriously?

In a recent, hour-long interview, Lindsey Graham said if he is reelected to the Senate in November, he will begin exploring a bid for the presidency.

Graham has long been one of the most active and outspoken hawks in Congress....

In our interview, Graham repeatedly spoke of the challenges that will face the next president because of the mistakes made under Obama. And he suggested that he might just be the one to fix them.

This is from a Stephen Hayes article in The Weekly Standard about a resurgence of hawkishness in the GOP -- although, Hayes says, the GOP dalliance with noninterventionism "wasn't much of a fling." The people at the Standard would be saying this even if it weren't true, but I think it is -- Republicans always revert to hawkishness as a default position, because they hate most non-Europeans, and because their greatest pleasure is to portray Democrats and liberals as feckless love-bead wearers who put daisies in gun barrels.

But Graham? Really? I'm not going to make the gay jokes everyone else makes -- if he's a closet case, I don't care. I don't even think Republicans care -- he gets reelected because he delivers satisfying attacks on the president on an almost daily basis, but the base across the country regards him as a RINO, primarily because he's not an immigration hard-liner. (Google the word "Grahamnesty.") So this would be a fool's errand. Does he not know this? Is he self-deluding? Or are Sheldon Adelson and other hawks just expressing an eagerness to write such huge checks to anyone who'll challenge Rand Paul in the primaries that a race is hard to resist? (I assume that's what Peter King is thinking.)

Um, if there are too many hawks in the race and only one Rand Paul, doesn't that make Paul more likely to win the nomination, while the hawks split the vote?

Yeah, yeah, I know the conventional wisdom: Christie, Perry, and Walker could all be under indictment as the race gets under way; Romney and Jeb probably won't run (though being pro-immigration reform also dooms Jeb in the primaries, as does being a big advocate of Common Core); dark horses like Pence and Kasich could do well, but they may not run. Yes, but if the candidates the insiders are counting on don't run, I think Graham will be outpolled by fringier names -- not just Ted Cruz but Ben Carson -- because they bring the rage much more compellingly than Graham does. (Graham delivers in bulk, but they beat him on quality.)

Ultimately, I think this thing is going to go to someone like Walker or Paul Ryan -- or Romney again, if he gets in. (He's really, really good at the one thing GOP voters care about more than anything, which is bashing Obama in rube-pleasing ways.) Graham? Zero chance.

LIMBAUGH TIME-TRAVELS TO A WORLD WHERE LOUIS FARRAKHAN IS STILL RELEVANT

Rush Limbaugh said on his show today that he thinks non-conservatives in America are eventually going to blame Ebola on "powerful majorities." He says this because conspiratorial thinking about Ebola is being disseminated by Louis Farrakhan -- an incredibly influential person among non-conservatives who are stuck in a bend in the time-space continuum where it's still 1988:

RUSH: Now, some predictions as to the way this is gonna go because of political correctness....

If Ebola starts spreading quickly in the United States, and if the death toll rises rapidly, I want you to be prepared for the fact that this will be a disease created by the CIA or other powerful majorities for the purposes of wiping out minorities. That is how it will be -- and not in kookville. This will be mainstream stuff. College professors will tell their students this.

Others will discuss it on cable television, much like they discuss the "art" in a movie on how to assassinate George W. Bush. They will discuss whether or not we need to consider such theories; could they, in fact, be possible. In fact this prediction's already beginning to come true because Calypso Louie, "Minister Farrakhan" of the Nation of Islam, is already saying so.

The CIA created AIDS, too. It's out there now, and Calypso Louie, think of him as a kook, if you will, but he's got followers that believe everything he says. They tell other people who believe what they say and it mushrooms.

One of my commenters also brought this Farrakhan thing up. (On Twitter, Farrakhan called Ebola and AIDS race targeting bioweapons.) I don't expect this idea to spread very far on my side of the fence. On the other hand, I see that the doomsday-prepper site SHTFplan.com ("When it hits the fan, don't say we didn't warn you") -- where there a lot more gun and ammo ads than you tend to see at, oh, say, Mother Jones or Daily Kos -- the notion of government involvement in Ebola dissemination is already being taken very, very seriously:

Report: "Disaster Teams Were Notified Months Ago They Would Be Activated in October"

A public tweet from a large government supplier of emergency response products specializing in "high risk events" says that Disaster Assistance Response Teams were told to prepare to be activated in the month of October. The shocking revelation, made on the Goldenstate Fire/EMS Twitter page, suggests that not only did someone know that the Ebola virus would be reaching America, but that they knew exactly when it would happen....

What we are now hearing is just the tip of the iceburg as we enter October. #Ebola virus will cripple EMS and hospitals. The wait is over!

— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014

@FutureMoneyTren DART teams were notified months ago they would be activated in October. Timing seems weird. Source: current DART member.

— GoldenStateFIRE/EMS (@GoldenStateEMS) September 30, 2014

And, of course, according to this post, everything you think you know about Ebola is wrong!!!1!1!

... The traditional thinking here is that the virus made its way to the United States simply by one infected individual coming into contact with another, and so on. But, a growing chorus of contrarian researchers suggests another possibility -- the Ebola virus may have been weaponized by a government or rogue terror cell and it has been deployed as a bio weapon....

Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show notes that the U.S. Army is intimately involved in Ebola research, adding further fuel to speculation that it has been used to develop new bio weapon systems....

Over the last several years the U.S. government has been actively preparing for a widespread crisis scenario. Whether that crisis is Ebola or something else remains to be seen. But, what we do know is that they have stocked up not only armaments and ammunition, but tens of thousands of Hazmat suits, body bags and what are believed to be millions of disposable FEMA coffins.

Moreover, the President updated several Executive Orders over the last several years authorizing, among other things, forced quarantines and round-ups in the event of a pandemic emergency and the appropriation of private resources like food, water and human labor....

I'm not worried about Farrakhan. I am worried that, if Ebola really does establish a significant footprint in this country, the response to it will be hampered by the refusal of many True Patriots to cooperate with even minimally inconvenient procedures meant to stem the spread of the disease, because FREEDOM! Also because FIRST STEP TO OBAMA SOCIALIST TOTALITARIANISM AND GLOBAL CALIPHATE!

Here's what they're doing in Nigeria and other affected parts of Africa, as reported by Alexis Okeowo in a New York Times op-ed:

Most people I know now carry hand sanitizer around and religiously cleanse several times a day; they know that, in contaminated areas, chlorine can be used to kill the virus; and, before being allowed to enter public buildings, they submit to checks by security guards armed with "temperature guns" that detect a fever. On a recent excursion to a nightclub, a guard put one of these devices to my head and then told me I had "passed"; at the entrance we were required to take hand sanitizer from a dispenser just to be sure.

If things get bad in America, or in New York, would I do that? To stay alive? Sure. But I'd worry that a lot of wingnuts would balk. I fear they'd propose mass internment (or execution) of all aliens who aren't ethnic Europeans, plus a solid line of nuclear missiles on the Mexican border, before they'd willingly adapt to the new reality.

TED NUGENT'S REPUBLICAN "EXPERT" ON BLACK FAMILY BREAKDOWN IS A CONVICTED DEADBEAT DAD

Ted Nugent is getting some attention for his new World Net Daily column, which is titled "Liberalism's Killer 'Welfare Crack'" and is about as bad as that title would suggest:

A Ferguson, Missouri, police officer was shot recently while he was investigating a break-in.

From the stories I have read on the Internet about the shooting, the media have made it a point not to describe the suspect or suspects the police are searching for. I don’t know about you, but I find this rather fascinating....

Based on crime stats in Ferguson and elsewhere, it would be a safe bet to assume the two thugs the police are looking for are black males between the age of 15 and 25.

It would also be a safe bet the two thugs being searched for were raised by a single parent, have criminal records, are high school dropouts, don’t have jobs and are very likely to be members of a gang. Just a random Nuge hunch....

Nugent goes on to blame liberalism for this state affairs -- you're shocked, right? me too! -- and calls on someone he apparently regards as an expert to buttress his argument:

Project 21 spokesman Christopher Arps stated, "The War on Poverty has arguably destroyed the black nuclear family. Roughly 75 percent of black children were born to a married two-parent family when the 'war' began in 1964. By 2008, the percentage of black babies born out of wedlock numbered over 72 percent. Today, the rate of unwed motherhood in the black community is more than twice as high as among whites – and almost three times higher than before big government's grand intervention. And all this comes at a steep financial cost. The federal government has spent an estimated $15 trillion to end poverty. Government reportedly spent $20,610 on every poor individual and $61,830 per poor family in 2012."

Christopher Arps is affiliated with the black conservative groups Project 21 and Move-On-Up.org. He was also, as noted by the Riverfront Times and St. Louis American in 2010, found guilty of not paying child support a decade ago:

The man is a deadbeat dad, and not just a missed-one-payment type -- according to the Missouri Department of Corrections, Christopher Arps of Florissant was convicted of non-support for six out of 12 months in St. Louis County in 2001. According to the Department of Corrections official, Dean Watson, the dude is on active probation in District 8E (Florissant) until 2011.

(Yes, he's from Florissant, Missouri, one town over from Ferguson, which meant that he provided commentary on this summer's events there to the Tea Party News Network.)

Arps allied himself with profession affirmative-action foe Ward Connerly to try to get an anti-affirmative action referendum on Missouri's ballot in 2008. (Not enough signatures were collected.) He also accused the NAACP of failing to help Kenneth Gladney, a black man reportedly roughed up by union counter-demonstrators at a Tea Party rally.

But the effort was cut short when the head of the civil rights group showed up at the news conference and said that no one had asked the NAACP to investigate the claims.

"The St. Louis branch of the NAACP will and does accept and investigate all written complaints filed with us, regardless of the complainant's ideology," said Claude Brown Sr., president of the St. Louis City NAACP. "We regret that a group has decided to protest outside our office before contacting us or filing such a complaint."

In 2005, when the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for America's history of lynching, Project 21 denounced the resolution:

The lynchings of the past, while a sad place in history to recount, is exactly that - history. The best way to avenge this shameful history and make it relevant to us today is not to wallow in the apologies and regrets offered by senators who couldn't be in any way responsible for what occurred, but to supply our own closure by forgiving those who trespassed against us and moving on.

Project 21 is an initiative of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which, among other things, fights for voter ID laws.

Ted Nugent, it should be noted, wrote in a column in February of last year that he was going to call his forthcoming tour "Black Power 2013." And here are a few of his witticisms on that subject:

I'm a huge, crazed black man from Detroit....

*****

I am the funniest black man in America since Richard Pryor caught on fire.


*****

Tell Larry The Cable Guy I'm the funniest black man around.

(Source; source; source.)

Mike Huckabee, your thoughts?

RAND PAUL IS AN EBOLA TRUTHER

Media insiders, here's your hip, sophisticated poster boy for Republicanism 2.0:

Glenn [Beck] interviewed Senator Rand Paul on radio today to talk about some key elections and the outbreak of the Ebola virus here in the United States. Paul thinks it's a huge mistake to downplay the threat of an epidemic, and believes political correctness is what's hampering a real discussion from taking place....

"I do think you have to be concerned. It's an incredibly transmissible disease that everyone is downplaying, saying it's hard to catch. Well, we have physicians and health workers who are catching it who are completely gloved down and taking every precaution and they're still getting it. So, yes, I'm very concerned about this. I think at the very least there needs to be a discussion about airline travel between the countries that have the raging disease," he [said].

Of course, that's not what's going on. Here's the truth:

Health care workers in poor nations often do not have enough protective gear to keep them safe from being infected with blood-borne viruses such as Ebola and HIV, a new study shows.

While the study was conducted before the current Ebola outbreak began in West Africa last spring, its findings are confirmed in statistics released Monday [August 25, 2014] by the World Health Organization (WHO)....

"In many cases, medical staff are at risk because no protective equipment is available -- not even gloves and face masks," the WHO statement added.

However, in the study reported online Aug. 26 in the journal Tropical Medicine and International Health, Johns Hopkins researchers found these shortages existed long before this latest Ebola outbreak.

In Liberia, only 56 percent of hospitals had protective eyewear for doctors and nurses and only 63 percent had sterile gloves. In Sierra Leone, those figures were 30 percent and 70 percent, respectively, the researchers found....

The mainstream press hates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and is just dying to anoint someone, anyone, as the modern, hipster embodiment of a rejuvenated GOP. Rand Paul, with his groovy dudebro libertarianism, is the one the insider journos have pinned the most hopes on. Well, yeah, this Ebola trutherism is hip, but it's hip the way vaccine skepticism is hip among upscale parents.

And who knows -- maybe that is the future of hipsterism. Maybe the GOP should add "Republicans are anti-vaxxers" to that "Republicans have tattoos and beards" ad they just did. But if that's the future, we're doomed as a society.

MORE ON RONALD KESSLER, THE FORMER NEWSMAX COLUMNIST POLITICO ASKED TO COMMENT ON THE SECRET SERVICE

You've probably heard about the Politico Magazine column in which Ronald Kessler argues that an assassination of President Obama would be necessary to change the culture of the Secret Service in a positive way, the current culture being President Obama's own fault:

Agents tell me it's a miracle an assassination has not already occurred. Sadly, given Obama's colossal lack of management judgment, that calamity may be the only catalyst that will reform the Secret Service.

Josh Marshall is right:

So Obama is at fault for his inevitable assassination, or he's the only thing standing in the way of cleaning up the agency responsible for his inevitable assassination.There's a lot packed into that two sentence flourish. But all of it is deeply f'd up.

Marshall explains, though not in great detail, why Kessler was a dubious choice for this gig:

Kessler is a legitimate expert on national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He's written many books on these topics. I actually interviewed him a couple times for pieces I wrote just after 9/11 on post-attack preparedness, intelligence sharing and related topics. But over the last decade he's made a hard veer to the right, with a heavy dose of Obama-hating conspiracy mongering.

Well, yes -- I'd call Kessler yet another mainstreamed extremist. From 2006 to 2012 he was a regular columnist for the wingnut site Newsmax. When he was hired, he told us this:

Since I first learned about NewsMax, I've admired how, in order to tell the truth about subjects ranging from politics to medicine, it presents factual material that the rest of the media ignore. I'm proud to be associated with an operation that practices journalism honestly and fairly.

(Newsmax's commitment to medicine is exemplified by its relationship with Russell Blaylock, a vaccine skeptic.)

One of Kessler's 2008 Newsmax columns, titled "Obama Attended Hate America Sermon," asserted that Barack Obama was present in Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church when Wright delivered a 2007 sermon on "white arrogance." When it was determined that Obama was en route to Miami during the sermon -- as even Fox News acknowledged -- Newsmax posted a "Clarification" to the story, and Kessler tried to edit references to the misinformation out of his Wikipedia entry.

Kessler's Newsmax columns weren't always quite so scurrilous, though he often reached similar pinnacles of inaccuracy. Among the pieces he published in 2012, for instance were "Democrat States Moving to Romney," "Romney Hits Bull's-Eye with Paul Ryan," "Why Romney Will Win Decisively," "Intensity for Mitt Romney Equals Ronald Reagan's," and "Expect a Mitt Romney Landslide."

Kessler loathes Hillary Clinton -- just as her 2008 campaign was getting under way, he described her as "two-faced and perpetually angry," and just as she's probably about to embark on another campaign, he's describing her as having "an unstable personality." Snopes offers a couple of choice (and, of course, unverifiable) Hillary quotes from Kessler:

"Where is the G-damn f**king flag? I want the G-damn f**king flag up every f**king morning at f**king sunrise."

(From the book "Inside The White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 244 - Hillary to the staff at the Arkansas Governor's mansion on Labor Day, 1991) ...

"Come on Bill, put your dick up! You can't f**k her here!!"

(From the book "Inside The White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 243 - Hillary to Gov. Clinton when she spots him talking with an attractive female at an Arkansas political rally)

On the other hand, Kessler adores Laura Bush -- he wrote a fawning biography of her in 2006, and told National Review this when he was promoting the book:

She is more versed in literature than most English professors or any previous First Lady, including Jacqueline Kennedy.

No hyperbole there!

How admirable is Laura Bush? Let Kessler explain:

Kessler: It's hard to overestimate Laura's modesty.... She instructs her speechwriters never to use the personal pronoun "I."

Um, really? Here's the start of her speech to the 2000 Republican convention:

I am honored -- and a little overwhelmed -- to help open the convention that will nominate my husband for President of the United States. You know I am completely objective when I say ... you have made a GREAT choice.

George and I have been blessed throughout our 23 years of marriage with many interesting opportunities. Our lives have changed enormously in the last six years. He was elected Governor, we moved to Austin with our then 13-year-old twin teenagers, and since then, we’ve been through dating, drivers licenses, prom night and just a few weeks ago, high school graduation.

Now we’re helping our daughters pack for college and we’re preparing for our next life crisis ... empty nest syndrome. They say parents often have to get out of the house when their kids go off to college because it seems so lonely. Everyone deals with it in different ways. But I told George I thought running for President was a little extreme....

Here's part of her speech to the 2004 convention:

I am so proud of the way George has led our country with strength and conviction. Tonight, I want to try to answer the question that I believe many people would ask me if we sat down for a cup of coffee or ran into each other at the store: You know him better than anyone -- you've seen things no one else has seen -- why do you think we should re-elect your husband as President?

As you might imagine, I have a lot to say about that.

I could talk about my passion, education. At every school we visit, the students are so eager. Last fall the President and I walked into an elementary school in Hawaii, and a little 2nd-grader came out to welcome us and bellowed, "George Washington!" Close, just the wrong George W."

I could talk about the small business owners and entrepreneurs who are now creating most of the new jobs in our country ... women like Carmella Chaifos — the only woman to own a tow truck company in all of Iowa. The President's tax relief helped Carmella to buy the business, and modernize her fleet, and expand her operations. Carmela is living proof of what she told me. She said: "If you're determined and you want to work hard, you can do anything you want to. That's the beautiful thing about America."

I could talk about health care. For years, leaders in both parties said we should provide prescription drug coverage in Medicare. George was able to bring Republicans and Democrats together to get it done.

I could talk about the fact that my husband is the first President to provide federal funding for stem cell research. He did so in a principled way, allowing science to explore its potential while respecting the dignity of human life.

I could talk about the record increase in home ownership. Home ownership in America, especially minority home ownership is at an all time high....

Need I go on? There's your expert, Politico.

LET'S NOT DOWNPLAY CLINTON-ERA RAGE

Charlie Pierce looks at Secret Service lapses and notes that they're coming at a time when we have a president who's especially vulnerable:

It is now a given in all these stories that this particular president has come under threat with far more regularity than his predecessors did. The reasons why are obvious, but are held in such stories to be uncertain. (Oooh, oooh! Ask me! I know!). But the difference here is more than the simple quantification of the number of threats, and more than a simple question of who (failed to) let the dogs out. There has been an ongoing threat to this president from the moment his hand left the Bible in 2009. There has been a deliberate, concerted, and well-funded campaign to delegitimize him as the twice-elected president of the United States....

Bill Clinton's legitimacy was challenged because he was a Democratic president who wasn't supposed to win. The attack on this president comes from a deeper and uglier place than that. This president's legitimacy has been challenged -- and repeatedly, openly denied -- because of who he is, not because of what party nominated him. Nobody doubted Bill Clinton's citizenship, or his fundamental Americanism, much less got rich doing so.

What Obama has faced is mind-boggling, but I have to question that last assertion about Clinton. Pierce's link is to a blog post about Dinesh D'Souza, but all sorts of D'Souzas made a very nice living attacking Bill Clinton (and his wife) in the 1990s. A guy named Matt Drudge comes to mind. Also Ann Coulter, who made her bones (as it were) with a 1998 book titled High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. How about David Brock, who, when he wasn't engaged in character assassination of Anita Hill, was writing much-read stories about "Troopergate," after which he receive a million-dollar book advance for a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton (which turned out not to be a hatchet job, as Brock had shifted to the left)?

Let's look at this list of New York Times bestsellers from Regnery Publishing. (And how about the folks at Regnery -- didn't they cash in on Clinton?) There's Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich, a #1 bestseller in 1996, in which we were told that Hillary Clinton decorated the White House Christmas tree with sex figurines and crack pipes. There were two books by Barbara Olson, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Sory of Hillary Rodham Clinton and The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House. There was Boy Clinton by Emmett Tyrrell -- who did pretty well for himself trashing the president at The American Spectator. And on and on.

Did anyone question Bill Clinton's "fundamental Americanism"? Not to the extent of questioning his U.S. birth. But he was absolutely accused of being a traitor to his country, or at least being suspect, by no less than the president of the United States, when Clinton was running against that president:

President Bush tonight accused Gov. Bill Clinton of not telling the truth about his visit to Moscow as a student in the late 1960's and sharply criticized the Democratic nominee for demonstrating against the Vietnam War while he was studying in England....

Asked by [CNN's Larry] King what he thought about Mr. Clinton visiting the Soviet Union while he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1969, Mr. Bush seemed to choose his words carefully....

"I don't want to tell you what I really think, because I don't have the facts," he said. "But to go to Moscow one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, not remember who you saw? I really think the answer is, level with the American people."

... Mr. Bush said: "You can remember who you saw in the airport in Oslo, but you can't remember who you saw in the airport in Moscow? I say level with the American people on the draft, whether you went to Moscow, how many demonstrations he led against his country from a foreign soil. Level, tell the truth and then let the American voters decide."

(And let's not even get into the later allegations of disloyalty to country known as "Chinagate.")

Yes, it's true that Barack Obama has been charged with treason more often than Bill Clinton -- but that may be because right-wingers were too busy charging Clinton with rape, drug-dealing, and murder. There's a so-called Obama body count, but it's a pale imitation of the extraordinarily lengthy Clinton body count. And, of course, Clinton murder and drug-dealing allegations were peddled by Jerry Falwell, one of the most prominent figures on the religious right.

Race explains a lot of the Obama-hate out there. But I think, if things are worse for Obama, it's also partly because the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown bigger and more professionalized. In the 1990s, the right-wing noise machine was like Apple in the 1990s -- innovative, aggressive, and disruptive, but with a limited market share. Now it's like present-day Apple -- an industrial machine that generates Pavlovian drooling among well-trained consumers of its products every time it teases a new release.

And their next target has lady parts, which offers up a completely new set of opportunities for tapping into primal hatreds. Maybe it won't be as bad as it's been with Obama. Maybe it'll never be as bad. But it'll be bad.