“Where Have Ebola’s Fear-Mongers All Gone?”: The One Word You Haven’t Heard A Politician Say Since Election Day
Only two months ago, many Americans were gripped by fear of the uncontrollable spread of an apparently incurable disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected could strike 1.4 million people in West Africa before it came under control.
Amid such reports, it took only one case to touch off near-panic inside the United States: that of Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan after he was misdiagnosed by a Dallas hospital.
In the weeks that followed Duncan’s death, state and local governments reacted — and sometimes overreacted. Several schools barred teachers and children who had visited African countries that were nowhere near the epidemic. In Maine, a teacher was put on leave because she had visited Dallas.
And then election-year politics kicked in.
Members of Congress, mostly Republicans, warned that Ebola could be carried into the country by illegal immigrants or even terrorists, and demanded a ban on travelers entering the United States from the affected countries. Governors scrambled to draft quarantine regulations, producing a showdown between Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and a nurse he tried to confine to a tent. (The nurse won.)
And now? The crisis is all but forgotten. We’ve moved on.
The epidemic is ebbing in Liberia, but still spreading in Sierra Leone. The World Health Organization estimates there have been about 18,000 cases, including more than 6,300 deaths: tragic numbers, but far below the apocalyptic scenario once predicted.
Only four cases of the disease have been diagnosed in the United States, two of them in people who contracted the disease in West Africa. And we’ve learned that when Ebola is identified early, in a country with a functioning healthcare system, the disease is treatable after all.
“What’s the one word you haven’t heard a politician say since Election Day?” Democratic strategist James Carville asked me a few weeks ago. “Ebola!”
I’m not blaming ordinary people for reacting as they did to a deadly epidemic they’d been told was difficult to stop.
I’m not even blaming governors who scrambled to impose quarantines to stop the spread of a disease they didn’t know much about. Their job was to protect their citizens. And when they discovered that their initial reactions might have been too broad, they pared them back — even Chris Christie.
It’s worth remembering, as well, that the Obama administration initially did a ham-handed job of mastering the crisis. Dr. Thomas Frieden of the CDC started out by assuring the country that the situation was under control — even though it wasn’t, at first.
But there is one list of politicians who still deserve a measure of scorn: the ones who fanned fear for fear’s sake.
This week, those politicians shared in an award they probably didn’t want: the annual “Lie of the Year” prize conferred by PolitiFact, the fact-checking arm of the Tampa Bay Times. They won, the paper said, because they deliberately “produced a dangerous and incorrect narrative” about an important global problem.
Before you dismiss that as another liberal media attack on the GOP, consider this: Last year’s PolitiFact winner for “Lie of the Year” was President Obama, for his promise that under his 2010 healthcare law, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.”
The politicians mentioned in this year’s citation included Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), an ophthalmologist who may run for president.
His advice on Ebola included this warning: “This is an incredibly contagious disease. People in full gloves and gowns are getting it.”
Well, no, as thousands of medical workers in Africa can testify — not when true precautions are in place.
“This is something that appears to be very easy to catch,” Paul added. “If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party, they’re contagious and you can catch it from them.”
Theoretically true — but only if your cocktail party acquaintance is emitting fluids in your direction; Ebola can’t be transmitted by air.
Then there was Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), another physician, who managed to combine two hot-button issues, Ebola and immigration. Gingrey announced that he had received “reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever and Ebola.”
Other members of Congress speculated that terrorists might infect themselves, sneak into the United States and try to spread the disease in crowded places. PolitiFact carefully said it couldn’t count that as a lie, since it was mere speculation.
But it was surely intended to increase fear. And fear is a powerful emotion, much easier to provoke than to ease.
So now that the acute fear of Ebola has ebbed, we should pause for a moment to thank some Americans who didn’t panic — and, more important, even did something to bring the epidemic closer to an end: the courageous relief workers who went to Africa, not knowing whether they’d be allowed to return home, relief workers that included roughly 3,000 U.S. military personnel who accepted deployment to Liberia as part of their jobs, and whose clinic-building mission will be complete soon. And yes, even those politicians, beginning with President Obama, who didn’t panic.
By: Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (TNS); The National Memo, December 18, 2014
“Documenting Police Killings”: Wide Discrepancies In Rate Of Police Killings Among Major Metropolitan Police Departments
One of the sources of confusion arising during recent controversies over police killings in Missouri and in New York has been the lack of good and consistent data on similar incidents. Congress just passed legislation to revive a lapsed 2000-2006 data collection law, but as veteran journalist Blake Fleetwood notes in a web-exclusive piece for Ten Miles Square today, the earlier law wasn’t enforced. As a result we know less than we should about police killings and such closely related issues as the risk to police of being themselves killed by lethal force in the line of duty. But by piecing together available data, Fleetwood does reach some tentative conclusions well worth testing with fresh data.
A Washington Monthly analysis of police homicides found wide discrepancies in the rate of police killings among major metropolitan police departments, when measured against population figures.
Contrary to popular belief, New York City—-with a police homicide rate of 1 in 123,529 citizens—-ranks near the top (best, least people killed) of large cities in the U.S. The NYPD killed 68 people from 2007 – 2012 out of a population of 8.4 million.
In Miami-Dade County, in a population of 2.5 million, (less than a third of the people living in NYC) police killed 68 citizens during that same five-year period. This means that citizens of Miami are 3.5 times more likely to killed by their local policeman than their counterparts in New York City.
An amalgamated review of police shooting data from the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and figures from 105 major police departments (obtained by the Wall Street Journal) —- when overlaid with population figures —- revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department killed 111 citizens during this period in a population of 3.8 million, which works out to one police homicide per 21,229 persons. This indicates that the average citizen’s chance of being killed by a policeman is nearly six times greater in Los Angeles than in New York City.
Fleetwood esttimates that the total number of police killings from 2007-2012 probably exceeded three thousand. Probably half or more of those killed did not have firearms. Moreover, while no one wants to expose police officers to undue risk, some facts remain that contradict the impression that it’s open season on the police:
In five years, 2008 to 2012, only one policeman was killed by a firearm in the line of duty in New York City. Police officers are many times more likely to commit suicide than to be killed by a criminal. Eight NYC policemen took their own lives in 2012, alone.
Comparatively, a fisherman is 10 times more likely to be killed on the job than a police officer, according to national figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A logging worker is eight times more likely than a police officer to die on the job, and a garbage man is three times more likely to die while working.
Most policemen killed on the job die in auto accidents, according to FBI statistics.
What can be done to reduce the number of police killings without making the lives of officers more dangerous? Fleetwood points to better training of a sort that used to be available not that long ago:
Twenty years ago Bill Clinton funded the Police Corps, whose mission was to train elite policemen with physical and mental conditioning very much like the training of the Seals and Green Berets. The recruits spent a year role-playing through every possible situation. The Police Corps produced 1,000 of the best trained and most professional policeman in the country.
But it was expensive, and, according to Joe Klein, it was killed by George W. Bush.
If the United States had better trained, more professional police, we certainly would not have so many police homicides, which are tearing apart the social fabric of our country.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 17, 2014
“Be The Smarter Bush Brother, Jeb; Don’t Run!”: Why Would A Guy Running For President Create A Brand Spanking New Bain Capital?
So Jeb is running. Or is he? And he’s really formidable! Or… is he?
I can’t remember in my adult lifetime a presidential candidate quite like Jeb Bush. Every presidential election we have our A-list candidates, your Clintons and your Romneys and your Humphreys and indeed your Bushes. And, every election, we have our quasi-comic-relief candidates, your Al Haigs and Gary Bauers and Bill Richardsons. These archetypes usually reside in separate life forms. But in John Ellis Bush, they exist in the same body.
The A-list case is: He’s a Bush. And… and… OK, he was the governor of a huge and electorally important state. And largely considered to have been, to those who can still remember, a successful and reasonably popular one. And there’s his Latina wife. But really, the A-list case comes down to the fact of his last name. Just as a football coach named Lombardi is going to win automatic positive “free media” until he turns out to be a total loser, a politician named Bush is going to be assumed to be a serious playah until he undeniably proves otherwise. Until then, establishment money is going to cascade to him.
The quasi-comic-relief case consists of a much longer list. First of all: Well, he’s a Bush. That is to say, while the name confers a certain status among insiders and the media, at the same time it reminds too many voters of the brother. This would be an obvious problem in a general election, but I think even in a primary. The Republican red-hots, the pols who play to the base that dominates the primary process, have been ranting against Dubya and his big-spending ways since the day he left office. There’s no reason to think the family tree will bring much good will.
The bigger thing is this. What in the world is a guy who wants to run for president doing, precisely during the months of presidential speculation, starting up an offshore private-equity firm? But Bush has done exactly that, filing the papers for BH Global Aviation with the SEC right around Thanksgiving. The fund raised $61 million in September, largely from foreign investors, and it incorporated in the U.K. and Wales to avoid paying American taxes. Business questions are raised—who starts a PE firm and bails on it in a matter of mere months?—but more salient are the political questions: Why would a candidate, on the eve of a presidential run, go out of his way to create what is in effect his very own brand spanking new Bain Capital?
Then there’s the service gap. He hasn’t been in office since January 2007, and more to the point hasn’t run a campaign since 2002. To find a presidential candidate with as long a gap between campaigns (excluding those like Eisenhower, who’d never run), you have to reach back to James Buchanan. Questions of rust will arise, of course, but more than that, we can fairly wonder whether he has a feel for the politico-culture landscape these days. The conservative movement of today is a rather fiercer creature than the one his brother held at bay with a few Scriptural dog whistles.
Here’s more, in terms of problems he’ll have with the base: He’s on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Come have a look at the “our work” page at the philanthropy’s website: Beyond Coal. Vibrant Oceans. Reproductive Health. Tobacco Control. No, no guns per se, but of course Mike Bloomberg is so identified in the right-wing mind with the torching of the Second Amendment that that one will undoubtedly come up.
Beyond this there’s the pro-immigration position. Rush Limbaugh has been laying into Bush on this one. There is such a thing in presidential primary politics as a single-issue deal-breaker. Ask Rudy Giuliani about how his pro-choice position worked out for him. And Jeb, of course, will also have to deal with his outspoken support for Common Core, which the Republican base loathes.
The polls? He runs a little bit ahead of the competition, with 14 percent in the current RCP average to Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee’s 10 and Paul Ryan’s 9.7 (and Ben Carson’s 8.8)! And with regard to taking on Hillary Clinton, he does no better than any of the rest of them. He’s 5 to 10 points behind her in just about every poll. That just is not the traditional idea of the frontrunner.
Throw it all into the kettle and, what? Well, it’s possible to imagine Bush as the nominee and even as the next president. To return to the Lombardi analogy, one would always imagine that a Lombardi would have it in him to find a way to win. So it is with a Bush. They are two-for-two, after all.
But maybe that’s just a psychological mirage. Maybe it’s just as easy, if not easier, to imagine him lasting four primaries. Here’s your 2016 GOP presidential primary calendar, at least as it currently exists. It starts as usual with Iowa and New Hampshire, which seem respectively more like Huckabee/Cruz and Ryan/Paul states than Bush states. Florida doesn’t come along until March 1. Has anyone ever—or since 1976, when we really started having lots of primaries and caucuses—won a party nomination without winning a primary or caucus until March? I don’t think that can be done.
And it might be easiest of all imagining him “exploring” a candidacy for a while and then deciding the hell with it. As has been oft-observed, he doesn’t seem to want to be president, and by most accounts his wife has never been hot on the idea. It used to be frequently said back in 2000 that Jeb was “the smart brother.” Given the tribulations that await him on the hustings versus the easy millions that dangle before him in the global aviation business, the choice that would prove he’s the smart one seems pretty clear.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 17, 2014
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