“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: The Dangers of Quarantines
Ebola Policies Made in Panic Cause More Damage
With good reason, Americans are deeply confused about the risks of Ebola. It is a frightening disease, made more so by dueling theories about how best to deal with people arriving from West Africa and by wildly different messages – based partly on erroneous information given out by New York City officials – about whether the doctor who returned to New York from treating patients in Guinea and came down with the disease was or was not a danger to others when he moved around the city.
To make matters worse, two ambitious governors – Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York – fed panic by imposing a new policy of mandatory quarantines for all health care workers returning from the Ebola-stricken countries of West Africa through John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty international airports. There is absolutely no public health justification for mandatory quarantines.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: GOP Betrays Social Security-Cutting Dems: Who Could’ve Seen It Coming?
Who could’ve seen it coming?
Progressives could be forgiven for developing something of a Cassandra complex when it comes to the Democratic Party’s economic stances. Here’s the latest case in point:
The Washington Post and Politico have warned us that Republicans, led by Karl Rove’s dark-money outfit, are attacking Democratic candidates for supporting the “bipartisan” cuts to Social Security that were all the rage in Washington for a few years.
Amid what the Post‘s Lori Montgomery calls “charges of hypocrisy,” Dems like Sen. Kay Hagan are being slammed for supporting increases in the retirement age and cuts to future benefits. Adding insult to injury, Republican ads are mocking the once-revered, supposedly “bipartisan” Simpson-Bowles deficit proposal as a “controversial plan” that “raises the retirement age.”
It is both those things, of course. It does raise the retirement age, and it is controversial — controversial enough to be opposed by most Republicans, as well as overwhelming majorities of Democrats and independents, according to polls.
But the conventional wisdom has insisted for years that Democrats who endorse cuts to their party’s signature programs will be handsomely rewarded, with both the gratitude of voters and the fraternal support of their Republican colleagues. Instead they’re being pilloried for taking unpopular and economically unsound positions.
Who, oh who, could have predicted it?
With large numbers of people now shivering in fear over Ebola, it has occurred to many that it would be nice if we had a vaccine against the deadly virus. If we had a vaccine, people in the countries where the disease is prevalent and the health care workers who care for the sick could get the vaccine and quickly bring the disease under control. The threat of Ebola would soon be history.
The interesting part of this story is that we could have had a vaccine, if the government had been willing to put up the money. The New York Times reported last week about a vaccine that was developed nearly a decade ago with funding from the Canadian government. According to the article, the vaccine was 100 percent effective in protecting monkeys exposed to Ebola from contracting the disease. [..]
However, it was never tested in humans. The cost of doing such testing would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. It could be as high $1 billion. To put that in context, this would be roughly $3 per person in the United States, assuming that there was no international sharing of development costs. Over the course of a decade, that would be a bit more than 30 cents per person per year, or 0.003 percent of what the federal government has spent over the last decade.
But the government wasn’t willing to spend the money. Undoubtedly politicians would have expressed outrage over spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a vaccine to prevent a disease that primarily affected people living in Africa.
Jeb Lund: This year’s hot new liberal strategy: just download the GOP hive mind!
If Democratic candidates refuse to stand up for their own party’s ideas, maybe these people don’t deserve to win
he Republican party has, reliably, been going more crazy for nearly a quarter century. So it’s been fairly easy for Democrats to guarantee a chunk of votes simply by standing still or inching rightward, while pointing at the loons and saying, “That’s not me.” Which is fine as a principle, but the only person Not Me will be dragging to the polls on a boring midterm election, is Billy from the Family Circus.
However, the closer Democrats get toward said crazy at which they’re pointing, the less saying “That’s not me” means to anyone – because it clearly doesn’t mean much to the candidates either.
Nothing brought home the depressing similarities quite like the final Florida gubernatorial debate between sitting Republican governor Rick Scott and Democratic candidate (and former governor) Charlie Crist on Tuesday night. Scott lied in his first statement, mischaracterizing something Crist had said – not on the trail, but literally seconds before, on the stage, in front of the audience. Both men made accusations and counter-promises like a couple of student body presidential candidates saying, “My opponent promised to take seniors to Big Kahuna’s Water Park for graduation and failed. I’ll take us to Six Flags.” The whole slapfight had less dignity than the Batley Townswomen’s Guild’s reenactment of Pearl Harbor. [..]
Rationalizations are easier to sell than platforms – which is why the latter are only constructed with great labor and reluctance, and the former are free and abundant. It’s true that the GOP turns out the vote better during midterms. But Republicans can only engineer so much crazy to create distinctions for Democrats to point and laugh at, and those distractions don’t mean much at the polls (or to encourage people to go to them) if liberal candidates refuse to stand up for their own party’s ideas, and instead cozy up to the Republican platform and employ the same dirty campaign tactics. What liberal voter wants to show up to witness that?
Robert Reich: Empathy Deficit Disorder
Commenting on a recent student suicide at an Alaska high school, Alaska’s Republican Congressman Don Young said suicide didn’t exist in Alaska before “government largesse” gave residents an entitlement mentality.
“When people had to work and had to provide and had to keep warm by putting participation in cutting wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have the suicide problem,” he said. Government handouts tell people “you are not worth anything but you are going to get something for nothing.”
Alaska has the highest rate of suicide per capita in America — almost twice the national average, and a leading cause of death in Alaska for young people ages 15 to 24 — but I doubt it’s because Alaskans lead excessively easy lives. [..]
Suicide is a terrible tragedy for those driven to it and for their loved ones. What possessed Congressman Young to turn it into a political football?
Dave Bry: The decline of interest in baseball is a harbinger of waning American power
An America that worships football and ignores baseball is one choosing its worse angels over its better ones
Long considered the country’s “national pastime”, baseball reflects the very best qualities of the American spirit, the higher values upon which our society was (theoretically, at least) founded: freedom, independence, tolerance. Football is a violent, territorial sport that rewards brute strength over everything else and symbolises, at its base level, imperialism, bloodlust, and corporate capitalism’s tendency to flatten any and all eccentricity into bland, cog-in-the-machine homogeny.
Sadly, it’s more than clear at this point that Americans don’t much like baseball anymore, at least compared to how much we like football.
This is a deep – and worsening – flaw in our collective character, as telling a sign of American decline as our terrible math skills, our tragic and preventable high infant mortality rate or the depreciation of our GDP vis-a-vis China.
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