For those who buy the Faux News scare tactics that unvaccinated migrant children are bringing outbreaks of disease across the border, here is an outbreak of Truthiness(TM) from Mother Jones:

GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

—By Tim Murphy

 

Marcus Dipaola/Xinhua/ZumaPress

Last week, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with a dire warning: Some of the child refugees streaming across the southern border into the United States might carry deadly diseases. "Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning," Gingrey wrote. "Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles."

Gingrey's analysis carried an aura of credibility among conservatives, because, as Judicial Watch noted, the congressman is "also [a] medical doctor." But his two-page letter is filled with false charges—there's no evidence that migrants carry Ebola or that they're less likely to be vaccinated—from an inconvenient messenger: The congressman has himself pushed legislation to discourage some kinds of mandatory vaccinations in the United States.

According to the World Health Organization, Ebola virus has only ever affected humans in sub-Saharan Africa. (It has been found in China and the Philippines, but has never caused an illness, let alone a fatality.) Central America is far away from sub-Saharan Africa:

Central America is on the left. Google Maps

Ebola has a 50 percent mortality rate and a remarkably short life-span, so it's safe to assume that if it had somehow made its way across the Atlantic to our own hemisphere, we would've heard it by now; some congressman probably would've sent a letter. But apparently Ebola fearmongering can travel across the Atlantic even if the disease can't: A similar allegation was leveled in Italy last spring, with activists warning that migrants from Guinea were bringing Ebola with them to the peninsula.

(Although false, the claim was at least more plausible: There is an Ebola outbreak in Guinea.)

Gingrey's misdiagnoses aren't confined to Ebola. As the Texas Observer points out, when it comes to measles, children in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are more likely to be vaccinated than children in the United States. None of those countries have recorded an outbreak of measles in 24 years. Kids in Marin County are more at risk.

Gingrey has long-standing ties to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a far-right medical group that opposes all mandatory vaccines. The organization touts access to Gingrey as one of its membership perks. (The AAPS has, incidentally, taken the lead in pushing the idea that migrant children are disease carriers.) In 2007, he wrote an amendment that would allow parents to block their children from receiving HPV vaccines, which are designed to combat cervical cancer.

Now that he's got a full-time job in Washington, Gingrey doesn't spend as much time practicing medicine as he used to. Maybe he could use a refresher.

For more of Mother Jones' reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

Republicans Freak Out At Learning Reagan Decree Protects Lois Lerner

Posted: 07/19/2014 7:30 am EDT Updated: 07/21/2014 9:59 am EDT       

WASHINGTON -- Although legal experts warned at the time that little would come of Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) attempt to prosecute former IRS official Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress, Republicans on Issa's Oversight and Government Reform Committee were infuriated to learn Thursday that a key obstacle is a Reagan administration legal opinion.

 

Issa's committee and then the full House voted to hold Lerner in contempt because she twice asserted her Fifth Amendment right in refusing to testify about her role in the IRS's botched screening of political nonprofits. She led the unit that oversees whether such groups get tax breaks, and was in charge when an inspector general found the IRS used "inappropriate" terms that largely singled out conservative groups.

When Congress finds a person in contempt, the matter is referred to federal prosecutors to be brought before a grand jury.

Legal experts advised against taking the step, and one of them, Gregory Gilchrist, told HuffPost at the time that it was unlikely a prosecutor would take up such a case, even though federal law spells out that pathway.

The reason, he said, is that not only were the facts in the case weak, but courts have historically given prosecutors wide leeway in deciding whether to bring cases.

"I just can't imagine that they would proceed with the case," Gilchrist said. "Unless the U.S. attorney takes a different view of the merits than I do, which I don't expect he will, I don't see any way this ends up in an actual charge."

At Thursday's hearing, several Republicans demanded that Deputy Attorney General James Cole explain why prosecutors had not already moved forward.

 

"This Congress held Lois Lerner in contempt, geez, almost nine weeks ago," Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) said, citing the procedure that's spelled out in law that says the prosecutor's duty "shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury."

But Cole noted that the prosecutor still gets to decide.

"My understanding of the law is that it does not strip the U.S. attorney of the normal discretion that the U.S. attorney has," Cole said. "He proceeds with the case if he believes it is appropriate to do so."
His answer infuriated Republicans, especially Issa, who demanded proof.

"If you think that's discretionary, would you please give that back to us in a legal opinion so that we can change the law to make it clear you're wrong," Issa said.

Issa's Democratic counterpart on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) was happy to find that opinion himself, written by conservative lawyer Theodore Olson when he worked for President Ronald Reagan's Office of Legal Counsel in 1984.

"What it says is, 'We believe Congress may not direct the executive to prosecute a particular individual without leaving any discretion to the executive to determine whether a violation of the law has occurred.' That's what the opinion says -- a 1984 opinion dated May 30," Cummings said. "This was a contempt citation coming from Congress that he was talking about."

The Obama administration wouldn't be the first to rely on that opinion. The White House also cited it under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And although Issa described it as a "new" assertion in the hearing, his own committee heard it in 2012 when Congress voted to hold the attorney general himself in contempt. Indeed, the letter asserting it was written by Cole, and Issa was CC'd.

Watch the hearing here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/19/darrell-issa-contempt_n_5600789.html

Michael McAuliff covers Congress and politics for The Huffington Post.

These were written by one of my readers in 2006, while Bush was still in office. They seem eerily prescient now that we have the Hobby Lobby decision, don't they?  - Dot Calm

From the "News We Just Might See" Department ...

So ... pharmacists can deny women access to their prescription birth control medications on the grounds of said pharmacists' "moral" beliefs?

Then here is a headline that can't be far away:

Vegan pharmacist refuses to fill prescriptions for Armour thyroid (which is produced from desiccated pig thyroid glands) on the grounds of God’s will and his religion; same animal rights activist pharmacist also refuses to fill prescriptions for medications compounded with milk products and vaccines compounded with horse serum.

From Dot Calm's mailbag...

 

Enforced pregnancy = mandatory organ donation

 

As a man, would you allow your entire body to be coopted without your permission for nearly a year--hooked up to life support--so that a stranger you'd never met (and might never meet) could have a chance to live parasitically off your heart, kidneys, digestive system, etc.?

How would you feel, knowing that accepting the risks would change your physical life forever--maybe even kill you? Does this stranger have more right to your body than you do--does his or her need outweigh your right to autonomy over your own body?

There's an old urban legend of a man going into a bar and taking a pretty girl home only to wake up in a bath tub full of ice because "they'd" harvested one of his kidneys to transplant into someone else. If you're comfortable with the notion of someone doing this to you, then good on you--you are a noble creature worthy of praise and acclaim--but, even so, you have NO RIGHT to dictate that what's OK for you is mandatory for the next person. And if you find this scenario objectionable, then LEAVE WOMEN ALONE about birth control and abortion.

An essay from my reader P.R.  - Dot Calm

Pro-Life, or Just Pro-Birth?

My son, A., has always delighted in word play. The first time I referred to someone as "talking out of both sides of his mouth," A. went around holding his upper and lower lips together in the middle and trying to talk. Someone who was said to be "talking through his hat" earned me two weeks of silly talk through the cowboy hat A. held over his face for every conversation.

A. and I worked hard for our local democratic party after vowing that we could not wake up on 3 November with the knowledge that we had not done everything in our power to turn our country away from its descent into oligarchy. It was critical to us, and to A.'s future, that we give our all to halt the steady destruction of the middle class. As we listened, read, and watched the campaign, we both became increasingly conscious of the pertinence of those two phrases: talking through your hat and talking out of both sides of your mouth.

The pro-choice/pro-life controversy swirls around us daily, yet it is a fundamentally flawed discussion when couched in these two terms. George Bush repeatedly declared that we need to make our country a "pro-life" country. The so-called pro-life or right to life movement has focused single-mindedly on the issue and has apparently amassed the power to turn out the vote on this issue alone.

But what is the issue? Who is talking out of both sides of their mouth? Who is just talking through a hat?

The real controversy lies between the advocates for life and the advocates for birth. Once you release your lips in the middle and pull that hat from in front of your face, the issues become clear. Pro-life means the whole life, not just the birth event.

Regardless of when you say life truly begins, our lives do NOT end with our exit from our mothers' wombs. The moment human children are born, they assume the risks and rewards of human endeavor. Each living human being is a life which, at various stages, requires all kinds of support, encouragement, and love. Therefore, a pro-life stance must include favoring the entire lifetime of a human, not just the time that ends at the moment of birth.

Pro-birth advocates are relieved, by their own definition of their cause, of any responsibility for life after it is born. The great majority of pro-birth advocates support the death penalty and the dismantling of social security; they oppose welfare support to children and families. Pro-birth advocates ignore or approve of corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy that often have a negative impact on our society's weakest members. Many pro-birth advocates openly and/or secretly encourage the murder of people with whom they disagree: the murder of women's health care providers who offer abortion options is just one example. In summary, the advocates of birth are blind to the hypocrisy of their position: singling out only the birth event and claiming that to be all and everything there is to life.

Conversely, pro-life advocates are driven by their definition of life to support causes that aim to support the most vulnerable members of our society: social security, pension funding for old age, universal health care, and welfare support for children, the disabled, and the elderly. True pro-life advocates respect those who hold different views and rarely kill or maim those with whom they disagree. In sum, true pro-life advocates look across the human life span and attempt to stitch together the social fabric in such a way that, as individual fortunes wax and wane, the rest of society is there to shoulder the risk.

If you believe that being for life is being for birth, you're talking through your hat. Why? Because talking through your hat means you don't know what you're talking about. If you believe that you favor life but support movements that systematically destroy the social fabric that we all need to survive, then you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. That's because talking out of both sides of your mouth means that you only promote the part of the cause that's convenient for you, ignoring the rest. In other words, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth when you advocate only for the birth event and ignore or systematically destroy what we need for lifelong survival as individuals and as a society.

I'm pro-life, and so is A. And we're proud to say that we are working very hard to make this country a true pro-life society.

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Impeach Obama?
After Bush/Cheney!
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The Radicalization of Paul Krugman: Exposing Class Interests of SadoMonetarists

by TomPFollow

We often look to academic experts for advice.  Many assume that these experts are outside the influence of class interests, bringing their expertise to solve problems in an even handed way.  Not so, though.  Class interests, world views, and ideologies seep into the most "neutral" experts.

Sometimes it is unconscious, but often not at all.  Experts need to live and there is a market for their work.  They sell their labor.  And guess who buys it more often than not?

This brings me to Paul Krugman's column today, a column that in my view is one of his best: Who Wants a Depression?
You should read the entire column.  It's short.  I'll paraphrase and quote some of the main points.

One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine.

Krugman goes on to say that, perhaps, people should not have thought so, but he certainly did believe that "there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues" in economics, at least until the Great Recession happened.  Then Krugman learned that class interests infect the views of many economists and other experts. He points to the statement by Bush's administration regarding the 2001-2002 downturn that “aggressive monetary policy can make a recession shorter and milder."  Surely there was a consensus between left and right economists on this basic point regarding monetary policy.  And there was, until it affected class interests.  

I’ve written a number of times about the phenomenon of “sadomonetarism,” the constant demand that the Federal Reserve and other central banks stop trying to boost employment and raise interest rates instead, regardless of circumstances.  I’ve suggested that the persistence of this phenomenon has a lot to do with ideology, which, in turn, has a lot to do with class interests. And I still think that’s true. But I now think that class interests also operate through a cruder, more direct channel.

Quite simply, easy-money policies, while they may help the economy as a whole, are directly detrimental to people who get a lot of their income from bonds and other interest-paying assets — and this mainly means the very wealthy, in particular the top 0.01 percent.

Krugman points to conservative economists, pundits, and financial interests who have warned for five years that the Fed's low interests rates are debasing the currency and will lead to runaway inflation.  Yet it has not happened.  Normally facts cause false opinions to change, but not here.  The opinion, the warning, the opposition to easy money remains, but the rationale changes.

[Like the Bush tax cuts.  Krugman does not point to this, but remember in 2000-2001?  Bush wanted tax cuts because there would be too big of a surplus when the economy was doing well.  Then there was a recession and Bush wanted the same cuts to boost the economy because it was not doing well.

The facts changed, so the rationale changed and the policy remained the same.  It did not matter what the facts were: Bush wanted tax cuts.  Same with Iraq.  He wanted an invasion and, in the famous words of the Downing Street Memo, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

That is what is happening here.]

So why does this view persist when it is rebutted by facts?  Some is ideological: Krugman points out the conservative aversion to government.  If activist government can ameliorate the pain from the Great Recession, then maybe it can do health care, etc.  But that's not all:

And conservatives don’t want to legitimize the notion that government action can ever have positive effects, because once you start down that path you might end up endorsing things like government-guaranteed health insurance. But there’s also a much more direct reason for those defending the interests of the wealthy to complain about easy money: The wealthy derive an important part of their income from interest on bonds, and low-rate policies have greatly reduced this income.

It's the .01 of 1% that derives large amounts of income from interest on bonds.
 

Back in 2007, before the slump, the average member of the 0.01 percent received $3 million (in 2012 dollars) in interest. By 2011, that had fallen to $1.3 million — a loss equivalent to almost 9 percent of the group’s 2007 income.

To Paul Krugman's main point, and one that I think is very important:

It turns out, however, that using monetary policy to fight depression, while in the interest of the vast majority of Americans, isn’t in the interest of a small, wealthy minority. And, as a result, monetary policy is as bound up in class and ideological conflict as tax policy. The truth is that in a society as unequal and polarized as ours has become, almost everything is political. Get used to it.

His eyes are opening.  Krugman started as a mainstream liberal.  So did Joe Stiglitz.  And they are seeing the limits of liberalism.  Both are moving toward becoming class warriors for working people.  The battle of intellectuals is not enough, but it helps.  Just as Piketty's book does.

The truth is that in a society as unequal and polarized as ours has become, almost everything is political. Get used to it.

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Every time a poor person dies,
a Republican gets his horns.

--Anonymous

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A hardworking mom and dad, two little girls and the "shame" of food stamps

by murphthesurf3Follow

October 2012. At a small local grocery store I frequent.
There was a mom, in a nursing assistant's uniform- and a dad, in a mechanic's overalls with a little patch displaying the name of a garage. They had two little girls who were telling mom and dad about their day at grandma's - their child care.

The mom told the cashier, in hushed  tones, that she had food stamps and that she had been approved by the store manager to use them there. The cashier asked for ID and checked a list. She had been approved. The manager only a accepted SNAP benefits from those who lived locally. He told me that "I have my reasons and they are good ones." Nothing more.

I had let them step into line ahead of me. The girls were antsy and mom and dad were clearly exhausted. I stepped around to help them bag their groceries. The dad and I chatted while the cashier checked her list, and then began scanning the groceries. We bagged.

* I learned that the Dad worked 20-25 hours a week at a garage doing simple maintenance.

* He worked another 15-20 hours a week unloading trucks.

* His wife was a nurse's aid and worked 25-35 hours a week on her regular schedule.

* He told me that he and his wife hate having to take Food Stamps but they have no choice.

Minimum wage in Mo. is $7.35, although many work for less under state exemptions. Based on the going rate for their work, I guessed $8.00 an hour. 65 hours of work a week. $520 a week; $27,040 a year. (Sidenote: Since I met this couple two years ago I have gotten to know them. I shared this story with them and they told me that they actually make a little less than I guessed because of slow seasons at their jobs when their hours fall off. In 2012 they earned approximately $26,000).

-2012 Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of four: $24,550.
-SNAP/Food Stamp Eligibility in Missouri for a family of 4: $29,064
-In Missouri, the average SNAP stipend for a family of four is $514.16 a month.
-The USDA says that the low average cost of food for a family of four is $218 a week for a healthy diet. $872 a month.

When the cashier was done, the mother presented her SNAP card  and the dad dug out $46 dollars in cash. They were $21 short. Mom started to pull back some of the "luxuries" including some ice cream. The girls moaned but their mom told them that they could only get ice cream if they something extra and they didn't.

Well, that did it for me. I told the cashier to add it to my bill.  They said "No" and I said they  should ask the cashier and the manager how stubborn I am. They laughed and thanked me.

I wondered....How secure is their employment? How close to the edge do they walk every day. Right then, they qualified for SNAP but it would not be hard to imagine a rapid reversal of fortune and the loss of jobs. Jobs are scarce in my county; training programs have no open slots; and volunteer programs that qualify per the GOP's proposal are very few.

AND THEN SOMETHING ELSE HIT ME.....I saw them drive out of the parking lot in an old, old car....on the bumper this sticker: ROMNEY/RYAN 2012

How often the poor vote against their own best interests. I suspect that their family, their friends, their church, all endorsed that bumper sticker which makes me even sadder.

 

The GOP is Stuck between what used to be its rock solid foundation of reasonable, rational conservative economic and international policy (with not a lot to say about social policy) and the hard place that those who are labeled the Tea Party have created.

Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in 2012.

I wrote this in October 2012. Truer today. I was moved to republish as a result of this extraordinary post.... Hope mine is in keeping with Puck's.
Everybody I know is on Food Stamps by Puck Goodfellow.

This diary is from Daily Kos. I considered editing it to bring it up to my publication standards, but I decided that its sheer rawness adds to its impact. I'd say read it and enjoy, but it's more of a read  it and weep.  - Dot Calm

Fri Jul 18, 2014 at 10:30 AM PDT
 

Who The Hell Is This Woman and Why Is She So Angry?

by Boudicas ChildFollow for Boudicas Child

This is my first diary.  I decided to create this profile because the diaries of Puck Goodfellow inspire me and I can no longer continue to be this angry and stay silent. To my friends that will sound ridiculous. Silent? Really? Well I have been except for the occasional outburst on my Facebook timeline and my tirades over dinner with my husband. I've been angry, so very angry that I can't sit still sometimes. It feels like the anger I had in my youth when I constantly fought the system of inequities to scratch out a life and survive.

I was one of the unfortunates who had come from a family that struggled. They were Irish Catholic Republicans, which was a real oddity at that time. They believed that hard work would always prevail. The cruel twist of my parent’s fate was that the very people they voted for were the ones that tore down all of their hard work till it was nothing but ash and oppressive life long debt.

My father inherited his boyhood home which put a struggling salesman and his family in the middle of a white upper middle class neighborhood full of lawyers, doctors, and politicians who’s wives didn’t work. Their children’s cloths came from Neiman Marcus and mine came from the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. We were always the outcasts everywhere we went, even in our church because my father had married my mother, a divorcée.

I was even more an outcast than my family because I was a freethinking, questioning, intelligent tomboy who didn't accept “you can’t because you are a girl”. I was tough and fierce and earned my way into being one of the boys when I was a kid. I believed if I proved I was equal I would be. I believed in working hard, in confidence being the key, and I believed in the empowerment of fighting for and proving your worth. I challenged convention and refused to lose my self to marry well. I had the audacity to want to be free. All of these values and beliefs were as American as it gets, but these were the ideals of men and were unacceptable in women.

The church tried to destroy my spirit and pollute my faith with their assertion that not only was I not equal, but I was unfaithful because I asked questions. I was not a good Catholic because I did not blindly accept what I was taught and fall in line. In Catholic school the nuns asked, “Where did I learn such a heathen attitude? “My father!” I answered. My father had taught me to read everything, to appreciate art and literature, and to think for myself. He had taught me that the world isn’t fair and if you wanted to be treated fairly you had to fight for it. Without realizing it my father had taught me to think like a man. The church didn’t like it and they told him so. Then my father sat me down and had the “you need to behave like a lady” speech. The very person who had lifted me up betrayed me.

The more I went out into the world the more I heard I wasn’t equal. No amount of hard work could change the fact that I was a woman. I had no interest in conforming, but I also intended to survive. I compromised. I turned a liability into an asset and played the system with a bat of my eyelashes watching for any chance to pull myself up. However the best chances always had an emotional and spiritual cost attached. I married my first love, but we were young and stupid and when my son was born everything changed. Every choice I made effected him, so I sold out. I left love, married security, and ended up in hell. I became trapped in an abusive relationship and convinced myself I could endure it for my son’s future. I wound up in the very situation I had sworn to avoid and I became beaten down by it. I walked a very dark road for a time.  Eventually I pulled free of that nightmare, but at a very steep cost. I lived in poverty or just one foot out of it with minimum wage part time (couldn’t get full time) jobs for the next 20 years.

Today I have a certain level of prosperity I never believed I could achieve. Maturity calmed the rage and I learned to make healthier, less tragic compromises.  The fear is always there that one misfortune; one turn of luck could take it all away. I have something more to protect now and I’ve tended to spit fire at home and quietly smolder outside so I don’t upset the delicate balance that keeps me just above the minimum wage abyss. I know I can survive anything, but now that I have had something more, survival will never again be enough.

Standing on this delicate edge I see a country declining to third world levels of poverty. I see a government no longer run by the people and an economy manipulated by the super rich which is trying to push more and more of its citizens into that abyss. I find myself less willing to put my own world at risk to stand up for what’s right. I’ve become more likely to fall into the spiritual degradation of judging other’s just below me on the economic ladder to make myself feel safer. I was even against, for while, the idea of raising the minimum wage. There was a fear that it would diminish my achievement if the minimum wage were closer to my wage. “No! I worked so hard and suffered so long to be above minimum wage and now they want to pull me back down”. See what years of wage slavery and poverty does? It warps you. If you finally break free you run from it, leaving everyone else behind hoping to stay away from it’s gravitational pull because once it knows your name, it never forgets. Instead of wanting to pull everyone up you push against them for leverage to keep yourself from falling back in.

However, my passionate sense of social justice has reawakened the fighter. I might not have the bite I used to, but my bark has more power than ever before.

I’m angry because I care about the ones I shared the struggle with. I’m angry because I fear for the future of young women. I’m angry that what little freedom women won for themselves is being attacked. Those fat white f@#$ers are pissed that for a while we had them on the ropes. For a while it looked like equality was within reach and now they think that they can push us back down “into our place” without a fight.

Am I scared to lose it all if I fight? Yes. Of course I am, but the reality is I could lose it all anyway. One thing my struggle has taught me is that achieving something at the cost of your conscience and humanity is a poison that will blacken your spirit and eat your soul till you hate yourself and everyone around you.

There are limits to what I can do. I can’t fight the boys like I used to, but I can be a mighty warrior with a powerful pen.
12:58 PM PT: Wow. The positive response is really appreciated. I want to add that I have nothing against men. Really. I have some amazing guy friends who are champions for equality and a few who, by their own experiences, do understand my struggle. I will never discount another's struggle or diminish it in comparison to my own. Blowing out someone else's flame to make mine look brighter is not how I roll.

Mon Jul 21, 2014 at 10:00 AM PT: Thank you so much to all of the people who commented and shared their stories as well. Its overwhelming. This diary was even listed on the daily recommended email. Holy Fricken' wow! I look forward to posting another diary. I feel very encouraged to continue writing and I'm pretty sure I already know what I'm going to write about based on some of the comments.

I would also like to say that I know there will always be some haters. However, for anyone who really wants to make a difference in women's issues at the political level, we have to let go of hate toward men. Really we do. Hate will accomplish nothing but more hate. If you really read my post you will see that other than my expletive about the establishment, there is no hate. Only righteous anger. Hate must be left outside our fight if it is going to accomplish anything.

Thank you so much for reading. I will not be able to comment further so that I have time to write something new.

Thank you soo very much for your support.

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REPUBLICAN  OBSTRUCTION
IN CONGRESS IS
SHAMEFUL!

 

Don't take a 5-Week Vacation,
YOU CREEPS!
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