It’s that day again

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Yes folks, time passes swiftly and once again it is (blare of trumpets) National Candy Corn Day! Which means it’s time for a repeat of this post, originally published in 2008.]

No doubt all of my readers, being unusually well-informed people, were already aware that today is National Candy Corn Day.

But did you know it is estimated that in this country twenty million pounds of the classic treat (invented in the 1880s) are sold every year? I personally might be responsible for approximately a ton of that if I gave in to my worst impulses. However, I keep my addiction in tightly-controlled check.

It is part of my penance to confess here that I really like the dreadful stuff and always have. Once I even went to a Halloween party dressed as a piece of candy corn, and believe me I was already a grownup.

Apparently I am not the only adult who has dressed up as candy corn on Halloween. And no, I didn’t look like this—more’s the pity (although to be technical, isn’t she dressed as two pieces of candy corn, the body and the hat?):

candycorncostume.gif

I am not alone in my shameful liking for the tricolor tooth-destroyer. I heard on Fox News (can’t give a link here because I was unable to find the information online) that candy corn is the Halloween treat most often stolen by parents from their kids’ Halloween stash. I believe this to be undeniably true. It is a guilty, shameful secret for most, but I am glad this is finally seeing the light of day.

Even some fanatically health-consciously vegans seem to crave candy corn although alas, the treat is off-limits to them because of its animal-related ingredients. Animal ingredients? If you doubt my words, just take a look:

Sugar, Corn Syrup, Confectioner’s Glaze, Salt, Honey, Dextrose, Artificial Flavor, Gelatin, Titanium Dioxide Color, Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 3, Blue 1, Sesame Oil.

Gelatin and honey must be the big no-nos. But happily, a thoughtful vegan (are there any other kind?) mother has come to the rescue with a recipe for candy corn so complex and labor-intensive that it undoubtedly reflects a devotion to the stuff even more intense than mine. Try it if you dare—and if you are insane.

There are various gourmet variations on candy corn, and I’ve sampled quite a few in my day. To my mind they can’t compare to good old classic Brach’s. But after watching the following highly informative video, I may just try some Goelitz:

And here’s a burning question I was reminded of by the video: do you eat your candy corn in sections? And, if so, do you consider the top to be the yellow part or the white part? I’ve always seen the little white triangle as the “foot” of the candy corn, but I learned when I designed my costume years ago that most people see it the other way. For those who might be inclined to disagree with me, I offer the following exhibit from the realm of science:

corn-components.jpg

Lanny Davis, concern troll, looks ahead

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece by Lanny Davis purports to give helpful advice to Republicans just in case they win the Senate (he doesn’t think they will, by the way—but you know, just in case).

It’s manipulative and duplicitous, but unconsciously funny as well. It’s for the latter reason that I’m highlighting it. Davis has turned himself into a concern troll. But the funny part is that his trolling is so transparent, and basically involves telling Republicans not to do what Democrats do when they win.

Only of course he doesn’t put it in those terms.

A sample of what I mean:

First, [Republicans] could misinterpret their victory as a mandate to implement a hard-right agenda…

The second mistake could be that the Republicans who now control both houses of Congress will be unable to resist the Tea Party base to roll back Democratic programs on an entirely partisan basis. If they do so, they will be ignoring all the current polling data showing voters opposing such partisan power plays. And they will own the results.

Is that not an excellent description of what happened to Democrats—to a lesser extent in the 2010 midterms, and to a greater extent (we hope) now? Furthermore, aren’t mistakes number one and number two sort of the same thing, stated differently?

Come to think of it, so is Davis’ mistake number three:

Third, once the GOP is the majority party in both houses of Congress, Republicans will find it more difficult to suppress three powerful ideological groups within the party whose positions on key issues are way out of touch with most voters’, according to national polls.

Near the close of his missive, Davis comes up with this whopper:

But unlike Republicans, [Democrats] prefer candidates who can civilly debate fact-based solutions and can effectuate bipartisan compromises to break the gridlock in Washington.

Of course, Davis’ column isn’t really meant for Republicans. No Republican would listen to him (at least, I certainly hope not). It’s meant to rally the Democratic troops to vote next Tuesday rather than giving up, to look on the bright side after what may turn out to be a defeat, and to congratulate them for their wonderful civility and reality-based point of view.

Okay, so here’s my question

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article about a study that says drinking more milk may be bad for you. It may not reduce the risk of bone fracture, and it may even increase the risk of death:

We indeed found higher oxidative stress and inflammation in women and men who consumed several glasses of milk per day compared with those who drank lower amounts,” lead author Karl Michaé«lsson told Yahoo Health. Michaé«lsson and his research team also found no reduction in fracture risk with higher milk consumption. Furthermore, women who drank more than three glasses of milk a day (average 680 ml) had a higher risk of death than women who drank less than one glass of milk a day (average 60 ml).

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I detest milk and always have. But I’ll go a step further and say that I don’t understand how anyone except young children can like it.

So, here’s my question: what adult willingly drinks more than three glasses of milk a day?

And might such people have a higher risk of death because they’re just plain crazy?

Kaci Hickox, America’s sweetheart

The New Neo Posted on by

New Jersey’s loss seems to be Maine’s gain:

Kaci Hickox, the nurse who was quarantined at a New Jersey hospital despite exhibiting no Ebola symptoms after arriving from West Africa, won’t follow the quarantine imposed by Maine officials, her attorney said tonight.

“Going forward she does not intend to abide by the quarantine imposed by Maine officials because she is not a risk to others,” her attorney Steven Hyman said. “She is asymptomatic and under all the protocols cannot be deemed a medical risk of being contagious to anyone.”

Hickox will abide by all the self-monitoring requirements of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state of Maine, Hyman said.

But I wonder how many people in Fort Kent, Maine are going to be eager to attend her “Welcome home, Kaci” party?

Now that Christie has washed his hands (metaphorically speaking) of Hickox—which is beginning to look more and more like a very savvy decision—what will LePage of Maine do? Treat her with kid gloves, apparently, although I wonder whether that will be enough for Ms. Hickox:

Maine requires that health care workers such as Hickox who return to the state from West Africa will remain under a 21-day home quarantine, with their condition actively monitored, Gov. Paul R. LePage said in a statement.

“We will help make sure the health care worker has everything to make this time as comfortable as possible,” he said.

The comments to the linked article are uniformly angry. Typical is this: “She makes it REALLY easy to hate her.” And that’s among the nicer ones.

From some of the statements in this article, however, it sounds like Maine may be ready for a legal battle with Hickox:

Early Tuesday evening, Maine Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew noted at a hastily called news conference that the state has the authority to seek a court order to compel quarantine for individuals deemed a public health risk.

Meanwhile, Connecticut has eight people already under forced quarantine, and we haven’t heard all that much about them:

Under guidelines issued by Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, anyone returning to the state from Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone is subject to mandatory health monitoring and may be placed under involuntary quarantine if the commissioner of the state’s health department determines they “have met the threshold for such action.”

One of them, however, is speaking up:

“I’m outraged and very upset about the impact that this policy and the subsequent policies in other states will have on the actual fight to contain Ebola in West Africa,” Boyko, a Ph.D candidate in the School of Public Health’s epidemiology of microbial diseases department, told the Hartford Courant.

We rubes just don’t understand everything there is to understand about ebola, unlike Boyko. He must know exactly how and when every single case of ebola in Africa was contracted, and that there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of someone catching it from someone in a relatively early stage of the disease, with mild symptoms and a fever. Note also his words “the actual fight to contain ebola in West Africa.” As opposed to what—the fake fight to contain it here, the one that states such as Connecticut are putting up? The one that restricts his freedom for three weeks? That one?

Boyko’s story is in some ways even more interesting than Hickox’s. When he was in Liberia he did not treat ebola patients (he’s neither an M.D. nor a nurse); he worked at a computer. But he had a meeting with Ashoka Mukpo, the NBC freelance cameraman who came down with the disease, the evening before Mukpo was diagnosed. After returning to the states he was not originally told to stay in quarantine [emphasis mine]:

Boyko said his plan was to lay low the first week back, not return to school, and rest. He didn’t do much ”” once he drove around in a car with his girlfriend to look at the foliage ”” but a few days later on Oct. 15 he developed a low fever and diarrhea.

He called doctors to tell them about his symptoms and said he wanted to wait until the next day before going into the hospital. He was convinced he couldn’t have Ebola. The disease is not transmitted through the air ”” it is only transmitted through bodily fluids ”” and it is only transmitted by people who are symptomatic. Boyko was certain his brief visit with Mukpo, who had no symptoms, could not have made him ill.

But the Yale doctors decided he should come in immediately. Boyko called his mother in St. Louis to tell her he was going to the hospital, but that he was sure he didn’t have Ebola.

That has turned out to almost certainly be correct. But what was all this initial certainty about, in the face of exposure to ebola, and symptoms? That was really playing with fire.

Hickox and Boyko are giving those who volunteer for ebola duty in Africa a bad name. I sincerely hope they are not typical of the genre. But the way they’re talking certainly doesn’t make me think these two could be trusted with a voluntary quarantine or even voluntary self-monitoring. Their arrogance, and their resentment of the very human desire to protect our communities from a scourge such as ebola, come through loud and clear.

[NOTE: It’s interesting that all this quarantine-of-health-workers business seems so far to be concentrated in the Northeast—New York and New Jersey (those make sense as places of entry), Connecticut and Maine.]

Netanyahu: chickenshit

The New Neo Posted on by

This administration has such class:

The other day I [journalist Jeffrey Goldberg] was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname…

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.”

The article goes on to discuss the administration’s further criticism of Netanyahu in a way that can be summarized as: all he cares about is politics. What an extraordinary accusation for this group to make!

I am also in awe of their judgment and knowledge of history:

Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister born in Israel after the establishment of the state. Netanyahu joined the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War in 1967, and became a team leader in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit. He took part in many missions, including Operation Inferno (1968), Operation Gift (1968) and Operation Isotope (1972), during which he was shot in the shoulder. He fought on the front lines in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, taking part in special forces raids along the Suez Canal, and then leading a commando assault deep into Syrian territory. He achieved the rank of captain before being discharged.

If you’re not familiar with the Operation Isotope, it involved the rescue of the hijacked Sabena Flight 571:

Soon after the hijacking, the hijackers separated Jewish hostages from non-Jews and sent them to the back of the aircraft. The hijackers demanded the release of 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists who were imprisoned in Israel, and threatened to blow up the airplane with its passengers. Seeing the terrorists crying and hugging each other goodbye, Reginald Levy managed to send a message and ask for help to be delivered as soon as possible. The security minister Moshe Dayan conducted negotiations with the terrorists while also making preparations for a rescue operation, code-named “Operation Isotope.”

On 9 May 1972 at 4:00 p.m. the rescue operation began: a team of 16 Sayeret Matkal commandos, led by Ehud Barak and including Benjamin Netanyahu, both future Israeli Prime Ministers, approached the airplane. The commandos were disguised as airplane technicians in white overalls, and were able to convince the terrorists that the aircraft needed repair. The commandos stormed the aircraft and took control of the plane in ten minutes, killing both male hijackers and capturing the two women. All the passengers were rescued. Three of the passengers were wounded, one of whom eventually died from her wounds. Netanyahu was wounded during the rescue, presumably by friendly fire. The two female surviving terrorists were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment, but were freed as part of a prisoner exchange after the 1982 Lebanon War.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: some chicken, some shit.

Oh, and by the way, extreme bravery (and airplane hostage rescue) runs in the Netanyahu family. His brother, Yonatan, was the only Israeli soldier killed in the famous Operation Entebbe:

Netanyahu joined the Israeli Defence Forces in 1964. He volunteered to serve in the Paratroopers Brigade, and excelled in the Officer Training Course. He was eventually given command of a paratroopers company. On June 5, 1967, during the Six Day War, his battalion fought the battle of Um Katef in Sinai, then reinforced the Golan Heights. During the battle, Yonatan received a wound to his elbow while helping rescue a fellow soldier who lay wounded deep behind enemy lines.

After the Six Day War, Netanyahu went to the United States to study at Harvard University, but returned a year later because of the War of Attrition. Instead, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, returning to active military service after half a year.

In the early 1970s he joined Sayeret Matkal (Israeli special forces), and in the summer of 1972 was appointed as the unit’s deputy commander. During that year, he commanded a raid (Operation Crate 3) in which senior Syrian officers were captured and exchanged in return for captive Israeli pilots. The following year he participated in Operation Spring of Youth, in which the alleged terrorists and leadership of Black September were selectively killed by Sayeret Matkal, Shayetet-13 and the Mossad.

During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, Netanyahu commanded a Sayeret Matkal force in the Golan Heights that killed more than 40 Syrian commandos in a battle which thwarted the Syrian commandos’ raid in the Golan’s heartland. During the same war, he also rescued Lieutenant Colonel Yossi Ben Hanan from Tel Shams, while Ben Hanan was lying wounded behind Syrian lines.

Following the war, Netanyahu was awarded Medal of Distinguished Service, Israel’s third highest military decoration, for his wartime conduct. Netanyahu then volunteered to serve as an armor commander, due to the heavy casualties inflicted on the Israeli Armored Corps during the war, with a disproportionate number of these in the officer ranks. Netanyahu excelled in Tank Officers course, and was given command of the Barak Armored Brigade, which had been shattered during the war. Netanyahu turned his brigade into the leading military unit in the Golan Heights.

In June 1975, Netanyahu left the Armored Corps and returned to Sayeret Matkal as unit commander. He was killed in action on July 4, 1976, while commanding an assault unit in Operation Entebbe, his first big operation since returning to the unit. Netanyahu was the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid (along with three hostages, all of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members, and dozens of Ugandan soldiers). Netanyahu was shot outside the building being stormed, and would soon die in the arms of Efraim Sneh, commander of the mission’s medical unit. The operation itself was considered a success by Israel, and is known as Mivtsa Yonatan (Operation Yonatan) in honor of Netanyahu.

Netanyahu was buried in Jerusalem’s Military Cemetery at Mount Herzl on July 6 following a military funeral attended by enormous crowds and top-ranking officials. Shimon Peres, then Defense Minister, said during the eulogy that “a bullet had torn the young heart of one of Israel’s finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of its most promising commanders ”“ the magnificent Yonatan Netanyahu.”

Of course, that was back when the US had Israel’s back.

[NOTE: I speculate who the “senior official” might be. My leading guess is John Kerry.]

The great ebola policy divide

The New Neo Posted on by

It breaks down this way—

The Obama administration and liberals: don’t panic. Trust us, less is more. No travel restrictions, no forced quarantine, the CDC knows best. We are the educated scientists and smart people, you are the dummy hysterics are operating on emotion.

Republicans and the right: the CDC and government have shown themselves to be unworthy of trust, the science is unsettled on this. So why not err on the side of caution. We need to protect our country and our people.

The lines have been drawn, the talking points issued. But are the troops (that’s us, folks) falling into line?

Here’s an article on a recent CNN poll: “CNN poll: Americans confident in Ebola response.” And then below it is a graphic, shouting “More than 7 in 10 Americans say federal government can stop an ebola epidemic.”

Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it? Americans must be happy with what the government is doing.

But that’s not actually what the poll indicates. It is question 36 that’s being referred to: “How confident are you that the federal government can prevent a nationwide epidemic of the ebola virus?” “Prevent” is not the same as “stop.” The latter assumes that an epidemic is already in the works and is halted in its tracks, which is harder to do than preventing one in the first place (“an ounce of prevention is worth…”). And there can be local spreads of the disease without a national epidemic occurring, of course, and the question specifically mentions a national epidemic.

In addition, it asks about “can stop” rather than “will stop.” There’s a difference between theoretical ability and actual execution. Last but not least, we have the usual form of such polls, where “very confident” (33%) and “somewhat confident” (38%) are lumped together as “confident.”

But there can be a very wide gulf between the two. For example, I might have answered “somewhat confident” to that question, because I certainly think it’s possible that a nationwide epidemic could be prevented (or perhaps avoided in the first place, although that question’s not an option). But I am strongly critical of the government and the CDC’s response.

If you read the entire poll you’ll see that a great many people consider ebola a big issue in the election, and many people think there should be more restrictive policies in place for the entry of nationals from the ebola countries as well as returning US citizens.

On a slightly different but related topic: the good news is that Amber Vinson has been released. I’m happy for her, her family, her friends, and her fiance. But I noticed in the comments section of the linked article that her swift recovery, and that of the other Americans who came down with the illness here, have fed a certain confidence among some people that this would be the norm here, and that the fear about the disease is overblown.

I plan to write at greater length on this topic in the future, because it’s both complex and important. But I’ll deal with it briefly now. There is growing evidence that early diagnosis and intervention can be extremely helpful. Each of the people who survived here got some sort of unusual medication and/or transfusion as well, and in reading the details of the recoveries of the ones who had started out sicker than Pham and Vinson in the first place, I was struck by the fact that they described those moments of receiving the medication or transfusion as a distinct turning point in their illness.

Plus, every single one of the survivors had known prior risk factors. They all had been taking care of ebola patients, and are health professionals. Therefore they knew enough to react at the very first symptoms. We can quibble about how early they reacted (how high the temperature was, for example). But they knew enough to suspect the disease at a very early stage and alert authorities, and they were hustled off to the best of care.

But if ebola were to make a leap into the general population (and there is most definitely a chance of that) and infect a person with no reason to suspect that he/she has been exposed to the disease, then all bets are off for early diagnosis.

To make the point more clear: Nina Pham and Amber Vinson got treatment when their fevers were about 100 degrees and they had no other symptoms. Unless everyone with a fever of 100 degrees starts coming into emergency rooms for an ebola test, the risk of the spread of ebola is significant. And of course, once it did spread into the general population and proliferated, the medical system would quickly become overwhelmed and the sort of treatment Pham and Vinson received would be impossible for most people. That’s what happened in Africa, and also what happened during the 1918-1919 flu epidemic.

I hope we’ll be able to avert these worst case scenarios, but they are very real. And it’s not the least bit hysterical to point them out. It’s realistic.

Election Day in one week

The New Neo Posted on by

Election Days make me nervous.

Back in the twentieth century (doesn’t that sound archaic?), that wasn’t the case. I always voted, and I always preferred one candidate to another, but it didn’t affect me very deeply. It seemed that even the candidate I didn’t like wasn’t going to do all that much damage. Despite their differences, everyone running seemed to have our interests at heart, and although they might disagree on how best to meet those interests, there were some basic assumptions on which we all agreed, including the need to protect this country and the free world.

I may or may not have been correct about this. But it was a strong perception, and I was hardly alone in it; it was the prevailing feeling.

No more.

Now I get much more agitated about elections. And that’s not because I idealize either side; I’ve got plenty of beefs with the Republican Party and particularly its leaders. But (as I’ve explained many times) they are so much better than the alternative that it seems important to give them a chance, or at least to throw somewhat of a monkey wrench into the left’s inexorable march to permanent control.

So, I get nervous—even in elections like this one, where it’s looking pretty good for Republicans. Will Scott Walker win? That seems important, particularly in terms of 2016 possibilities. What about the Georgia Senate race? Kansas? North Carolina? Those should all be gimmes, but they’re not.

Note that in some of them—North Carolina, for example—there is a Libertarian candidate who is acting as a possible spoiler (the candidate there draws as much as 7% of the voters in polls). Libertarians are of course free to run for office, and people are free to vote for them. To me it seems clear, though, that they tend to hurt the Republican candidates more than the Democrats, and are often responsible at least in part for the victory of the latter.

However, I’m extremely familiar with the arguments of libertarians who want to vote for their candidates even if it’s a losing cause this time, and even it helps the side they oppose more. I’m also familiar with arguments that say that Libertarians draw from each side equally; I just don’t find them convincing. But it’s probably true that many (not all) of the people on the right who vote for the “L” candidate would probably not vote at all if no one were running on the Libertarian ticket.

So, what happens if the Republicans do as well next week as I hope? Then they will need to show us it was worth voting for them. But we need to be realistic: with Obama as president, and lacking enough votes to override a veto, their hands are somewhat tied. They should pass a lot of bills to show what they would like to do, and challenge him to veto them. They should use the tools that Democrats handed them (no filibuster for judicial appointments) to tie up his judicial nominations. They need to hold Obama’s feet to the fire. And somehow (I don’t know how, if Obama chooses to do it through executive action, as has been threatened), they need to block amnesty, and strengthen the border.

Let’s make quarantine so wonderful…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they’ll be looking forward to it, not dreading it.

This is the sort of thing I’ve been suggesting:

What’s needed is a quarantine so luxurious that health care workers will look forward to their 21 day quarantine, or at least not dread it. What if the federal government took over an isolated resort, say on the Gulf Coast. Stocked it with finest foods and wines in the land, and the best films and recreation and wireless Internet access and volunteer musical acts ”” a French widow in every room, as a friend of mine used to say, equivalent to a very expensive vacation, available for free to any returning volunteer. The only catch is they couldn’t leave for 21 days. (They could bring their spouses and partners, if they wanted ”“but then the spouses couldn’t leave either.)

As for the money involved, seems to me it would be cheaper than all the contact tracing and disinfecting that would otherwise need to be undertaken. There is a problem, though—as this commenter points out, the quarantined would have to be quarantined from each other for the duration, as well. Then there’s the waste disposal problem.

And what of the staff? Would they wear full hazmat gear? Or would it all be done like this?:

Earliest satellite photos reveal a few things

The New Neo Posted on by

Found—some old satellite photos with grainy images:

Scientists have uncovered a cache of satellite images of Earth from the 1960s that had been forgotten in storage for nearly 50 years and that push back the first satellite images of our planet a full 17 years.

They reveal some surprises:

What they found astonished them: The images revealed new records for both the smallest maximum [Antarctic] sea ice ever recorded and the largest. The latter record was just broken this year. The two records were just two years apart, but the difference in sea ice extent was more than 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), an area twice the size of Mexico.

“We’re talking a 20 percent difference,” says Gallaher. “That’s a sizeable change.”

So many things we don’t understand. Like this:

The Nimbus satellites also caught images of the Arctic before warming from climate change accelerated. Gallaher and Campbell were surprised to see some mysterious holes in the ice in the old images.

Holes in the Arctic ice are a common phenomenon today, as the Arctic warms. But in the colder 1960s, a large patch of thin or melted ice was unexpected””and nothing like it was seen again until the 21st century.

“It’s an intriguing thing, but we haven’t figured out what it is, or verified what it is,” says Campbell. “It looks like open water, but it could be very thin new ice that formed in a break in the old ice.”

Intriguing, indeed.

This comment explains Massachusetts politics today—and Romney

The New Neo Posted on by

Today we have the astounding news that the uber-liberal Boston Globe has endorsed Republican Charlie Baker over Democrat Martha Coakley for governor of Massachusetts.

You may recall that Coakley is the person Scott Brown defeated for the Senate. She is an exceptionally tone-deaf and uncharismatic politician, and that’s been true in this campaign as well. However, there’s more going on here; the Globe doesn’t have that much to lose by endorsing a Republican. Every now and then the state of Massachusetts gets a hankering for a tad more efficiency, but just a tad. When that feeling comes over the electorate, it goes for a Republican. But it really doesn’t matter all that much, either on a national scale or a local one, because of the peculiar nature of Massachusetts politics.

During the 2012 campaign I tried to describe the political situation in Massachusetts in post after long-winded post. Here a commenter at Althouse does it in two succinct paragraphs, on a thread about why Charlie Baker may win:

The reason they don’t fear a Republican governor is because the Dems have enough state congressional seats to override any veto. They can push through any law that they want. Who cares if the governor is a Democrat or Republican? It’s a position of prestige, maybe, but little power.

Please remember that state-wide universal health coverage wasn’t Mitt’s idea. The legislature was pushing that through come hook or crook. Mitt tried his best to make it as market-friendly as possible, but he got rough-shodly run over, and now most people think Obamacare was based on Mitt’s ideas rather than the Democrat hacks that foisted it upon the polity.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not going into this again because I think Romney should run again. I don’t. I think someone new is needed in 2016. But it still annoys me that so many people swallowed a lot of garbage about so-called “Romneycare” hook, line, and sinker, never bothering to learn the complexities of the actual situation.

Such as:

The Massachusetts law is different in important ways from the plan that Romney pushed as governor. Few voters know, for example, that Romney strongly opposed the employer mandate and wanted an escape from the individual mandate — allowing people to instead be able to post a bond if they were uninsured and had big medical bills. When Romney signed the law, he believed it contained the escape hatch, but legislators removed it before final passage.

Romney vetoed eight provisions of the Massachusetts bill, and every one of his vetoes was overridden by the legislature. Should Romney have known this was likely? Yes…

And then along came Romney’s successor, Deval Patrick:

In the end, it didn’t matter what Romney thought about the employer mandate. The Democrats controlled 85 percent of the legislature. After the bill-signing ceremony was over, they went back to the State House and overrode each of Romney’s eight vetoes.

More crucially, as Jennifer Heldt Powell and Josh Archambault describe in a new book, The Great Experiment, it was Democrats and progressive activists who ended up implementing the Massachusetts health law, especially after Romney left office in January 2007. They took the law in a much different direction than Romney would have liked. And while Democrats have sought to credit (or blame) Romney for the passage of Obamacare, it is more accurate to say that the federal Affordable Care Act is modeled after the Democratically implemented version of the Massachusetts law, as opposed to the one that Romney had sought…

Everyone needs to understand the situation faced by a Romney, or a Charlie Baker, or any Republican governor, in a state such as Massachusetts, where the power for Republicans to change things is limited.

You might ask why Republicans run in Massachusetts, then, if it’s that bad. I think those Republicans who do want to change things are aware of how hard it will be, but want to do what they can and are not afraid of fighting overwhelming odds. Romney, for example, felt that the state was going under financially (which it was at the time), and he felt that he could at least help a little, even with the obstacles the Democrats would put up. And he did help, a little. But it required the sort of compromise that many conservatives don’t tolerate in a politician, and afterwards much of the good he had accomplished was undermined and undone by the left.

I hope Baker wins, and I wish him much luck. And I wish that people would look on subsequent national runs of any Republican who has had face the necessity of working with a strongly veto-proof Democratic legislature as not being indicative of what that person would do if he/she had more legislative support.

Squeaky wheel Kaci Hickox gets the grease: out of quarantine

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, that didn’t last long:

The New Jersey Department of Health issued a statement this morning that Hickox has been “symptom free for the last 24 hours,” and that it decided to discharge her after consulting with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“After consulting with her, she has requested transport to Maine, and that transport will be arranged via a private carrier not via mass transit or commercial aircraft,” the department said.

Senior officials in the Christie administration said she will be driven in a car and escorted by officials from the state and Doctors Without Borders, the agency the Hickox worked for in West Africa.

“Health officials in Maine have been notified of her arrangements and will make a determination under their own laws on her treatment when she arrives,” the New Jersey statement said.

So New Jersey has passed the buck to Maine. I wonder what pressure was brought to bear on Christie? Of one thing I’m pretty sure: this is not a popular decision, if blogs are any indication. I’m not just talking about blogs on the right, either; even the few I’ve looked at on the left seem to have more than half the commenters siding against the nurse and with Christie, at least prior to today’s announcement.

Last night I noticed a rather strange statement from Hickox. If this is a bona fide quote, it’s scary that she’s working as a nurse:

“To quarantine everyone, in case, you know, when you cannot predict who may develop Ebola or not, and to make me stay for 21 days, to not be with my family, to put me through this emotional and physical stress, is completely unacceptable,” Hickox told Crowley. She added, “I feel like my basic human rights have been violated.”

Now, I’m all for treating people decently when they’re in quarantine, especially those who’ve just come back from working in Africa. That takes guts and sacrifice. So give them steak, nice movies on their widescreen TVs, hot fudge sundaes, whatever. If the authorities really did treat her badly, they need to improve things. For example, the article’s got a photo of a port-a-potty they provided her. That seems pretty yucky, but I wonder whether it has something to do with disposing of her wastes as biohazards rather than letting them go into the general sewage system? I’d like to hear their side, but so far I haven’t seen a word from them.

However, more importantly, how could she have missed learning what a quarantine actually is? Once more, with feeing, “To quarantine everyone, in case, you know, when you cannot predict who may develop Ebola or not…”

Does Ms. Hickox believe you must know that a person will definitely develop an illness in order to justify quarantining that person? I’m really, really curious, because of course one purpose of a quarantine is to separate a person who has been exposed to a dangerous illness from contact with the public until the time is up when they might get that illness. Preventive quarantines must cast a wide net compared to those who will actually come down with the disease. Of course, the term “quarantine” is sometimes used to refer to a person who is already ill, but that’s erroneous. The correct term for that is “isolation.”

My best guess is that Ms. Hickox, who is young, actually has no idea what quarantine is, it’s been so long since these things have been instituted, and she is actually confusing it with isolation, with which she would be familiar. Ah, but she’s the medical expert, and we’re not, right? The term “quarantine,” by the way, is from the Italian, and originated with the forty-day quarantine period instituted for plague.

I’ve noticed that, since Cuomo and Christie made their quarantine announcement, those who disagree and feel that quarantine is not necessary fall back on the old “we are the public health authorities, and we know that no one can catch ebola from someone who doesn’t have symptoms” routine. I’d love to see some scientific backup for an absolute statement like that, because forgive me if I don’t trust the CDC anymore on this sort of thing.

Seems to me that it can’t be a binary, either/or situation, but a continuum. Early on, the chance of contagion is likely to be very low but not zero, and then it increases exponentially. Since somehow the disease managed to get out of control in Africa despite the efforts of medical pepole, I really don’t think we know enough about this particular strain to make statements like the pronouncements I’ve been hearing. The risk with someone in Hickox’s situation may not be high, person by person, but the dangerous possibilities are, and it would be better to err on the side of caution in order to protect this country from what could turn into a conflagration. Make quarantine more pleasant, and most reasonable people (not Ms. Hickox) will consider it part of the deal they take on when they go to Africa to fight it and then return home.

I’ve also gotten sick and tired of people saying we can’t do this here and we can’t do that here because we must eradicate ebola in Africa. This is not an either/or proposition. We need to fight it in Africa and prevent its spread here—what is so hard to understand about that? Oh, I think most people do understand it, but the authorities put it out anyway because they think it sounds good, even though it doesn’t.

One thing I keep wondering is how this epidemic get so of hand in Africa, when previous ones had not? I’ve read that it might be because it spread to cities this time instead of remaining in more isolated rural villages. But why has it spread to cities? Was it just a matter of time? It’s also the first ebola epidemic in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea; previous outbreaks were mainly in the Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Zaire, a very different part of Africa. That seems significant, but of what I don’t know.

Here’s a National Geographic piece I found that I thought might answer some of my questions but really doesn’t, although it’s interesting in other ways:

The virus probably will not go airborne, but it could conceivably increase its Darwinian fitness in other ways, becoming more subtle and elusive.

The genetic study by Gire and his colleagues (five of whom were dead of Ebola by the time their study appeared) found 341 mutations as of late August, some of which are significant enough to change the bug’s functional identity. The higher the case count in West Africa goes, the more chances for further mutations, and therefore the greater possibility that the virus might adapt somehow to become more transmissible-perhaps by becoming less pathogenic, sickening or killing its victims more slowly and thereby leaving them more time to infect others.

That’s why, the Gire group wrote, we need to stop this thing everywhere as soon as possible.

Note that word “everywhere.”

Our health care authorities are guilty of a combination of stupidity and hubris. They indicate that they believe they know everything there is to know about the science of the way this disease is transmitted, and are arrogant about it. But they don’t even know what they don’t know (such as, for example, that a temperature as high as 101.5 should not be the threshold for an ebola diagnosis, as we’ve learned to our sorrow recently). And yet they—with the full cooperation and urging of the Obama administration and many on the left—continue to say, “Trust us; we know best.” Meanwhile, they’ve acted in ways that make it clear there’s no reason to trust them at all.