Discussion for article #228738
Stone, an infectious disease specialist, said that this reduction in funding hampered the U.S. in its response to the first Ebola patient in Dallas.
Thanks Republitards!
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But it’s Barack Hussein Obola’s fault, because he’s to blame for EVERYTHING!!! Get it RIGHT ya litburds!!! Obola was to blame for Katrina, he was to blame for the 9/11/01 attacks, he was to blame for Saint Reagan being shot and JFK’s assassination! Time to inpeeeech!!!
/s
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Stone, an infectious disease specialist, said that this reduction in funding hampered the U.S. in its response to the first Ebola patient in Dallas.
She lamented that politicians who are poorly informed about infectious disease prevention are in charge of resources for such efforts. She said that funding cuts have led to job losses at the local level, impacting local health officials ability to prepare for an outbreak.
“At this rate, what is happening in Dallas is going to be about as effective as the shameful response to Hurricane Katrina was,” she wrote.
Bam! She’s talking about you, GOP Conservatards!
Brownie Mitchie, your doing a heckuva job!
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Every time the Rs raise the hue & cry about …well, whatever (I have come to think of it as the shitstorm du jour)…our first reaction should be to look at the history of the funding. The Republican schtick since 2000 has been to scream about government ineptness and then ensure that it is by underfunding.
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I’m glad that someone has run the numbers. It is surely a very dismal story, but I don’t think it as simple as blaming the Republicans. It looks like spending hit its peak in 2006, when the Republicans controlled both the WH and the Congress. I don’t know if there were special circumstances that caused this, but it would be important to find out. The Democrats took control of the Congress for the 2007 budget year, and the spending started to come down at that time. Once Obama came into office, the spending stabilized for the “Obama Stimulus Years”, but then started to fall rapidly, as the Republicans took control of the Congress. That slash in funding is worthy of great condemnation, and I agree that the Democrats should use it as a very visible example of what Republican budget making has caused. But, before we take the issue to the public, it would be a good idea to know what Obama proposed during these years? Did Congress cut his appropriations request? Did Obama fight for higher numbers? What about the Democratic Senate vs the Republican House. This is important information to have, too.
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One measure of the complete and utter political incompetence of the Democratic Party is that it was left to a writer for a science publication to make this very simple point. Democrats—Including the Obama Administration—should have been hammering the Republican Party for months if not years on this issue. And when I use the word “hammer” I don’t mean one strongly-worded statement in press conference that nobody listens to and then nothing. I mean relentlessly bringing up in every statement to the press and on the campaign trail by every goddamn Democrat at every level—in other words, what Republicans do.
Of course, this would require a level of message coordination and planning that is simply beyond the understanding and capabilities of the alleged geniuses at the DNC, in Congress, and in the Obama administration.
Most critically, it would also require something resembling a spine.
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For Democrats to “have a spine,” they need support, and your rant is not supporting them. It would also require them to have functioning majorities, which means in the House and at least 60 votes in the Senate. How the hell do you believe those majorities will happen if you continue to bitch and moan about Democrats, as opposed to pointing out how obstructionist the Republicans are, and getting rid of them?
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Spending is up significantly over the last six years. So if Public Health Emergency Funding is down, perhaps the guy in charge should explain why.
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I absolutely agree, but this is just one instance of the Democrats and Obama losing the narrative thread and not fighting for their priorities. I know that that Rahm Emmanuel is not a TPM favorite, but once he left the Administration, they forgot how to do politics.
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Did you look at the graph? Every year of the last Republican administration invested more than every year of this administration. This, despite the $831 Billion spent on the Stimulus, with Democrats in complete control of both houses of Congress. Don’t forget the annual trillion dollar deficits that followed. The billions of dollars spent on priorities set by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid prove that Public Health Emergency funding wasn’t one of them.
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I took @bluestatedon 's comment as a criticism of the uncoordinated messaging and lack of party discipline necessary for the Democrats to convey to the American public that there is a price to pay for voting Republican. The spine part may have been rhetorically over the top, but the sentiment behind it has some validity. For Democrats not to be Republican-lite, we have to encourage the politicians from our party to voice the principles that make us Democrats, and to do it the same way Cato the Elder did, as part of every speech regardless of its content.
I say that as someone who has worked on campaigns since 1964, including ones where the state and national money people pulled out from under us when we weren’t mushy centrist enough.
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No.
The sequester cut $1.55 billion from the budget of the National Institutes of Health, took another $300 million from the Centers for Disease Control, slashed global health programs by $411 million and USAID by $289 million. The budgets drawn up by Rep. Paul Ryan and passed by the House GOP would have deepened those cuts significantly. The CDC’s budget has been cut $600 million since 2010.Source [Republicans are liars and hypocrites][1]
And also
In addition to the two Ebola cases in Texas:
Two weeks ago, El Paso officials said more than 700 infants may have been exposed to a hospital aide with tuberculosis. And in July, the first case of chikungunya, a virus spread by mosquitoes, arrived in Texas.... Local entities have slashed funding for health departments in recent years, said Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. Thirty-six percent of local health departments in Texas laid off staff as a result of budget cuts between 2008 and 2013, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.Source: [Texas Republicans Destroy the Texas Public Health Infrastructure with their Boneheaded Corruption and Extremist Ideology][2]
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The sequester was agreed to by both houses of Congress & the President; the Republicans control only 25% of that. And you ignore those two years when Democrats controlled everything, with $831 billion to spend as they liked.
I have no doubt that Texas had to react to those circumstances.
This is obviously Obama’s fault. I think we all knew how this was going to turn out when he refused to support additional funding for the CDC when he was a state Senator in Illinois*.
*just trying to get a jump on the wingnut (left and right) trolls…
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Hmmmm. What happened in September 05, do you suppose, that might have had an impact on funding?
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And you ignored the “since 2010” fact.
Also? Republicans only controlled “25% of that”?
Entertaining arithmetic.
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Oh for fuck’s sake, I can point out how obstructionist Republicans have been 24/7/365 for the next two years on this here blog and it won’t mean a goddamn thing BECAUSE I’M NOT AN ELECTED OFFICIAL WITH ACCESS TO THE MEDIA ANYTIME I WANT IT.
You do understand the difference between some random guy on the internet and elected Democrats, right?
And your point about not having functioning majorities is beside the point here, because the point I was making specifically was about a gigantic failure of communications and messaging, not policy. I know damn well why public health funding has fallen off—it’s the Republican ideology at work. My point, which you entirely missed, is that Democrats have been criminally negligent at making the Republicans own the the consequences of their ideology of ignorant intransigence. And that criminal negligence goes back to the Reagan era. Only occasionally do Democrats of any stature make the arguments in favor of government, which is what we’re talking about when it comes to public health spending. The Democratic Party has almost entirely acceded to the basic premise of GOP ideology that has driven that collection of loons since at least the mid-1970s—that government is automatically bad—and with few exceptions have reduced themselves to arguing about how much to cut. Very few Democrats seem to have the brains and the balls necessary to figure out a way of telling the American people what the real consequences of the GOP ideology will be in their daily lives.
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Nope, sorry. That’s just wrong. I’ve heard some of POTUS’ stump speeches around the country and that’s exactly what he’s pointed out. I’ve also heard some Dems Senators bringing up the same theme.
And where do you come up with “lack of party discipline”? It’s the GOP that’s suffering from that malady not us.
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You actually have the audacity to believe that the GOP has public health as one of their priorities?? You’re either delusional or an idiot.
Or both.
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