Politics 2014

[Hixter]

Yeah, I caught that, too. That's gotta sting a little.

Not even the slightest bit of sting. I could probably spend all day walking the streets of Texas and not find a single person who cared what out-of-staters think about Texas. I'm sure the same goes for just about every state and its residents.

 

Because I have lived here in Florida for the past 20 years, I feel that I have the right to say that the guy is an absolute douchrocket. Sorry if that offends anyone on here, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em. Not thrilled with Crist, but I'd rather suffer through another term of his than another term from Skeletor.

No offense taken, even though the governor is a family friend, but I find Crist to be thoroughly reprehensible. Anyone who says, with a straight face, that he was a conservative, pro-gun Republican before becoming an anti-gun Democrat is a little too comfortable with lying for me. God knows almost any politician will say almost anything to get elected, but I find such about-faces disgusting. 

[Mr. Heartbreak]

By the way, there are already some Ebola patients recovering from the disease here in the U.S., so it's not exactly a death sentence.

 

http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/emorys-third-ebola-patient-says-shes-recovering-wi/nhj38/

 

I suspect that the nurses who contracted it will also have a good shot at recovery. From what I saw of their photos on the news, they look reasonably young and healthy. I agree with KevinG that the media really is causing a lot of the hysteria surrounding the whole thing.

[KevinG]

And his opinion piece closes with an anti-gun paragraph; that's all I need to know about the author. Like a good gun hater, he triples the casualty count by including suicides.

 

 

So by your statement, removing suicides from the equation, 10K people die a year from guns.  That is still 9,999 more then will die form Ebola. So the level of freak out is justified.  And just because you you don't agree with his stance on guns you are willing to throw out the whole tenant of his argument?  I know you hate it when people infer what you mean, but this was your only response to the article.  

 

There are so many things that are more troubling then Ebola, but they are not as scary and won't get ratings.  

[Hixter]

From what I saw of their photos on the news, they look reasonably young and healthy.

Young and healthy doesn't matter where some diseases are concerned. It does with the flu (90% of deaths are elderly) but not with diseases like AIDS or Ebola.

 

It'll be interesting to see how effective plasma injections from Ebola survivors turn out to be. I think the nurses were injected, but the dead patient in Dallas wasn't, due to an incompatible blood type. Luckily for me, my blood type makes me a universal recipient.

 

So by your statement, removing suicides from the equation, 10K people die a year from guns.  That is still 9,999 more then will die form Ebola. So the level of freak out is justified. 

It's stupid to compare different causes of death. Would the fact that more than twice as many people in this country die in automobile accidents than die of AIDS merit a column imploring people to stop worry about AIDS? I don't think so.

 

There are so many things that are more troubling then Ebola, but they are not as scary and won't get ratings.  

But they all get their time in the news reports eventually. Maybe not day after day in the headlines, but there are reasons that Ebola is getting so much coverage:

 

1) This outbreak is by far the largest in history. It is nearly out of control in western Africa.

 

2) Europe and the U.S. have seen their first cases in history. This isn't cancer or heart disease or the hundreds of other illnesses we're used to seeing.

 

3) Someone with Ebola flew across the country. The CDC even said it was ok.

 

4) The infections of healthcare workers indicates that our protocols are either insufficient or difficult to implement correctly/fully.

 

5) It makes you bleed out of your eyeballs and butt and essentially liquifies your organs. That's practically zombie stuff and everybody knows that zombies are all the rage these days.

[tinnitus photography]

5) It makes you bleed out of your eyeballs and butt and essentially liquifies your organs. That's practically zombie stuff and everybody knows that zombies are all the rage these days.

luckily there's an experimental ointment that is showing promise against this:

 

[Hixter]

Discerning Who fans will notice that my avatar shows Keith Moon with a tube of Clearasil, not Medac. I believe the Australian version of Sell Out was the only LP to feature the Clearasil photo.

[KevinG]

 

It's stupid to compare different causes of death. Would the fact that more than twice as many people in this country die in automobile accidents than die of AIDS merit a column imploring people to stop worry about AIDS? I don't think so.

 

No one is saying that.  It goes to the level of attention and the hyper freak out mode that we are in.  It goes to the scale of how many people it affects and our attention to it.  

 

You are not coming to the conversation with all of the facts.  You pride yourself on watching FoxNews, listening to talk radio, etc.  Even when examples of media freakout is presented, you flatly refuse to watch.  This media frenzy is my point.  Ebola is a deadly dangerous and serious disease.  It will cause thousands of deaths.  We should be concerned, I don't think anyone is saying we shouldn't be concerned.  However it does not warrant the level of attention and hysteria that is shown.  It does not warrant the Right Wing Talk Radio Machine's insistence that this is another example of Obama's failed leadership.  It does not warrant the fear mongering by news outlets.  It does not warrant incessant badgering of network news.  For Americans it is not a big deal.  

 

Take sometime and flip through some news stories, flip on talk radio.  This is what I a problem with.  It is not the concern, but it is the level of focus and how that focus is directed.  

 

 

 

 

5) It makes you bleed out of your eyeballs and butt and essentially liquifies your organs. That's practically zombie stuff and everybody knows that zombies are all the rage these days.

 

And with that comment you just proved my point.  

[tinnitus photography]

Discerning Who fans will notice that my avatar shows Keith Moon with a tube of Clearasil, not Medac. I believe the Australian version of Sell Out was the only LP to feature the Clearasil photo.

Clearasil only works against anthrax; Medec is the efficacious one against ebola. 

[jff]

It's not really heloping that this bitch lied her way onto a cruise ship after handling ebola specimens. 

[Hixter]

Just finished voting like a good citizen. Early voting was my only option since I'll be out of town on Election Day. A note to the Green Party: leave the nicknames off the ballot unless it's something like 'Tex.' Who in their right mind would vote for a senator named 'SpicyBrown'?

[Atticus]

Voted yesterday. Felt great

[tinnitus photography]

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

 

 

THE VOTERS WHO put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor.

But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear disarmament is spending up to $1 trillion modernizing and revitalizing America’s nuclear weapons.

Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted with politics to take a harder line. But Tufts University political scientist Michael J. Glennon has a more pessimistic answer: Obama couldn’t have changed policies much even if he tried.

Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

RELATED: ‘National Security and Double Government’ by Michael J. Glennon

 

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?

GLENNON:It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.

 

IDEAS: What evidence exists for saying America has a double government?

GLENNON:I was curious why a president such as Barack Obama would embrace the very same national security and counterterrorism policies that he campaigned eloquently against. Why would that president continue those same policies in case after case after case? I initially wrote it based on my own experience and personal knowledge and conversations with dozens of individuals in the military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies of our government, as well as, of course, officeholders on Capitol Hill and in the courts. And the documented evidence in the book is substantial—there are 800 footnotes in the book.

 

IDEAS: Why would policy makers hand over the national-security keys to unelected officials?

GLENNON: It hasn’t been a conscious decision....Members of Congress are generalists and need to defer to experts within the national security realm, as elsewhere. They are particularly concerned about being caught out on a limb having made a wrong judgment about national security and tend, therefore, to defer to experts, who tend to exaggerate threats. The courts similarly tend to defer to the expertise of the network that defines national security policy.

The presidency itself is not a top-down institution, as many people in the public believe, headed by a president who gives orders and causes the bureaucracy to click its heels and salute. National security policy actually bubbles up from within the bureaucracy. Many of the more controversial policies, from the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors to the NSA surveillance program, originated within the bureaucracy. John Kerry was not exaggerating when he said that some of those programs are “on autopilot.”

RELATED: Answers sought on CIA role in ‘78 JFK probe

IDEAS: Isn’t this just another way of saying that big bureaucracies are difficult to change?

GLENNON: It’s much more serious than that. These particular bureaucracies don’t set truck widths or determine railroad freight rates. They make nerve-center security decisions that in a democracy can be irreversible, that can close down the marketplace of ideas, and can result in some very dire consequences.

 

IDEAS: Couldn’t Obama’s national-security decisions just result from the difference in vantage point between being a campaigner and being the commander-in-chief, responsible for 320 million lives?

GLENNON: There is an element of what you described. There is not only one explanation or one cause for the amazing continuity of American national security policy. But obviously there is something else going on when policy after policy after policy all continue virtually the same way that they were in the George W. Bush administration.

 

IDEAS: This isn’t how we’re taught to think of the American political system.

GLENNON: I think the American people are deluded, as Bagehot explained about the British population, that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy. They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. Now, there are many counter-examples in which these branches do affect policy, as Bagehot predicted there would be. But the larger picture is still true—policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.

 

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem?

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

[Mr. Heartbreak]

Here's a little calming news about the whole Ebola "crisis."

 

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/10/24/federal-officials-say-dallas-nurse-nina-pham-is-free-of-ebola/20983605/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmaing9%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D551503

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/why-has-nurse-amber-vinson-recovered-ebola-so-quickly-n232431

 

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-81738992/

[LouieB]

Its all Obama's fault. Every bit of it. He created it in a lab 40 years ago knowing he would be President.

 

LouieB

[Mr. Heartbreak]

Its all Obama's fault. Every bit of it. He created it in a lab 40 years ago knowing he would be President.

 

LouieB

That f___king Kenyan Muslim socialist!

[lost highway]

Here's a little calming news about the whole Ebola "crisis."

 

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/10/24/federal-officials-say-dallas-nurse-nina-pham-is-free-of-ebola/20983605/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmaing9%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D551503

 

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/why-has-nurse-amber-vinson-recovered-ebola-so-quickly-n232431

 

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-81738992/

 

 

E- what?  Oh yeah, that thing I was panicking about?  That's so two weeks ago, we're talking about Renee Zellwegger's plastic surgery now.  Duh.  You're so boring all "here's some information,blah, blah".

[uncool2pillow]

Ooh. Let's all talk about gun control.now.

[lost highway]

Is our country ever going to be ready to seriously talk about gun control?

[uncool2pillow]

No. Bans like the U.K. would work, but we won't go there. Anything less than that would have mixed results.

[KevinG]

Is our country ever going to be ready to seriously talk about gun control?

 

Nope, there is a small but vocal minority in this country who will fight any thought of gun control.  This minority for some reason has so much power politicians run scared in fear of pissing them off.  

 

The anti-gun control crowd has effectively blocked an extremely qualified candidate for Surgeon General, because of his views on gun control.  Gee it sure would have been nice to have a public health advocate to talk to the country during this Ebola "crisis."

 

Also to understand why our country is not ready to talk seriously about gun control you don't have to venture further than our conversations on this board.  Generally they have devolved in to pissing and screaming matches.  Hell even when we were discussing Ebola, a pro gun advocate from this board, discounted the view of author because he mentioned suicides in his gun death numbers. 

 

But all the blame cannot be laid at the feat of the NRA crowd.  The gun control crowd has to realize that gun ownership is a fundamental part of this country and there has to be a concerted effort on both sides to find a mutual agreeable solution.

 

Until that day arrives every one has to realize that gun deaths will happen ever day.  Every month or so, some mentally ill individual will go into a public place (possibly a school) and senselessly murder people.  It is a fact and way of life in our country.  

[uncool2pillow]

But all the blame cannot be laid at the feat of the NRA crowd.  The gun control crowd has to realize that gun ownership is a fundamental part of this country and there has to be a concerted effort on both sides to find a mutual agreeable solution.

To elaborate on my earlier post. I don't think anything that's mutually agreeable with come close to being a solution. I don' think piecemeal legislation will have much of an impact on anything.

[Hixter]

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

President Obama's about-face has nothing to do with secret government and everything to do with harsh reality. I doubt he wants to spend billions upgrading our nuclear weapons, but the warheads and missiles are decades old and it would be a dereliction of duty to allow the Chinese and Russians to modernize their arsenals while allowing ours to degrade.

 

People who thought that his more audacious campaign promises were anything more than empty promises made in order to garner votes haven't paid much attention to how political campaigns are run.

[Hixter]

Is our country ever going to be ready to seriously talk about gun control?

It depends on whether the gun control consists of a ban on gun ownership and confiscation of existing weapons. The American people have spoken out against such measures. Other than bans/confiscations, we already have some rather robust controls in place.

[NoJ]

Anyone paying attention to what Putin is saying lately? More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that he is one hell of an evil person.

[Hixter]

Also to understand why our country is not ready to talk seriously about gun control you don't have to venture further than our conversations on this board.  Generally they have devolved in to pissing and screaming matches.

 

I don't recall any pissing or screaming matches.