Republicans

[Seabass]

The Atlantic: The CDC Is About to Fall Off a Funding Cliff—It's already planning to pull back on work that protects the world from pandemics.

Last October, I wrote that a large pot of money, dedicated to protecting the world from infectious diseases, was about to run dry.

In December 2014, Congress appropriated $5.4 billion to fight the deal with the historic Ebola epidemic that was raging in West Africa. Most of that money went to quashing the epidemic directly, but around $1 billion was allocated to help developing countries improve their ability to detect and respond to infectious diseases. The logic is sound: It is far more efficient to invest money in helping countries contain diseases at the source, than to risk small outbreaks flaring up into large international disasters.

But the $1 billion pot, which was mostly divided between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID, runs out in 2019—a fiscal cliff with disaster at its foot. As I wrote:

That money has been used well, to train epidemiologists, buy equipment, upgrade labs, and stockpile drugs. If it disappears, progress will halt, and potentially reverse. The CDC, for example, would have to pull back 80 percent of its staff in 35 countries, breaking ties with local ministries of health.

This is now coming to pass. Two weeks ago, Betsy McKay at The Wall Street Journal reported that the CDC, with no firm promise of future funding, is indeed preparing to downsize its work in 39 countries. Those include the Democratic Republic of Congo, which recently experienced its eighth Ebola outbreak, and China, which is currently undergoing its worst outbreak of H7N9 bird flu. Lena Sun of The Washington Post confirmed this report on Thursday, writing that “notice is being given now to CDC country directors” as the first part of a transition.

The CDC is not the only affected agency. USAID also received $300 million from the same dwindling pot of money, which it used to expand its work in the Middle East and Asia. Those programs may also have to shut down in 2019.

These changes would make the world—and the United States—more vulnerable to a pandemic. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” says Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who now heads an initiative called Resolve to Save Lives. “The surveillance systems will die, so we won’t know if something happens. The lab networks won’t be built, so if something happens, we won’t know what it is. We can’t be safe if the world isn’t safe. You can’t pull up the drawbridge and expect viruses not to travel.”

continued...

[JimC]

Make America Plague-ridden Again...

[Seabass]

Make America Plague-ridden Again...

The Republican party is the plague that worries me most...

[Seabass]

[L'Emmerdeur]

Yeah, he deleted that tweet.

'Paul Ryan Deletes Tweet Connecting Woman’s Tiny Raise to Tax Cut'

House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday afternoon that had drawn immediate and widespread ridicule for advertising a woman’s $1.50-a-week raise as an impressive result of the GOP tax cut.

Though the tweet has now vanished into the ether, screenshots have been lovingly preserved.

...

It’s true that the GOP’s tax plan, which the party labeled “reform,” gives the vast majority of Americans some kind of benefit, often more substantial than the 21 cents a day Ryan was crowing about. But the massive cuts, which cost $1.5 trillion for a party that once pretended to care about deficit spending, are enormously skewed to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations, who will see their tax rates plummet from 35 percent to 21 percent. As Twitter let Ryan know, the effort to portray his plutocratic pet project as an act of mercy for the working class is a farce.

[Hermit]

House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday afternoon that had drawn immediate and widespread ridicule for advertising a woman’s $1.50-a-week raise as an impressive result of the GOP tax cut.

Though the tweet has now vanished into the ether, screenshots have been lovingly preserved.

Won't be long before the story starts making the rounds that the screenshots are forgeries cooked up by the main stream fake media.

Not that it matters. The deplorables will simply ignore the faux pas. They are really good at ignoring stuff that doesn't suit their prejudices and delusions.

[Tero]

They did it again!
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/ ... ican-rule/

Democrats left paying bills 2020 and getting unpopular because they have to raise taxes.

[Scot Dutchy]

They did it again!
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/ ... ican-rule/

Democrats left paying bills 2020 and getting unpopular because they have to raise taxes.

That is all Trump does just pushing things into the future.

[Joe]

They did it again!
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/ ... ican-rule/

Democrats left paying bills 2020 and getting unpopular because they have to raise taxes.

That is all Trump does just pushing things into the future.

This has been their modus operandi since Reagan. As the columnist George Will put it in 1987:

For years the Republicans complained about the Democrats. They complained about Harry Hopkins who said to Franklin Roosevelt, "We will tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect." Then Republicans found something worse! It is borrow, borrow, spend, spend, elect, elect. What makes that worse is: That with tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect, at least the cost of the generation's consumption of goods and services from government is borne by that generation. Under borrow, borrow, spend, spend, elect, elect, a good part of the cost of the consumption of government goods and services is shoved into the indefinite future onto a rising generation. Thus big government is made cheap and the last political restraints on the growth of government are removed. It is a profoundly dangerous development.

Someday, the bill will come due.

[Tero]

And one is due the 8th:
Trump doesn’t seem to have much of a sense for what an actual compromise would have to look like to win over Democrats and the requisite number of Republicans. He seems to think there’s a deal that wins over almost every Republican and a small number of Democrats, and the people around Trump ― in Congress and in the White House ― aren’t telling him that such a bill doesn’t exist.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/republican-m ... 14039.html

Trump spends all that time watching TV. Yet he does not know what is going on. He only watches TV for praise to himself.

[Joe]

Another brick in the wall, eh?

[Tero]

Here we go, even better than the MO McCaskill challenger in MO. All kinds of Republicans crawling out to run in the wake if Trump
https://forward.com/fast-forward/393595 ... 1-headline

[Seabass]

Here we go, even better than the MO McCaskill challenger in MO. All kinds of Republicans crawling out to run in the wake if Trump
https://forward.com/fast-forward/393595 ... 1-headline

Well, at least he's not politically correct, right?

[Joe]

Here we go, even better than the MO McCaskill challenger in MO. All kinds of Republicans crawling out to run in the wake if Trump
https://forward.com/fast-forward/393595 ... 1-headline

Whoa! That must be what the GOP means when they say they have a deep bench.

[Tero]

Michigan Republican of Finnish descent