REPORT: Fox News doctors progressives
Creating a FALSE impression.
IN OTHER WORDS 'LIE'
SUMMARY: Media Matters has documented numerous examples of Fox News hosts and correspondents cropping comments by progressives and Democratic political figures in a manner that misrepresents them.
On three occasions from April 24 to May 1, Media Matters for America documented Fox News figures airing clips of progressives that were cropped in a way that misrepresented their statements. For example, White House correspondent Wendell Goler cropped a comment by President Obama and took it out of context to falsely suggest that he supports creating a health-care system "like the European countries." In fact, Obama was paraphrasing the town hall question he had been asked before explaining why he opposed such a system.
These examples are not anomalous for Fox News -- while it purports to be "fair and balanced" and claims, "We report, you decide," Media Matters has documented dozens of similar examples over the years. Fox News has misleadingly cropped the comments of progressives such as Obama, former Vice President Al Gore, Vice President Joe Biden, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), and former President Bill Clinton. Those comments dealt with a wide range of topics, including health care, earmarks, the financial crisis, the 2008 presidential campaign, and global warming.
In 2006, Media Matters noted a pattern in which correspondents on Fox News' Special Report aired cropped clips of Democratic senators commenting on President Bush's warrantless wiretapping that did not include those senators' objections to the program's legality.
Below, Media Matters presents a non-comprehensive list of the most misleading instances in which Fox News figures aired cropped clips of progressives that were taken out of context.
During the May 1 edition of Special Report, saying it was a "description of how the president hopes his nominee will interpret the law," congressional correspondent Major Garrett aired a clip in which Obama stated: "I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes." Garrett then said: "That aggravates those who believe justices should follow the Constitution and legislative intent." But Garrett omitted the very next sentence, in which Obama stated: "I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role."
On the May 1 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, during a segment suggesting that Gore has profited from his advocacy of renewable energy and climate change mitigation, guest host Laura Ingraham presented clips of Gore's April 24 congressional testimony that had been edited to remove his statements that he donates the money he makes from his climate-related work to a nonprofit organization.
During the April 24 edition of Special Report, Goler claimed that Obama "doesn't want to do it halfway" on health care, and then aired a clip from a March 26 online town hall event of Obama saying, "If you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health-care system like the European countries?" Following the clip, Goler reported: "His critics worry universal health care would mean government-run health care." In fact, Obama actually said, "Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health-care system like the European countries?" [emphasis added] In doing so, Obama was paraphrasing the town hall question he had been asked -- "Why can we not have a universal health-care system, like many European countries, where people are treated based on needs rather than financial resources?" -- before explaining why he opposed such a system.
On the April 3 edition of his television program, Sean Hannity played a clip of Obama saying in an April 3 speech in Strasbourg, France: "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America's shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." Hannity then said: "And the liberal tradition of blame America first, well, that's still alive." Hannity later asked: "Why is there this anti-Americanism in Europe?" In fact, immediately after the part of the speech Hannity played, Obama criticized anti-Americanism in Europe as well as Europeans who "choose to blame America for much of what's bad."
During the March 16 edition of The Live Desk, co-host Martha MacCallum claimed that "after weeks of economic doom and gloom, the Obama administration is now singing a slightly different tune. Take a look at what was said in recent interviews this weekend." Fox News then aired clips of administration officials purportedly giving an optimistic view of the economy, which included a clip of Biden stating: "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." After the clips aired, MacCallum contrasted the administration's purported remarks from "this weekend" with what then-Sen. Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he criticized Sen. John McCain for stating that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times." However, Biden did not make his remarks during an "interview[]" over the past weekend; Biden made his remarks at a September 15, 2008, campaign event, and, like Obama, was criticizing McCain for his remarks -- not echoing McCain. On the next day's Live Desk, MacCallum apologized for "inadvertedly us[ing]" the clip.
On April 7, 8, and 9, several Fox News personalities -- including Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Fox & Friends co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy -- aired cropped video of Frank's exchange with Harvard University student Joel Pollak, who asked Frank during an event at the Harvard School of Government, "[H]ow much, if any, responsibility do you think you bear" for the financial crisis. The Fox News personalities suggested or stated that Frank had refused to answer Pollak's question or had denied any responsibility for the crisis. In fact, in portions of the exchange not aired by the Fox News personalities, Frank said, "The answer is, yes, I do take responsibility for something." Frank later added that after filing "a bill in 2006, when I was still in the minority, to say hedge funds should be registered," in 2007, he "was approached by people who said, 'No. No. You can't do too much regulation,' and I backed off. I wish I hadn't." Frank also noted that he did, in fact, work on legislation to deal with mortgage lending, stating that in 2007, his committee passed restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and on subprime lending.
On the March 6 edition of his Fox News program, Hannity falsely claimed that Obama made a "campaign promise" to allow "no earmarks." After purporting to "go to the videotape" and "show the audience at home" Obama's "campaign promise" of "no earmarks," Hannity aired a number of clips from the 2008 presidential campaign in order to claim that Obama was breaking his promise, when, in fact, in three of the clips, Obama was referring to reforming the earmark process, and in a fourth, he was asserting that an opponent was being hypocritical for taking earmarks and then advocating against them. In the fifth clip, which was actually taken from a January 6 media availability -- not during the presidential campaign, as Hannity suggested -- Obama stated: "We are gonna ban all earmarks -- the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review." However, Obama was referring to his desire to "ban all earmarks" from his "recovery and reinvestment plan," which he specifically distinguished from "the overall budget process."
Like Hannity, O'Reilly aired Obama's statement, "We are going to ban all earmarks," and falsely characterized it as a promise to ban them from all legislation, not from the recovery plan. On the March 4 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly aired Obama's statement, then said, "President Obama pledging last January to end earmarks in federal spending." Later in the show, referring to earmarks included in the omnibus appropriations bill, O'Reilly stated, "But Obama's on record -- we just played the clip -- that he's going to do away with this. And then he takes 9,000 of them and signs it?"
On the October 17, 2008, edition of Special Report, Washington correspondent James Rosen stated of Samuel Wurzelbacher -- commonly known as Joe the Plumber -- "Even Obama himself has gone to work on this working stiff," and aired a cropped quote of Obama saying, "How many plumbers you know making a quarter-million dollars a year?" In fact, the context of that remark makes clear that Obama was actually criticizing McCain, not Wurzelbacher, as Rosen falsely claimed.
On the July 8, 2008, edition of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity aired a deceptively cropped statement from Clinton's July 5 remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in asserting that Clinton was "obviously taking a shot at Senator McCain." In fact, as the full statement and context of Clinton's remarks make clear, Clinton was discussing what former South African president -- and political prisoner -- Nelson Mandela means to him. Hannity provided no evidence to support his assertion that Clinton's comments were a "shot at Senator McCain."
During the January 31, 2008, edition of America's Pulse, host E.D. Hill falsely asserted that Clinton said "we need to slow" the economy in order to combat global warming. Hill cropped Clinton's comments, airing only his statement: "We just have to slow down our economy and cut our greenhouse gas emissions, because we've got to save the planet for our grandchildren." But Clinton did not say that we "have to slow down our economy" to fight global warming. Rather, he said that "rich" countries could take that approach, but then he said why he thought it wouldn't work, asserting that the "only way" to fight global warming is to prove that doing so "is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy."
Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Monday, May 04, 2009
WHERE DID THAT PHRASE COME FROM ANYWAY?
England is old and small and in the 1500's they started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit in the gaveyard all night ("the graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, some could be "saved by the bell" and others could be considered "dead ringers."
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
Many centuries ago, houses had thatched roofs - thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, rats and bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof -hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs." There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house and this posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice, clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
Next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be in the 1500's: Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. They began to "smell" again by June, so brides carried a bouguet of flowers to mask the body odor. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women - next, the children - last of all, babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it - hence the saying, "Don't Throw The Baby Out With The Bath Water."
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
In the 1500's most floors were dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entryway; hence, a "thresh hold." They cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while-hence the rhyme, "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old."
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
The phrase "the whole nine yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measure exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it was "The whole nine yards."
In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where the phrase, "goodnight, sleep tight" came from.
It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month" or what we know today as the honeymoon."
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's."
Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. Then they needed refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle," is the phrase inspired by this practice.
In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden....and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.
Back in the 16th century, English farmers began to put their own identifying marks on the ears of their cattle and sheep to prevent them from being stolen. This didn't always work, and thieves who were caught were themselves "earmarked" by having their ears slit!
To pull out all the stops: This idiom comes from the church organist, who produces the loudest sound by pulling out all the stops, which control the flow of air.
Nest egg: This expression relates to the old custom of putting pottery eggs in a hen's nest to induce her to lay her eggs there.
Ballpark figure: This expression comes from American baseball - "ballparks" being baseball stadiums. The phrase probably comes from the 1962 coinage of - "in the ballpark" - for "something that is within bounds, negotiable, not out of reach"; "out of the ballpark" means just the opposite.
To land on your feet: This phrase comes from the idea that the cat always falls on its feet unharmed.
Pot luck: In the Middle Ages dinners came from big pots into which leftovers were thrown each day. When visitors were invited to "take pot luck," it really was a matter of luck what was in the pot! Nowadays when people are invited to a "pot luck dinner or supper" each person takes a different dish and everyone shares.
Scot free: This term has no connection with Scotsmen. A "scot" or "sceot" was a tax in 12th century England and anyone who "got off scot free" did not have to pay anything.
You can bet your bottom dollar: Originating out West around 1850, these words refer to the last silver dollar in a stack of coins on a poker table, which the confident player would bet.
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
Many centuries ago, houses had thatched roofs - thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, rats and bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained, it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof -hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs." There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house and this posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice, clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
Next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be in the 1500's: Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. They began to "smell" again by June, so brides carried a bouguet of flowers to mask the body odor. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women - next, the children - last of all, babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it - hence the saying, "Don't Throw The Baby Out With The Bath Water."
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
In the 1500's most floors were dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entryway; hence, a "thresh hold." They cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while-hence the rhyme, "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old."
Where Did That Phrase Come From Anyway ?
The phrase "the whole nine yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measure exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it was "The whole nine yards."
In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. That's where the phrase, "goodnight, sleep tight" came from.
It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month" or what we know today as the honeymoon."
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's."
Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. Then they needed refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle," is the phrase inspired by this practice.
In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden....and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language.
Back in the 16th century, English farmers began to put their own identifying marks on the ears of their cattle and sheep to prevent them from being stolen. This didn't always work, and thieves who were caught were themselves "earmarked" by having their ears slit!
To pull out all the stops: This idiom comes from the church organist, who produces the loudest sound by pulling out all the stops, which control the flow of air.
Nest egg: This expression relates to the old custom of putting pottery eggs in a hen's nest to induce her to lay her eggs there.
Ballpark figure: This expression comes from American baseball - "ballparks" being baseball stadiums. The phrase probably comes from the 1962 coinage of - "in the ballpark" - for "something that is within bounds, negotiable, not out of reach"; "out of the ballpark" means just the opposite.
To land on your feet: This phrase comes from the idea that the cat always falls on its feet unharmed.
Pot luck: In the Middle Ages dinners came from big pots into which leftovers were thrown each day. When visitors were invited to "take pot luck," it really was a matter of luck what was in the pot! Nowadays when people are invited to a "pot luck dinner or supper" each person takes a different dish and everyone shares.
Scot free: This term has no connection with Scotsmen. A "scot" or "sceot" was a tax in 12th century England and anyone who "got off scot free" did not have to pay anything.
You can bet your bottom dollar: Originating out West around 1850, these words refer to the last silver dollar in a stack of coins on a poker table, which the confident player would bet.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Buffett and Munger Share Lessons of Turmoil
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- Billionaires Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said Sunday the most important lessons of the recent financial turmoil are that companies should borrow less and build a system that imposes severe disincentives for failure.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s top two executives offered that frank assessment of what led to the current recession at a news conference held a day after 35,000 attended the company's annual meeting in Omaha. The two men also said most of the nation's biggest banks are not too big to fail, but consumers shouldn't be worried about bank failures because of protections built into the system.
Buffett said having severe disincentives for failure and proper incentives for success is key to ensuring large financial institutions are run well. He said people didn't become more greedy in the last decade, but it wasn't hard for them to take advantage of the system.
''I think the most important lesson is the world needs a whole lot less leverage,'' said Buffett, who is Berkshire's 78-year-old chief executive and chairman.
Buffett said jokingly that if the system were set up so that an executive would be shot if the company fails, then the company would definitely borrow less.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac show that intense regulation can't prevent problems because those mortgage finance firms were some of the most regulated companies before government seized control of them amid mounting mortgage losses, Buffett said.
However, assigning blame for the economic mess doesn't make a lot of sense because so many people made mistakes that contributed, he said.
''I think that virtually everyone associated with the financial world contributed to it,'' Buffett said.
Munger, Berkshire's 85-year-old vice chairman, said a combination of factors caused the financial crisis. He said the nation tolerated way too much debt, immorality and stupidity, and now it's paying the price.
''We have failed big-time on multiple fronts,'' Munger said.
He said gross immorality persisted in the consumer credit and derivatives businesses, and many people were victimized.
Then the accounting profession failed to catch problems and tolerated too much foolishness, Munger said. He said accounting rules that allow companies to report huge profit just before failing doesn't make sense.
''We do not need insane accounting that rewards people that can't handle the temptation,'' Munger said.
But it still might be hard to get Congress to pass sensible rules for investment banks and derivatives, Munger said, because of the amount of lobbying investment banks have done.
''We're going to have a hell of a time getting this fixed the way it should be fixed,'' Munger said.
Buffett said he's not sure how the government will handle the results of the stress tests officials are conducting on the 19 largest U.S. banks, but he doesn't think the government should rule out the failure of most of the banks.
''These 19 banks are not too big to fail.'' Buffett said.
The stress tests are designed to determine which banks would need more cash if the economy weakens more. Federal Reserve officials have said the banks will be required to keep extra capital on hand in case losses escalate, which means some banks would be forced to raise money.
Buffett said he hopes the government didn't simply try to classify the kind of assets banks hold to determine how strong they are because, for example, not all home equity loans carry the same risks. He said a checklist approach won't reveal which banks might need help.
''I would hope there is a somewhat more sophisticated analysis done,'' he said.
But Buffett said consumers should not worry about bank failures because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is there to protect them with the resources it collects by charging banks fees, so taxpayers don't pay when the FDIC rescues banks.
''I'm not worried at all about a run on the banks,'' said Buffett, whose company holds large stakes in Wells Fargo & Co., US Bancorp, M&T Bank, SunTrust Banks Inc. and Bank of America Corp. All of those banks, except M&T, are included in the government stress tests.
Given the ages of Buffett and Munger, there is fervent speculation on who might replace them. Buffett said Sunday that investors would know if either had health problems.
''If I know of anything serious -- or anything that might be interpreted as serious -- health problems, Berkshire would disclose it,'' Buffett said. ''We don't want rumors flying around.''
But Munger joked there might be a high threshold for disclosing anything about his health: ''In my case, I'm so nearly dead anyway that it's a minor detail.''
Both Munger and Buffett said they feel great.
Berkshire's Class A stock lost 32 percent in 2008, and Berkshire's book value -- assets minus liabilities -- declined 9.6 percent, to $70,530 per share. That was the biggest drop in book value under Buffett and only the second time its book value has declined.
But Buffett always measures the company's book value performance in relation to the Standard & Poor's 500 index, which fell 37 percent in 2008, so he's not bothered by stock price fluctuations.
''We don't consider it our worst year by miles,'' Buffett said Sunday.
Berkshire owns more than 60 subsidiaries including insurance, clothing, furniture, and candy companies, restaurants, natural gas and corporate jet firms. Berkshire also has major investments in companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s top two executives offered that frank assessment of what led to the current recession at a news conference held a day after 35,000 attended the company's annual meeting in Omaha. The two men also said most of the nation's biggest banks are not too big to fail, but consumers shouldn't be worried about bank failures because of protections built into the system.
Buffett said having severe disincentives for failure and proper incentives for success is key to ensuring large financial institutions are run well. He said people didn't become more greedy in the last decade, but it wasn't hard for them to take advantage of the system.
''I think the most important lesson is the world needs a whole lot less leverage,'' said Buffett, who is Berkshire's 78-year-old chief executive and chairman.
Buffett said jokingly that if the system were set up so that an executive would be shot if the company fails, then the company would definitely borrow less.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac show that intense regulation can't prevent problems because those mortgage finance firms were some of the most regulated companies before government seized control of them amid mounting mortgage losses, Buffett said.
However, assigning blame for the economic mess doesn't make a lot of sense because so many people made mistakes that contributed, he said.
''I think that virtually everyone associated with the financial world contributed to it,'' Buffett said.
Munger, Berkshire's 85-year-old vice chairman, said a combination of factors caused the financial crisis. He said the nation tolerated way too much debt, immorality and stupidity, and now it's paying the price.
''We have failed big-time on multiple fronts,'' Munger said.
He said gross immorality persisted in the consumer credit and derivatives businesses, and many people were victimized.
Then the accounting profession failed to catch problems and tolerated too much foolishness, Munger said. He said accounting rules that allow companies to report huge profit just before failing doesn't make sense.
''We do not need insane accounting that rewards people that can't handle the temptation,'' Munger said.
But it still might be hard to get Congress to pass sensible rules for investment banks and derivatives, Munger said, because of the amount of lobbying investment banks have done.
''We're going to have a hell of a time getting this fixed the way it should be fixed,'' Munger said.
Buffett said he's not sure how the government will handle the results of the stress tests officials are conducting on the 19 largest U.S. banks, but he doesn't think the government should rule out the failure of most of the banks.
''These 19 banks are not too big to fail.'' Buffett said.
The stress tests are designed to determine which banks would need more cash if the economy weakens more. Federal Reserve officials have said the banks will be required to keep extra capital on hand in case losses escalate, which means some banks would be forced to raise money.
Buffett said he hopes the government didn't simply try to classify the kind of assets banks hold to determine how strong they are because, for example, not all home equity loans carry the same risks. He said a checklist approach won't reveal which banks might need help.
''I would hope there is a somewhat more sophisticated analysis done,'' he said.
But Buffett said consumers should not worry about bank failures because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is there to protect them with the resources it collects by charging banks fees, so taxpayers don't pay when the FDIC rescues banks.
''I'm not worried at all about a run on the banks,'' said Buffett, whose company holds large stakes in Wells Fargo & Co., US Bancorp, M&T Bank, SunTrust Banks Inc. and Bank of America Corp. All of those banks, except M&T, are included in the government stress tests.
Given the ages of Buffett and Munger, there is fervent speculation on who might replace them. Buffett said Sunday that investors would know if either had health problems.
''If I know of anything serious -- or anything that might be interpreted as serious -- health problems, Berkshire would disclose it,'' Buffett said. ''We don't want rumors flying around.''
But Munger joked there might be a high threshold for disclosing anything about his health: ''In my case, I'm so nearly dead anyway that it's a minor detail.''
Both Munger and Buffett said they feel great.
Berkshire's Class A stock lost 32 percent in 2008, and Berkshire's book value -- assets minus liabilities -- declined 9.6 percent, to $70,530 per share. That was the biggest drop in book value under Buffett and only the second time its book value has declined.
But Buffett always measures the company's book value performance in relation to the Standard & Poor's 500 index, which fell 37 percent in 2008, so he's not bothered by stock price fluctuations.
''We don't consider it our worst year by miles,'' Buffett said Sunday.
Berkshire owns more than 60 subsidiaries including insurance, clothing, furniture, and candy companies, restaurants, natural gas and corporate jet firms. Berkshire also has major investments in companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.
Farmer may have given swine flu to pigs
Pigs in Canada may be first in recent outbreak to test positive for virus
One-third of 161 sick Americans visited Mexico, or had contact with visitor
WHO reports 659 confirmed cases of H1N1 virus in 16 countries
Hong Kong hotel guest tests positive; 300 quarantined
(CNN) -- More than a week after the swine flu outbreak rattled the world, with cases of infected people popping up from Mexico to South Korea, the new virus strain has shown up in a herd of swine.
The catch, Canadian officials say, is that the animals may have caught the flu from a human.
Canadian officials on Saturday said they have quarantined pigs that tested positive for the virus -- scientifically known as 2009 H1N1 -- at an Alberta farm in what could be the first identified case of pigs infected during the recent outbreak. They said the pigs may have been infected by a Canadian farmer who recently returned from a trip to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak that has sickened nearly 660 people.
The farmer "may have exposed swine on the farm to an influenza virus," said Dr. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
"We have determined that the virus H1N1, found in these pigs, is the virus which is being tracked in the human population," he added.
Evans and other officials said it is not uncommon for flu viruses to jump from humans to animals, and that it does not pose a risk for consuming pork. The number of pigs infected was not disclosed.
The infected farmer had flu-like symptoms and is recovering, Evans said.
Meanwhile, as the number of confirmed swine flu cases reached 659 worldwide, the World Health Organization said Saturday it had started distributing 2.4 million doses of a common anti-viral drug to 72 nations. So far, 16 countries have confirmed cases of swine flu, the WHO said. Watch latest developments as swine flu sweeps world »
Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the WHO director of its global alert and response team, said the doses of the drug Tamiflu came from a stockpile that was donated by Swiss health-care giant Roche in 2005 and 2006.
Roche, which produces the common anti-viral drug Tamiflu in a statement said it was working with the WHO to prepare for the virus. The drug should be taken within 48 hours of experiencing symptoms, according to the drug's Web site.
Mexico has the most confirmed swine flu cases, with 397 infected people and 16 deaths, the WHO said. Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos reported that the country has confirmed 421 cases and 19 deaths.
Several other countries, including Canada and Italy, had confirmed additional cases that had not yet been added to the WHO's total.
The United States has the second-highest number of confirmed cases, with 161 sickened and one death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO.
President Barack Obama spoke with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Saturday afternoon to discuss both countries' "efforts to limit the spread of the 2009 H1N1 flu strain and the importance of close U.S.-Mexican cooperation," the White House said in a statement.
Other than Mexico and the United States, the WHO confirmed cases in 14 other countries: Canada, with 51; the United Kingdom with 15; Spain with 13; Germany with six; New Zealand with four; Israel with three; France, with two; and Austria, China, South Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Costa Rica, each have one. See where cases have been confirmed »
Ryan said the WHO was still preparing for a pandemic.
"At this point we have to expect that phase six will be reached," he said, referring to the organization's highest pandemic threat level. "We have to hope that it is not reached." And he noted that a pandemic describes "the geographic spread of the disease, not its severity."
The latest developments come as parts of Asia discovered they were not immune to the spread of the virus.
Hundreds of guests and staff were under quarantine in China on Saturday after health officials determined that a hotel guest had contracted the H1N1 virus.
Nearly 200 hotel guests and 100 staff members were ordered to stay in Metro Park Hotel in Hong Kong for seven days to stop the spread of the H1N1 virus, a government spokesman said.
The quarantine was ordered after a 25-year-old Mexican man stayed in the hotel and became sick, according to the spokesman. It is the first confirmed case of the virus in Hong Kong, local medical officials said.
South Korean officials on Saturday confirmed their first case -- a 51-year-old nun who recently traveled to Mexico for volunteer work.
In the United States, the CDC announced 19 additional cases, in 21 states. Dr. Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health for the agency, said 13 people are hospitalized. Go behind the scenes at the CDC »
She said one-third of the U.S. cases were linked to exposure in Mexico; the others were infected in their own communities.
New York has the highest number of confirmed cases, with 50. Texas has 28 and California has 24.
The other states include: South Carolina with 13; Massachusetts with eight; New Jersey with seven; Arizona and Delaware with four each; Illinois and Indiana with three each; Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Michigan and Virginia with two each; and Connecticut, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio and Rhode Island each have one.
New York's health department on Saturday confirmed another dozen cases, bringing its total to 62 -- though the additional cases were not reflected in the CDC's tally.
Connecticut also announced an additional confirmed case, while Iowa and New Mexico and reported their first cases -- though neither were immediately included in the CDC total.
One-third of 161 sick Americans visited Mexico, or had contact with visitor
WHO reports 659 confirmed cases of H1N1 virus in 16 countries
Hong Kong hotel guest tests positive; 300 quarantined
(CNN) -- More than a week after the swine flu outbreak rattled the world, with cases of infected people popping up from Mexico to South Korea, the new virus strain has shown up in a herd of swine.
The catch, Canadian officials say, is that the animals may have caught the flu from a human.
Canadian officials on Saturday said they have quarantined pigs that tested positive for the virus -- scientifically known as 2009 H1N1 -- at an Alberta farm in what could be the first identified case of pigs infected during the recent outbreak. They said the pigs may have been infected by a Canadian farmer who recently returned from a trip to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak that has sickened nearly 660 people.
The farmer "may have exposed swine on the farm to an influenza virus," said Dr. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
"We have determined that the virus H1N1, found in these pigs, is the virus which is being tracked in the human population," he added.
Evans and other officials said it is not uncommon for flu viruses to jump from humans to animals, and that it does not pose a risk for consuming pork. The number of pigs infected was not disclosed.
The infected farmer had flu-like symptoms and is recovering, Evans said.
Meanwhile, as the number of confirmed swine flu cases reached 659 worldwide, the World Health Organization said Saturday it had started distributing 2.4 million doses of a common anti-viral drug to 72 nations. So far, 16 countries have confirmed cases of swine flu, the WHO said. Watch latest developments as swine flu sweeps world »
Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the WHO director of its global alert and response team, said the doses of the drug Tamiflu came from a stockpile that was donated by Swiss health-care giant Roche in 2005 and 2006.
Roche, which produces the common anti-viral drug Tamiflu in a statement said it was working with the WHO to prepare for the virus. The drug should be taken within 48 hours of experiencing symptoms, according to the drug's Web site.
Mexico has the most confirmed swine flu cases, with 397 infected people and 16 deaths, the WHO said. Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos reported that the country has confirmed 421 cases and 19 deaths.
Several other countries, including Canada and Italy, had confirmed additional cases that had not yet been added to the WHO's total.
The United States has the second-highest number of confirmed cases, with 161 sickened and one death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO.
President Barack Obama spoke with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Saturday afternoon to discuss both countries' "efforts to limit the spread of the 2009 H1N1 flu strain and the importance of close U.S.-Mexican cooperation," the White House said in a statement.
Other than Mexico and the United States, the WHO confirmed cases in 14 other countries: Canada, with 51; the United Kingdom with 15; Spain with 13; Germany with six; New Zealand with four; Israel with three; France, with two; and Austria, China, South Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Costa Rica, each have one. See where cases have been confirmed »
Ryan said the WHO was still preparing for a pandemic.
"At this point we have to expect that phase six will be reached," he said, referring to the organization's highest pandemic threat level. "We have to hope that it is not reached." And he noted that a pandemic describes "the geographic spread of the disease, not its severity."
The latest developments come as parts of Asia discovered they were not immune to the spread of the virus.
Hundreds of guests and staff were under quarantine in China on Saturday after health officials determined that a hotel guest had contracted the H1N1 virus.
Nearly 200 hotel guests and 100 staff members were ordered to stay in Metro Park Hotel in Hong Kong for seven days to stop the spread of the H1N1 virus, a government spokesman said.
The quarantine was ordered after a 25-year-old Mexican man stayed in the hotel and became sick, according to the spokesman. It is the first confirmed case of the virus in Hong Kong, local medical officials said.
South Korean officials on Saturday confirmed their first case -- a 51-year-old nun who recently traveled to Mexico for volunteer work.
In the United States, the CDC announced 19 additional cases, in 21 states. Dr. Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health for the agency, said 13 people are hospitalized. Go behind the scenes at the CDC »
She said one-third of the U.S. cases were linked to exposure in Mexico; the others were infected in their own communities.
New York has the highest number of confirmed cases, with 50. Texas has 28 and California has 24.
The other states include: South Carolina with 13; Massachusetts with eight; New Jersey with seven; Arizona and Delaware with four each; Illinois and Indiana with three each; Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Michigan and Virginia with two each; and Connecticut, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio and Rhode Island each have one.
New York's health department on Saturday confirmed another dozen cases, bringing its total to 62 -- though the additional cases were not reflected in the CDC's tally.
Connecticut also announced an additional confirmed case, while Iowa and New Mexico and reported their first cases -- though neither were immediately included in the CDC total.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
OUTING GAY CONSERVATIVES IN ‘OUTRAGE’
There’s a lot of nervous toe-tapping in the hallowed stalls of Washington after the Tribeca premiere of Outrage and its upcoming theatrical release May 8.
“Outrage,” a new documentary from filmmaker Kirby Dick, takes issue with the secret lives of closeted gay politicians — especially conservative Republicans who outwardly oppose gay rights.
The film, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, features tell-alls from men who say they’ve had relationships with various Republicans, including Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Bush strategist Ken Mehlman and former Senator Larry Craig.
According to Magnolia Pictures, “Outrage” is a “searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians with appalling gay rights voting records who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to.”
I wish they’d used the trailer tagline, “We know what you did last session,” on the poster after the cut. It’ll be interesting to see how Florida Governor Charlie Crist deals with Outrage in future gubernatorial and senatorial races. Often named as Republican hopeful for the 2012 Presidential candidacy, does this movie effectively screw his chances?
While “Outrage” includes interviews with openly gay Representatives Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin, as well as out former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, it’s the look inside the secret lives of powerful U.S. political figures that will likely have people talking once the film is unveiled. The film aims to tell stories that haven’t ever been reported on.
“Outrage,” a new documentary from filmmaker Kirby Dick, takes issue with the secret lives of closeted gay politicians — especially conservative Republicans who outwardly oppose gay rights.
The film, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, features tell-alls from men who say they’ve had relationships with various Republicans, including Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Bush strategist Ken Mehlman and former Senator Larry Craig.
According to Magnolia Pictures, “Outrage” is a “searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians with appalling gay rights voting records who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to.”
I wish they’d used the trailer tagline, “We know what you did last session,” on the poster after the cut. It’ll be interesting to see how Florida Governor Charlie Crist deals with Outrage in future gubernatorial and senatorial races. Often named as Republican hopeful for the 2012 Presidential candidacy, does this movie effectively screw his chances?
While “Outrage” includes interviews with openly gay Representatives Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin, as well as out former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey, it’s the look inside the secret lives of powerful U.S. political figures that will likely have people talking once the film is unveiled. The film aims to tell stories that haven’t ever been reported on.
BOB HERBERT 'GOP Out of Touch' STILL CLUELESS
The incredibly clueless stewards of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party would do well to recall that it was supposedly Abe Lincoln, a Republican, who said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
It’s not a party; it’s a cult. I’m no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance. This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.
It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.
Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy.
Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it. The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years (all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.
And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.
It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.
When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans, the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the catastrophic ordeal of Detroit’s automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”
And Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top financial adviser during the presidential campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he said the country was experiencing “a mental recession.”
After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters who hadn’t sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn’t help but recognize that the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.
It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned on television that the Democrats’ moves to stem the banking crisis “gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.”
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama as “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” And Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the administration’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country. John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and attention span that you’d expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.
“I love the Oscars,” he told GQ. “I’m looking for who’s got what dress on, you know?”
All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.
Not only has the G.O.P. spent years trying to fool everybody in sight with its phony-baloney, dime-store philosophies, it’s now trapped in the patently pathetic phase of fooling itself.
The economy has imploded, the auto industry is in danger of being vaporized and more than half of all working Americans are worried that they may lose their jobs in the next year. So what’s the Republican response? To build a wall of obstruction in front of efforts to get the economy moving again, and then to stand in front of that wall chanting gibberish about smaller government, lower taxes, spending cuts and Ronald Reagan.
It’s not a party; it’s a cult. I’m no fan of Arlen Specter, but if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t be shoving him out the door and waving good riddance. This is the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt (“I’m trying to rise from the ashes”) Gingrich, and the dark force who can’t seem to exit the public stage or modify his medieval ways, Dick Cheney.
It is losing all credibility with the public because it is not offering anything — anything at all — that could be viewed as helpful or constructive in a time of national crisis. And it has been unwilling to take responsibility for its role in bringing that crisis about.
Americans are aghast at what happened to the country while the G.O.P. was in charge. Iraq and Katrina come to mind, not to mention the transmutation of the Clinton surpluses into the Bush budget deficits and the collapse of the entire economy.
Trickle down. Weapons of mass destruction. Torture. Deregulation. You name it. The Republican-conservative know-it-alls of the past several years (all-too-frequently with feckless Democrats following closely behind) brought destruction and heartbreak to just about everything they touched.
And yet the G.O.P. behaves as though nothing has changed. Even in the face of a national economic nightmare, the party is offering nothing in the way of policies or new ideas that might give a bit of hope or comfort to families wrestling with joblessness, housing foreclosures and bankruptcies.
It’s a party that doesn’t seem to care about anything other than devotion to a set of so-called principles that never amounted to more than cult-like rhetoric. Waging unwarranted warfare while radically cutting taxes for the wealthy and turning the national economy into the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme may be evidence of many things, but none of them have to do with the so-called conservative principles the G.O.P. is always braying about.
When it came to looking out for the interests of ordinary working Americans, the party of just-say-no could hardly have cared less. Referring to the catastrophic ordeal of Detroit’s automakers, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, told us last November, “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”
And Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top financial adviser during the presidential campaign, was enshrined in the foot-in-mouth hall of fame last summer when he said the country was experiencing “a mental recession.”
After awhile, it became all but impossible to overlook the madness of these true believers and the incalculable damage they had done to the country. Voters who hadn’t sipped from the Kool-Aid themselves couldn’t help but recognize that the G.O.P. was bizarrely detached from the real world.
It still is. In the place of constructive alternatives to Obama administration policies, it has offered increasingly hysterical rhetoric. Mr. Gingrich warned on television that the Democrats’ moves to stem the banking crisis “gives them the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship.”
Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, described President Obama as “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” And Mike Huckabee, a former Republican governor of Arkansas and presidential candidate, said of the administration’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
This is not a party that can be trusted with the leadership of the country. John McCain was ready to have Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and reportedly wanted Phil Gramm to be his Treasury secretary. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has the strategic sense and attention span that you’d expect to find in a frat house on Saturday night.
“I love the Oscars,” he told GQ. “I’m looking for who’s got what dress on, you know?”
All the talk about the permanent marginalization of the Republican Party is silly. It will be back. Someday. But first it will have to stop fooling itself and re-engage with the real world.
MAUREEN DOWD 'How Character Corrodes'
How quaint.
The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.
The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”
Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run “roughshod” and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that “there’s no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government.”
Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”
This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)
After so many years of watching a White House upend laws, I now listen raptly when President Obama plays the constitutional law professor. He was asked at his news conference Wednesday night about the Republican fear that he will “ride roughshod over any opposition” and establish one-party rule.
“I’ve got Democrats who don’t agree with me on everything,” he said. “And that’s how it should be. Congress is a coequal branch of government.” You almost thought the professor in chief was going to ask the assembled students to please turn to page 317 in their Con Law book.
He went on to reassure Republicans that his vision of the presidency is very different from the imperial view held by the Boy Emperor and his regents.
“I do think that, to my Republican friends, I want them to realize that me reaching out to them has been genuine,” the president said, adding, “The majority will probably be determinative when it comes to resolving just hard-core differences that we can’t resolve, but there is a whole host of other areas where we can work together” and “make progress.”
The officials who actually represented a threat to the country while they were running the country are continuing to defend themselves. But they just end up further implicating themselves.
Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.
I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”
She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.
The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.
“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”
Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”
As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”
“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”
Class dismissed.
The Republicans are concerned about checks and balances.
The specter of Specter helping the president have his way with Congress has actually made conservatives remember why they respected the Constitution in the first place. Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the shrinking Republican minority, fretted that there was a “threat to the country” and wondered if people would want the majority to rule “without a check or a balance.”
Senator John Thune worried that Democrats would run “roughshod” and argued that Americans wanted checks and balances. Senator Judd Gregg mourned that “there’s no checks and balances on this massive expansion on the size of government.”
Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to put the best face on it, noting, “This will make it easier for G.O.P. candidates in 2010 to ask to be elected to help restore some checks and balances in Washington.”
This is quite touching, given that the start of the 21st century will be remembered as the harrowing era when an arrogant Republican administration did its best to undermine checks and balances. (Maybe when your reign begins with Bush v. Gore, a Supreme heist that kissed off checks and balances, you feel no need to follow the founding fathers’ lead.)
After so many years of watching a White House upend laws, I now listen raptly when President Obama plays the constitutional law professor. He was asked at his news conference Wednesday night about the Republican fear that he will “ride roughshod over any opposition” and establish one-party rule.
“I’ve got Democrats who don’t agree with me on everything,” he said. “And that’s how it should be. Congress is a coequal branch of government.” You almost thought the professor in chief was going to ask the assembled students to please turn to page 317 in their Con Law book.
He went on to reassure Republicans that his vision of the presidency is very different from the imperial view held by the Boy Emperor and his regents.
“I do think that, to my Republican friends, I want them to realize that me reaching out to them has been genuine,” the president said, adding, “The majority will probably be determinative when it comes to resolving just hard-core differences that we can’t resolve, but there is a whole host of other areas where we can work together” and “make progress.”
The officials who actually represented a threat to the country while they were running the country are continuing to defend themselves. But they just end up further implicating themselves.
Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.
I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and “legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, “Is waterboarding torture?”
She replied: “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.
The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.
“By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
She also stressed that, “Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”
Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, “I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that “President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”
As Mr. Obama said in his news conference, it is in moments of crisis that a country must cleave to its principles. Asserting that “waterboarding violates our ideals,” he said he had been struck by an article describing how Churchill would not torture prisoners even when “London was being bombed to smithereens.”
“And the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking shortcuts and over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people,” he said. “It corrodes the character of a country.”
Class dismissed.
FRANK RICH 'Enough With the 100 Days Already'
BELIEVE it or not, there are Americans who have a “very negative” opinion of Barack Obama (13 percent, in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll). Some are even angry at him (10 percent, New York Times/CBS News). As the First 100 Days hoopla started to jump the shark last week, I tried, as an experiment in empathy, to see the world through their eyes.
It was difficult at first, but an interview with the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, on CNN, pushed me over the edge. Souza was showing all those beguiling behind-the-scenes pictures that, though government issued, were more or less passed off as journalism by virtually every news outlet in the land.
Inevitably we got to The Dog. “I want to show this picture because I find this to be a fascinating picture,” said the CNN anchor John King, who found almost every picture fascinating. “The president running down the hall with his new jogging partner there, Bo.” What, he asked Souza, is it like “to add this to the diversity of your work at the White House?”
I’ll leave the photographer’s answer to your imagination. But for a second, anyway, I could imagine what it’s like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama. Those who feel the whole world is against them. Those who think the press corps is in the tank. Those so sickened by the fawning that they’d throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.
But only for a second. I confess to being among the 81 percent (per Wall Street Journal/NBC) who like the guy. And I share the belief of nearly two-thirds of the American people (per every poll) that he has made an impressive start. The new president is largely doing what he promised, and he is doing it with the focus, brainpower and preternaturally calm temperament that kept his campaign on track even as the political press dismissed him as a hope-mongering naif next to the supposedly far more organized and more moneyed Hillary.
That the same crowd is over the top now in its praise says more about the news business than Obama. The journalism industry is fighting for its life. Obama is the one reliable product that moves the market for newspapers, magazines and television. No wonder so many special sections, special issues and special cable marathons have alighted on the 100 Days.
All those great report cards! Trying to stand out in this over-caffeinated throng of hagiographers, a Time pundit sprinkled his evaluations with A-pluses. One of them was for Michelle Obama, whose approval rating is even higher than her husband’s. Hard to believe that just a year ago some of the same commentators were questioning her pride in America, and that Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, was seriously arguing that her 1985 Princeton thesis linked her by association to the views of Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan.
Of course the high marks, mine included, are all ludicrously provisional. It’s too early to judge the results of any Obama policy. What we do know is that his leadership is restoring the country’s faith in itself and the future; the spike in the number of Americans who say we’re on the “right track” is eye-popping. And, for all the politicians and pundits who complain that Obama is attempting too much at once, many of us like the breadth of his ambition. Doing too much at the same time, even at the risk of failure, is a core American trait that built the nation. It’s as American as Benjamin Franklin, “Moby-Dick,” the New Deal and a double cheeseburger with all the toppings.
We’ll see how Obama’s vast plans play out. We’ll see what unexpected nightmares, bigger than the swine flu, materialize on his watch. The 100 Days celebrations could not fade soon enough, because neither he nor the country should be lulled into resting easy. There are at least two toxic fiefdoms to keep the president and us awake at night: Pakistan and Wall Street. Both could wreak further untold catastrophe. Obama has control over neither, and in the case of the financial sector, he is fielding a team dominated by Robert Rubin protégés whose wisdom remains, to put it generously, unproven.
But if those are the obvious hotspots for this presidency, there is also the domestic political culture to worry about. The Republican Party has collapsed, and that is not a good thing for the country or for Obama. We need more than one functioning party, not just to ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft. No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”
That Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as 20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.
Arlen Specter’s defection is the least of the Republicans’ problems, a lagging indicator. Though many characterize his departure as a “wake-up call” for the party, it’s only the most recent of countless wake-up calls the party has slept through since 2006. That was the year that Specter’s Pennsylvania Republican colleague in the Senate, Rick Santorum, lost his seat by a margin of more than 17 percentage points. Despite that rout and many more like it of similar right-wing candidates throughout America, the party’s ideological litmus test is more rigid than ever. The G.O.P. chairman, Michael Steele, and enforcers of Republican political correctness like William Kristol and the blogger Michele Malkin jeered Specter and cheered his departure. A laughing Limbaugh seconded e-mail from listeners commanding Specter to “take McCain with you — and his daughter.”
You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”
From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.
But this is funny only up to a point. It was in 1937 — the year after the Democratic landslide left the Republican national ticket with a total of eight electoral votes — that a hugely empowered F.D.R. made two of the biggest mistakes of his presidency. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with partisan allies and, overconfidently judging the economy recovered, retreated from the New Deal by instituting spending cuts that prompted a fresh economic tailspin.
In the current climate Obama mustn’t drink his own Kool-Aid. As the 100 Days rollout reminded us, he remains a master at promoting and controlling his and his family’s image for maximum effect, down to each picture of Bo. The Obama White House has been more adept and broad-based than any of its predecessors at working the media, whether “Access Hollywood” or ESPN, Leno or YouTube, Us Weekly or what remains of newspapers. As Angela Burt-Murray, the editor of Essence, a magazine aimed at black women, recently told The Los Angeles Times after negotiating access to the Obamas for a photo spread, “There’s definitely a science to the way they’re approaching this.”
That’s why it was alarming to learn that a White House official had authorized that idiotic public-relations photo shoot for Air Force One at the Statue of Liberty. We’ve just lived through a hubristic presidency that delighted in staging propagandistic stunts to remake reality — Friday was the sixth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” — and we don’t need another. The real Obama, unlike his predecessor, is more than strong enough as he is, without the steroids of excessive stage management. It will be incumbent on him now to remain grounded when there is so little opposition, in the political arena or most anyplace else, to challenge his high-flying course.
It was difficult at first, but an interview with the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, on CNN, pushed me over the edge. Souza was showing all those beguiling behind-the-scenes pictures that, though government issued, were more or less passed off as journalism by virtually every news outlet in the land.
Inevitably we got to The Dog. “I want to show this picture because I find this to be a fascinating picture,” said the CNN anchor John King, who found almost every picture fascinating. “The president running down the hall with his new jogging partner there, Bo.” What, he asked Souza, is it like “to add this to the diversity of your work at the White House?”
I’ll leave the photographer’s answer to your imagination. But for a second, anyway, I could imagine what it’s like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama. Those who feel the whole world is against them. Those who think the press corps is in the tank. Those so sickened by the fawning that they’d throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.
But only for a second. I confess to being among the 81 percent (per Wall Street Journal/NBC) who like the guy. And I share the belief of nearly two-thirds of the American people (per every poll) that he has made an impressive start. The new president is largely doing what he promised, and he is doing it with the focus, brainpower and preternaturally calm temperament that kept his campaign on track even as the political press dismissed him as a hope-mongering naif next to the supposedly far more organized and more moneyed Hillary.
That the same crowd is over the top now in its praise says more about the news business than Obama. The journalism industry is fighting for its life. Obama is the one reliable product that moves the market for newspapers, magazines and television. No wonder so many special sections, special issues and special cable marathons have alighted on the 100 Days.
All those great report cards! Trying to stand out in this over-caffeinated throng of hagiographers, a Time pundit sprinkled his evaluations with A-pluses. One of them was for Michelle Obama, whose approval rating is even higher than her husband’s. Hard to believe that just a year ago some of the same commentators were questioning her pride in America, and that Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, was seriously arguing that her 1985 Princeton thesis linked her by association to the views of Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan.
Of course the high marks, mine included, are all ludicrously provisional. It’s too early to judge the results of any Obama policy. What we do know is that his leadership is restoring the country’s faith in itself and the future; the spike in the number of Americans who say we’re on the “right track” is eye-popping. And, for all the politicians and pundits who complain that Obama is attempting too much at once, many of us like the breadth of his ambition. Doing too much at the same time, even at the risk of failure, is a core American trait that built the nation. It’s as American as Benjamin Franklin, “Moby-Dick,” the New Deal and a double cheeseburger with all the toppings.
We’ll see how Obama’s vast plans play out. We’ll see what unexpected nightmares, bigger than the swine flu, materialize on his watch. The 100 Days celebrations could not fade soon enough, because neither he nor the country should be lulled into resting easy. There are at least two toxic fiefdoms to keep the president and us awake at night: Pakistan and Wall Street. Both could wreak further untold catastrophe. Obama has control over neither, and in the case of the financial sector, he is fielding a team dominated by Robert Rubin protégés whose wisdom remains, to put it generously, unproven.
But if those are the obvious hotspots for this presidency, there is also the domestic political culture to worry about. The Republican Party has collapsed, and that is not a good thing for the country or for Obama. We need more than one functioning party, not just to ensure checks and balances and pitch in ideas at a time of crisis, but to temper this president’s sporadic bursts of overconfidence and triumphalist stagecraft. No one is perfect. We must remember that there is also an Obama who gave us “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” a faux presidential seal and a convention speech delivered before what Sarah Palin rightly mocked as “Styrofoam Greek columns” hauled out of a “studio lot.”
That Obama needs a serious counterweight in the political arena. But the former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamentalist core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds — as small as 20 percent of the populace in the latest polls. Its position on the American spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.
Arlen Specter’s defection is the least of the Republicans’ problems, a lagging indicator. Though many characterize his departure as a “wake-up call” for the party, it’s only the most recent of countless wake-up calls the party has slept through since 2006. That was the year that Specter’s Pennsylvania Republican colleague in the Senate, Rick Santorum, lost his seat by a margin of more than 17 percentage points. Despite that rout and many more like it of similar right-wing candidates throughout America, the party’s ideological litmus test is more rigid than ever. The G.O.P. chairman, Michael Steele, and enforcers of Republican political correctness like William Kristol and the blogger Michele Malkin jeered Specter and cheered his departure. A laughing Limbaugh seconded e-mail from listeners commanding Specter to “take McCain with you — and his daughter.”
You can’t blame the president if he is laughing, too. As The Economist recently certified, the G.O.P. is now officially in the throes of “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” The same conservative gang that remained mum when George W. Bush praised Putin’s “soul” and held hands with the Saudi ruler Abdullah are now condemning Obama for shaking hands with Hugo Chávez, “bowing” to Abdullah, relaxing Cuban policy and talking to hostile governments. Polls show overwhelming majorities favoring Obama’s positions. But his critics have locked themselves in the padded cell of an alternative reality. Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”
From derangement it’s a small step to madness. Last week, the president of a prime G.O.P. auxiliary, the Concerned Women for America, speculated that the president’s declaration of “a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing” to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination as secretary of health and human services. At those tax-protesting “tea parties” on April 15, signs and speakers portrayed Obama as a “fascist,” a “socialist,” a terrorist and Hitler. Republican governors have proposed rejecting stimulus money for their states (only to fold after constituents rebelled) or, in the notorious instance of Rick Perry of Texas, toyed with secession from the union.
But this is funny only up to a point. It was in 1937 — the year after the Democratic landslide left the Republican national ticket with a total of eight electoral votes — that a hugely empowered F.D.R. made two of the biggest mistakes of his presidency. He tried to pack the Supreme Court with partisan allies and, overconfidently judging the economy recovered, retreated from the New Deal by instituting spending cuts that prompted a fresh economic tailspin.
In the current climate Obama mustn’t drink his own Kool-Aid. As the 100 Days rollout reminded us, he remains a master at promoting and controlling his and his family’s image for maximum effect, down to each picture of Bo. The Obama White House has been more adept and broad-based than any of its predecessors at working the media, whether “Access Hollywood” or ESPN, Leno or YouTube, Us Weekly or what remains of newspapers. As Angela Burt-Murray, the editor of Essence, a magazine aimed at black women, recently told The Los Angeles Times after negotiating access to the Obamas for a photo spread, “There’s definitely a science to the way they’re approaching this.”
That’s why it was alarming to learn that a White House official had authorized that idiotic public-relations photo shoot for Air Force One at the Statue of Liberty. We’ve just lived through a hubristic presidency that delighted in staging propagandistic stunts to remake reality — Friday was the sixth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” — and we don’t need another. The real Obama, unlike his predecessor, is more than strong enough as he is, without the steroids of excessive stage management. It will be incumbent on him now to remain grounded when there is so little opposition, in the political arena or most anyplace else, to challenge his high-flying course.
New York Times 'A Shift on Immigration'
Last week, immigration enforcement policy shifted a little. The administration issued guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement that place a new emphasis on prosecuting employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
That is a good idea, and a break from the Bush administration method — mass raids to net immigrant workers while leaving their bosses alone. The raids were tuned to the theatrics of the poisoned immigration debate, using heavy weapons, dogs and helicopters to spread the illusion that something was getting fixed.
But as policy, they were worse than useless. They netted about 6,000 undocumented immigrants, out of 12 million, and 135 employers or supervisors. They destroyed families, tearing parents and grandparents from children, many of them citizens. The fear they caused went viral in immigrant communities, driving workers further into the arms of abusive employers while bringing us no closer to a working immigration system.
So the new guidelines are smarter than cruel idiocy, but raids are still not a solution. They keep the country trying to arrest, prosecute and deport its way toward a working immigration system. Enforcement alone will never get us there. Workplace raids, no matter how sensibly or tactfully redesigned, will never fix immigration by themselves. Indeed, they make things worse.
Raids do not uphold or reinforce workers’ rights, a non sequitur in the world of off-the-books labor, where employers erode conditions for Americans by hiring workers at deplorable conditions and pay. They do not fix long backlogs in legal immigration, lines that extend years or decades, forcing people who want to follow the rules to make an agonizing choice between intolerable separations from their families or lawbreaking.
They do not protect illegal immigrants from the arbitrary cruelties of the detention and deportation system, in which due process is limited and detainees face unacceptable risk of sickness, injury and death in prison.
And the new enforcement regime, like the old, might lead employers to purge their payrolls of people they merely suspect are here illegally, to avoid the hassle and expense of a raid. When raids are coupled with electronic hiring-verification schemes like E-Verify, which the government has been inching toward, the likelihood of mass firings becomes greater. Without a path to earned legalization, undocumented workers who lose their jobs will have nowhere to go — except to endure ever-lower wages and worse abuse from bottom-feeding employers. The cycle of illegality will not have been broken.
The administration has promised to tackle comprehensive immigration reform this year. President Obama has consistently said the right things, defending a path to assimilation and citizenship for illegal immigrants rather than the futility of mass expulsion.
The decision to adjust the policy on raids seems sensibly motivated. But we agree with immigration and labor experts like Professor Jennifer Gordon of Fordham Law School, who sees the new guidelines as a smarter version of a bad idea. Far better, she says, for the government to redouble enforcement of laws like the minimum wage, the right to organize, and health and safety protections. This would reduce the incentive to hire the undocumented, and raise standards for all workers. It would not end up devastating immigrant families, as raids do. In times like these, that would be a step toward immigration reform that all workers could support.
That is a good idea, and a break from the Bush administration method — mass raids to net immigrant workers while leaving their bosses alone. The raids were tuned to the theatrics of the poisoned immigration debate, using heavy weapons, dogs and helicopters to spread the illusion that something was getting fixed.
But as policy, they were worse than useless. They netted about 6,000 undocumented immigrants, out of 12 million, and 135 employers or supervisors. They destroyed families, tearing parents and grandparents from children, many of them citizens. The fear they caused went viral in immigrant communities, driving workers further into the arms of abusive employers while bringing us no closer to a working immigration system.
So the new guidelines are smarter than cruel idiocy, but raids are still not a solution. They keep the country trying to arrest, prosecute and deport its way toward a working immigration system. Enforcement alone will never get us there. Workplace raids, no matter how sensibly or tactfully redesigned, will never fix immigration by themselves. Indeed, they make things worse.
Raids do not uphold or reinforce workers’ rights, a non sequitur in the world of off-the-books labor, where employers erode conditions for Americans by hiring workers at deplorable conditions and pay. They do not fix long backlogs in legal immigration, lines that extend years or decades, forcing people who want to follow the rules to make an agonizing choice between intolerable separations from their families or lawbreaking.
They do not protect illegal immigrants from the arbitrary cruelties of the detention and deportation system, in which due process is limited and detainees face unacceptable risk of sickness, injury and death in prison.
And the new enforcement regime, like the old, might lead employers to purge their payrolls of people they merely suspect are here illegally, to avoid the hassle and expense of a raid. When raids are coupled with electronic hiring-verification schemes like E-Verify, which the government has been inching toward, the likelihood of mass firings becomes greater. Without a path to earned legalization, undocumented workers who lose their jobs will have nowhere to go — except to endure ever-lower wages and worse abuse from bottom-feeding employers. The cycle of illegality will not have been broken.
The administration has promised to tackle comprehensive immigration reform this year. President Obama has consistently said the right things, defending a path to assimilation and citizenship for illegal immigrants rather than the futility of mass expulsion.
The decision to adjust the policy on raids seems sensibly motivated. But we agree with immigration and labor experts like Professor Jennifer Gordon of Fordham Law School, who sees the new guidelines as a smarter version of a bad idea. Far better, she says, for the government to redouble enforcement of laws like the minimum wage, the right to organize, and health and safety protections. This would reduce the incentive to hire the undocumented, and raise standards for all workers. It would not end up devastating immigrant families, as raids do. In times like these, that would be a step toward immigration reform that all workers could support.
NICKOLAS KRISTOF 'A Nation of Typhoid Marys'
As swine flu spreads around the country, it’s only appropriate that the next political donnybrook may concern health care.
Vice President Joseph Biden said a few days ago that for the second 100 days of the administration, “the top of the agenda, the very top, is health care.” Lacing its armor across the field, a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is airing commercials denouncing (and distorting) President Obama’s health care proposals.
Not to be impolite, but Republicans like Karl Rove and Senator Susan Collins (along with some Democrats) lost credibility on this front when they scolded Mr. Obama a few months ago for proposing stimulus spending on something as frivolous as ... preparations for a flu pandemic. (Note to Senator Collins: You might want to remove from your Senate Web site the February article citing your opposition to pandemic preparation.)
The flu crisis should be a wake-up call, a reminder that one of our vulnerabilities to the possible pandemic is our deeply flawed medical system.
“From SARS to avian flu to the current escalating outbreaks of swine influenza, it has become increasingly clear that we are risking a major catastrophe unless we act to restore the safety net,” noted Deborah Burger, the co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Think of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance. They are less likely to receive flu vaccines (which might or might not help), less likely to receive prompt care when they get sick, and less able financially to stay home from work — and thus they are more likely both to die and to spread the virus inadvertently.
“These are, in effect, 47 million ‘Typhoid Marys’ of the next pandemic — at risk themselves and to their families and neighbors,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“This is a most dangerous brew: a dysfunctional health care system, vast numbers of Americans without access to health care, a severe recession, overextended and highly stressed hospitals, and the prospect of a nasty new killer virus,” Dr. Redlener said.
The American health care system is exceptionally good at cutting-edge technologies. The top five American hospitals together conduct more clinical trials than any entire European country.
Yet over all, our health care system has failed us. Troll through World Health Organization data and cringe: Americans live shorter lives than Greeks, our kids are twice as likely to die by age 5 as Portuguese children, and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as women in Ireland. Over all, we rank well below most European countries in our health statistics (for which you can also blame the Danish in your hand as you read this).
The larger problem is that we over-invest in clinical care like CAT scans and underinvest in public health. There should be a Nobel Prize for Public Health, so that we might get more great minds wrestling with nonmedical pieces of the health puzzle, like industrial hog farms that can serve as breeding grounds for viruses and bacteria, from swine flu to MRSA.
President George W. Bush did an excellent job making preparations specifically for a flu epidemic, partly because of the avian flu scare and partly because he read a book about the 1918 influenza epidemic. But he and other presidents starved the broader public health system, so that today it is in desperate shape.
Hospitals lack spare beds, ventilators and staff to cope with an epidemic. One study found that a flu epidemic would mean that 10 million Americans would need to be hospitalized — compared with a total of nearly one million beds in America, about two-thirds of them occupied. Last year, Representative Henry Waxman ordered a review of “surge capacity” in hospitals available for a terror attack, and found that more than half the emergency rooms studied were already operating above capacity.
We don’t know whether this swine flu will be as lethal even as a typical flu season (the boy who died in Texas last week has already received more attention than all 36,000 Americans who die in a typical year of the flu). So far it has been mild in this country, but we know that the first wave of flu in 1918 caused few deaths but was followed three months later by a different form that killed tens of millions of people around the globe.
We do know we need to take precautions. These include not only washing our hands with soap and water, but also instituting far-reaching health care reform in the coming months.
“If a severe pandemic materializes,” Dr. Redlener said, “all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us.”
Vice President Joseph Biden said a few days ago that for the second 100 days of the administration, “the top of the agenda, the very top, is health care.” Lacing its armor across the field, a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is airing commercials denouncing (and distorting) President Obama’s health care proposals.
Not to be impolite, but Republicans like Karl Rove and Senator Susan Collins (along with some Democrats) lost credibility on this front when they scolded Mr. Obama a few months ago for proposing stimulus spending on something as frivolous as ... preparations for a flu pandemic. (Note to Senator Collins: You might want to remove from your Senate Web site the February article citing your opposition to pandemic preparation.)
The flu crisis should be a wake-up call, a reminder that one of our vulnerabilities to the possible pandemic is our deeply flawed medical system.
“From SARS to avian flu to the current escalating outbreaks of swine influenza, it has become increasingly clear that we are risking a major catastrophe unless we act to restore the safety net,” noted Deborah Burger, the co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Think of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance. They are less likely to receive flu vaccines (which might or might not help), less likely to receive prompt care when they get sick, and less able financially to stay home from work — and thus they are more likely both to die and to spread the virus inadvertently.
“These are, in effect, 47 million ‘Typhoid Marys’ of the next pandemic — at risk themselves and to their families and neighbors,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“This is a most dangerous brew: a dysfunctional health care system, vast numbers of Americans without access to health care, a severe recession, overextended and highly stressed hospitals, and the prospect of a nasty new killer virus,” Dr. Redlener said.
The American health care system is exceptionally good at cutting-edge technologies. The top five American hospitals together conduct more clinical trials than any entire European country.
Yet over all, our health care system has failed us. Troll through World Health Organization data and cringe: Americans live shorter lives than Greeks, our kids are twice as likely to die by age 5 as Portuguese children, and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as women in Ireland. Over all, we rank well below most European countries in our health statistics (for which you can also blame the Danish in your hand as you read this).
The larger problem is that we over-invest in clinical care like CAT scans and underinvest in public health. There should be a Nobel Prize for Public Health, so that we might get more great minds wrestling with nonmedical pieces of the health puzzle, like industrial hog farms that can serve as breeding grounds for viruses and bacteria, from swine flu to MRSA.
President George W. Bush did an excellent job making preparations specifically for a flu epidemic, partly because of the avian flu scare and partly because he read a book about the 1918 influenza epidemic. But he and other presidents starved the broader public health system, so that today it is in desperate shape.
Hospitals lack spare beds, ventilators and staff to cope with an epidemic. One study found that a flu epidemic would mean that 10 million Americans would need to be hospitalized — compared with a total of nearly one million beds in America, about two-thirds of them occupied. Last year, Representative Henry Waxman ordered a review of “surge capacity” in hospitals available for a terror attack, and found that more than half the emergency rooms studied were already operating above capacity.
We don’t know whether this swine flu will be as lethal even as a typical flu season (the boy who died in Texas last week has already received more attention than all 36,000 Americans who die in a typical year of the flu). So far it has been mild in this country, but we know that the first wave of flu in 1918 caused few deaths but was followed three months later by a different form that killed tens of millions of people around the globe.
We do know we need to take precautions. These include not only washing our hands with soap and water, but also instituting far-reaching health care reform in the coming months.
“If a severe pandemic materializes,” Dr. Redlener said, “all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us.”
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