NY Times:
The fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security that began with Republicans thundering about a lawless president abusing power to change immigration policy ended with a quiet capitulation Tuesday when the House voted to fund the agency and avert a partial shutdown.
In the end, Speaker John A. Boehner was forced to build a majority on Democratic votes to pass the bill, 257 to 167, with just 75 Republican supporters. But although the uprising among conservatives burned hot into the week, there was no suggestion that Mr. Boehner’s leadership was imperiled. Instead, many Republicans expressed a sense of resigned relief.
Jonathan Bernstein:
John Boehner is very, very good at his job.
You'd never know that from the news coverage of the House defeat of his proposed three-week funding extension for the Department of Homeland Security. After an unusual combination of conservative Republicans and almost all House Democrats rebuffed the speaker's bill, the Senate jumped in to pass a one-week interim measure, which the House then approved, avoiding a partial government shutdown.
The House will reportedly complete the process today by passing a “clean” bill to fund the department for a full year without the riders that would have restricted Barack Obama's actions on immigration.
Pundits and reporters have portrayed the chain of events as a disaster for the speaker, and are wondering again if his job is in jeopardy. So why do I think Boehner’s “defeat” was actually a brilliant maneuver?
He's brilliant because he made the best of a bad hand? I don't think so. Republicans still haven't shown they can govern, and that's still the name of the game, not Boehner keeping his job.
More politics and policy below the fold.
National Journal:
But when the confetti fell last November and Republicans won their majority, the expectation was that the Republican Party and its leaders would be hitting their stride by now. The party had a clear mandate: return to regular order while proving it could govern with policy proposals on everything from Obamacare replacements to tax reform that went beyond just blocking Democrats. Instead, Congress appears to still be clawing from crisis to crisis.
Intra-party squabbling has undermined Republicans' ability to exhibit its discipline to govern and it has allowed Democrats to exercise power in the minority.
Exactly so.
NY Times:
Over six years of bitter disagreements about how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel kept running into one central problem: The two leaders never described their ultimate goal in quite the same way.
Mr. Obama has repeated a seemingly simple vow: On his watch, the United States would do whatever it took to “prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Mr. Netanyahu has used a different set of stock phrases. Iran had to be stopped from getting the “capability” to manufacture a weapon, he said, and Israel could never tolerate an Iran that was a “threshold nuclear state.”
That semantic difference has now widened into a strategic chasm that threatens to imperil the American-Israeli relationship for years to come, and to upend the most audacious diplomatic gamble by an American leader since President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China.
Netanyahu's playing to Republicans and neocons is a disaster for Israeli-American relations, for AIPAC (finally seen for the partisan tool that it is) and, I think, ultimately for Republicans. But it'll have to play out a while for it to be seen.
What did Bibi say? I was in meetings. #Presidential
— @ron_fournier
@ron_fournier He's starting an exploratory committee...
— @NormanKelley
Paul Waldman:
Why Netanyahu’s speech didn’t do his American allies any favors
Craig Spencer, the Ebola doctor, has his say about Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, and other politicians who neglected to talk to their public health people:
Meanwhile, politicians, caught up in the election season, took advantage of the panic to try to appear presidential instead of supporting a sound, science-based public health response. The governors of New York and New Jersey, followed by others, enacted strict home quarantine rules without sufficiently considering the unintended side effects. The threat of quarantine may cause sick people to defer seeking treatment, and both nationals of affected countries and health care responders returning from those countries may alter their travel plans or misreport their exposure to avoid quarantine. Implementing restrictions that don't accord with the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention4 also undermines and erodes confidence in our ability to respond cohesively to public health crises. At times of threat to our public health, we need one pragmatic response, not 50 viewpoints that shift with the proximity of the next election. Moreover, if the U.S. public policy response undermined efforts to send more volunteers to West Africa, and thus allowed the outbreak to continue longer than it might have, we would all be culpable.
Dallas Morning News:
Experimental drugs and special care helped make Nina Pham Ebola free. But today she fears she may never escape the deadly disease.
The 26-year-old nurse says she has nightmares, body aches and insomnia as a result of contracting the disease from a patient she cared for last fall at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.
She says the hospital and its parent company, Texas Health Resources, failed her and her colleagues who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person in the United States diagnosed with Ebola.
“I wanted to believe that they would have my back and take care of me, but they just haven’t risen to the occasion,” Pham told The Dallas Morning News last week in an exclusive interview.
Pham says she will file a lawsuit Monday in Dallas County against Texas Health Resources alleging that while she became the American face of the fight against the disease, the hospital’s lack of training and proper equipment and violations of her privacy made her “a symbol of corporate neglect — a casualty of a hospital system’s failure to prepare for a known and impending medical crisis.”
She says that Texas Health Resources was negligent because it failed to develop policies and train its staff for treating Ebola patients. She says Texas Health Resources did not have proper protective gear for those who treated Duncan
Reuters:
Chris Barr had no problem getting his eight children exempted from vaccinations when they went to school. First in California, and later when the family moved to Arkansas, the natural healing practitioner simply signed a piece of paper stating that his personal beliefs didn’t allow the immunizations.
Such exclusions may not be so easy to obtain going forward. This year’s highly publicized measles outbreaks, which have infected more than 150 people in 17 states, are no longer front page news. But they could well have a lasting public health legacy. Already, lawmakers in at least 10 states are promoting legislation that would make exemptions far harder to obtain.
The proposed laws have been introduced in statehouses by both Democrats and Republicans and include a range of approaches, from requiring schools to post immunization rates to entirely eliminating religious and philosophical exemptions. But they all respond to one undeniable fact: Most of the recent measles cases have been in people who were not vaccinated against the disease.
Good.
More here on why I say "good".
The lawsuit states, “Desperately, THR issued a press release that announced Nina’s condition had been upgraded from stable to good in hopes that the public would think THR was doing something right.”
But two days later, Pham was flown to a specialized treatment center at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. She left with a flurry of fanfare.
Texas Health’s public relations staff published a YouTube video of Pham tearfully thanking colleagues from her hospital bed. There were “Nina is our hero!” tweets and admiration for her beloved dog, Bentley. A company press release quoted Pham as saying, “I am #presbyproud!”
Today, the emotional bedside video of Pham can no longer be viewed on YouTube. Links to some press releases about Pham on the hospital’s website are also no longer accessible. The hospital declined to answer specific questions from Yahoo News but did email a statement.
AP:
The Alabama Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the state's probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, a decision that flies in the face of numerous rulings by federal judges in Alabama and other states across the country who have said banning gay marriage violates the U.S. Constitution.
The all-Republican court sided with a pair of conservative organizations Tuesday in ruling that the U.S. Constitution doesn't alter the judges' duty to administer state law, which defines marriage as between only one man and one woman.
Six justices concurred in the 134-page opinion, which wasn't signed, but the court's most outspoken opponent of gay marriage, Chief Justice Roy Moore, recused himself.
Bad.