LA Times on the effort to curtail personal vaccine exemptions in CA:
The vaccination debate has reached fever pitch. Legislation has passed in the state Senate that would do away with the "personal belief exemption" that allows parents in California to refuse to vaccinate their children. As it moves to the Assembly, opponents are ratcheting up their rhetoric, calling the bill a huge intrusion on their rights, and one that is written so broadly that even children with conditions that make vaccinations dangerous for them wouldn't be entitled to exemptions.
The noise surrounding SB 277 is drowning out the truth, which is this: In general, parents have a right to make medical decisions for their children. But when it comes to communicable diseases, which can have devastating consequences on large groups of people, there also is a general societal right to protect public health.
It just happened in
Vermont:
Gov. Peter Shumlin has signed without fanfare the legislation that removes the philosophical exemption from Vermont's vaccination law.
On the heels of a polarized and emotional public debate at the Legislature this year, Shumlin signed the bill privately in his office early Thursday afternoon, according to spokesman Scott Coriell.
The exemption is to end July 1, 2016.
Politico has a piece semi-defending Dennis Hastert:
The specific charges against Hastert involve “structured withdrawals,” Hastert is alleged to have taken down a series of transfers from financial institutions all just under the ten thousand dollar reporting threshold, allegedly to evade reporting them to the government. As an add on, Hastert is accused of having lied to federal investigators when questioned about these withdrawals.
These reporting requirements, first adopted in 1970 and recently expanded in the USA Patriot Act—a notable legislative accomplishment, ironically, of Dennis Hastert—were designed to furnish tools for law enforcement in combatting money laundering and drug trafficking. Are the feds saying that Hastert is a money launderer or a drug trafficker? No. What exactly was wrong with his unreported withdrawals? There is a strong suggestion of improper purpose, but the indictment is sparing with the facts.
Hastert is so screwed. Good luck defending him.
Daniel Larison with a conservative critique of the GOP's debate problem, Part I:
The trouble with excluding some candidates and allowing others to stay is that it is inevitably arbitrary. The officials making the decision are likely to misjudge which candidates merit inclusion. Candidates that are deemed part of the “top tier” by pundits and party officials can sometimes be complete flops with the voters when the time comes (see Pawlenty, Tim), and on occasion the debates have served as the springboard for one of the lesser-known candidates to rise to be one of the top competitors in the race. When polling is used to determine who should be allowed in, that treats early polling as if it were a meaningful measure of support rather than the name recognition test that it really is. People tend to say they prefer candidates that are already familiar to them. Meanwhile, candidates that aren’t already well-known before the debates end up being barred from the venues where they are most likely to become familiar to more voters. The danger in relying on polling is that little-known candidates with decent credentials will be passed over while uncompetitive celebrity candidates are allowed in.
and
Part II:
Some of the candidates likely to be excluded from the first debates are new and really are lacking in name recognition, and keeping them out of the debates does make it even less likely that they will have any impact on the race. This is to some degree arbitrary and “unfair,” but it’s also true that the first-time candidates that won’t make the cut add little or nothing to the debate that won’t already be there. Fiorina is a somewhat unconventional candidate, but her views are utterly conventional. Given the large number of hawkish candidates that are sure to be running, Graham’s presence is the race is at best redundant. The party doesn’t miss out on anything if they aren’t included. Moreover, there is no faction that will be shut out of the debates if they are not permitted to participate. There will be more than enough Clinton-bashing and hard-line foreign policy nonsense as it is. There has be a line drawn somewhere, and obviously hopeless ego-driven candidacies should be the first to go. The field might eventually swell to almost 20 declared candidates before it’s all over, and there’s simply no way to accommodate them all without turning the entire process into an even bigger circus than it already is.
Jay Jaroch (on Kevin Drum's blog) talking about Cuban reaction to Marco Rubio:
For obvious reasons, it can be difficult to get a Cuban to open up about their political views. It usually took some time to establish trust, and a certain amount of privacy. Sharing a few rum drinks didn’t seem to hurt either.
But they often did open up, especially when I offered to answer any questions they had for me. And the one question virtually everyone had was this: is Hillary Clinton going to be the next president? When I’d tell them I gave her a 75%-80% chance of winning based on demographic trends alone, they’d exhale. It wasn’t because they had any particular love for Hillary Clinton. It’s that they expected that she would continue Obama’s Cuba policies, whereas a Republican president would reinstate the full embargo. So, viva Hillary.
The more interesting thing, to me, was that they saved a particular brand of venom for Marco Rubio.
Charles Blow:
Gallup has tested the moral acceptability of 19 variables since the early 2000s.
And, as Gallup found this week:
“The upward progression in the percentage of Americans seeing these issues as morally acceptable has varied from year to year, but the overall trend clearly points toward a higher level of acceptance of a number of behaviors. In fact, the moral acceptability ratings for 10 of the issues measured since the early 2000s are at record highs.”
Acceptance of gay or lesbian relations is up 23 percentage points over that time. Having a baby outside of marriage is up 16 points. Premarital sex is up 15 points. Divorce and research using stem cells obtained from human embryos are both up 12 points.
At the same time, the death penalty is down three points (within the four-point margin of error) and medical testing on animals is down nine points.
We as a country may still be engaged in a vigorous debate about the proper size and function of government, and about which parties and candidates could best steer America in the right direction, but one thing is less and less debatable: We are rapidly becoming a more socially liberal country.
Timothy Egan:
You thought he was the smart Bush. You thought he was the reasonable one. You thought he was the Republican with one foot in the 21st century, the man who wasn’t going to say crazy things to win the primary voter who believes in crazy things. But you haven’t been paying attention to Jeb Bush.
Yes, he was strafed from both sides for his tortured and fact-challenged explanations of the Iraq war. The fumbling is understandable: Bound by family fealty, the fraternal load of the biggest foreign policy debacle of our time, Jeb Bush can’t state the obvious.
But an equally astounding, and perhaps more absurd utterance, has not received nearly as much attention — his climate change stance. Bush the youngest believes the Earth is warming. No doubt, he’s willing to go further out on a limb and conclude that heat expands, cold contracts and a dolphin is not a fish.
That’s as far as he’ll go. He says the science is “convoluted,” even though the latest assessment from international climate scientists states with 95 percent confidence that humans are the cause of a sick planet. That obfuscation is also understandable. You simply cannot be a leader of the Republican Party without appearing to know less than a fifth grader about earth science.
The real stunner was a statement made earlier this month at a campaign event. What bothers him is not the threat of megastorms, life-killing droughts, city-burying sea rises — but experts in the scientific community who are sounding such alarms. Those people.
Robert Costa:
When Republican officials in Iowa convened a planning session Thursday for their quadrennial presidential straw poll, only a handful of advisers to GOP contenders bothered to show up.
The sparse attendance and lack of enthusiasm, even from those who came, was worrying to state party brass: The straw poll — a carnival-like organizing ritual that has in past years winnowed the candidate field and marked the start of caucus season — has faded into irrelevance.