#GOP wants an "Ebola Czar" umm it's called the Surgeon General and you've blocked the nomination you dimwits.
#SaveTheSenate
— John Joseph (@CAPolitics) October 14, 2014
Budget cuts may have been a minor contributor:
A liberal advocacy group is blaming Republicans for the Ebola crisis in a new ad that will first air on TV in Kentucky next weekend.
The Agenda Project released an ad online late Sunday that interlaces self-described “disturbing footages of the Ebola outbreak” with a mash-up of top Republicans — including those tied up in crucial midterm contests and potential 2016 candidates — saying the word “cut.” The ad describes how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw its discretionary funding cut by $585 million from 2010 to 2014 and the National Institute for Health has faced $446 million in cuts during the same period.
The group plans to continue to play up public fears over the Ebola virus in the final weeks leading up to the midterms and will modify the ad with state-specific versions to hit Republican Senate candidates like Iowa’s Joni Ernst and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis who want to cut federal government spending, the group’s founder and president Erica Payne said.
Payne called the ad an “indictment” of Republican policies that have “led directly to thousands of deaths overseas” and said the ad is not “sensationalized” or “aggressive.”
SHAMELESS!
ruemara
Truth. It, oddly, never favors republicans.
wmd
Ads that play on fear? What happened to hope and change?
Nice to see them reap the whirlwind of their own stupidity.
Suffern ACE
Yeah. I want that on my resume. “Ebola Czar”. I guess it would look more impressive than “Child Molester Czar”, but not by much.
Keith P
This is the most mean-spirited ad John McCain has seen in his entire life.
moonbat
Poetic, especially considering how Repugs have been ginning up fear of the disease in recent weeks.
danielx
Yet another episode of “Let’s Play Shoot Ourselves In The Foot”. The way Republicans insist on playing this game, they must have more feet than a goddamn millipede.
Edit: @Keith P: And John McCain knows from mean spirited, oh yes he does.
SarahT
Attention DSCC, DGA, and DCCC : More ads like this, please – immediately.
Violet
Good! Glad to see this sort of thing happening. The NIH cuts have been devastating. Now we’re seeing real examples of why. No need to lie. It’s all true.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So Czars are suddenly a good thing to conservatives?
And how long before pointing out that blocking the Surgeon General nominee is contributing to the problem is just playing politics?
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Czars, Kings, and such are always okay for conservatives. Those who want to empower the people are anathema.
danielx
Speaking of mean spirited, Brent Bozell sez Karl Rove is ruining the Republican Party. How, may you ask? Why, because he just doesn’t love conservatism enough.
News to me; I seem to recall this eight year period where Rove was pretty instrumental in trying to give conservatives pretty near everything they thought they wanted at the time of the Cheney Regency. Who knew? But here’s the money quote….
Somehow Brother Bozell has missed the blindingly obvious, that Reagan couldn’t get nominated today on a bet. He actually talked to Democrats with the objective of passing legislation.
Mike J
Fuck ebola, right now I’m watching TCM and I’m only worried about my intercostal clavicle.
phantomist
Obama has more czars than the Romanovs – who ruled Russia for 3 centuries. Romanovs 18, cyberczar makes 20.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) May 30, 2009
___________
Wolf(frank va-10) is cosponsoring legislation that would prohibit the president from appointing high-ranking officials without going through the Senate’s confirmation process. The Czar Accountability and Reform Act (H.R. 3226) also would eliminate funding for czars who hold senior policy-making positions who carry out the same functions as officials who have been confirmed by the Senate.
______
Congressman Jerry Moran recently introduced H. Res. 778 – a resolution to formally express Congress’ opposition to the “czar” appointment process while calling for the President to cease all “czar” appointments. Moran also sponsored H.R. 3226, the Czar Accountability and Reform Act of 2009, to prohibit paying the salary of a “czar” that has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“The Obama Administration’s excessive czar’ appointments exemplify the ever-expanding federal bureaucracy and big government that Kansans and Americans have grown tired of,” Moran said. “The increasing use of unconfirmed government officials is irresponsible – it is time Congress stops the executive branch from abusing this flawed appointment process. I have introduced this resolution to condemn the increased use of unconfirmed government officials and heads of agencies.
Citizen_X
A Todd Akin-like implosion!
GregB
I am going to assume that are one or two cases away from the entire rightwing demanding in unison that FEMA needs to start building camps and filling them with American citizens in order to stop the disease.
These people are so tiring.
jl
Well, public health budgets, including infectious disease control and surveillance HAVE been slashed. And from what I read it is all on the head of our current insane Congressional GOP.
Do you know who has a good reputation among public health people for control and surveillance funding, as well as electronic medical records funding among people who watch budgets over time, compared to now?
Dub.
Yeah that is right, George W Bush, that Dub.
But now, even Dub is an evil commie….er compassionate conservative.,, er progressive, or collectivist, or something…
I mean really, how ghastly can a political party get? I guess the current GOP will continue to strive to answer that question.
Violet
@GregB: Yes, and meanwhile the enterovirus that is in most states, appears to have airborne transmission, attacks young children, has killed two and mysteriously paralyzed others is hardly mentioned. Why no Enterovirus Czar?
jl
@jl: Forgot that electronic medical record funding has gone up, but that is the doing of the very evil and illegitimate Obama health reform. Obama and Dems have not been able to (or not tried? I really don’t know…) to protect public health funding.
Origuy
@GregB: Fox News already went there.
jl
And obviously, schmucks like Hannity saying he doesn’t trust the CDC, and making general hints towards the Limbaugh sewer about secrets and agendas and cover-ups on Ebola is not politicizing the Ebola outbreak. It is just healthy Enquirer-ing
But simply providing a fact-checkable history of funding now that there is panic over Ebola is just absolutely outrageous.
But, the corporate hack media divas are so incompated and doofus-ized, they are incapable of recognizing any kind of reality that some VSP cannot fix up. An infectious disease outbreak won’t touch them, obvs, because they are special, and everything has the same reality as Crazy Uncle Biden schtick, or Hilary cankles controversy, or whatever Mean Girls thing about Michelle Obama is winning the morning today.
sm*t cl*de
Aren’t those called “hospitals”?
Chris T.
@Violet: It’s because ebola isn’t around, so it’s scarier. If there’s one or two cases in the entire country, fearful people project all their fears onto it. If there are thousands of cases and they are therefore at least somewhat familiar with it, people are less susceptible to this.
In other words, an actual epidemic, even one of ebola, is less scary than an imagined epidemic.
azlib
MY goodness, John McCain is a hypocrite! I would have never guessed! Our senior Senator is such an embarrassment at times.
I hope the ads knock some sense into enough voters to realize the Republican Party has no interest in funding essential services from the Federal Government.
jl
@sm*t cl*de: Hospital? That is not serious. ‘Detention Camps’ is serious. Hoo boy, we need detention camps, Discipline and Punish!
RaflW
@Violet:
Because Ebola! comes from Black people, and the Enterovirus comes from, uhhh, the air? An Entero, whatever that is? (Hmm, sounds like a failed Pontiac, kinda.)
Anyway, Ebola has that whole darkest Africa ogedy-boogedy to it. So it must be the latest GOP freakout.
Petorado
It’s about time. When the general public finally realizes that “cut” means “less of,” maybe this nation will start to realize that budget cuts mean we all have less of something that was meaningfully placed there for all our well-being in the first place.
Yatsuno
SHRILL! UNCIVIL!!! Dare I say…PARTISAN!!! How DARE they!
Arclite
Obviously the CDC and the NIH have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They’ll just have to do more with less. Also, they need to fund pensions out to 2050.
Arclite
@Chris T.:
Also, if it were an ACTUAL epidemic, people wouldn’t fall for these scare tactics. They’d actually want gov’t to do something about it. Such a shame the GOP has defunded the gov’t so that it’s more difficult to take action.
Chris
@danielx:
And the revolution continues to eat its young, as all the things that go wrong are blamed on saboteurs and traitors and the fact that people aren’t sufficiently committed to The Way Things Ought To Be. Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
It is fascinating, though, to see which icons they pick out of the past to turn into generic saints who were always True Believers, no matter what they actually said and did. Like Reagan. Was there ever a time when the crazies didn’t revere him, like during his presidency, before the whole retrospective myth/hagiography was created?
Richard Fox
I am hopeful the flagellants will be appearing soon. They make a most epic spectacle.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
They didn’t revere him as much, but I point you to his overwhelming reelection. Reagan ran on the message that being a religious, racist asshole was actually mature and brave and noble. He got the country overwhelmingly on his side with that message, and it became the new normal. Welfare queens and the War on Drugs, which was publicly understood at the time to be about helping blacks, whose adolescents were all cocaine-addicted gang members in ghettos that needed to be policed good and hard to protect them from themselves.
They loved it then, but as the country slipped away percentage point by percentage point, as their children abandoned fundamentalism and the demographic timer counted down, they grew to worship him and want him back more than anything in the world.
brantl
They got that right, at least. 1 for 1,000,000; a new trend
SFAW
@Origuy:
“
JudenKranken ‘raus!”Cervantes
Rarely has the word “dimwits” been utilized better.
Cervantes
@Chris:
Reagan made a televised speech for Goldwater the evening of October 27, 1964. From that speech on, and with lots of help from his closest advisers, for two decades Reagan’s message was crafted to appeal to “the crazies” and the rest of us at the same time.
billb
the rethuglicans hate amurica by cutting the budget to keep us safe from ebola!, man when I win the lotto tonight, I am funding those ads all across the country! Especially on your lame azz ol’mitch.