Source: Washington Post

NORTHFIELD, Minn. — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) brought her populist message Saturday to this small college town to rev up the final weeks of Sen. Al Franken's reelection campaign, but also to claim the mantle of the modern liberal movement's political godfather.

Speaking before more than 400 people at Carleton College, Warren repeatedly invoked the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, the fiery liberal senator who died 12 years ago this month in a plane crash during his reelection campaign. Wellstone remains a revered figure in Minnesota politics, and his brand of populism -- out of step in the Clintonian Democratic Party of the 1990s -- is now mainstream among leading liberal activists. Warren has become the most prominent public face of that movement, and the Wellstone disciples in this town 40 miles south of Minneapolis gave their approval Saturday.

"The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it," Warren said to loud cheers.

It's part of a three-state tour of Senate campaigns for Warren, who later Saturday headed to St. Paul for a get-out-the-vote rally on behalf of Franken, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and other candidates. Franken and Dayton are strong favorites to win reelection next month.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/10/18/warren-in-minnesota-the-game-is-rigged/

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Edit to note that the Washington Post now has renamed the article to "The game is rigged," but taking out Warren's quote, which says, "and the Republicans rigged it."

One thing that is rarely discussed is the federal government's actual legal authority over hospitals. While the State and Federal government certainly regulate Hospitals, the Federal Government does not actually own or operate many hospitals such as the Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Finally, the reality as the debate over the ACA showed is that the U.S. healthcare system is hardly run by a monolithic federal agency.

Here is a link to the laws and regulations governing the operations of the CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/specificlawsregulations.html

Of particular note, here is the authority governing the CDC's ability to quarantine people:

http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html

Isolation and Quarantine
Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease.

Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.
In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are “police power” functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.

Federal Law
The federal government derives its authority for isolation and quarantine from the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S. Code § 264), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States and between states.

The authority for carrying out these functions on a daily basis has been delegated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

CDC’s Role
Under 42 Code of Federal Regulations parts 70 and 71, CDC is authorized to detain, medically examine, and release persons arriving into the United States and traveling between states who are suspected of carrying these communicable diseases.

As part of its federal authority, CDC routinely monitors persons arriving at U.S. land border crossings and passengers and crew arriving at U.S. ports of entry for signs or symptoms of communicable diseases.

When alerted about an ill passenger or crew member by the pilot of a plane or captain of a ship, CDC may detain passengers and crew as necessary to investigate whether the cause of the illness on board is a communicable disease.

State, Local, and Tribal Law
States have police power functions to protect the health, safety, and welfare of persons within their borders. To control the spread of disease within their borders, states have laws to enforce the use of isolation and quarantine.

These laws can vary from state to state and can be specific or broad. In some states, local health authorities implement state law. In most states, breaking a quarantine order is a criminal misdemeanor.

Tribes also have police power authority to take actions that promote the health, safety, and welfare of their own tribal members. Tribal health authorities may enforce their own isolation and quarantine laws within tribal lands, if such laws exist.

Who Is in Charge
The federal government

Acts to prevent the entry of communicable diseases into the United States. Quarantine and isolation may be used at U.S. ports of entry.
Is authorized to take measures to prevent the spread of communicable diseases between states.
May accept state and local assistance in enforcing federal quarantine.
May assist state and local authorities in preventing the spread of communicable diseases.
State, local, and tribal authorities

Enforce isolation and quarantine within their borders.
It is possible for federal, state, local, and tribal health authorities to have and use all at the same time separate but coexisting legal quarantine power in certain events. In the event of a conflict, federal law is supreme.

Enforcement
If a quarantinable disease is suspected or identified, CDC may issue a federal isolation or quarantine order.

Public health authorities at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels may sometimes seek help from police or other law enforcement officers to enforce a public health order.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Coast Guard officers are authorized to help enforce federal quarantine orders.

Breaking a federal quarantine order is punishable by fines and imprisonment.

Federal law allows the conditional release of persons from quarantine if they comply with medical monitoring and surveillance.

Federal Quarantine Rarely used
Large-scale isolation and quarantine was last enforced during the influenza (“Spanish Flu”) pandemic in 1918–1919. In recent history, only a few public health events have prompted federal isolation or quarantine orders.

Source: Dallas News

Health care workers treating Thomas Eric Duncan in a hospital isolation unit didn’t wear protective hazardous-material suits for two days until tests confirmed the Liberian man had Ebola — a delay that potentially exposed perhaps dozens of hospital workers to the virus, according to medical records.

The 3-day window of Sept. 28-30 is now being targeted by investigators for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the key time during which health care workers may have been exposed to the deadly virus by Duncan, who died Oct. 8 from the disease.

Duncan was suspected of having Ebola when he was admitted to a hospital isolation unit Sept. 28, and he developed projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea later that day, according to medical records his family turned over to The Associated Press.

But workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas did not abandon their gowns and scrubs for hazmat suits until tests came back positive for Ebola about 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, according to details of the records released by AP.

Read more: http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2014/10/presbyterian-workers-wore-no-protective-gear-for-two-days-while-treating-ebola-patient.html/?hootPostID=c7c473e639ad2859ea04ad2773012ff1

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While Fox News goes crazy about how Ebola is magically spreading despite all the precautions that were taken, the truth is that it now turns out that no precautions were taken when Eric Duncan was first admitted with projectile vomit and explosive diarrhea. This information is being hidden as folks go into hysterics about how Ebola is now going airborne and how you may be able to catch Ebola through casual contact. The fuck-up was at the hospital in allowing staff to come into contact with vomit and diarrhea without any appropriate gear.

This reminds me of the early days of the AIDS spread in 1980s when the news media was suggesting that you could get AIDS simply by standing near someone who was gay.

The corporate media will, of course, refuse to cover the lack of insurance coverage in red states. Worse, the media will attempt to blame Democrats for the efforts of Republicans to halt the implementation of the ACA. However, what you will not hear is an answer to the question of whether we expect people without insurance coverage to go to a doctor at the first sign of a fever. The first ebola patient did not go to the Hospital until his fever was 103 degrees, and he was sent home with Tylenol. In contrast, the Texas nurse went to seek help at the very first sign of fever, presumably because she has health coverage.

Will the State of Texas pay for these visits? Or, will they continue to insist that health care is not a right, and let communicable diseases spread?


http://kxan.com/2014/09/16/texas-no-1-for-uninsured-rate-again/

AUSTIN (KXAN) — New numbers from the U.S. Census show Texas holds the title of the state with the highest rate of uninsured people, with more than 22 percent of the population without health insurance.

Massachusetts had the lowest rate with a 3.7 percent uninsured population.

The numbers from the U.S. Census American Community Survey show the rate of people without insurance dropped in Texas in 2013 to 22.1 percent from 22.5 percent the year before, meaning about 5.7 million people don’t have health insurance in the state.

The health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act began to take effect in January, after this data was collected.

Source: NY Times

ore than half of the general election advertising aired by outside groups in the battle for control of Congress has come from organizations that disclose little or nothing about their donors, a flood of secret money that is now at the center of a debate over the line between free speech and corruption.

The advertising, which has overwhelmingly benefited Republican candidates, is largely paid for by nonprofit groups and trade associations, some of which are established with the purpose of shielding wealthy individuals and corporations that contribute. More money is being spent on advertising by the secret donors than by “super PACs,” the explicitly political committees whose fortunes have dominated attention with the rise of big money in politics.

Fifty-five percent of broadcast advertising in the midterm elections has been paid for by groups that do not fully disclose their donors, according to an analysis by The New York Times of advertising data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group, compared with 45 percent from super PACs, which are required to file regular financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission.

* * *
The dominance of secretly funded advertising defies one of the underlying assumptions of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed outside groups to raise and spend more money, so long as they did not coordinate with candidates and parties. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy envisioned campaigns in which unlimited independent spending by unions and corporations would be paired with robust real-time disclosure.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/11/us/politics/ads-paid-for-by-secret-money-flood-the-midterm-elections.html?_r=0

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While much is made of the "fundraising advantage" Democrats are holding in terms of dollars flowing from donors directly to candidates, this does not include the dark money that is being spent in support of Republicans by billionaires who can now readily hide their identities thanks to Citizens United. Also, the complete disconnect between the assumptions made by Anthony Kennedy in Citizens United and reality underscores the lack of integrity of the Court's right wing appointees in trying to legitimize corporate corruption of the political process.

The primary reason behind the rightward shift in our politics has been the rightward shift of our media as exemplified by the growth of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. The concept of a liberal media has always been a myth, but now the biggest lie is that the "mainstream media" is somehow neutral. False neutrality has replaced objectivity. A monopolistic media market relentlessly attacks or obscures Democratic and progressive viewpoints in order to pander to their right wing corporate advertisers.

Liberal talk radio is now largely dead because corporate advertisers have increasingly acted in concert to boycott it. Now, the only political talk radio available is from right wing blowhards. Bill Moyers once said "There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle." Sadly, we have already lost this struggle. The press is not free. It is for sale. And the only folks who can afford it are the Shelden Adelsons and Koch Brothers of the world.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/killed-liberal-radio-star-article-1.1557670

In Los Angeles, the last remaining all-liberal talk station, KTLK, will do an about-face and start airing only conservative talkers on Jan. 1. Ditto for KNEW in San Francisco. Last November, progressive stations in Portland, Ore., and Seattle switched to all-sports formats.

The biggest pressures squeezing liberal talk radio are commercial ones. Deregulation of the airwaves allowed conglomerates like Clear Channel to borrow billions from Wall Street and begin buying up stations by the hundreds. Saddled with debt, Clear Channel has ruthlessly standardized its 840 stations and squeezed each for maximum profit. That meant eliminating progressive talk from its stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.

Angry progressives claim such moves could also have a political motivation: Clear Channel is owned in part by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once run by Mitt Romney . That’s possible, but it wouldn’t explain the problems besetting stations like WWRL, which is owned by Access 1, a family-owned media company.

A more likely culprit is the hard economics of persuading businesses to advertise on local radio. “National advertisers have pulled away from progressive stations, and not just in New York,” says Mark Riley, a New York radio veteran who just ended a great stint as WWRL’s morning man. “Stations aren’t worth what the people who bought them thought they were worth,” he says.

In right wing world, President Obama's speech to the UN regarding climate change was just a distraction from the horrors of Bengazi and Obamacare. Of course, the main stream media gives Republicans a free pass on climate change issues because only Democrats are expected to be responsible.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0925/It-s-Climate-Week.-Where-are-Republicans

WASHINGTON — Leaders from across the globe, executives of multinational corporations, and a wide array of private citizens descended upon New York this week to support clean energy and climate change action at Tuesday’s UN Climate Summit and adjoining Climate Week events.

But amid the hubbub in Manhattan, one group has kept notably quiet.

For much of President Obama’s tenure, Republicans have criticized his administration’s green goals as job-killing, ineffective, and bureaucratically messy. Some Republican lawmakers reject the existence of human-induced climate change; but more frequently, Republicans say Obama’s climate policies are a distraction from pressing concerns like job creation, the economy, and national security.

“While America faces immediate challenges and threats, President Obama remains fixated on pushing an extreme climate agenda,” Sen. John Barrasso (R) of Wyoming told the Monitor in an e-mailed statement Wednesday.

In a Fox News world, some folks probably do think that Gohmert's comments are totally accurate, which is why Republicans do stand a chance to take control of the Senate. A large segment of the voting public lives in a world where Obamacare represents national security disaster, Bengazi is far worse than 9/11 and the pretext that lead to the Iraq war, and climate change is a hoax.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/09/26/3572693/tea-party-congressman-eric-holders-resignation-is-a-ploy-to-distract-americans-from-the-horrors-of-obamacare/

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) speculated on Thursday that Attorney General Eric Holder was resigning from office to distract attention from Obamacare and “the world falling apart.”

“Because of the timing, I can’t help but wonder if this is the president’s attempt to change the subject from the horrors that Obamacare has caused people’s health care and the dismal economy and the world falling apart because of this president’s foreign policies or the lack there of,” the Texas Congressman said during an interview with Radio America.

Gohmert, who famously sparred with Holder during Congressional investigations into the Fast & Furious operation and has repeatedly called for his impeachment, went on to accuse the outgoing Attorney General of partnering with “radical Islam,” which, he claimed, “has an open door at the White House.”

The allegations are nothing new from Gohmert. Following the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, Gohmert directly accused Holder of siding with terrorists. “Think about it, when your attorney general spent more of his legal career helping terrorists than defending the country, then you know we all have certain biases and lean certain ways,” he said.

I thought Republicans were for small government, and now we are supposed to track people like Fed Ex packages. Next, they will be advocating bar code tattoos.

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/09/25/3571376/barbara-comstock-fedex-immigrants/

During a debate for the 10th Congressional District with a Democratic challenger Wednesday, Virginia Republican congressional candidate Barbara Comstock said that the government can secure the border by tracking immigrants in a similar fashion to how the shipping company FedEx tracks packages.

“I think immigration should be done by legislation, not executive action. I think first and foremost, we need to stop playing politics with this and secure the borders,” Comstock said at the debate against Democratic challenger John Foust. “Fedex can track packages coming in here all the time; we can track people who are coming into the country. And we can do that right.”

“We secure the borders; we enforce the laws; and then we pass things like H-1B visas which I support, ” Comstock added. “We need to do a step by step process … So often when you have these huge monolith bills, you have unexpected consequences.”

Responding to a questioner who asked about the immigration reform proposals she supports and whether she advocated amending current laws including supporting executive action on immigration relief, Comstock said that she believed any immigration action should come from Congress and not from the Obama administration.

I do think it is amazing that the cable media has been so quiet about a billionaire threatening to withhold donations because of the Pope's comments about income inequality. It just goes to show how corrupt our mainstream media has become.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ken-langone-20140103-story.html#page=1

Is it a law of evolution that the fatter the wallet, the thinner the skin? The wallet of Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, is so fat he he must sit on it funny, yet there he was the other day, crabbing to CNBC about Pope Francis' missive to the effect that the rich are indifferent to the poor.

Langone was careful to attribute his complaints to an unnamed fellow plutocrat, who being a rich person ostensibly took the Pope's remarks as an insult. Langone claimed his friend was so upset by the Pope's remarks that he was reconsidering a donation for the renovation of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral.


If Langone sounds a little like the guy with an embarrassing condition opening his medical consultation with the words, "Doc, I've got this friend...," so be it. Langone told CNBC he advised Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York that the pope should cool it with the finger-pointing at the rich. ("You get more with honey than with vinegar," he said.) Dolan promised to explain to the reluctant donor that he was "misunderstanding" the pope's words and suggested he would explicate the pope's words in a more emollient way. "And then," Dolan said hopefully, "he's going to say, 'OK, if that's the case, count me in for St. Patrick's Cathedral.'"

Remember, this is all about a $180-million project to renovate the big cathedral on Fifth Avenue, which suggests that the priorities of the New York diocese may not leave so much room for "misunderstanding" the pope's message.