Rand Paul, the Republican senate candidate in Kentucky, is a freewheeling libertarian. Instead of getting some fancy board-certification as an ophthalmologist, Paul decided to "go Galt" and make up his own credentials. Paul founded the National Board of Ophthalmology, ostensibly to certify doctors as qualified eye specialists.
The NBO is run out of Paul's home in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Paul is the president, is wife is the vice president, and her father Hilton Ashby is the organization's secretary. Normally medical boards sponsor rigorous exams to ensure the highest professional standards in their respective specialties. "I can't tell you what the organization does," Ashby told TPM.
It takes a rugged individualist eye doctor to found an entire medical board just for himself and a few friends. When you think about it, it's kind of hypocritical of Paul to hold a standard medical license. If he were a true libertarian he'd found his own medical board and let the free market decide who's a "real doctor."
FDA cracks down on DNA tests
The mean old FDA has ordered that companies offering so-called over-the-counter DNA testing prove that their products actually work. Libertarian Alex Tabarrok is outraged. He argues that if the tests don't actually harm anyone, the government shouldn't restrict them.
At the American Prospect, Tim Fernholtz replies that the FDA's decision is just common sense. If a company is claiming to provide medical information, the onus is on them to prove that they are informing the public accurately. Besides, even if the test itself is harmless the results of the test could have life-altering consequences.
Michael Mechanic reports in Mother Jones that one woman became convinced that she'd been the victim of a hospital baby mixup when a over-the-counter DNA test showed that her son wasn't hers. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones applauds the FDA for getting involved but wonders aloud whether over the counter DNA testing is really that much different from astrology or other dubious prediction methods that are perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment. Should Magic 8-Balls be allowed to market themselves as pregnancy tests? Signs point to no.
HIV in the Motor City
Former White House staffer Van Jones is raising the alarm about HIV in Detroit, as Todd Heywood reports in the Michigan Messenger. HIV rates in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. have garnered national headlines, but the crisis in Detroit has gone largely unnoticed. Over half of the zip codes in Detroit report HIV prevalence rates of at least 3%. In the most severely affected zip codes, 6% of the population is HIV positive, an infection level on par with Uganda.
Modeling Christian behavior
A self-proclaimed Christian school in Florida fired a pregnant teacher because she admitted to conceiving her child three weeks before her wedding. Jaretta Hamilton was fired from Southland Christian School for telling the truth about premarital sex, Joseph DiNorcia reports in RH Reality Check. By all accounts Mrs. Hamilton's job performance was fine. Instead of bearing false witness, she answered an intrusive question truthfully. Apparently the school felt it was more "Christian" for Hamilton's baby to be born to an unemployed mother. Hamilton is suing for discrimination.
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This week's health care news was full of mind-bending paradoxes: Prostate health is girly, abstinence-only education works through failure, "principled" libertarian Rand Paul would protect all-white lunch counters but ban private abortion clinics, and more.
The administration and Organizing for Obama are clearly aware that many of the strongest supporters of healthcare reform are reluctant to support the President's current plan because it lacks a public option. In the OFA conference call on finishing health care reform the following question was asked:
Q: I was just wondering if we come across folks who are still advocating for the public option, should we still be supportive of that or would that mess things up?
Mitch: The President laid out his plan and the public option is not in that and I know a lot of people - not only on the phone here - but a lot of the folks that you talk to feel very strongly about the public option, but this is what I would say... This is our best shot at getting health insurance reform; comprehensive health insurance reform passed and while its not going to be exactly what everyone wants. This bill - the President's plan - accomplishes 90% of what I think all of us agree is a step in the right direction. So I would just talk about what is at stake. Sitting on the side lines based off of the public option - at this point is going to be absolutely detrimental to our efforts as we move forward. We have a lot of conversations about that and just say what's at stake - is that the sole reason why you support health insurance reform? You know, pose that question to folks. If we don't get this done now, literally it will be a decade before anyone brings this back up again and our country can't afford that - businesses, families, individuals and our government - local, state and federal - can't afford to put this problem off for another decade so that is what I would say to folks. I know it isn't a perfect answer. I know a lot of people feel extremely strong about that issues, but that's the best answer I can give you all tonight.
(thanks to Chris Bowers for prosting this)
This is a gross misunderstanding of why public option supporters oppose the current bill. Our response is not the selfish, simple-minded "oh, we didn't get our pet project in the bill, so we're against it" mentality that OFA leadership has tried to present it as. We are, by and large, opposed to any bill that would force the uninsured (such as myself) to buy policies from the very same private insurance companies Obama and the Democratic leadership have painted as the corrupt, well-monied defenders of a broken status quo.
We cannot, and will not support a bill that rewards these companies for denying coverage, for putting profit over people's lives, for distorting the democratic process through lobbying money, by handing them 50 million new customers, forced by government to buy their overpriced products. We are not just sitting on the sidelines, we are fundamentally opposed to this type of a bill.
We have said from the very beginning, that if there is to be an individual mandate to buy insurance we must have some option outside of the existing private, for profit companies. Whether a new public agency, a non-profit, or a Medicare buy-in (this is what most progressives would actually prefer if voluntarily open to all ages), any or all would be fine, just not WellPoint (whose former CEO was the Baucus staffer that largely wrote the Senate bill that Obama has based his proposal around). We will not support a bill that was written by insurance company CEOs and lobbyists.
This is not a qualm over a small detail; it is a huge rift over the fundamental direction of healthcare reform and government in general. Do we truly change and move this country in a new direction, by once again using government to provide for the general welfare of the people, as the Constitution gives Congress the authority and responsibility to do (Section 8, Article I), or do we continue with more of the same: big government bailing out big business at the expense of our general welfare?
Conservative philosophy has been on full-throated display in recent days. Between the Republican talking points at the Health Care Summit (which essentially boiled down to "we don't care about the uninsured or less healthy people, especially if it might cost any rich people a penny in taxes"), the Senate floor where Republicans held hostage a bill to help unemployed people because they wanted a chance to let mega-millionaires off the hook on inheritance taxes, and the speeches at the CPAC conference, the last few days have allowed us all to see the modern conservative philosophy in all its undisguised glory. My reaction to all this is that I owe Ayn Rand an apology. Given that she's been dead for a while, she's not likely to care, but even so Ayn: I'm sorry. I underestimated your influence. Where I wrote my book about the history of the American political debate, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, I neglected to mention Rand. I did this for a couple reasons. One was because her extreme form of libertarianism seemed to me only one modest strand compared to the intellectual and/or political giants of historical American conservatism such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, the Social Darwinists, or even the modern day conservative movement builders like Buckley, Helms, Goldwater, or Reagan.
The other reason that I discounted her was, well - how do I put this diplomatically? She was such a freak. Her twisted novels extolling selfishness and cruelty - apparently based in part on her admiration of a kidnapper and murderer who dismembered his twelve year old victim and threw her head and torso at the girl's father as he sped away in a car - are so twisted and nasty that I had trouble believing she really merited note in a discussion of influential conservatives. But the victory of libertarian Ayn Rand disciple Ron Paul at the CPAC straw poll, the strong influences of her thinking on such CPAC heroes as Michelle Bachman and Glenn Beck, and the increasingly strident me-first-and-only-me rhetoric of a Republican party utterly captured by Tea Partiers have made me realize just how big Rand's influence is. Rand's philosophical magnum opus was a book she entitled "The Virtue of Selfishness." In it she argues not only that selfishness is moral and good, but that altruism, charity, and even kindness are evils - a "moral cannibalism" is what she called it. Like Glenn Beck, who glorified (to the laughter and cheers of the CPAC audience) the "lion eating the weak," people who are poor or weakened or in trouble for any reason are just parasites, nothing more.
Rand went even further, writing that people who place even their families and friends above their own work and desires are immoral. Rand and Beck's philosophy that selfishness is the ultimate virtue, and that any kindness or generosity or compassion toward others - even your own family and friends - is so the opposite of what all the world's great religions and moral traditions teach us that you would think Bible toting conservatives would run from these beliefs. You'd think that the contradictions would be too great, and there are certainly rifts at times between the true libertarians and the Christian conservatives. But for political reasons conservatives try hard to keep a combination of these two philosophical strains in place at the same time, a sort of hybrid conservative that scours the Bible for quotes that can be somehow interpreted as pro-free market and against taxing the rich. My personal favorites in this genre include a Christian Coalition issues guide which argues against labor unions by quoting a verse about how slaves should obey their masters, and a guy named David Barton who argues that the Parable of the Talents (which some Bible readers might have thought was an analogy about spiritual matters) means that there should be no Capital Gains tax.
Yesterday afternoon, former Republican Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr had the audacity to say, "Waterboarding is torture." The reason it took audacity is that he was at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He was promptly booed.
Instead of adhering to the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, conservative ideological leaders and Republican leaders have decided to shoot for political expediency, stubbornness, and sadism.
Of course he's a total hypocrite cause he used to be a Republican examining Bill Clinton's bedroom habits but that is besides the point.
I fear if he attacks Obama and McCain on things like civil liberties, gay marriage, foreign policy, and other issues that resonate with liberals those attacks might resonate with some of the younger new Democrats who Obama has been trying to recruit. Of course all the signs say that overall he will hurt McCain more than Obama, I do wonder if he could do damage in certain key areas/demographics. I could see him being popular with young liberal here in Georgia, but it is pretty hard to imagine him hurting the Dems more than the GOP.
I just saw him on Fox News Sunday and he appeared to be more attacking Obama from the left than attacking McCain from the right. We Democrats want Barr to slam the Republicans on economic fiscal conservatism as much as humanly possible. If he starts doing this, I think we should do our best to make sure he gets seated in as many debates as possible. However if he focuses on attacking Obama with the same concentration that some of these other anti-Obama media outlets have I could see it, at the very least, minimizing the amount that he will act as a spoiler against the Republicans.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens. The Obama slime machines are in such full effect already I just get worries. The media is the only thing that is going to give McCain a chance in hell of winning in November. Fox News has become so apparently anti-Obama that its hard to imagine that even hardcore Republicans haven't noticed and adjusted accordingly. I would be willing to cut off one of my toes if that would make Juan Williams disappear. He drives me even more crazy than Sean Hannity because he actually poses as a neutral objective political analyst.
