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While Republicans throughout the country are united in their push to revive local businesses — in some cases at the expense of public health — they are divided on how to pursue expanded coronavirus testing, universally considered to be the cornerstone for the safe rebuilding of the economy. As senators Ted Cruz and Pat Toomey push for the federal distribution of rapid-response tests — and Democrats go to bat for a vast, centralized testing apparatus — other Republicans want to continue to let the states determine the course without the luxury of competent federal guidance. According to Politico, Republican lawmakers “argue that private companies are best suited to find an innovative solution to the testing debacle, not the federal government. In addition, they say Congress already spent money on testing in the previous spending packages and should see the results before spending more.”
In order to maintain the consistency of small-government messaging, Republican lawmakers are willing to tank an effective federal response to the crisis, even though undermining national programs — like broad CDC and NIH cuts — helped pave the road to disaster in the first place, while a general erosion of the safety net has left millions of Americans without health coverage during a pandemic. And for state responses to be effective, it would also require the Trump administration to not actively undermine their efforts to collect medical equipment.
HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
~~Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (2002)
Lakota woman counts coup on neo-Confederates.
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—With a Whimper and a Whine:
When Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast right wing conspiracy” in 1998 as she lashed out at the attacks against then president Bill Clinton, many (especially on the right) thought her paranoid, and the right still mocks her to this day regarding her choice of phrase. But in the decade or so since Clinton made that statement, various researchers have revealed the size and scope of the network of conservative groups and individuals who indeed so operate in concert to advance the conservative agenda.
On the communications size, the network of radio, TV, and blogs create a right-wing noise machine, which, in the past, has proven astonishingly successful at creating scandal out of the benign or making fiction seem like fact (i.e., Obama is a Muslim, or he’s unpatriotic because he didn’t wear a flagpin).
The April 15th “tea protests” revealed more about this right-wing noise machine than they did about some purported coast-to-coast anti-liberal revolution.
