We begin today's roundup with a series of editorials analyzing the quarantines of health care workers. First up,
The New York Times:
Chris Christie of New Jersey and Andrew Cuomo of New York — fed panic by imposing a new policy of mandatory quarantines for all health care workers returning from the Ebola-stricken countries of West Africa through John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty international airports. There is absolutely no public health justification for mandatory quarantines. [...]
Lost in this grandstanding was one essential point. The danger to the public in New York in the case of Dr. Craig Spencer, who had worked in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, was close to nonexistent. Health experts are virtually unanimous in declaring that people infected with the virus do not become contagious until after they develop a fever or other symptoms, such as diarrhea, vomiting, or severe headaches, at which time they need to be hospitalized and taken out of circulation.
The Washington Post adds its take:
The right answer is to protect the public without overreacting. Mistakes made in the Dallas hospital ought to be a warning and a lesson, and it seems to us that they are being taken as such. The decisions adopted by Maryland and Virginia on Monday — to screen and monitor those returning from the Ebola-stricken region of West Africa, and to ask some to stay home or away from public places — are prudent and reasonable. The experts have repeatedly explained that Ebola does not spread like the flu; transmission requires the transfer of bodily fluids. That’s the science. But emotions count, too.
Much more on this and the day's other top stories below the fold.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
The quarantines, while understandable, are likely to spread even more misinformation about the disease, which cannot be transmitted by anyone without symptoms. In New Jersey, the isolation was primitive and absurd -- a tent outside of a New Jersey hospital -- and the nurse who was quarantined, Kaci Hickox, who helped treat Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, rightly complained she had no symptoms. She has been released so that she can be monitored in Maine, her destination, which is the right response. [...]
The White House also needs to recognize that earlier lapses by federal and local health authorities are driving the disparate state responses. Among those lapses was allowing Amber Joy Vinson, the nurse later confirmed to have Ebola, to travel to Ohio -- necessitating extensive and expensive follow-up monitoring of people who had contact with her.
Our hats are off to brave health care workers who go to Ebola hot spots and risk their lives but it's not too much to ask them to go the extra mile and submit to 21 days of strict monitoring once they return to the United States.
Switching topics,
Joe Nocera asks if our courts are for sale:
Judges need to be impartial, and that is harder when they have to raise a lot of money from people who are likely to appear before them in court — in order to compete with independent campaign expenditures. An influx of independent campaign money aimed at one judge can also serve as a warning shot to other judges that they’ll face the same opposition if their rulings aren’t conservative enough. Most of all, it is terribly corrosive to the rule of law if people don’t believe in the essential fairness of judges.
Yet there seems to be little doubt that the need to raise money does, in fact, affect judges.
And on the topic of
Chris Christie:
Gov. Christie says he’s tired of hearing about the minimum wage.
Why wouldn’t he be? It doesn’t affect him. Most of his friends undoubtedly don’t care much about it. Most of those people whose approval he seeks would prefer the minimum wage not be raised
That sentiment was certainly prevalent among the folks at Tuesday’s Chamber of Commerce gathering in Washington, when Christie delivered his already oft-quoted dismissal of the minimum-wage debate: “I don’t think there’s a mother or father sitting around a kitchen table tonight in America who are saying, ‘You know honey, if my son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all our dreams would be realized. Is that what parents aspire to for their children?”
Critics were quick to equate Christie’s comments with Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remark in which the 2012 Republican presidential challenger disdainfully characterized nearly half of all Americans as losers devoid of personal responsibility who support Democrats because they want to live off government.
And finally, great analysis (and video) by
Ari Berman at The Nation:
Why has the Republican Party been steadily attacking the voting rights of people of color and young people over the past decade? And why has the Supreme Court gone along with them in their assault on the Voting Rights Act? “The Republican Party, at least some segments of it,” Ari Berman explains in this segment Moyers & Company, “have analyzed the electorate, figured out where they can try and cut down voter turnout, and they’ve passed laws that have tried to do that.” Berman also reports that ALEC, the right- wing lobby group, has been deeply involved with Republicans in this process to disenfranchise voters across the country. For more on this fight, read Berman’s article, “The GOP Is Winning the War on Voting”.