Faces Of The Day

BURKINA-POLITICS-PROTEST-PARLIAMENT

Protesters pose with a police shield outside the parliament in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso as cars and documents burn outside on October 30, 2014. Hundreds of angry demonstrators stormed parliament before setting it on fire in protest at plans to change the constitution to allow President Blaise Compaore to extend his 27-year rule. Police had fired tear gas on protesters to try to prevent them from moving in on the National Assembly building ahead of a vote on the controversial legislation, but about 1,500 people managed to break through the security cordon and were ransacking parliament. By Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images.

Change Doesn’t Need A Trigger

A reader writes:

Thanks for the interesting post [“The Complexion Of The Gun Rights Movement“]. It seems to me that in the the success of the civil rights movement owesSupreme Court Hears Arguments On California's Prop 8 And Defense Of Marriage Act almost nothing to the possession of firearms and almost everything to passive resistance and non-violence. Gun rights advocates take it as a fundamental premise that the right to bear arms is somehow essential to protecting our other liberties, but it’s hard to think of a single instance since the Revolutionary War when that has been the case. Personal safety may be protected by firearms. But rights?

If you think of any fundamental right that any American enjoys (including the right to bear arms), that right exists and is protected not because someone shot someone (or threatened to shoot someone), but because someone sued someone, and it is a wonder to me that libertarians and conservatives are not more aware of this. If you go for your gun, you have already lost. If you call a lawyer, you just might change the world.

(Photo of Edie Windsor by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

How Soon Can You Get An Ebola Shot?

Paul Howard monitors the progress drug companies and government agencies are making:

If Uncle Sam doesn’t shell out the money to help develop and then buy an Ebola vaccine, no one else will. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the only other major investor in countermeasures for early-stage research, wrapped promising drugs such as ZMAPP in red tape, and seemed more interested in publishing academic papers than in actually helping companies develop products. Not surprisingly, the government is not an effective pharmaceutical company.

Still, nothing focuses the mind of government bureaucrats like a global health crisis unfolding in real time on cable-news networks. The government and private companies are now fast-tracking vaccine-development programs. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health is collaborating on developing Ebola vaccines with GlaxoSmithKline and NewLink Genetics. GSK hopes to get data from early-stage safety testing soon. If the vaccine passes, GSK intends to run a large trial with health-care workers in Ebola-affected countries by early 2015, if not sooner.

Dr. Jesse Goodman, the former chief scientist of the FDA, discusses the inherent challenges in developing a vaccine:

These are complex vaccines that involve a live virus and you always have to have very well-controlled production. Cost is one factor: I think it’s hard to predict, but these are not going to be inexpensive to produce. However, many public health experts have said that if we have a safe and effective vaccine, the cost mustn’t get in the way of it reaching communities.

With all experimental treatments, including vaccines, it’s really important not to make presumptions that they will work. It would really be a shame if we’re not able to learn what works and what doesn’t, for the next outbreak or if this one continues over an even longer period. A vaccine could be a really important tool, but if we don’t have solid studies that show that it works and is safe, I think it would be really problematic just to immunize huge numbers of people with a vaccine we don’t understand.

Meanwhile, Alexandra Sifferlin highlights a major research project at Emory University in pursuit of an effective treatment:

Scientists at Emory’s Children’s Center for Drug Discovery have extensively studied the development of drugs for HIV that stop the replication of the virus in the body. The center provided breakthroughs for HIV drug development and, more recently, the development of a drug for Hepatitis C. The viruses, though different, have similar replicating mechanisms (viral RNA replication), and now they think they can do it for Ebola.

The team, led by director Baek Kim, is fast-tracking a program to screen a library of over 10,000 chemical compounds that can treat viruses at the molecular level to see if one or more of them may show promise with Ebola. “We need to start screening many, many compounds,” says Kim, anywhere from 500 to 10,000 of them—each of which will be evaluated one by one. Emory chemist Raymond F. Schinazi, who discovered compounds used in multiple very successful anti-HIV drugs, will be working with five to 10 virologists, chemists and biochemists to get the job done.

Labour Support Collapses In Scotland

According to a remarkable new survey:

The survey, by Ipsos Mori, found Labour is currently polling at just 23 per cent in Scotland which, if replicated in May, would see the party lose all but four of the 41 MPs it currently has north of the border. Such a result would make it next to impossible for Labour to win an overall majority in Westminster and form a Government after the next election.

Massie calls this “the most astonishing survey of Scottish political opinion in living memory”:

There will be two stories in Scotland next May.

On the one hand Labour will, as always, present the election as a contest between two possible outcomes: Prime Minister Cameron or Prime Minister Miliband. This has traditionally squeezed the SNP vote in Westminster elections and Labour are counting on it doing so again. A vote for the SNP is effectively a vote for David Cameron. If, as you say you do, you hate the Tories you have no choice but to vote for a Labour government. Sure, Labour may be uninspiring but, come on people, focus on the bigger picture.

Quite so, say the Nationalists. The bigger picture is bigger than Miliband vs Cameron. The SNP will argue that only the Nationalists can truly stand up for Scotland. Only the SNP will put Scotland first. The only way to advance Scotland’s interests is to send a large delegation of SNP MPs to Westminster. There they will hold Westminster’s feet to the fire. There they will hold the balance of power and wield their influence for Scotland’s advantage. You need not believe in independence to vote for the SNP. To vote, in effect, for Scotland. Labour’s difficulty, you see, is Scotland’s opportunity. (And a Tory government is better for the SNP than a Labour one.)

The thing about it – the thing that makes this election interesting and also dizzyingly unpredictable  – is that both of these stories, both of these arguments, are true.

Larison zooms out:

There are some lessons that other parties could learn from Labour’s recent travails. The most important lesson is that a party can neglect its core supporters for only so long before they give up and move on to an alternative. Taking support from any constituency or region for granted will eventually come back to haunt the party, and this can happen at the worst possible times. If a party is effectively representing the interests of its voters, it won’t keep suffering mass defections to its competitors.

A “Crisis” In US-Israel Relations?

There was a little kerfuffle yesterday as Goldblog reported on an Obama bigwig calling Bibi a “chickenshit.” My favorite bit of the column was this nugget:

“The Israelis do not show sufficient appreciation for America’s role in backing Israel, economically, militarily and politically,” Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. (UPDATE: Foxman just e-mailed me this statement: “The quote is accurate, but the context is wrong. I was referring to what troubles this administration about Israel, not what troubles leaders in the American Jewish community.”)

Heh. But the more troubling aspect of the column is this idea that any obvious clash of views or interests between the US and Israel is some kind of “crisis”. It certainly isn’t a crisis for Obama or the US. Paul Pillar makes a good point (seconded by Larison):

Sweep aside the politically-driven fiction about two countries that supposedly have everything in common and nothing in conflict and instead deal with reality, and the concept of crisis does not arise at all.

Nor does it really matter if Netanyahu “writes off” Obama in his last two years.

Obama can get the critical nuclear deal with Iran without the Israelis and without the Congress, for that matter, and the deal will (and already has) made an Iranian nuclear bomb much less of a threat than it once may have been. With the Iranian threat neutralized, Netanyahu will have to find another excuse to justify his creeping annexation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. But with the Iran issue bracketed, the Obama administration can adjust its UN veto in defense of Israel, expose it to greater international isolation over the occupation, and publish the official American view of what the borders of the future Palestinian state will be.

It was always Obama’s strategy to offer Israel and Netanyahu every chance to abandon its neo-colonial enterprise, to do everything possible to reassure Israel about its security (the Iron Dome/the security guarantees and arrangements proposed by Kerry), but, in the end, to pursue America’s core interests in the region, if Israel and its powerful lobby refuse to budge an inch.

I suspect the Israelis have under-estimated Obama’s steel in this regard; and they may be particularly foolish to write him off in his last two years, when a president often has more leeway in conducting foreign policy, when Obama’s long game is designed to reach a conclusion, and when the president has nothing left electorally to lose. If the end result is a tamed Iranian nuclear program and progress toward a real two-state solution, it will have been well worth waiting for, won’t it?

Know hope.

If The Democrats Hold The Senate

Ramesh imagines the GOP reaction:

Many conservatives … would argue that the party establishment had led them to ruin. The establishment largely got its way in the 2012 presidential primaries, and then got its way again in running an agenda-less general-election campaign. This time, Exhibit A for these conservatives would be the North Carolina Senate race, where the establishment candidate — Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state House — has persistently run a little behind his Democratic opponent. (Actually, that might be Exhibit B if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell manages to lose in Kentucky.)

Conversely, a lot Republican officeholders might conclude that the Democratic attacks on them as uninterested in compromise and hostile to women had succeeded, and that they should accordingly move leftward.

Should the Democrats pull off an upset, Nate Cohn will look “to the challenges of modern polling as a big reason for the surprise”:

In 2010, the polls underestimated the Democrats in every competitive Senate race by an average of 3.1 percentage points, based on data from The Huffington Post’s Pollster model. In 2012, pre-election polls underestimated President Obama in nine of the 10 battleground states by an average of 2 percentage points.

A couple of elections in which polls tilt slightly Republican aren’t enough to prove anything. The polls have erred before, only to prove fine over the longer term. But the reasons to think that today’s polls underestimate Democrats are not based on just the last few years of results. They are also based on a fairly diverse set of methodological arguments, supported by extensive research, suggesting that many of today’s polls struggle to reach Democratic-leaning groups.

But liberals shouldn’t get too excited:

The biggest reason to be skeptical that the Democrats will fare better than the polls predict is the context: The Republicans probably have a large enough advantage to withstand another round of modest polling errors. Even if there is another three- or four-point error in Colorado, for instance, the result would be a dead heat in a race that on its own is not at all sufficient for Democrats to hold the Senate. And the Republicans could just as easily counter the effect of any polling error by winning undecided voters, who tend to disapprove of Mr. Obama’s performance — along with their incumbent Democratic senator, Mark Udall.

Even with the problems that polls have, the Republicans’ advantage is clear enough to make them favorites to win the Senate.

 

Views Differ On Meaning Of “Sexual Assault” Ctd

A reader comments on this post:

The excerpt from Elizabeth Nolan Brown quotes “increasing progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give consent.” I’m troubled by this.  The fact is, people can (and do) give consent while intoxicated.  Intoxication does not render one a zombie or possessed by a demon.  In fact, many would argue that one’s words and actions while intoxicated reveal more of your true self than when sober (think of the guy who goes off on a racist tirade while drunk, but would never be caught saying those things out loud when sober).

The notion that a woman (or man) should be absolved of all responsibility for their sexual actions while drunk is preposterous.  Yet it seems that this is exactly what high school and college campuses are now telling their students.

But let’s look at it this way: If a female college student were to go to a frat party, get sloshed, and then – instead of climbing into bed with a frat guy – climbed into the driver’s seat of her car, took off and went on to kill someone with it, nobody would be suggesting that she was not responsible for her actions while drunk.  Why should her ability to make a judgment concerning sex while drunk be any different than if she drove a car?

Here’s another example: Let’s say a guy gets drunk and has sex with a woman without a condom and she gets pregnant.  Nine months later should he be absolved of his responsibility to provide for the child just because his judgment in deciding whether to use a condom was impaired at the time of intercourse?  Please.

Update from a reader:

The “increasing progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give consent” runs smack into this reality (emphasis mine):

Typically, if either the victim or the perpetrator is drinking alcohol, then both are. For example, in Abbey et al. (1998), 47% of the sexual assaults reported by college men involved alcohol consumption. In 81% of the alcohol-related sexual assaults, both the victim and the perpetrator had consumed alcohol. Similarly, in Harrington and Leitenberg (1994), 55% of the sexual assaults reported by college women involved alcohol consumption. In 97% of the alcohol-related sexual assaults, both the victim and the perpetrator had consumed alcohol. The fact that college sexual assaults occur in social situations in which men and women are typically drinking together makes it difficult to examine hypotheses about the unique effects of perpetrators’ or victims’ intoxication.

That’s a problem. Unless, of course, the activists want to establish that men are supposed to be the guardians of helpless women’s virtue at all times, which doesn’t sound particularly progressive to me. In fact, it sounds … what’s the word I’m looking for … ah! Patriarchal.

At some point, today’s feminism and yesterday’s Victorianism will reach a perfect convergence. But the new feminists will have to impose their idea of male virtue by force of law.

QE, We Hardly Knew Thee

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Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced that it was halting the bond-buying program known as “quantitative easing”, the third round of which had begun in September 2012. While the Fed won’t divest itself of the more than $4 trillion in bonds it has accumulated, and has no immediate plans to raise interest rates, it won’t buy any more. Matt O’Brien fears that the Fed is sending the wrong signals as the economy remains lethargic:

The fact that it’s ending QE3 despite still-low inflation and still-high, though declining, unemployment, signals that the Fed is eager to return to normalcy. So does changing its statement from saying there’s a “significant underutilization of labor resources” to it “gradually diminishing.” The Fed, in short,  looks much more hawkish. And that’s not good, because, as Chicago Fed President Charles Evans explains, the “biggest risk” to the economy right now is that the Fed raises rates too soon.

QE isn’t magic — far from it — but it is, as Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren told me, “quite effective.” Especially at convincing markets that the Fed won’t raise rates for awhile, which is all it should be saying right now. Because the only thing worse than having to do QE is having to do QE again. The Fed, in other words, should do everything it can to make sure the economy lifts off from its zero interest rate trap before it pulls anything back. Otherwise, we might find ourselves back in the same place a few years from now.

Justin Wolfers stresses that this isn’t really “the end” of QE, since the assets the Fed holds will continue to have a stimulative effect:

Of course, the aspect of Wednesday’s Federal Reserve decision that has captured the most attention is its decision to stop purchasing further long-term securities. But don’t confuse this with a monetary tightening. It’s hanging on to the stock of securities it currently holds, and the Fed’s preferred “stock view” says that this is what matters for keeping longer-term interest rates low. By this view, the Fed’s decision to end its bond-buying program does not mark the end of its efforts to stimulate the economy. Rather, it is no longer going to keep shifting the monetary dial to yet another more stimulative notch at each meeting. The level of monetary accommodation will remain at a historical high, even if it is no longer expanding.

Over recent years, policy makers have also worked to lower long-term interest rates by shaping expectations about future monetary policy decisions, in a process known as forward guidance. Today’s statement continues this policy, repeating recent guidance that the Fed expects interest rates to remain low for “a considerable time.”

But Ylan Mui suggests that higher rates may not be as far off as promised:

The debate over when to raise rates, which has already begun, will prove tricky for the Fed — and likely the biggest challenge of Janet Yellen’s tenure since she took over as head of the central bank early this year. Fed officials, who have suggested that the move could come in the middle of next year, hope that it causes little disruption. But achieving that delicate balance is the most basic dilemma of central banking. If the Fed moves too soon, it could undermine the recovery. If it waits too long, it could breed the next financial bubble as investors take too many risks backed by the belief the Fed will always be stimulating the economy.

When Fed officials suggested in the past that they may withdraw stimulus from the economy faster than anticipated, markets have swooned and interest rates have popped up. That’s one reason central bank officials have been preaching patience in responding to the strengthening recovery — but some investors believe they will not be able to wait much longer.

The Bloomberg View editors revisit the debate over whether QE worked. They maintain that it was the right call:

Exactly how much QE has helped the economy remains a matter of debate. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in 2012 that the Fed’s first two rounds may have boosted output by 3 percent and added more than 2 million jobs. In a more recent paper, San Francisco Fed President John Williams said such estimates were uncertain; he also noted the risks to the financial system posed by so large an intervention. Some believe QE has gradually diminishing effects; others that it has no positive effect at all.

Regardless, the gamble was justified. After the crash a persistent slump in demand hobbled the recovery and drove up long-term unemployment, threatening great and lasting economic damage. With inflation low, the risks of QE were small in relation to the possible gains. The benefits weren’t confined to the direct effects of the Fed’s purchases: Even more important, QE bolstered confidence that the central bank was willing to do everything in its power to revive the economy.

Danielle Kurtzleben also defends the program:

One key thing to consider with QE3 is the counterfactual — what would the economy have looked like had it never been put into place? One of the big benefits of QE3 was that it counteracted a Congress that insisted on holding back spending, even while the economy was sluggish. As Fed Chair, Bernanke was constantly chiding Congress for dragging on the economy, encouraging them to save deep spending cuts like those under sequestration for later.

So though 2013’s economic growth wasn’t exactly stellar compared to 2012’s, it’s important to consider how bad it could have been, says [economist Paul] Edelstein. “I mean, 2012 GDP growth was two and a quarter percent. 2013 comes, we have all the sequester-related spending cuts, and we have QE3. The result: GDP growth of two and a quarter percent,” he says. “Is two and a quarter percent good? Not really. But clearly again it could be a lot worse if we didn’t have fiscal drag.”