Ashley Madison and Planned Parenthood

More people seem to be upset about the Ashley Madison hack than about the edited videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood.  Chris Hayes was positively apoplectic in talking about the breach, because it was actually ruining lives.  In his defense, he tweets that this hack could just as easily have been one on confidential medical records, income tax returns or emails.

But why hasn't the attack on Planned Parenthood resulted in the same outrage?  Nikki Haley has expressed her outrage at the Ashley Madison hackers while vowing to begin an investigation of Planned Parenthood in South Carolina.  Not to be outdone, fellow idiot, Bobby Jindal, actually showed movies on a continuous loop outside of the governor's mansion of those abhorrent tapes.

But have you seen the video of Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor denouncing yet another Senate vote to defund Planned Parenthood? Nobody is playing that on a continuous loop.  I did not even hear it referred to on MSNBC; it might have aired at some point, but it surely didn't get the airtime of Donald Trump's latest attack of verbal diarrhea.

In Warren's speech, she gets right to the point:  our republican Congress has repeatedly attempted to shut down Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that government does not fund abortion services.  They have perpetuated lies and misdirection.  They have blocked unrelated bills by adding amendments to defund, and continue to threaten to shut down the government if Planned Parenthood is not defunded.

Meanwhile, small businesses like Stem Express are feeling the pressure of the intense publicity resulting from the bogus Center for Medical Progress films, and intensified by by House and Senate demands for them to appear before congressional committees.  They have essentially been forced to cut ties with Planned Parenthood in order to attempt to survive the assault.  Of course, the right-wing media is using this to further insinuate that it is Planned Parenthood's misbehavior that caused the rift.

The greatest difference between the Ashley Madison hack and the assault on Planned Parenthood is that the latter is based on lies, editing and misdirection.  Imagine, per Chris Hayes' tweet, that your income tax records were hacked, and then edited to show that you had broken the law in an egregious manner.  That is what is going on with the attack on Planned Parenthood.

It happened with ACORN, when a couple pretending to be applicants entrapped employees into making questionable statements.  Some of the same characters whose names have popped up egging on CMP provided the grist for the right-wing republican hate machine with the same dirty tactics.  Housing, voter fraud, abortion:  all red meat and headlines for the right-wing scam artists and the members of the echo chamber in Congress.

Here's the thing.  Next time you find yourself talking politics in a restaurant or at work, next time you send an email to a friend or post to Facebook, imagine that what you say is being taped or copied.  Imagine that at work there may be people who are listening to pick up anything you might say that could be heard as improper or inflammatory.

And how often does a friend, acquaintance, customer or stranger ask a leading question that you grudgingly answer in a way that you honestly don't believe rather than argue or be seen as different?  How often have you not responded to racist, anti-gay or misogynist comments in a way that made it absolutely clear that you disagree?  Imagine that this is being done in a planned and purposeful way.  On tape.  And then the tape is edited, further distorting what you just said.

That, friends, is the world we need to be worried about.  Whether it is Ashley Madison or Planned Parenthood, people are able and willing to expose us, for things we have done or not done, things we have said or haven't said, intentions we had or never did have.

That is why we need to bring the debate back to the lies.  Every time.  We need to keep asking the accusers, as did Elizabeth Warren, "Did you fall down and hit your head???"

Because it could happen to Bobby Jindal, as it did to Mitt Romney, as it did to those playing out their fantasies on Ashley Madison.  And just as those real faux pas can go viral, shit factories like the Center for Medical Progress can also crop up to "expose" right-wing groups.  I like to think that those on the left hold to higher standards than that, but, hey, it could happen.

That is why we all just might want to take another look at this new world of warfare.

Trying to Be CNN

If you'd like to know, the only important thing that has gone on this week is the tragic derailment of the Amtrak train between New York and Pennsylvania.

I know because I get my news from MSNBC, and the best and brightest on their evening lineup have been filling their entire broadcast with that event.  Either it is the only news worth covering, or MSNBC has changed their format from covering several important and newsworthy events per one hour news show to wall-to-wall coverage of one single event.

I don't intend to seem callous.  The derailment is important news, and not just for the tragic deaths.  The day after the accident Congress, not to be "derailed" by reality, cut funding for Amtrak.  You can't make this stuff up.  And, to be fair, MSNBC covered the budget cut.  But you can only get away with calling their coverage of one event over the course of one hour, much less several hours running, "breaking news" for so long.  Jon Stewart has had many hours of fun (not consecutively however) mocking CNN for doing exactly that.

I'm not sure when this nonsense began, but after the shooting in Ferguson, Chris Hayes was out there night after night interviewing people on the street.  He did the same thing after the shooting in North Charleston and ditto in Baltimore.  He tends to get excited over these admittedly horrendous events, and it seemed at times that he was actually enflaming the crowd.  A newsworthy event, but it stopped being news after the first fifteen minutes of each broadcast.

Anyway, I had assumed this was because of the importance of the gun issue, and the point was in fact that police violence toward African Americans was a constant presence in America, one we had been ignoring throughout our history.

But two nights after the Amtrak crash, there was Chris Hayes, interviewing, well, anyone that was there.

I've gotten to the point where I can tell in minutes whether MSNBC has got their teeth into a news story that is going to go 24/7, and of course, after a short time, it is no longer news.  And then I wonder, what about all the other important things that are going on in the country?  Do people really want to hear from every single person on the street, and how many times can you re-air somebody-or-other's official statement, and how many different ways can you analyze it?  Larry Wilmore interviewed gang members in a Baltimore diner and was able to be more relevant and newsworthy in eight minutes than MSNBC had been throughout their whole coverage.

During those entire weeks of wasted airtime, I hunger for other news.  For that matter, I also get impatient when Rachel Maddow takes twenty minutes repeating the same comment over and over to make one important point.  If she only said the same thing once or twice, her program would be fifteen minutes long.  But boy would it be powerful.  Or, she could cover that many more stories.

I hate that MSNBC has dulled their news reporting, made it as trite as that of CNN.  Their repetitions and redundancies, their hundreds of on-the-street interviews, have watered down the important headlines and analyses that I had come to expect from them.  While we heard over and over and over again that the engineer on the Amtrak train was in the hospital and had amnesia for the crash, Congress was voting on important budget matters, attempting once again to prohibit the right of women to seek abortions, fighting over Obama's fast-track trade deal, and who only knows what else, because it wasn't being covered on MSNBC.

This is what I would like.  I would like, in the first segment on each show, an update on any major event.  And then I would like to hear what else is going on in the country and in the world.  If you asked, you might find that I am not the only one that after the first few minutes of the same reprocessed news about the important event turns off the TV or walks out of the room.

So please, MSNBC, take a look at what you're doing.  Would YOU watch your show night after night to see the same piece of information presented over and over again?  Really, you are far, far better than that.

Thank you, and good night.

Get Out Your Pitchforks

I have been trying to be quiet through this latest episode of mass hysteria.  I really have.  But at the risk of raising the wrath of every single one of my friends, I am going to have to speak my mind.  Because that is what I do.

I usually enjoy Chris Hayes' liberal rants.  His young face gets all puffed up and he starts to stutter.  He is outraged, but he tends to wrap his outrage up in reason.  Except when it comes to vaccinations.  Then he becomes the 21st century yuppie parent, screeching about how my kid is going to infect his kid.  And since the latest "measles outbreak" it has been all-measles-all-the-time on All In with Chris Hayes.

It's not just Hayes, though.  For weeks we have been bombarded with the terror inspiring word of "100 cases" of measles, brought about by those bad parents who irresponsibly and selfishly chose not to have their kids vaccinated for measles AND THEN WENT TO DISNEYWORLD.  I have been listening, hard, to these news reports, waiting to hear of the 100 cases spreading into the thousands, or to hear how many of those hundred have died from the disease.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is none.

Then, two days ago, I heard that the worst fears had been realized:  five infants had been confirmed to have measles.  Before I began to write, I gave it one more try.  When I googled "measles," I learned that a "Baby Had Been Confirmed as First Victim in New Jersey."  Oh my god.  It finally happened.

But no.  The report goes on to say that the one-year-old has since recovered.  Everybody in the building, the town, the state and the country, however, has been alerted.  I can be fairly certain that if there had been a death it would be front page everywhere.  Not that it couldn't happen.  But in developed countries, where overall health and hygiene are good, measles is rarely fatal.

For those of you youngsters, like Mr. Hayes, even your parents are not likely to remember when measles was just a childhood disease.  A kid broke out, itched, ran a temperature, and stayed home from school for a week.  And then they got better.

Back in the 80's, when my daughter was born, there was a healthy debate about the value of vaccinations versus allowing natural immunities to develop.  That debate seems to have been hijacked by the debate over vaccines causing autism.  And over the past couple of weeks, even when anti-vaccine proponents have been interviewed, I have not heard a single word spoken about natural immunity.  So here it is.

An infant has a weak and developing immune system.  Nursing contributes to adding mother's immunities to the baby.  And just as a childhood disease like measles is likely to be worse in an adult, healthy babies tend to experience milder symptoms.  When my pre-school daughter got chickenpox at four years old, her six-month-old brother also contracted the disease.  While she itched and had a fever, her brother didn't even notice he was sick.  And they both now have lifetime immunity to chickenpox.

Which brings me to the point that I keep waiting to hear.  If you are vaccinated, you need to be re-vaccinated.  The immunity is temporary.  If you allow this childhood disease to run its course, however, you have immunity for life.  So that pregnant women who have had the measles as children need not fear contracting measles, which is truly dangerous to the development of a fetus.

Now, it also appears that drug companies are griping, and vaccine supporters are touting, the "fact" that drug companies are not making a fortune on vaccine.  A cursory search did not come up with any numbers, and it's true that we don't have to pay much for vaccines.  But drug companies have done an amazing job of hiding the cost -- and the profit -- of the most commonly used drugs.  Government subsidizes a lot of the cost of vaccines, which means drug companies still get paid.  It may be that they don't make the mint that they make on far too many much needed drugs.  But vaccines are the steady, guaranteed profit-maker.  Drug companies are more likely to balk at having to waste money researching more desperately needed vaccines for third world countries than to complain about reaping that steady US vaccine market.

Now, if MSNBC wanted to rant about what is endangering lives in America, they might want to take a look at overmedication.  There was a peep in the media a few years ago about the over prescription of antibiotics, and then it went away.  But in fact, prescribing antibiotics when an illness could just run its course, has led to the development of, oh, let's call it a master race of infections.  And you don't need to be the one taking the antibiotics to reap the rewards of being infected by these master bugs.  And the drug companies continue to make stronger antibiotics and the bugs that survive the drugs continue to get stronger and harder to eradicate.  Much like using Round-Up to kill weeds until you have master weeds that need ever stronger poisons to be killed.

It amazes me when smart people who tend to be rational go nuts.  I am thinking about the hysterics in the 80's over "catching AIDS" (and I hate to admit, I was one of those, although eventually I did succumb to reason).  Or how about last year's ebola scare, when healthy people where coming back from Africa, even parts that were nowhere near the reported outbreaks, and faced anger and outrage and even -- thank you Chris Christie -- quarantine.

The most idiotic argument, the one that is expressed every single time vaccination is "discussed" is that your unvaccinated kid is going to endanger my vaccinated kid.  Well, no.  If your kid is vaccinated, and the thing works the way you claim it works, your kid will be spared the scourge of the dreaded measles.  Or, if the kid comes down with the measles, it should be a mild version, and (if you're really lucky) it will be enough to immunize the child for life.  Wouldn't that be grand.

Anyway, I would like to conclude by saying:

JUST CALM DOWN.  If we were poor people who lived with poor health and poor hygiene, our children would be more vulnerable to extreme symptoms.  In that case, I would say, by all means get the vaccine.  And if you really believe that drugs trumps the body's ability to fight any disease, go for it.  But please stop trying to make it sound like children are dying in the streets from this disease.  Be smug in your superior parenting if you like, but stop trying to make it sound like people who disagree with you are arming themselves with deadly germs and coming after your kids.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I am a great fan of Chris Hayes' All In on MSNBC.  While not as much so as when he was Up in the wee hours of Saturday and Sunday morning, his show tends to present more intelligent topics and discussions than others on MSNBC.

So imagine my surprise when he tackled the subject of childhood immunization and the measles outbreak in Texas, and not only lost any sense of reason, but presented a one-sided and snarky attack on those anti-immunization fiends (which include myself).

But wait!  I have found that since I became pregnant way back in 1987 and began to research the pros and cons of vaccination, this topic creates the most irrational, hysterical and enraged arguments by those who promote immunization for, well, everything.

I listened through the segment twice, and then wrote a letter to Mr. Hayes.  But it seems that MSNBC does not invite listeners to send emails.

So I am sending out my open letter to Chris Hayes here:

Dear Chris,

I was catching up on All In today, so I apologize for the fact that these comments come several days after the show.

As I listened to your article on immunization, my mouth dropped open. I have heard you be snarky before, I admit I have no qualms about snark when it is called for. But your tone during that piece can only be described as that of a new parent who is having a tantrum because the rest of parentdom is not complying with your need to keep your child safe. I was so astonished by the piece, that I watched it a second time.

You make the same hysterical comments about measles that have been repeated for decades. Presenting no statistics, you define the course of measles as “rash, all over, and pneumonia and in some cases even death.” First of all, the outcome of a case of measles depends very much on the family's health and nutrition. Secondly, measles in infants and children tend to be very mild, and happily result in a lifetime immunity. Whereas, those people going over to Europe and coming back infecting people no doubt were immunized as children, in which case the immunity doesn't last forever. This also endangers pregnant women who were immunized as children, rather than allowed to have measles run its course.

Let me also tell you that measles is not at all in the same category as whooping cough. Pertussis is an extremely dangerous illness at any age. Doctors should remind people to get re-immunized every ten years, and children should be immunized.

Chicken pox, for which immunizationon is also thrust upon unsuspecting parents, is on the other hand no more dangerous than a cold. My son caught chicken pox at about six months old, felt no pain or discomfort and now has a lifetime immunity.

You claimed that failing to have a child vaccinated “imperils the lives of those kids but also imperils the lives of newborns who are not fully vaccinated.” And then later, we “denialists” are “endangering infants and newborns all over the place.” If you really want to have an infant who is safe from disease, let me suggets that the mother give birth at home, as hospitals are far more dangerous than lack of immunization.  And of course, don't go to the pediatrician's office for all those immunizations; that's where the real germs lie.  And please explain to me, because I have yet to hear any rational argument, just how a person who chooses not to immunize their children endangers children who are immunized.

What I heard in this piece was the same kind of hysteria that led people to douse themselves and their children with so much anti-bacterial soap and lotion that they not only killed off needed bacteria but lowered the body's resistance to infection.

I was disappointed to hear you dismiss Jenny McCarthy's claims as just more “anti-vaccination nonsense.” How dare you dismiss a parent who has seen a healthy child become disabled after an immunization. In fact, there were so many lawsuits in New York State in the 1980's-90's, that the law requiring immunizations before entering school was changed to allow parents to opt out with their physician's written approval. We – neither you nor I – know whether the immunization caused the autism, but parents have every right to be involved in making the determination as to whether they will take that risk with their child.

The spurious arguments presented by your guests, who claim lots of scientific evidence but fail to discuss any, might have been countered by an expert on the other side. I can assure you, there are respected scientists on the other side.

Finally, I had to laugh when you said, “20-30 years ago, I don't think there was any pop-cultural misgivings about vaccinating your kid.” This argument has been going on for decades. When my daughter was born, in 1987, there was tremendous debate about the possible harmful effects of vaccination, so much so that, after reading both sides of the literature, I chose not to have her vaccinated until she was school-aged. Her brother, three-and-a-half years younger, was allowed to opt out, and, on our pediatrician's recommendation, had only a pertussis vaccine. Both were wonderfully healthy, and remain so. And if your child gets all her vaccinations, she won't have to worry about getting infected by the likes of those who are not immunized.

For some reason, the debate about immunization causes usually objective and rational people to go all Rush Limbaugh. You probably should read some of the history and science – both sides – of this argument.

Sincerely,

Agnes

If any of my readers know the magic formula to reaching Chris Hayes, please feel free to forward him my comments.