Donald Trump uses surrogate Marco Rubio to spread horrible lies about Democrats by using rants about "isms" of unknown origin

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe, by 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  
Marco Rubio got it wrong❗
How the secretary of state warped the meaning of a proud American tradition.

In a fire-and-brimstone speech last month that often bordered on the bizarre, Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified “a distinctive and unique evil.” Rubio ranted and called it “far-left terrorism” and asserted that it poses a “serious threat” to the United States.

“It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves,” Rubio told an audience at the State Department, “to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight for what is ours.”

Much of Rubio’s speech was a boiler-plate rant reflecting Donald Trump’s cultist obsessions. Its central premise is dubious at best, since “far-left terrorism” is in fact quite low on the list of dangers that face the United States and the world. The oddest piece of this speech, though, was Rubio’s mention of anti-imperialists as part of the evil coalition.

“They can call themselves 🤥anti-capitalist or 🤥anti-imperialist or 🤥communist or 🤥anarchist or 🤥Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same,” he asserted. “It is a 🤥poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation.”  💩💩💩❗

TRUTH❗ Anti-imperialism has no relation to communism, anarchism, or Marxism. In fact, anti-imperialism is a rich American tradition. Especially at this point in our American history, it should be taken seriously. Rubio has every right to embrace the imperial idea. Other Americans, however, have an equal right to oppose it without being demonized as allies of communists or anarchists.

Debate over imperialism is as old as our Republic. It addresses a profound question: Should the United States seek to impose its will on foreign nations or allow them to go their own way❓

George Washington warned future generations of Americans not to become involved in “obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.” John Quincy Adams declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” 

Abraham Lincoln opposed the American invasion of Mexico in the 1840s, and Ulysses Grant called it “a wicked war.”

The widest-ranging debate over imperialism exploded in 1898, when the United States set out to crush Spanish power in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. 

Massachusetts was the epicenter of opposition.

Headquartered in an office near what is now Liberty Square in Boston’s financial district, the Anti-Imperialist League became a major force in American life. It was headed by George Boutwell, a former Massachusetts governor. Its eminent supporters included Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the United States; Samuel Gompers, the country’s most prominent labor leader; former president Grover Cleveland, who had unsuccessfully opposed the annexation of Hawaii; and Mark Twain, who forthrightly declared: “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

In the debate over whether the United States should begin imposing its will abroad, the most powerful arguments were presented by the two US senators from Massachusetts. George Frisbie Hoar called it “the greatest question ever discussed in this Chamber from the beginning of the Government” and colorfully denounced the rising imperialists: “You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence and your Constitution and your notions of freedom and notions of what is good!”

To this, the silver-tongued internationalist Henry Cabot Lodge had an equally powerful response. The United States, he said, “has a great mission in the world — a mission of good, a mission of freedom. I would have it fulfill what I think is its manifest destiny.”

Senators voted narrowly to ratify the treaty by which the United States turned the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico into American colonies. Anti-imperialists appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution gives the government no power to impose its will on foreign lands. The Court rejected their argument by a 5-4 margin. In a ringing dissent, Chief Justice Melvin Fuller wrote that overseas military expeditions are “wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution.”

This debate reemerged repeatedly. Following World War II, Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” opposed the creation of NATO because “the building up of a great army surrounding Russia” would set off “an inevitable arms race.” Debates over US intervention in Vietnam and Iraq also echoed those of the late 19th century.

Anarchism and Marxism are ideas that came to the United States from Europe. Neither ever found much support. Anti-imperialism is the opposite: a homegrown ideology that has long been embraced by a significant minority of Americans. 

Rather than a “far-left” idea, it is essentially a conservative one. It argues for humility, restraint, and limits on America’s role in the world. Liberal utopianism is what drives the idea that American intervention in other countries will ultimately lead to peace and prosperity for all.

Lumping anti-imperialism with communism also reflects a deep misunderstanding of history. Countries that have proclaimed themselves Communist, notably China and the Soviet Union, were built on imperial conquest at least as fully as the United States was.

Whether “far-left terrorism” is truly the deep threat that Secretary Rubio perceives may be debated. So may the question of whether the United States should seek to project military power around the world. To describe anti-imperialism as a form of 🤥 “far-left terrorism,” however, is a slander that ignores American history.

Medical history and racism: More about the Henrietta Lacks family's settlement

Echo commentary by columnist Theresa Vargus, published in The Washington Post and reprinted in Maine's newspaper the Portland Press Herald:

The Henrietta Lacks settlement about the proprietary use of her HeLa cells,  is bigger than one family’s victory.

In the lawsuit that led to the historic agreement, the outcome acknowledged the history of racism in the country’s medical system and the need to right those wrongs.

Like many women, I push a tiny pill out of a rectangular pack each day and pop it in my mouth.

For years, I never gave that act much thought. Birth control pills are one of the most common forms of contraception and have allowed countless women the freedom to decide when they want to start their families. When a doctor first prescribed them to me, that’s how I viewed them – as a way to plan for the future. I saw them only in the context of looking forward.

But that changed several years ago. I grew curious about the history of those pills and decided to look back at how they came to exist on the market.

Henrietta Lacks was born August 1, 1921 in Roanoke, Virginia and died on October 4, 1951, in Baltimore, Maryland.

What I found showed me how little we know about the dark parts of the country’s medical practices. I found myself reading about one medical breakthrough after another that used Black and brown bodies, often without full disclosure to the participants, to achieve advancements that benefited the masses.

The pill became known for its role in women’s liberation, but a lesser-known part of its story are the women who participated in the first large-scale human trial of it.

In the mid-1950s, before the pill was deemed safe enough to market to women throughout the country, it was tested on women in Puerto Rico who lived in a public housing project. Based on reports, some were illiterate and many were desperate for birth control.

At the time, hopes were high for the pill, but little was also known about its side effects. It had reportedly been tested on rats and rabbits, and on a small sampling of women in a medical practice in Massachusetts.

In Puerto Rico, researchers gave the pills – at much higher doses than are prescribed today – to as many as 1,500 women for years. Three women in the trial died, but no autopsies were conducted, so it remains unclear whether their deaths were linked to the drug. 

After the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill as a contraceptive, women across the United States started complaining about the side effects. Later, after concerns arose that the pill could be linked to strokes, heart attacks and blood clotting, congressional hearings were held.

But those health risks weren’t the only reason people later questioned the ethics of what happened in Puerto Rico and compared it to the shameful Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the government conducted research on hundreds of Black men for decades without their informed consent. A 2004, Orlando Sentinel article that featured several of the participants in Puerto Rico described them as “unwitting pioneers.”

“It remains one of the most controversial chapters in the island’s history – notably because participants weren’t informed that they were guinea pigs in an experiment to test the world’s first birth control pill, a tablet with three times as much hormones as today’s version,” the article reads.

I wrote about that human trial years ago, before I became a columnist. But, I found myself thinking about it again after learning that the family of Henrietta Lacks had settled its lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific, a biotech company that had been accused of profiting off her “immortal” cells.

For Lacks’ descendants, the settlement marks a long-overdue victory. It comes more than 70 years after a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital took her cervical cells without her consent and the hospital shared them with researchers.

Mrs. Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer who grew up in southern Virginia. She was a mother of five, living in Baltimore (Turner Station) when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was treated in a segregated section of Johns Hopkins, when those cells were taken and discovered to be extraordinary for their ability to grow outside of the human body. Her cells, known as “HeLa” cells, have since been credited with helping researchers achieve numerous scientific and medical discoveries. A few of them: a polio vaccine, an HPV vaccine, coronavirus vaccines, cancer treatments and in vitro fertilization. Her cells were even sent into space to test how human tissue would react under those conditions.

Those achievements are incredible. They are also ones that Lacks didn’t live long enough to see and that, even as companies profited off those bits of her body, her descendants never received compensation for. That is, until now.

The amount of the settlement was not revealed, but a specific number wouldn’t have changed the significance of the moment. It was a win for the family. It was also a win for the public. The lawsuit that led to it told of a history of racism in the country’s medical system and the need to right those wrongs.

“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” the lawsuit read. “Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism.”

Medical racism, we know, is not only a thing of the past. 

In fact, Black women are still more likely to die from childbirth than their white counterparts. But recognizing and addressing past wrongs is a start to creating a medical system that treats all bodies with the same respect and consideration, no matter a person’s race, ethnicity or financial situation.

In an article my colleagues Dan Morse and Gillian Brockell wrote about the settlement, they told what happened after Lacks’ death: “For decades, the family struggled to carry on without their mother. One of her daughters, Elsie, who had disabilities, was institutionalized and died at 15 in 1955. In the 1970s, two decades after Lacks’ death, members of her family started getting strange phone calls from researchers requesting blood samples. Their medical histories were published in research papers without their knowledge. One night, at a dinner party, a guest asked family members if they were related to the source of the famous HeLa cells. That’s how they found out cells from their mother were still alive all over the world.”

Many of us know about Lacks because her family’s story was captured in a best-selling book titled “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and a movie by the same name. But there are many Black and brown people who remain mostly unknown, even though their bodies were used to create the comforts we now take for granted.

Echo- North American Hispanics have historical precedence in the United States

https://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/commentary/article/America-came-to-Hispanics-not-the-other-way-13545678.php

“before we came to America, America came to us!” 

MaineWriter opinion - Our American Hispanic neighbors were populating our continent's southern regions for centuries, long before there were international borders.

First Nations peoples of the Americas:  Hispanics have precedence and treaties too. A scholarly opinion published in the San Antonio Express News by Julio Noboa

The Hispanic presence in the United States is inextricably linked to pivotal events in our nation’s history. Last year, 2018, marked two important events that forever changed the destiny of Mexico and Puerto Rico, the homelands of the two largest Hispanic groups in our nation. These events resulted in millions of Latinx people being absorbed into this territorial and cultural expanse we call America.

For Mexican-Americans, Feb. 2, 2018, marked 170 years since the signing in 1848 of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican American War. The U.S. expanded to include almost half of Mexico’s territory, bringing into the nation vast regions of the West, including California, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Another important but unrecognized result was the birth of the Mexican-American people, many of whom still identify as Chicanos — constituting a whole new ethnic identity within the American cultural and political landscape. 

Nevertheless, in violation of the treaty’s promises and assurances, Chicanos’ rights to their language and culture were soon threatened and abrogated, and much of their properties and lands were lost through duplicity, intimidation and outright violence. 

Mexican-Americans are still struggling to gain their legitimate claim to a host of human rights, and classroom history books continue to exclude their cultural, economic and military contributions to this nation.

For Puerto Ricans, particularly most of us who identify as Boricuas, July 25, marked 120 years since General Nelson Miles’ troops landed on the southern shores of our island, in the final chapter of the Spanish American War.

Claiming to bring the blessings of American civilization, Miles disbanded a democratically elected council of Puerto Rican deputies and replaced them with a military government. Nearly two decades later, the Jones Act of 1917 granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. Boricuas were not permitted to vote on this most crucial decision.

Following a period of imperial neglect, U.S. corporations came, conquered and gained control of most of the arable land, turning it into a sugar cane cash crop. While our labor was being exploited and our resources extracted, the colonial government instituted an English-only policy in public education, decimating our native language and culture. For decades it was only the U.S. president — for whom Boricuas could not vote — who appointed the governor of the island.

Last year marked 70 years since Puerto Ricans were finally permitted in 1948 to elect their own governor, Luis Muñoz Marin. However, the empire obligated him to suppress the legitimate movement for Puerto Rican independence to the point that during the repression, it was a crime to sing the national anthem or simply fly the Puerto Rican flag. Still, mounting economic pressures forced millions of Boricuas, beginning in the 1950s, to leave their homeland in search of employment in the cold industrialized cities of the North.

Both the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and Miles’ landing in Puerto Rico were culminating events of two wars: the Mexican American War and the Spanish American War. The concept of Manifest Destiny — so often invoked during the 19th century to justify conquest, genocide and domination — made these wars seem inevitable.

The Manifest Destiny of this nation was in the past two centuries — and even as conceived today — to be one of expansion, domination and hemispheric hegemony. Yet, for many Hispanic Americans, our cultural destiny revolves around affirmation of our culture and language, preservation of our identity and hemispheric cooperation.

Among the most essential, pivotal issues for Boricuas and Chicanos are those that were initiated and defined by those two wars of conquest. Mexican-Americans are more concerned about immigration and citizenship issues and Puerto Ricans are more focused on the complex conundrum of their island’s political status. 

Yet in both cases they can legitimately proclaim that “before we came to America, America came to us!”

It is not enough to simply know history, we should become aware of the relationship historical events have to the problems of today. 

As a multicultural nation of immigrants and natives, we need to understand well the lessons of history and commit to utilizing peaceful cooperation, rather than violent domination, for resolving the problems of diversity that await.

Julio Noboa is a recently retired assistant professor of social studies at the University of Texas at El Paso and, in the past, a frequent contributor to the Express-News opinion pages.

Where are the life saving pharmaceuticals? Topeka Kansas asks?

Although the news is consumed with the impact of an abundance of addictive opioid drugs, available both legally and illegally, there isn't much attention being given to the shortage of simple pharmaceuticals, like saline solutions etc.  A pharmacist in Topeka Kansas calls for pro-active and coordinated efforts to mitigate this problem in a letter to the editor in the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Shortages of IV solutions will prevent many critically ill people from having emergency access to life saving fluids

Obviously, there's not enough money in the production  and sales of inexpensive compounds, like saline solutions.  

Believe me, blog readers....we *never* want to return to the days when compounds were blended in the hospital.  *Never!*.  We need ~ and must have ~ high level quality control over all pharmaceuticals, especially those most needed to save lives, like saline solution that's quality tested for perfect measurements of sterile ingredients.  

FDA’s efforts to mitigate ongoing IV saline shortages were worsened by, the devastating impact of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. As the Food and Drug Administration continues to hear concerns about shortages in discussions with hospitals and health care providers, as well as in media reports, FDA
Scott Gottlieb, M.D wanted to provide more information on this evolving challenge.

Based on the information we’re receiving from companies and the actions we’ve taken at FDA, we continue to expect that the shortage of IV fluids will improve in the coming weeks and months. In addition to working with manufacturers to ensure that their Puerto Rico facilities can operate at full capacity, we’ve worked with manufacturers such as Baxter and B. Braun to import product into the U.S. from their foreign facilities including most recently from a Baxter facility in Brazil.

Here are links to drug shortages data banks:

https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/DrugShortages/default.htm

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/drugshortages/default.cfm

Echo letter to the editor:

Topeka, Kansas, pharmacist opinion letter to the Capital Journal newspaper ~ Drug shortage in Topeka is a problem

The drug shortage is a serious problem.

Unfortunately, the largest producer of quality saline solutions was located in Puerto Rico, but  the devastating hurricans of 2017, has interfered with production and supply lines.

We are running out of salt and baking powder. Normal saline and intravenous fluids (such as bicarbonate or baking powder) are the main resuscitation therapy to save our patients’ lives. The busiest hospital pharmacies in Kansas receive daily emails explaining drug shortages and allocations.

Critical shortages can limit a patient’s care. 

In December 2017, 146 drugs were in short supply. Watch for shortages of pain medications like fentanyl, and expect a shortage of antibiotics. Shortages have existed for the past 10 years without effective solutions. Experts expect these shortages to continue into the future. Hospitals will struggle to find a sustainable and constant drug supply.

Every hospital’s goal is to ensure quality, care and safety of patients. Drug shortages increase risk for serious or even fatal errors. With the help of my pharmacy colleagues, we try to overcome these shortages. 

Topeka Kansas needs more than 10,000 fluid bags of IV solution monthly, at our hospital.

Searching for safe and effective alternatives requires careful attention. Medical and pharmaceutical references are essential to finding answers during times of shortages. Our hospital pharmacy does a great job serving the population in northeastern Kansas.

It is time to start thinking of steps to overcome and avoid perpetual shortages. Communication and relationship with suppliers is not a sustainable solution. Kansas hospitals should establish a group with the goal of building a non-profit organization.

Highly professional and proactive staff must create a strategy for self-sufficiency in obtaining critical life-saving drugs. This is serious and requires quick steps and cooperation to end shortages permanently. Pharmaceutical companies blame hurricanes, but I do not believe that to be true. We need to release our hands tied by pharmaceutical companies ... or hurricanes.

Submitted by Talal Nassar, clinical pharmacist specialist at Stormont Vail Health, Topeka

Republicans are obviously afraid of immigrants

Republicans build fear in people. Why do they fear immigrants?

800,000 young people are at risk of being deported

Fear is the political glue used by Republicans to hold their base together.  Fear about science, the media, global warming and Muslims are paralyzing the brains of Republicans. Many even believe it's against the moral fiber of Republicans to think independently. 

Anti-immigration policies supported by Republicans demonstrate how the party is also fearful of people who are trying to live law abiding lives in America, as immigrants.  

Obviously, Republicans are afraid of immigrants.

• Gerrymandering election districts has marginalized the voting rights of communities where minority and immigrant groups live.
• Republicans support massive deportations of law abiding immigrants.
• Republicans support the Donald Trump plan to ban immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations.
• Republicans support taking immigrant protection status away from "Dreamers", those children given resident status and potential path to citizenship for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

In fact, Republicans are also trying to dissuade people in Puerto Rico  (American citizens) from voting, as they are fleeing their homes that were ravaged by hurricane Maria. In fact, Puerto Ricans are registering to vote after relocated in Florida and Texas (by choice) and Republicans are fearful about how the Puerto Rico voters will tip the balance to Democrat in gerrymandered voting districts.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Thursday he will seek to mobilize Latino voters ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, citing the GOP's tax overhaul passed this week.

Rosselló, a Democrat and member of the island's New Progressive Party, argued on MSNBC that the Republican tax plan hurts Puerto Rico's economy.

It's obvious that the Republican fear campaigns are harming the innocent people who are hard working and law abiding immigrants.

Apparently, Republicans don't want immigrants to become American citizens when they have voting rights. But, smart Republicans should embrace immigrants in an effort to create a stronger voting base.  It was the Republican Ronald Reagan who courted Hispanic voters when he extended them immigration amnesty.

Rather than fear immigrants, Republicans should reflect on their own immigrant histories.  Every single one of them has a family immigration story.  They must respect their inherited heritage.

Rather than fear immigrants, Republicans must embrace the power of the diversity and the talents they bring to America. 

Immigrants will "make America even greater again!"

Donald Trump and the degrading paper towel volley

Republicans have to somehow stop the leadership cycle of stirring fear, causing intimidation and creating bigotry coming from Donald Trump. In fact, Donald Trump's abysmal behavior in Puerto Rico was beneath the dignity of any human being, while he was supposed to be offering help and support for their devastated human condition. Moreover, beautifully coiffed Melania Trump looked like she was a Greek stone statue standing next to her insensitive husband. She should be ashamed of herself for standing stoically by, while Trump created a toxic environment for the Puerto Rican people, who need help. Trump tossed rolls of paper towels over their heads in a degrading act, to signify their responsibility to clean up their island. Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican people were desperate for drinking water.

Disgusting degrading behavior when the Puerto Rican people are desperate for drinking water

I'm wondering if Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took note of the brand name on those disgusting paper towels Donald Trump threw at water needy Puerto Rico people.  I'm sure she'd have preferred to see him throw her company's logo, by using Amway products.

It's beyond my comprehension as a human being to try and understand how Republicans continue to tolerate this humiliating behavior by Donald Trump. Paper towel volley ball is no way to show Puerto Rico people how they are valued as American citizens.

My advice to all Republicans is to get out from under the evils being perpetrated by the Donald Trump administration before your legacies are glued like dark shadows to his worsening behaviors.

Somebody in the Republican party must show moral leadership and tell the American people that Donald Trump is unfit to be President of the United States. Please.

Congress on vacation while Zika virus grows on overtime

"...almost 50 Americans have gotten Zika here, right here in the USA—not by travelling to some foreign country, but by walking around Florida."  Ronald Klain in The Daily Beast.

It makes no sense for the pro-life Republican party, the political zealots who oppose all intervention with a woman's pregnancy regardless of the safety of the mother, to take summer 2016 vacation and do nothing to protect the unborn child from the consequences of the growing Zika virus health menace.  A pregnant woman who becomes infected by the Zika virus has a high risk of passing the infection on to the fetus, a situation that appears to cause severe birth defects.

US Congress must act to protect mothers and the unborn from the birth defects caused by Zika!

MAYDAY!  Reports Ronald Klain in The Daily Beast

Zika Exploded While Congress Went on Vacation
Congress’s inaction on Zika is especially pathetic. 

Every constituency has been cowed into baffled submission except one: the mosquitoes.

Dear Congress,  I hope you enjoyed your Summer Vacation! You’ve been back for a week, and you still haven’t funded the Zika response. 

Let’s recap how we got here. 

Although President Obama promptly submitted a Zika response request back in February for a (relatively) modest $1.9 billion to control mosquitos, battle the disease, and accelerate vaccine development, you left town for the summer without passing any of it—not a penny. Instead, you voted on a series of half-baked efforts designed primarily to confuse the question of who was to blame for congressional inaction on Zika. A House bill funded only a fraction of what was needed, and did that by slashing ongoing work to make sure that Ebola is finally extinguished. (Really? Do we really want to risk a resurgence of Ebola? Really?).

This drew a strong rebuke from the President, who remembered when you were busy excoriating him for not taking the Ebola threat seriously enough. The Senate took up a bill that was loaded up with political poison pills (including a provision on Confederate flags on federal land) that was destined for failure. I give you credit: if the goal was to confuse casual observers about why Congress has not acted on Zika, what I have seen on social media and in blog post comments suggests that your confusion succeeded, spectacularly.

But do you know who wasn’t confused by the inaction? The mosquitoes. They just kept working away while you were gone. And by the way, they did not ask anyone’s party affiliation before they bit them.

Right now, almost 50 Americans have gotten Zika here, right here in the USA—not by travelling to some foreign country, but by walking around Florida. And the risk of local Zika transmission seem to be spreading, with cases now popping up outside of Miami-Dade County including one as far away as Tampa, FL.

We also found—for the first time ever—Zika in the mosqutoes flying around Florida, more indication of sexual transmission of the virus, evidence of male-to-male sexual transmission of Zika, and more suggestions that Zika is going to be with us for a while. 

In fact, the FDA announced that all blood donations would now have to be tested for Zika. Drs. Anthony Faucci and Tom Frieden—nonpartisan heroes who have saved untold numbers of lives—have all but held a telethon to try to get the money to fight the growing threat.

And yes, while you were gone, for the first time ever in U.S. history, the CDC was forced to tell pregnant women, the women thinking about becoming pregnant, and their partners, not to travel to parts of the continental United States. While you were off vacationing, public health authorities were warning citizens that there are parts of our own country where it is not safe to vacation. (And what about the pregnant women who actually live in these areas—who don’t have a choice about being in these areas?)

Moreover, Zika exploded in Puerto Rico. The official case count was about 3,000 as you wound things down for vacation in mid-July; last week’s total had the number of cases at over 15,000. And those are just the officially counted cases—there are certainly tens of thousands of more people with Zika on the island who have not yet been tested.

Zika had a big boom in the continental United States. There were about 1,300 cases in the 50 states when you left for break; now the total is 3,000—and again, that’s laboratory confirmed cases, the actual count is several times higher. (Zika symptoms show up only in about 20 percent of people with the virus, and generally, health officials don’t test people who don’t show symptoms.) Not quite as scary as Puerto Rico—but still, more than a doubling in eight weeks.

So a lot happened with Zika while you were gone. And to put it mildly, all of it was awful.

Also, we had floods in Louisiana while you were gone, and a hurricane hit Florida. We don’t know if local transmission of Zika will get worse because of these events, or how much worse, but, it does provide a reminder that Mother Nature definitely did not take the summer off.
So Congress, you are back. I would like to say that you are back in the nick of time, but, “the nick of time” came and past months ago.

Just fund the Zika response, this coming week, please. 

Pick something else to score partisan points on, something else to bicker about. Because in a few more weeks, you are going to leave again, for another recess, and the babies born to mothers infected with Zika will start to arrive in larger numbers (beyond the 17 tragic cases we have seen already). And that’s a “while you were away” letter that will be too heart-breaking for me to write.

Sincerely,
Ron Klain
White House Ebola Response Coordinator

(Unfortunately, the Pro-Life GOP political party should not need this kind of rebuke!)