Ace, yesterday:
Vaccines are the media's new "Birth Control Pills" question for the GOP - injecting an out-of-nowhere wedge issue question into the debate just because it hurts the GOP.
Almost all GOP politicians are pro-vaccination, of course -- but a distressing number of GOP voters are against it, making this a politically difficult question.
Note that the media could drop any number of such wedge issue questions on Democrats -- do you favor the making taxpayers pay for voluntary sex-reassignment surgery -- but they don't because they're Democrats themselves and want to hide such wedge issues, not expose them.
Ace and I are pretty much on the same page on this issue:
I disagree with the anti-vaccine people, and I think I'd find many of them to be superstitious and given over to that type of "skepticism" that results in having almost no skepticism whatsoever against various pop-rumor fears and conspiracies. That sort of "skepticism" that involves an intense skepticism bordering on paranoia towards the government and anyone in any "official" position -- anti-white-coat-ism -- but no skepticism at all for the various "Citizen Informer" newsletters pumping out these various paranoias.
If you're only skeptical towards one side, and are completely credulous towards the other, you're not actually a "skeptic" at all. You're a True Blue Believer, you just believe things contrary to most.
But it's absolutely immaterial whether or not I approve of such people's anti-vaccination beliefs. Until we are faced with a public heath crisis so grave that it demands we begin stripping away people's freedoms, they are entitled to believe these things, and act accordingly.
The only freedom that matters is the Freedom to Be Wrong.
Not to get all constitutional on your candy asses, but there is no power enumerated to the federal government that enables it to force all citizens to be immunized. That, as with every other issue not mentioned in the Founding Document, is a State issue.
But the Democrat-Media Complex knows that the lumpenproletariat is almost all utterly and completely ignorant as to what The Law Of The Land really says, and are equally emotionally manipulatable by evening news segments ridiculing those "paranoid parents," which is why the press is so eager to try and trap Republican officeholders by tying them together.
That is what makes this story so gosh-darn entertaining:
President Obama released his $4 trillion fiscal year 2016 budget proposal Monday, and in it he outlined some ambitious health care initiatives to improve efficiency and eliminate waste. But buried a little bit deeper is a $50 million cut to one of the U.S.’s longstanding vaccine programs for the under- and un-insured.
The fiscal 2016 budget includes $561 million for the Health and Human Service’s 317 immunization program, a decrease from the current $611 million allotted to the initiative.
The defunding comes amid a severe measles outbreak that has officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worried about how it may spread. At least 102 people have been infected by the airborne disease, raising a renewed debate over mandatory vaccinations, as well as the importance of adult immunizations. [emphasis added]
I'm going to predict that this funding cut for vaccination programs for the poor is going to fall in the category of "wedge issue questions on Democrats that will never be asked". But at least it'll get some publicity.
Of course, this will almost certainly lead to Republicans increasing funding for this program, which will feed right into The One's "Let's end this mindless austerity" meme (because "only" half-trillion dollar deficits are the picture of fiscal probity), so your mileage may vary.
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