Month: August 2016

The Clinton campaign had a response to the news that Donald Trump is trying to mainstream Alex Jones-ism by worrying publicly that the November election may be stolen from him.

Even for a reflexive conspiracy theorist like Trump, this is pathetic. It's dangerous, too.https://t.co/hcd4kQ4VS9

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 2, 2016

Personally, I prefer Greg Sargent’s take on it:

Is it possible that Donald Trump has begun to contemplate his own political mortality? Is it possible that Trump, who had previously boasted to GOP primary audiences that he would beat Hillary Clinton “easily” — has begun to contemplate the possibility that he might lose the presidential election?

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Trump has suddenly stopped tweeting about polls (which are now showing Clinton taking a meaningful lead) at precisely the moment that he is escalating his efforts to cast doubt, in advance, on the legitimacy of the general election’s outcome.

Earlier today there was some confusion about a poll showing Clinton up by one point in Utah (the poll doesn’t exist), but as far back as mid-July Clinton’s chief strategist, Joel Benenson was listing Utah as a target state:

BENENSON: Ohio is going to be close. I wouldn’t call it a redrawing. Here’s what I think about the map. It’s going to be a close race. But there isn’t any state in the battleground universe where Donald Trump will force us to play defense.

But there are other states where it becomes very problematic for Republicans. A state like North Carolina — in 2004, Republicans probably felt pretty comfortable there. They don’t now. States like Arizona and Utah, if we can make them play defense there, which is very plausible because of the kind of divisive candidate Donald Trump is, it puts more pressure on them.

Those comments were made prior to the two parties’ conventions, but they still look solid. The last three polls out of North Carolina show Clinton in the lead, including the latest by NBC/WSJ/Marist that shows her up by six. Arizona has been lightly polled, but Huffington Post has Clinton up by one tenth of a percent in their aggregator. And, while there’s no new poll out of Utah, there have been two this year showing Clinton tied there and all but one poll has shown Trump polling below forty percent.

I’d like to add to this that the most recent poll out of Missouri (by Mason-Dixon) has Clinton up by a point there, and that a Republican pollster released a survey yesterday showing the race tied in Georgia.

That’s a lot of defense that Trump is already having to play, which is one reason why I questioned his decision to campaign in Colorado. Mike Pence is scheduled to be in Denver and Colorado Springs tomorrow. Hopefully, he won’t get stuck in any elevators and need the assistance of any fire marshals.

I am impressed that Stuart Rothenberg managed to write this column. The ostensible point of the piece (as indicated by the headline) is to examine whether or not there is any likelihood of a wholesale exodus of Republican lawmakers who are so outraged or embarrassed by Trump’s behavior and positions that they rescind their endorsements of their own party’s presidential nominee.

Rothenberg argues that this is unlikely to happen because the Democrats didn’t abandon Bill Clinton during l’affaire Lewinsky.

Why am I so skeptical that mainstream Republicans who have already climbed out on the Trump limb will turn around and crawl back? Because that is not how American politics works.

Something very similar happened back in 1998, when Democrats circled the wagons and stuck by Bill Clinton even though he had a very inappropriate relationship (including in the Oval Office) with an intern and lied to the American public. Democrats turned the scandal into a partisan fight.

That construction right there…that retelling of not-too-distant history…is almost sufficient to boil my brain and make my ears steam.

I’m not going to re-litigate the Lewinsky scandal this morning, but a supposedly neutral analyst like Stu Rothenberg sure sounds like a Clinton-hating Republican when he says that it was the Democrats who turned the president’s bad behavior into a partisan fight.

For the young people who might not know, the Republicans’ hounded President Clinton relentlessly with frivolous investigations backed by unhinged conspiracy theories, and when they finally caught him lying about his sexual relationship with an intern, they told the nation that the only remedy was to treat it as a high crime and misdemeanor, hold an impeachment trial, share every sordid detail of the affair, and remove him from office. Any humiliation or punishment short of that was supposed to undermine the very fabric of our government and society.

But, for Rothenberg, the way the Democrats’ responded to that provocation is exactly the same as how the Republicans are responding (and likely to continue to respond) to having to defend Trump’s big mouth and policy heterodoxies.

The beauty of this column is that it allows Rothenberg to slam Bill Clinton and to say that however disgraceful Donald Trump is and how shameful it is for Republicans to continue to support him, the Democrats are exactly the same.

Like Bill Clinton back then, Trump’s behavior has been so far over the line — with his comments ranging from incoherent to inaccurate to outrageous — that it is remarkable so many Republicans continue to support and defend him.

Can you imagine what Republican officeholders, activists and voters would say if a Democratic presidential nominee acted as Trump has or benefited from Kremlin hacking? (I am sure Democrats would be defending that nominee.)

If the Democrats had a candidate who benefitted from Kremlin hacking, who insulted women, blacks, Latinos, gays, Muslims, and the disabled, while taking positions on civil liberties and rights that were completely at odds with their values and the Constitution, I think it is unlikely that they’d stay united behind that nominee.

But Rothenberg tells us that both sides are equally to blame.

In spite of all of the talk about weaker parties and the growing number of independents, partisanship runs very deep in American politics. It is easier and probably safer politically to hunker down with fellow partisans than to break from the crowd.

Character and principle are qualities that are in short supply on both sides of the aisle.

But that certainly is nothing new.

It’s true that people care about stuff and they don’t want to see someone who disagrees with them about important things elected president. Therefore, people will only reluctantly conclude that the other party’s candidate is the only suitable choice for president. But reluctance is not the same as making the right decision when it is forced upon you. It was totally unnecessary to impeach and attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office. The decision to rally behind him was completely unlike the decision some Republicans are making to stick with Donald Trump.

I wonder if the “objective” analyst Stu Rothenberg pulled any muscles contorting himself this much to make a “both sides do it” argument.

Sam Wang has some observations for the nay-sayers who are unimpressed with Hillary Clinton’s post-convention bounce:

I have seen some sniffy comments in the news that Hillary Clinton’s post-convention bounce is smaller than Bill Clinton’s bounce in 1992. However, by current standards, Hillary Clinton’s bounce is large. As I wrote the other day, post-convention bounces have been small for presidential elections since 1996, which I suggest is a symptom of political polarization: voters get entrenched in their support.

And, in any case, Gallup says that people hated the Republican convention.

Americans are evenly divided on whether they view the Democratic Party more favorably (44%) or less favorably (42%) after the party’s national convention last week. However, their ratings of the Republican Party after the GOP convention two weeks ago were significantly worse, with 35% saying they viewed the party more favorably and 52% less favorably.

More people watched Donald Trump’s speech than watched Hillary Clinton’s, but maybe that wasn’t such a good thing for Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign, through their Breitbart News cutout, has decided to go highly negative on Gold Star father Khizr Khan’s career and professional associations.

Also, Trump is now saying that he’s concerned that the election will be rigged, making it not unlikely that he won’t concede gracefully if he loses.

Apparently, Green Party candidate Jill Stein did some kind of online townhall thing and said that if she is elected president she will pardon Edward Snowden and make him part of her cabinet. Maybe she needs a pocket Constitution so she can read up on the advise and consent provision. She’s getting five percent in the latest CNN poll which also shows Hillary with a commanding 52%-43% in the two-way race.

Congress decided to go home without giving the president the money he requested for containing the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Now there’s an outbreak in Miami.

Federal health officials on Monday advised pregnant women to avoid a Miami neighborhood — marking the first time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned against travel to any area within the continental United States — as a Zika outbreak in South Florida has led to 10 more local cases spread by mosquitoes.

The advisory extends to all expectant mothers, and women planning on becoming pregnant who have traveled to a one-square-mile area north of downtown Miami — including Wynwood, Midtown and the Design District — on or after June 15, said CDC Director Tom Frieden.

This is what we get when we vote for a hyper-partisan political party that doesn’t believe in science.

The Dutch troops left Bosnia and crossed the border into Serbia. After reaching safety the Dutch celebrated their escape from hell with crown-prince Willem Alexander, PM Wim Kok and FM Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. The UN forces failed to protect the Muslim civilians as 8,000 boys, young men and adults were taken apart and executed in a beastly manner until all were shoveled underneath dirt in mass graves. A horrible memory and the single greatest human tragedy after WWII in Europe.

The hypocrisy of the Dutch foreign ministry and the Mark Rutte government after they gave five years support to the old colonials powers United Kingdom, France with the United States to support rebels and foreign jihadists in their effort for regime change based on ill-founded R2P policy of team HRC, Joe Biden, Samantha Power and Susan Rice.

Absolute part of western propaganda to irritate the Russians for their presence in Tartus and the support for Assad along with Israel nemesis Iran. Failed policy led to the Syrian tragedy of 300,000 deaths of both civilians and the Syrian Army. A magnitude of Syrian refugees spread to neighbouring states and in the end traveled to Europe to escape the ultimate horror of war and destruction.

PM Erdogan of Turkey was the puppet of the west to let jihadists cross the border into Syria funded by the CIA, Qatar and the Gulf States with special mention of KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

FM Bert Koenders is preaching ethics and morals while urging for a U.N. humanitarian corridor for the last neighborhood of Aleppo under control of the anti-Assad rebels.

Who are the Dutch kidding? The Dutch too are an old colonial power and were forced to allow the colonies become independent after WWII. The Dutch too were responsible for massacres by their military as The Hague tried desperately to hold onto their overseas territories.

Here is a full translation of the opinion piece published in Dutch national newspaper “De Volkskrant”.

Humanitarian aid to Aleppo has first priority

Will the war in Syria even worse, after five years of conflict? Yes, it could be worse. On July 14, the troops of Assad have taken the high ground overlooking the Castello road, the last major access route to what was once the economic center and the largest city in the country. Three hundred thousand civilians in Aleppo now actually besieged. Syria is crumbling off the last bit of respect for human rights, the verwerperlijke bombing Friday at a maternity clinic as provisional low.

The UN rightly describes the current situation as “medieval and shameful.” There is a real risk that the name “Aleppo” is again synonymous with the failure of the international community.

Only international pressure can prevent a greater disaster. The UN, the International Support Group for Syria (ISSG) and other countries need to make the Assad regime with louder voice calls an end to the siege. This kind of pressure has an effect. For example, a number of major countries at a meeting in Munich last February reached an agreement on a cessation of hostilities.

That agreement held a few months largely state. It was also enforced the agreement humanitarian access to over a million Syrians, who could be granted relief. That’s diplomacy in action.

The recent talks between the US and Russia in itself a positive development. But more important is to look right now what can be done to Aleppo. Continuing the dialogue between the US and Russia is essential in the current situation. At the same time an international focus that focuses on the IS terrorist organizations, Jabhat al Nusra and other groups is necessary, but not sufficient. An intensified military campaign against Jabhat al Nusra at best leads to the group splits, and the more moderate fighters will join other rebel groups. At worst reinforces the military campaign misleading story of the Assad regime and its pillars that extremism is the root of the conflict in Syria, which ignores the fact that the regime used daily brutality against its own people.

IS and Jabhat al Nusra Assad for strategic assets. These terrorist groups Assad can present itself as the lesser of two evils and calls the world to support him in the fight against terrorism. If he succeeds in this plan is not obeyed the will of the majority of the Syrians; they want ie neither Assad nor ruled by terrorist organizations. Such a policy is dangerous and short-sighted. As long as the brutality of Assad tolerated, remains the suffering of the civilian population, the instability and the blooms continue extremism.

International efforts must therefore continue to focus on two tracks, with access for humanitarian aid, the restoration of a cease-fire and resumption of peace talks in Geneva priority. The international community has committed itself to resolutions of the UN Security Council to these objectives. The success of the peace talks hinges on the willingness of all concerned without exception to compromise. Discussions can only be continued if there is sufficient international pressure exerted on the warring parties to implement the UN resolutions into practice.

The UN agency has proposed for the coordination of humanitarian assistance to establish a regular 48-hour humanitarian corridors to avoid famine and the death of thousands more civilians in Aleppo. These corridors make humanitarian aid available and this proposal should not be blocked in the Security Council. Humanitarian aid should not be questioned and may be granted to all people, whether they flee the city or stay decisions.

Access to the most necessary aid, the lowest common denominator, a starting point. Then we are obliged to ensure to the citizens of Aleppo that a neutral party, such as the UN, would assume responsibility for the development and implementation of an agreement. It is essential that the fate of 300,000 civilians in Aleppo is provided. That’s where the Dutch government these days in the International Support Group for Syria up for deployment.

Yes, the Dutch under PM Jan-Pieter Balkenende and FM Jaap de Hoop Scheffer [later “earned” top job as Secretary General of NATO] gave full political support to US president George Bush in March 2003 for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. An investigation reported the Dutch had supported an illegal war according to International Law. Years before the Chillcot report more or less proved the decision by PM Tony Blair was based on false evidence and lies to the House of Commons and the British people.

○ Dutch Investigation: Iraq Mission Ruled Illegal by Oui on Jan. 12th, 2010
○ British Empire Report: Its 179 Deaths In Focus [Updated]
○ 2.5M Words To Explain Utter Failure of Iraq War
○ Blair On Downfall Saddam, Iraq Compared Favorable to Quagmire In Libya and Syria by Oui on Oct. 25th, 2015

It’s doesn’t surprise me to learn that Donald Trump has completely reversed himself on the subject of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns since he commented on Mitt Romney’s reluctance to do so in 2012. I doubt he’s anywhere near as rich as he claims to be, and there’s probably a major political liability contained in them because of how little he pays in taxes compared to ordinary Americans.

The problem for Trump is that he’s damned if he does, but he’s still damned if he doesn’t.

The overwhelming majority of US voters think Donald Trump should release his tax returns, new polls show.

A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday found that 67% of voters thought presidential candidates should be required to release their tax returns. Just 21% did not think it should be a requirement.

On Sunday, an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 64% of voters thought Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, should release his returns. In addition, 54% of respondents felt strongly that the Manhattan billionaire should do so. Just 31% were fine with Trump withholding the release of his tax returns.

On the whole, it’s probably better for him to take these hits than to release his taxes and have to explain all the lies he’s been telling. But the Democrats are going to hit him like a jackhammer on his failure to divulge from now to Election Day.

Steven Lee Myers and Andrew Kramer have an important article in today’s New York Times that takes a long look at Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s connections to pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and various Russian oligarchs. I encourage you to read the entire piece and share it widely in your social networks because it’s very important information.

The reason I think people need to be aware of Manafort’s history is not just some guilt by association way of casting doubt on the candidacy of Donald Trump. It’s vital that people have this context so they can at least try to understand why Donald Trump has been taking positions that are far out of the mainstream on matters that pertain to Russia and Ukraine.

It’s been much noted that Trump has said flattering and conciliatory things about Vladimir Putin that no ordinary politician would ever say, but his accumulating record goes much further than that. Most troubling, Trump has threatened not to honor our NATO obligations unless certain demands for money are met. He has made similar threats against our Far Eastern allies, Japan and South Korea, so the NATO threat doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump is thinking primarily of Putin’s interests rather than the interests our country and our allies.

However, the Republican platform committee removed a plank that called for arming Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces within their borders. You should probably take a look at the astonishing transcript of Donald Trump’s Sunday appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos for a wide variety of reasons, but his claims about this change in the platform are troubling. I am going to cite a big chunk of the exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Then why did you soften the GOP platform on Ukraine?

TRUMP: I wasn’t involved in that. Honestly, I was not involved.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Your people were.

TRUMP: Yes. I was not involved in that. I’d like to — I’d have to take a look at it. But I was not involved in that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you know what they did?

TRUMP: They softened it, I heard, but I was not involved.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They took away the part of the platform calling for the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend themselves.

Why is that a good idea?

TRUMP: Well, look, you know, I have my own ideas. He’s not going into Ukraine, OK?

Just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right?

You can mark it down and you can put it down, you can take it anywhere you want.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?

TRUMP: OK, well, he’s there in a certain way, but I’m not there yet. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama, with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this, in the meantime, he’s going where — he takes — takes Crimea, he’s sort of — I mean…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you said you might recognize that.

TRUMP: I’m going to take a look at it. But, you know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also.

Now, that was under — just so you understand, that was done under Obama’s administration. And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it’s a mess. And that’s under the Obama’s administration, with his strong ties to NATO.

So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess. Crimea has been taken. Don’t blame Donald Trump for that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You said that…

TRUMP: And we’ll do better and yet we’ll have a better relationship with Russia.

And having a good relationship — maybe. and having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Much of the focus today is on Trump seeming to be unaware that Russia has already invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. But, reading the full body of his remarks it is clear that he basically sympathizes with Putin’s annexation of Crimea and accepts his rationale for compromising the territorial integrity of another nation state.

It’s quite puzzling that Trump claims to have no idea who was responsible for changing the platform. Paul Manafort appeared on Meet the Press and backed up Trump’s claim. Manafort also argued unpersuasively that he didn’t have anything to do with it, either. In fact, he went so far as to say that the change “absolutely did not come from the Trump campaign,” which even Trump had not tried to deny.

People shouldn’t get distracted over the question of whether or not it should be U.S. policy to arm the Ukrainians, or even whether it’s appropriate to put that kind of foreign policy specificity in a document like the Republican Party platform. The focus should be on the possibility that there’s enough smoke here to indicate a fire. You don’t have to agree that the Ukrainians should be armed in order to consider it disqualifying (or worse) for Donald Trump to be putting the territorial ambitions of Vladimir Putin over the interests of Ukraine and our NATO allies. If there are financial explanations for these policy stances, that’s treasonous, criminal stuff.

In any case, I’m fairly certain that either Trump or Manafort went on television yesterday and lied about their involvement in the platform change. Quite possibly, they both lied. And that’s a cause of concern quite irrespective of the context in which they lied.

Reading Max Boot’s column (How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump) in the New York Times, I was reminded of a piece I wrote last September called How the Stupid Party was Made. Here’s my intro to that piece:

It’s easy to get inured to polling results that demonstrate that a significant part of the American population barely has enough brain capacity to operate their lungs. It’s hard to imagine how a brain that can simultaneously hold that the president is a Muslim and that he is at fault for being a member of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s congregation can figure out how to simultaneously pump the heart and regulate body temperature.

And, therefore, it’s sobering to realize that a plurality of Republican poll responders think the president was born outside of the United States (44%-29%) and a big majority believe that he is a Muslim (54%) rather than a Christian (14%).

Consider the latter proposition. Republican poll responders are almost four times more likely to be wrong about the president’s religion than they are to be correct about it, and a third of them are too stupid to be sure one way or the other.

Okay, so there are a lot of dumb people in the world. This is not a newsflash to anyone.

But they’ve sorted themselves into this conservative movement in a rather striking fashion.

I’ll get to how I diagnosed this sorting in a minute, but first I want to take a look at Max Boot’s argument. He begins by noting that historically important Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were highly intelligent. He then seems to make a case that Republicans, perhaps starting with Eisenhower, began masquerading as the “stupid party,” in order to “preserve [their] political room to maneuver.”

Boot is taking a longer view than I had in my September piece. He’s trying to figure out how the Republican Party wound up nominating a Birther who “doesn’t know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds.” And he may have identified an important component of the explanation which can be described as “pretending to be stupid attracts stupid people.”

However, that doesn’t explain why the Stupid catalyzed from a strategic affectation into a virulent strain of Dumb during the (latter) Bush and Obama presidencies. My explanation addresses that question frontally:

What the Republicans did was create an electorate that didn’t previously exist. Sure, the gullible people were there already, but they weren’t misinformed and they weren’t sorted politically.

The reason this was done by Republicans, I believe, is because the conservative movement has determined that they can hold onto power a little longer despite demographic changes and the browning of America if they can sharply increase their share of the white vote. And the way to do that is not to figure out what these people need and offer ways to give it to them, but to get them to think more in terms of their whiteness. Whites go over here in the right column and everyone else goes over there in the left column.

This is the rationale. It has the potential to work, and it’s already working on the state and congressional district level, helping Republicans control legislatures throughout the country and in Washington DC.

It’s a transparent effort to ramp up racial animosity as a way, probably the only way, to avoid softening their positions on their conservative ideology. If they don’t do this, then they’ll have to recraft their appeal, which means that conservatives will lose control of the Republican Party– one of only two viable parties in the country.

There’s an ironic beauty in the fact that Trump came along and adopted this strategy as his own, but without the intention of preserving the power of the Conservative Movement. So, Max Boot is correct that the Republicans created Donald Trump by becoming the Stupid Party, but I don’t think he understands how this hijacking really occurred. It wasn’t dabbling in stupidity that weakened the party to the point that it could be stolen from conservatives. It was dabbling in racism that did that.

A political movement that relied on polarizing the nation by race in order to survive without compromising or evolving their ideology wound up getting a racially polarized nation and losing their party and their power.

So, now, conservatives are actually offended the racism goes too far and is sincere, and the pretense to stupidity has become the reality.

There’s a big cleanup in aisle three, and very few of the people who created this mess are in a position to be part of the solution. There’s no constituency left that wants to accept their leadership or listen to what they have to say.

From the CDC and to be published in the Journal of Acquired and Immune Dificiency Syndromes. *

Two newspapers have now covered what is presumed to be the major compoenents of the alert.  The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.  The WSJ article is the better one but can’t link to it.  While not as good, The Guardian did do some actual reporting on it in Kentucky.

A new alarm for the HIV epidemic sounded early last year when a small, rural town in Indiana was beset with a staggering 188 cases of the hard-to-control disease – and the sirens have been heard in similar towns across the country.
The threat of another outbreak such as the one in Austin, Indiana, so concerned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the federal agency drafted a report showcasing which places in the US are most vulnerable to a similar outbreak.

The vulnerabilities are the same as what many have learned about the opioid epidemic.  The concern now is that HIV and Hepatitis C could begin to spread quickly through this addict population.
The map in The Guardian pinpoints that counties that are currently at most risk.  Do read the article and study the map.

It feels almost like we. as a nation, are right back where we were in 1964 when the War on Poverty was proposed.  A major impetus for the Great Society programs was the 1962 publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America.  Four years ago, Harold Myerson in the The American Prospect wrote an excellent piece putting Harrington’s work within the context of the times and its impact on public opinion and government actions and policies.  Difficult not to wonder if Americans were better back then at a social conscience level.  Maybe we were, but if so, not by much.  The big difference between then and now is that New Dealers were prevalent in DC and politicians, mostly Democrats, were better at selling “doing the right thing.”

In 1968 RFK toured the an area of KY and recognized they we have only just begun.
Empathy was easier to elicit from working/middle class Americans when they saw the images of shacks for shelter and emaciated bodies from Mississippi and the Appalachian region.  Times are different.  While the underlying core problems  remain the same, the images are far different.  While watching live coverage of the impacts of Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi with a friend, she remarked, “They’re all so fat.”  I likely scowled, but did say it’s the result of the poor diet in the south and that’s aggravated by plethora of cheap calories that exists today.  Obesity is now an epidemic — study the map.  Notice the similarities between this one and the rural counties at risk for opioids, HIV, and Hepatitis C.  (It’s a correlation and no, obesity isn’t causing opioid addiction or HIV.)

My scary thought is that the clusters for opioid addiction-HIV-Hep C that the CDC has identified are incomplete.  Could there be a reason why they are popping up in these locations other than prevalence rates?

One more map to look at.   The at-risk couty map distorts the visual interpretation.  For example, Utah counties are geographically large but their populations are small.   To a lesser extent, the same is true with regard to Maine.  That leaves only two states with a significant number of counties on the risk-list that are withot the Medicaid expansion.  Unfortunately, without access to the CDC data it’s not yet known how high they are on the list and to what extent reports of HIV-Hep infection among opioid addicts, as contrasted with the other risk factors including opioid addiction rates.  There may also be something unique about the availibilty of medical care in TN that I’m not familiar with beyond the fact that Tennessee ranks 18th in number of primary care physicians per capita.

(As with most measure of health, MS is near the bottom on physicians/capita #49, although on this criteria UT at #44 is surprisingly low as well.)

Arkansas appears to be an anomaly as Medicaid was expanded there when it was introduced nationwide.  However, the program in AR was done with a DHS waiver and may not be as robust as KyNect which despite its name is the standard Medicaid expansion.  Or opioid addictions may be low there.

Louisiana didn’t implement the Medicaid expansion until  June 1, 2016.  So, too soon to tell.

I suppose that honesty requires noting that Governor Pence and the State of Indiana haven’t been lax since the HIV outbreak in their state.  A syringe exchange program was implemented.

Once again encourage others to read at least The Guardian article.    This is a matter of national health and one more horrible aspect of the opioid use epidemic.

* If it isn’t free to read when published then the USG is going down another slippery slope.  One the Aaron Swartz was ringing a bell about this with his hack of JSTOR.)