America does not presently have a surgeon general because the person appointed by Obama Vivek Murthy was not approved by the Republicans and so was defeated in March 2014.
Meanwhile illogically the Republicans claim this is Obama's fault-he should have appointed someone of whom they approved .
But who would the conservative movement approve someone who was on Abortion pro-choice or was in favor of more regulations to curb health problems such as obesity or heart disease and thereby labeling of food products so people can make healthier choices-no way say conservatives . Would they support someone who proclaimed marijuana was not a major health issue or
who argued the war on drugs was not healthy for Americans that treatment would be better than incarceration or would they prefer someone who wanted more focus and a substantial increase in spending on mental health issues
They want a Surgeon General who is not in any way confrontational or controversial that he tow the conservative Republican Christian right line and not be too specific in his proposals concerning public health whatever that means or as narrowly defined by said conservatives and the NRA and Big Pharma and other corporate interests including gun and ammo manufacturers etc.
So let's set the stage as the NRA takes on the first amendment right to free speech while defending second amendment rights which trumps all other rights such as the right to liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness when in fact the only real right is the right to bear arms and stand your ground and shoot anyone you don't like.
Jon Stewart rips NRA for blocking Obama's surgeon general nominee by Bruinkid via DailyKos,TUE MAR 25, 2014
Last night, Jon Stewart tore into the NRA and exposed the hypocrisy of the pro-gun senators who are helping the NRA block Obama's surgeon general nominee, the extremely well-qualified Dr. Vivek Murthy.
So what were Dr. Murthy's comments about guns?
SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER, R-TN (2/4/2014):
In your tweets of October 16, 2012, "tired of politicians who are scared of the NRA". Those are some of the words. And I would hope you would know that Americans have a First Amendment right to advocate the Second Amendment.
"Yes, Americans have a First Amendment right to advocate the Second Amendment. Apparently, you don't have a First Amendment right to have a different opinion from that. Everyone knows the First Amedment only applies to saying positive things about the Second Amendment. That's all. Says in there, you have the First Amendment right unless you don't have anything positive to say about the Second Amendment. Then you have to shut the fuck up. You have to shut the fuck up, is what I'm saying."
Not to mention that in addition to that tweet, Murthy also supports majority-popular ideas like background checks and an assault weapons ban. In other words, stop him!!
Chuck Todd Challenges GOP Senator : Should NRA Have Veto over Surgeon General Nominee?
Published on 19 Oct 2014
With calls for an ebola czar flying left and right, some attention has been paid in the past couple weeks to the U.S.’s lack of a surgeon general, who has been awaiting confirmation for over a year in large part because Dr. Vivek Murthy earned the wrath of the NRA, which has successfully pressured senators to balk on his confirmation. On Sunday morning, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd challenged Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) to the defend the NRA’s “petty” actions.
CNN: 'Hostage Crisis' in Obama's Cabinet as NRA Set to Block Surgeon General Nominee?
Megan Kelly and Fox News act as stooges for NRA accuses nominee of being radical political activists who is anti-second amendment. In other words any criticisms of the NRA or of guns in any way is seen as seditious that one is therefore considered against the American constitution .
So we see it is up to the NRA and Fox News Channel who is to appointed as the Surgeon General.
Megan says appointee may not be qualified which is laughable given the unexceptional people appointed under the Bush Regime such as "Helluva Job Brownie" in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina debacle or Iraq's blundering Czar Paul Bremer who did everything wrong .
Obama picks rabid anti-gun advocate to be Surgeon General
Jon Stewart: Save Americans From Ebola & ISIS, But Not From Guns & Heart Disease (Pt 1)
Published on 3 Oct 2014
Posted: Between ISIS and Ebola, Republican lawmakers are demanding swift action to do whatever it takes to save American lives. But as Jon Stewart pointed out on Thursday night's "Daily Show," that demand doesn't extend to other major killers of Americans. In recent years, Republicans have been preventing implementation of Obamacare, blocking attempts at gun control and even fighting efforts to improve the American diet. "All keep hearing is 'we must do whatever it takes to save American lives' -- unless it's stopping the things that are actually killing Americans," Stewart said. Check out the clip above for the full takedown.
Jon Stewart: Save Americans From Ebola & ISIS, But Not From Guns & Heart Disease (Pt 2)
Rand Paul Roadblocks Obama's Surgeon General Nominee
Paul wrote:
"Historically, the Surgeon General of the United States has been a position with the purpose of educating Americans so that they may lead healthier lives, rather than advancing a political agenda. Dr. Murthy has disqualified himself from being Surgeon General because of his intent to use that position to launch an attack on Americans' right to own a firearm under the guise of a public health and safety campaign."
However, some Surgeon Generals in recent years have had agendas that some would define as radical or political. For example:
In 1986 during Republican Ronald Reagan's administration, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called for AIDS education in early elementary school grades. His AIDS report fully supported using condoms for disease prevention.
In 1994 during Democrat Bill Clinton's administration, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders stated during a UN AIDS conference that masturbation should be promoted to prevent young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity.
note Rand Paul forgets for instance that conservatives joined the tobacco industry to fight against government regulating smoking in any way.
He and others also are against the government educating public about heart disease and labeling products so consumers can know what's in a product at a store or a fast food chain or restaurant etc.
Rand Paul: Obama Surgeon General Nominee To Push For Gun Confiscation
"Ted Cruz: GOP Blocked Obama's Surgeon General Because Guns Are 'Not Connected To Public Health'" By David via Crooks& Liars.com, October 19, 2014
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sunday accused President Barack Obama's pick for surgeon general of not being a "health care professional" because the doctor had backed a ban on military-style assault rifles.
During an interview on CNN, host Candy Crowley pointed out that the surgeon general should "voice" of public health during the Ebola crisis, but Republicans in the Senate had blocked the appointment of Dr. Vivek Murthy.
"Of course we should have a surgeon general in place," Cruz told Crowley. "And we don't have one because President Obama, instead of nominating a health professional, he nominated someone who is an anti-gun activist."
"And a doctor," Crowley pointed out. "That's a health professional."
"He's a doctor," Cruz admitted. "Where he's made his name is as a crusader against Second Amendment rights, and as a consequence, he didn't have the votes among Republicans or Democrats."
"And so was it a mistake for the president to nominate an extreme partisan on an issue that is not connected to public health?" the Texas senator added. "Yes, that was a mistake."
What Ted Cruz and his interviewer Candy Crowley at CNN both accept is the dubious or debatable notion and assumption that gun control is not to be considered a public health issue. But gun violence in America is an issue and can be deemed a public health issue as are other issues such as smoking tobacco or the use of seatbelts or airbags to make driving safer or controls on air pollution or providing reliable information on the spread of diseases such as Ebola or Sexually Transmitted Diseases such as AIDS or problem of obesity and the labeling of food products and so on.
According to Ted Cruz gun control is not a public health issue but is rather a constitutional law issue and it is an absolute right which cannot under any circumstances be breached.
But if the numbers of injuries and deaths can be significantly reduced through more gun control then this is a matter of public health and safety.In countries with strict laws on gun ownership the numbers of injuries and deaths due to guns is significantly than those countries with laxer laws and regulations regarding gun ownership and the use of fire arms.
In the 1980s the Surgeon General a Reagan appointee Everett Koop claimed the AIDS epidemic had to be treated as a public health issue and not a moral or religious issue. Whereas conservatives believed that the issue had to do with immorality and homosexuality and that to many religious conservatives AIDS was the Gay Plague sent by God to punish homosexuals. These conservatives were also reluctant to discuss such sexual private matters in public or sending such information even in flyers to individual households or set up AIDS and sex education programs in the public schools. C. Everett Koop believed that knowledge about the disease and its transmission combined with basic sex education and promoting the use of condoms were the key to fighting the epidemic.
Reagan and the Republicans and the Religious Right choose Everett Koop because they believed he was one of them a right wing conservative and moralist who would defend conservative Christian values since he was anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia but when it came to his public office he believed that his personal beliefs should not prevent him from doing what was medically and scientifically right for public health.
On the case of Surgeon General Everett Koop see:
In the end :
"Former liberal critics of Koop were pleasantly surprised while his erstwhile conservative supporters were taken aback by the explicit language and the lack of moral censure in his AIDS report, and above all by Koop's promotion of sex education in elementary schools. Yet, as Koop himself saw it, his approach to AIDS was consistent with his long-standing professional commitments as a pediatric surgeon, as well as with his religious faith: "My position on AIDS was dictated by scientific integrity and Christian compassion. . . . My whole career has been dedicated to prolonging lives, especially the lives of people who were weak and powerless, the disenfranchised who needed an advocate: newborns who needed surgery, handicapped children, unborn children, people with AIDS." "
and astoundingly :
"In May of 1988, Koop sent an eight-page, condensed version of his AIDS report to all 107,000,000 households in the United States, the largest mailing in American history and the first time that the federal government provided explicit sex information to the public. His report, speeches, and television appearances did much to change the public debate on AIDS in the United States and, along with it, attitudes towards public discussion of sexuality. In April of 1988, the first condom ad appeared on national television. By then, analogies between AIDS and the great epidemic scourges of the past were heard less often; so were calls for mandatory testing and quarantine of AIDS carriers, the most rigorous public health measures employed during past epidemics. Instead, following the lead of the Surgeon General, physicians, government officials, politicians, and the public were coming to view AIDS as a preventable and manageable disease, even if it was not curable. With the advent of AZT (zidovudine, formerly called azidothymidine) in 1986, and especially with the development of a more effective combination of antiretroviral drugs in the mid-1990s, AIDS in the United States changed from an epidemic to a chronic disease, with the focus as much on the long-term medical care and medical costs, employment opportunities, and civil rights of AIDS patients as on AIDS education and prevention."
see: The C. Everett Koop Papers AIDS, the Surgeon General, and the Politics of Public Health
C. Everett Koop's two terms as U.S. Surgeon General coincided with the rise of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, an epidemic that, scientists and health officials predicted, would turn into the greatest public health catastrophe of the twentieth century. After his superiors relegated him to the sidelines of the AIDS debate during his first four years in office, Koop dedicated almost all of his time and energy to the disease in his second term. In 1986, he was finally authorized to issue a Surgeon General's report on AIDS. In 1988, he mailed a congressionally-mandated information brochure on AIDS to every American household. As he recollected, during this period "AIDS took over my life." Through his report and his many speeches and interviews on AIDS Koop did more than any other public official to shift the terms of the public debate over AIDS from the moral politics of homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use, practices through which AIDS was spread, to concern with the medical care, economic position, and civil rights of AIDS sufferers. Similarly, Koop promoted redefining the prevalent scientific model of the disease, from a contagion akin to bubonic plague, yellow fever, and other deadly historic epidemics that required the strongest public health measures--mandatory testing and quarantine of carriers--to a chronic disease that was amenable to long-term management with drugs and behavioral changes.
During the height of Koop's nomination battle, in June 1981, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported five cases of homosexual men in Los Angeles who were dying from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a rare form of pneumonia most often contracted by people with weakened immune systems. A month later, the CDC reported on twenty-six young homosexual men recently diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma, an equally rare skin cancer. During his forty-year career as a surgeon Koop had seen two cases of Kaposi's sarcoma; twenty-six cases in a single report, he realized, were the makings of an epidemic disease, a disease that was destroying the immune system of otherwise healthy adults, who then succumbed to other, opportunistic diseases. The disease, which in 1983 was named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, was traced the same year by French and American scientists to a virus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Researchers discovered the means by which AIDS was spread, namely through sexual intercourse, the sharing of contaminated needles among intravenous drug users, transfusion of infected blood, and transmission from pregnant mother to child in utero, during birth, or during nursing. A blood test to detect antibodies to HIV and a technique for killing the virus in blood products were developed in 1985, making the blood supply once again safe for transfusion, and clotting factors safe for hemophiliacs. Yet, also by 1985, nearly 12,000 cases of AIDS had been reported in the United States, and just under 6,000 of those infected had died. One of those who died that summer was movie star Rock Hudson, a friend of President Ronald Reagan whose death drew nationwide attention to the epidemic.
and for instance:
C. Everett Koop: The Surgeon General Who Put Science Before Personal Ideology by Martha Kempner at realitycheck.org, February 28, 2013
By all accounts he was a person of strong personal beliefs who nonetheless placed medical and scientific evidence, and the health of U.S. citizens over his or his administration’s ideology. While this should be the norm, in today’s political world it is shockingly rare.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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