Corker: GOP shutdown threat a ‘silly effort’

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday blasted a plan endorsed by at least a dozen Republican senators to shut down the government to block funding for ObamaCare.

“I think it’s a silly effort,” Corker said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “What people are really saying who are behind that effort is that, 'We don’t have the courage to roll up our sleeves and deal with real deficit reduction and spending decisions, and we want to take ourselves out of the debate and act like we’re being principled to the American people.'”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) says he’s recruited more than a dozen Republican colleagues willing to block a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond Sept. 30 if it includes funding for implementing the president’s healthcare reforms.

The second- and third-ranking members of Republican leadership, Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and John Thune (S.D.), have said they support Lee’s plan, as do influential conservatives and potential presidential candidates Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).

 “I don’t look at that as very courageous. I think most of us see through it and realize that these people are really just taking themselves out of the debate,” Corker continued. 

“We’ve got an opportunity to get our country right as it relates to fiscal issues. We’ve taken some big steps, and when people take themselves out of the game like this, I think people see through it and understand what’s really taking place,” he added.

Backlash against the plan has picked up steam recently among some Republicans in the Senate.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) spoke out against the plan last week, and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) called it “the dumbest idea I've ever heard.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) warned Friday a government shutdown would cost the GOP control of the House and could destroy the party.

“The strategy that has been laid out is a good way for Republicans to lose the House,” Coburn said in an interview with the Washington Examiner's Byron York.

“Lee’s answer [to critics] is, ‘Give me a different strategy,’” Coburn said. “Well, there isn’t one because we lost the [election]. I’m getting phone calls from Oklahoma saying, ‘Support Mike Lee,’ and I’m ramming right back — support him in destroying the Republican Party?”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), however, has refused to back the idea.

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DNA Databases - Threat To Privacy Or A Good Thing?

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Main Category: Genetics
Article Date: 12 Jul 2013 - 9:00 PDT Current ratings for:
DNA Databases - Threat To Privacy Or A Good Thing?

Creating huge national databases of people's DNA is an increasingly contentious topic since the US Supreme Court recently backed the routine swabbing of DNA from all criminal suspects once they are arrested - at the immediate stages of investigation and before any legal proceedings.

The Fourth Amendment requires the US government to balance legitimate law enforcement interests with the privacy rights of individuals. When it comes to genetic fingerprinting, people worry about how safely guarded their DNA data is, as well as about the reliability of the information.

Similar concerns are hotly debated in the medical world. The sharing of large amounts of DNA data can enable researchers to predict and treat serious disease. But would you want an insurer to gain access to your genetic blueprint of personal disease risk?

A new example of where there may be clear medical benefits to widespread sampling of DNA is seen in research against Alzheimer's disease.

Today (July 12th), the international conference for the UK's Alzheimer's Association, held in Yorkshire, England, heard researchers claim they had gained whole genome sequences for the "largest cohort of individuals" ever grouped together for a single disease - more than 800 people.

Who should have access to your DNA?

Enrolled in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the genetic information from these people could be crucial for the understanding and treatment of this common type of dementia.

But how safe is it to give up all your genetic information to medical research? Well, in medical research studies, highly regulated ethical protocols are in place that aim to prevent such things as abuse of private and confidential data.

For the Alzheimer's research project, anyone interested in enrolling in the study had to give their informed consent, and the study doctors and scientists had to abide by numerous protocols set out in advance. Any parties interested in gaining access to the resulting DNA database must also agree to a number of principles, including not asking any researcher to somehow try and track down individual DNA data.

So, in medical research, information from individual people's DNA should be safely anonymized so that analysis is on a "big data" level and cannot be drilled down to identifiable individuals.

This is not always the case, though. A paper published in the journal Science by Yaniv Erlich, who runs a lab at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, shows how he managed to identify individuals and their families among anonymous DNA research data.

So how much trust do people place in police and other public authorities to safeguard the data on your genes? The Economist recently ran an online poll and found a roughly 60/40 split - the majority of people said yes to the question, "Is it ever right for the DNA of the innocent to be used for any purpose without the consent of the 'owner.'" The debate, "The ethics of DNA databasing", centered on a motion that "This house believes that people's DNA sequences are their business, and nobody else's".

While it seems a majority of people are not too worried about national DNA databases, a large minority are seriously concerned.

Written by Markus MacGill

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