Next superbug pandemic will kill “millions”

Health authorities warn next superbug pandemic will kill “millions” … and nations aren’t doing anything to stop it

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 by: Isabelle Z.
Tags: antibiotic overuse, antibiotic resistance, Antibiotics, badhealth, badmedicine, disease causes, drug-resistant bacteria, healthcare economics, OCED, outbreak, pandemic, superbug disaster, superbug pandemic, superbugs, WHO

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(Natural News) When you think of a pandemic, global disease outbreaks like the Spanish flu that killed 50 million in the early 1900s or the more recent HIV/AIDS pandemic are what usually come to mind. However, some experts are warning that the next pandemic will come from an unexpected source – and it’s something that could largely be prevented if countries take the right precautions now.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is an advisor to the World Health Organization on initiatives for public health, has warned that public healthcare and spending face “disastrous consequences” if basic hospital hygiene is not improved and antibiotic use isn’t curbed.

The group said that superbugs could kill 2.4 million people by the year 2050; drug-resistant bacteria are already responsible for thousands of deaths, killing more than 33,000 Europeans in 2015 alone. The OECD said that the cost of treating these infections could climb to roughly $3.5 billion, on average, per year in each of the countries analyzed. The group said the countries are already spending around ten percent of their healthcare budget on antimicrobial-resistant bug treatment.

OECD public Health Leader Michele Cecchini said: “AMR costs more than the flu, more than HIV, more than tuberculosis. And it will cost even more if countries don’t put into place actions to tackle this problem.”

At the heart of this problem is the overuse of antibiotics, and we’re being hit from all angles. Doctors are prescribing antibiotics for viruses, which don’t respond to such medications, and they are also making their way into our bodies through agriculture and livestock products that are given such medications. As a result, many bacteria strains are developing that are able to resist the effects of antibiotics.

Resistance is already incredibly high in lower- and middle-income countries, with as much as 60 percent of the bacterial infections seen in places like Brazil, Russia and Indonesia already resistant to one or more antibiotics. The growth of these infections is expected to be 47 times faster in 2030.

Expert warn that even small kitchen cuts, minor surgeries and infections like pneumonia could turn deadly. The group also expressed concern about resistance to second-line and third-line antibiotics, which they say will swell by 70 percent by the year 2030. These types of antibiotics are supposed to be reserved for worst-case scenarios, but doctors are already using more of them when they should be using less, and that is seeing some of the best emergency options available right now taking a big hit.

How can this superbug pandemic be avoided?

The OECD says that the only way this superbug disaster could be prevented is by implementing widespread changes in healthcare immediately. For example, they stress that healthcare professionals need to make a better effort when it comes to hygiene in hospitals, washing hands regularly and instituting stricter safety rules.

Quicker testing to determine whether infections are viral or bacterial could also make a big difference as antibiotics are completely useless in the former case. Another approach that may be helpful is delayed prescriptions, which entails requiring patients to wait three days before they pick up antibiotic prescriptions. This is approximately the amount of time that a viral infection would take to run its course. In trials of this approach, two thirds of the patients who were given delayed antibiotic prescriptions never ended up collecting their medicine, which means that they did not take any needless antibiotics and exacerbate the problem.

According to Cecchini, such changes could cost as little as two dollars per person each year, paying for itself within a few months in addition to saving billions of dollars and millions of lives by mid-century.

Sources for this article include:

France24.com

TheGuardian.com

72 percent say media ‘dividing Americans,’ spreading ‘hate’

Exclusive: 72 percent say media ‘dividing Americans,’ spreading ‘hate’

by Paul Bedard

 | November 13, 2018 12:20 PM

 

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Nearly three-quarters of the country believes that the media is “dividing Americans” along political, racial, and gender lines, a stunning condemnation of the press, according to a new national survey.

What’s more, the Zogby Analytics poll provided to Secrets said that the media bias is sparking hate and misunderstanding.

And while Americans also blame President Trump for dividing voters, the survey analysis said the media is worse. Those surveyed, said Zogby Analytics, “felt the mainstream media spreads hate and misunderstanding, also felt that President Trump is responsible for the spread of hate and misunderstanding, but more voters overall, and in most sub-groups, blame the media slightly more!” 

The Path Forward on Health Reform for Conservatives

Marie Fishpaw The Daily Signal

Last week’s election results show that health care is still a top concern for many Americans. Members of Congress must now decide how to move forward. Their task: providing a coherent answer to our national anxiety over health care.

Americans care, immensely, about health care. A Washington Post study found that health care was the most Googled subject in nearly every single county. Polls repeatedly showed that the No. 1 issue voters wanted their elected representatives to address was the high cost of health coverage.

Despite this dynamic, Republicans ran away from an issue that had been a source of political strength in recent years. Perhaps it was because of their failed attempt to repeal Obamacare, or perhaps it was because there was no consensus among them on how to protect individuals with pre-existing conditions. This gave the left an opening to attack conservatives as wanting to kill people with pre-existing conditions—an egregiously false slander.

Regardless, their silence allowed Democrats to retake the rhetorical high ground on health reform. Liberals used the opportunity to build the case for replacing Obamacare with even more government-run health care.

In other words, the same cadre that drove up health costs and cut health care choices for 15 million people by breaking the private market now want to do the same thing for the rest of the country.

We can expect repeated efforts to push various forms of a government-run health system over the next two years. More than half of the House Democrats have signed onto a bill implementing this vision, as have 16 senators—including some often mentioned as potential presidential candidates.

But new federal government health schemes will not bring better, more affordable care to most Americans. Most would lose their current coverage—be it from their employer, union, or school—because it would become illegal. Nor could individuals or families purchase coverage outside of the government’s system.

Make no mistake: Under these schemes, the government decides what gets covered, who gets what care, and when. It would reduce access to care and dramatically increase wait times. In Canada, where health care is government-run, some will wait nearly three months to get a simple MRI.

Politicians who reject that approach must also reject half-way measures like “public options” and new federal reinsurance programs—all of which double down on the problems we have today and would expand the government’s role, driving up costs and reducing choice even further.

But politicians need to do more than simply oppose. Instead, they must finally offer a compelling alternative for all Americans, including those with pre-existing conditions. Exit polls show that Americans care deeply about how this country will protect people with pre-existing conditions and make sure they have the care they need.

Fortunately, conservative policy experts, working together at the national, state, and grassroots levels, have developed just such an alternative.

The Health Care Choice Proposal would make coverage far more affordable—lowering premiums by up to 32 percent, according to the Center for Health and Economy in research commissioned by The Heritage Foundation. Moreover, it would ensure that everyone could access a quality, private coverage arrangement of their choice.

The proposal relies on a fresh framework. Patients would be able to choose the coverage arrangement that works best for them from a wide array of options, including direct primary care, short-term limited duration plans, catastrophic coverage, or “gold-plated Cadillac” coverage. Everyone who gets a government subsidy for health care would get new control over those dollars and be able to apply them to a plan of their choice rather than the one a bureaucrat picks for them.

The proposal also would do away with Obamacare’s flawed subsidy structure in which insurance companies receive taxpayer subsidies, dollar for dollar, as they raise prices. Instead, federal funds would be placed on a budget and sent to states to help people access a quality private coverage arrangement of their choice—including the vulnerable poor and sick.

Data show that this proposal builds on a promising emerging trend. A Heritage Foundation study found that, when states have been given even a little bit of freedom from Obamacare’s mandates, they’ve been able to lower projected 2019 premiums—in one state by up to 43 percent—while still ensuring that the sick retain access to care. And they’re able to do all this without new federal money or micromanagement of the market.

Ninety leading conservatives have already endorsed the Health Care Choice Proposal as the path forward on health reform. This is a sharp change from 2017, when Congress fell short and failed to unify behind an Obamacare replacement plan. Our families cannot afford continued failure.

That’s why conservatives created a strong framework on which to build. Efforts to refine and improve this proposal can and will continue. But even in its current form, it offers a way to help Americans suffering under high health costs and fewer choices, a clear alternative to the progressive agenda, and a serious plan to alleviate the health care anxiety in the country.

With Ice Growing At Both Poles, Global Warming Theories Implode

Published on October 1, 2016

Written by Alex Newman

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean. Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 18 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased.

Of course, all of that is great news for humanity — call off the carbon taxes and doomsday bunkers! However, as global-warming theories continue to implode on the world stage, the latest developments will pose a major challenge for the UN and its member governments. Later this month, climate “dignitaries” will be meeting in New York to forge an international agreement in the face of no global warming for nearly two decades, record ice levels, and growing public skepticism about the alleged “science” underpinning “climate change” alarmism.

As The New American reported last month, virtually every falsifiable prediction made by climate theorists — both the global-cooling mongers of a few decades ago and the warming alarmists more recently — has proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many cases, the opposite of what they forecasted took place. But perhaps nowhere have the failed global-warming doom and gloom predictions been more pronounced than in the Antarctic, where sea-ice levels have continued smashing through previous records. For each of the last three years, ice cover has hit a new record high.

The most recent data show that the Antarctic is currently surrounded by more sea ice than at any other point since records began. In all, there are right now about 20 million square kilometers of frozen sea area surrounding the Antarctic continent. That is 170,000 square kilometers more than last year’s previous all-time record, and more than 1.2 million square kilometers above the 1981-to-2010 mean, according to researchers.

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we’ve never seen from space before,” meteorologist and sea ice scientist Jan Lieser with the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) told Australia’s ABC. “Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we’ve never seen that before, that much area. That is roughly double the size of the Antarctic continent and about three times the size of Australia.”

Despite having predicted less ice — not more — as a result of alleged man-made global warming, some alarmists have comically tried to blame the record ice on “global warming.” Indeed, in a bizarre attempt to explain away the latest findings, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC boss Tony Worby tried to blame “the depletion of ozone” and the “warming atmosphere” for the phenomenal growth in sea ice — contradicting previous forecasts by warming alarmists, who warned that ice would decrease as temperatures rose along with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The biggest problem with Worby’s claim, however, is the fact that the undisputed global temperature record shows there has been no warming for about 18 years and counting — contradicting every “climate model” cited by the UN to justify planetary alarmism, carbon taxes, energy rationing, massive wealth transfers, and more. Dozens of excuses have been concocted for what alarmists refer to as the “pause” in warming, as many as 50 by some estimates. The Obama administration’s preferred explanation, for which there is no observable evidence, is often ridiculed by critics as the “Theory of the Ocean Ate My Global Warming.”

However, scientists and experts not funded by governments to promote the alarmist narrative say the observable evidence simply shows the man-made CO2 theories and “climate models” pushed by the “climate” industry are incorrect. More than a few climate experts and scientists have even warned that a prolonged period of global cooling is approaching quickly. The consequences could potentially be devastating — especially if warming alarmists succeed in quashing energy and food production under the guise of stopping non-existent “warming.”

Also in response to the fast-expanding ice, some die-hard alarmists and warming propagandists styling themselves “journalists”have recently been hyping a relatively tiny part of the Antarctic ice sheet that may — centuries or even millennia from now — go into the sea. Numerous independent scientists and experts quickly debunked the fear-mongering, however, pointing out that it was almost certainly due to natural causes and was nothing to worry about.

In an ironic incident that sparked laughter around the world, a team of “climate scientists” who set out to show how Antarctic ice was supposedly melting ended up getting their ship trapped in record-setting ice — in the summer!Millions of taxpayer dollars and massive quantities of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions were required to rescue the stranded and embarrassed warming alarmists after their misguided adventure.

Another key tactic of the warmists to deflect attention from the expanding polar ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been to hype changes occurring in the Arctic instead. Unfortunately for the alarmists, however — critics often ridicule the movement as a “cult” for desperately clinging to its beliefs despite the evidence, not to mention the “Climategate” scandal — that will now be much harder to do with a straight face.

“After the very high melt rates of the 2007-2012 period, the trend reversed in 2013 and especially in 2014 when the melt fell below the long-term average,” explained German professor and environment expert Fritz Vahrenholt, adding that the heat content of the North Atlantic was also plummeting. “In other words: The 21st century climate catastrophe is not taking place.”

Decades ago, of course, Newsweek reported that Arctic ice was growing so quickly due to man-made “global cooling” that “scientists” were proposing to melt the polar ice cap using black soot. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. More recently, “climate” guru Al Gore had been regularly predicting that the entire polar ice cap would be gone by now. Instead, it is now far more extensive than when he made his now-discredited predictions.

Of course, UN bureaucrats, many of whom depend on sustainable alarmism for their livelihood, still have their heads in the sand about the implosion of their theory. On a call with reporters last week, for example, UN “climate team director” Selwin Hart, who serves under Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, claimed an upcoming global-warming summit in New York “will be a major turning point in the way the world is approaching climate change.” He may be right, though probably not in the way he intended. The conference, which will be skipped by key world leaders, is meant to put climate alarmism “back on top of the international agenda,” Hart added.

In the United States, meanwhile, as the evidence continues to contradict the alarmist predictions, polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans reject the UN’s man-made global-warming theories. Like the UN, however, Obama continues to act as if the discredited theories were gospel, promising to save humanity from their carbon sins by lawlessly bypassing the U.S. Senate and the Constitution to foist a planetary “climate” regime on the American people. Lawmakers have vowed to prevent any such schemes, but it remains unclear how far the White House is willing to push the issue. After failing even with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the EPA is already working to impose Obama’s anti-CO2 schemes on America by executive decree.

With the evidence discrediting UN global-warming theories literally piling up on both ends of the Earth and everywhere in between, alarmists face an increasingly Herculean task in their bid to shackle humanity to a “climate” regime at next year’s UN summit in Paris. However, to protect the public — and especially the poor — from the devastation such a planetary scheme would entail, Americans must continue to expose the baseless alarmism underpinning what countless scientists now refer to as the “climate scam.”

 Photo of typical Antarctic landscape

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.

Related articles:

Embarrassing Predictions Haunt the Global-Warming Industry

Obama Plotting to Bypass Congress on UN Climate Regime

Media Ridiculed for Hyping “Antarctic Collapse” Amid Record Ice

Global Warming Alarmists Stuck In Antarctic Sea Ice

Record Antarctic Sea Ice Chills Climate-change Projections

Desperate Dash of Global Warming

UN Carbon Regime Would Devastate Humanity

Climate Alarmists Push Chinese Communism, Population Control

In Historic Blow to Climate Hysteria, Australia Kills Carbon Tax

Carbon Scam by UN and World Bank Behind “Genocidal” Land Grabs

Desperate Dash of Global Warming

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Not everyone should vote

Jay Baker

Voting, restricting, demonizing, question begging and shooting the most electoral, racist, anti-white, fallacious and propagandic fakeries in the week's fake news. Not everyone should vote On the day before some 100 million Americans (most of them actually citizens) went to the polls to vote in local, state and national elections this week, the globalist mouthpiece publication Foreign Policy (FP) asked, "Why is it so hard to vote in America?" The editorial posits that a voter turnout that lags behind socialist utopias like Belgium, Sweden and Denmark indicates that voting in America is too difficult. FP laments that the United States has onerous roadblocks in some states, like a so-called complicated registration process, requiring people who vote to actually be who they say they are (voter ID), dumping inactive voters off the rolls, requiring voter information to match government databases, voting during the week on a normal work day and no established national holiday for voting. America has a huge "scheduling problem," FP claims, because, "To cast their ballots, many Americans have to rush to their polling stations before work or face long lines at the end of the day. That's because voting in the United States is done in the middle of the week." So FP suggests a number of things the U.S. can do to encourage more voting. Among its suggestions are automatic voter registration, establishing a national voting holiday and expanded early voting.  The idea that voting in the U.S. is difficult is fake news indeed. Registration opportunities abound. Kids get registered at school when they turn 18, they can register at the local courthouse and many civic organizations set up registration booths at local fairs, pageants and celebration day events. The federal government has online registration, as do many — if not all — states. In the weeks leading up to the registration deadline, government men and celebrities alike take to the airwaves to encourage registration and explain how to begin the process. When voting day comes, polls are open anywhere from 11 to 15 hours… and longer if any hint of ballot trouble, foul weather or impropriety arises. Some states require a photo ID, but everything from writing a check to applying for government services requires one, so not more than one in a million adults are likely without one. Then there is early voting that goes on for weeks, and absentee voting. A greater percentage of whites vote than blacks — except in 2008 and 2012 when racist blacks turned out to vote for the half-black man simply because he was black — but only by a couple of percentage points. And older people are much more likely to vote than younger people by a wide margin. People aged 60 and older turn out at a rate of 70 percent which debunks the argument that voting is difficult and standing in line is a problem. Almost 60 percent of people aged 30 and up vote. It's the young people who don't participate, and all of them are technologically savvy enough to find a way to vote if they want to. So what we have here is that FP believes everyone must vote, and conventional wisdom holds that everyone should. As the boss recently noted: You are vilified and looked down on for not voting. Witness the rise of the "I voted" buttons you will see everywhere on Election Day. Oh how they want to make our country like the socialist utopia where voter participation is 100 percent! The opposite of the yellow star during WWI. Those who don't wear an "I voted" sticker are supposed to feel ashamed. But the truth is, if you're too dumb to know who's running or what they stand for, you shouldn't vote. If you think that transferring wealth from one segment of society to another is a good idea that will create a society of equality, you shouldn't vote. And if you're too lazy stand in line when all the old codgers who can manage totter up to the polling place do it a smile on their faces, you shouldn't vote. FP has decided that everyone wants to vote but more than 30 percent of those who don't vote didn't vote because they were being hindered, even though there's nothing to back that premise. You can be sure that if anyone was denied an opportunity to vote there'd be video of it on the interwebz immediately. But all that's assuming that voting makes a difference anyway. On a national scale, I'm not so sure that's the case. Your vote just determines which cronies get the choicest seats at the table. Correction: Socialists want everyone to vote except straight white men Seems the boss erred when he said that socialists want a utopia where voter participation is 100 percent. Stephen Clifford, author and former CEO of the King Broadcasting Company and National Mobile Television, says that the U.S. government should "prohibit straight white males from voting" in U.S. elections as a way to "save" democracy. As PJMedia reports: "I think it's the only hope for democracy in America and I will be leading a great movement to prohibit straight white males, who I believe supported Donald Trump by about 85 percent, from exercising the franchise and I think that will save our democracy," Clifford said during an interview after speaking at the forum "Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism," which was organized by the Center for Study of Responsive Law – a group former independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader founded in 1968. Umm. Mr. Clifford: America is not a democracy. And if you cut out straight white men you're going to bring down the voter participation rate, which is going to make heads explode over at FP. Who needs white men, anyway? Certainly not Kirsten Powers, who used to make sense — at least for a leftist — but seems to have lost her marbles since she started hanging out with the gay white guys at CNN. Powers — who was married to one white guy and is now engaged to another — was on a special Sunday edition of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon — thearticulate light-skinned black guy who dates a white a guy but still hates white guys — and said that "white men are very violent and a problem." The comments came during a discussion of Lemon's recent nonsensical statement that "We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men…" Said Powers: If all these school shootings were done by someone from the Middle East, there'd be a very different reaction to them. I think if they were frankly done by African-Americans, it would be a very different reaction to them. So what we see here is we ignore — and we have statistics here showing that white men are very violent and a problem, and nothing's being done about it. And then we have the President of the United States talking about a bunch of brown people like they're the terrorists. I mean, we have a county where we — every other day it seems like a white woman calls the police on a black man for barbecuing or gardening or delivering the mail, and yet we sit quietly while all these white men are out, you know, terrorizing people essentially. I mean, every time there's one of these shootings, and it's a white man. As we noted last week, black men commit far more crimes with guns — murders included — than whites, even though they make up less than 7 percent of the population. But it's politically incorrect to talk about that. So Powers is right in one respect. If these shootings were "frankly done by African-Americans, it would be a very different reaction to them." The MSM would ignore them like it does the problem of blacks killing an inordinate number of people. Politifact is unbiased, just ask them Politifact has checked itself for bias and failed to find any. Begging the question, much? Politifact has just delved into logical fallacy. We can trust them because they say so. Here's how they proved their point: Not only have they given negative ratings to Donald Trump, they also have given negative ratings to Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters and — shocker of all — Barack Obama. The more one makes inaccurate statements, the more they fact check them. They correct their errors. They don't take money from anonymous sources, political parties, politician or any other source they Politifact deems has or creates a conflict of interest (except leftwing organizations). We're so glad they cleared that up. I guess we were imagining things when we pointed out they were biased and fake news so many times in this space. But if you're as far left as Politifact, even the center looks right wing. 60 Minutes lies about mass shooters' "weapon of choice" The unhinged anti-Trumper Scott Pelley, fired from his job as anchor of CBS Evening News and booted over to 60 Minutes, continues to make stuff up. This week it was a report that said that the AR-15 is the "weapon of choice" for mass shooters. Pelley mentioned five shootings in his report: Tree of Life Synagogue (Oct. 27, 2018), Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. (Feb. 14, 2018), the church at Sutherland Springs, Texas (Nov. 5, 2017), Las Vegas concert (Oct. 1, 2017), and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn. (Dec. 14, 2012). The report is no doubt a prelude to the coming attempts to ban so-called "assault rifles" that are sure to come now that Democrats have control of the House of Representatives. Communist Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, who bears a stunning resemblance to Jabba the Hut, didn't even wait until the smoke cleared in the Thousand Oaks, California shooting — which did not involve a rifle of any kind — before going off on an anti-gun rant on Twitter. But according to research from globalist think tank Rockefeller Institute of Government, rifles have been used in less than 29 percent of all mass shootings. Which stands to reason, given that the FBI Crime Stats show that only 403 people were killed by criminals using rifles in 2017 — fewer than died from attacks by knives, clubs and hammers and hands and feet. So once again Pelley is fake news. Calls for bans on so-called "assault weapons" are not about saving lives. They are about restricting your freedoms.

Democrats now have full Control of Illinois

Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan is about to see two things he’s never seen before. And given he’s been in the Statehouse since 1971, that’s saying something. The first is the strength of his majority. Democrats have never held more than 72 seats in the 118-member Illinois House, with the high water mark coming in 1991. The magic number required to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot and override the governor’s veto is 71 votes. As of Nov. 8, House Democrats are in line for 73 House seats in 2019, possibly 74 – a new record. It will be Madigan’s largest majority ever. The second is the type of person who will occupy the governor’s office. Madigan has worked with two governors of his own party since he was first elected House speaker in 1983: Rod Blagojevich and Pat Quinn. These two men were not shrewd power brokers, to say the least. Madigan could pinion both at will. Enter billionaire Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker, who just spent more than $170 million to unseat Gov. Bruce Rauner. That money is a total game-changer for Madigan’s Democratic Party, which has traditionally relied on government worker unions, trial lawyers and business interests who need special favors in order to fill its coffers. So far, Madigan has brought Pritzker entirely into the fold. He knew Pritzker’s money would be a major boost for his House candidates across the state. But what happens when Pritzker goes from candidate mode to manager mode? He will inherit a massive bill backlog, a state that’s one notch above a junk credit rating and a budget that’s already out of balance by $2 billion. He will not be able to raise enough revenue to cover already-bloated spending and new promises in the short term. Something’s got to give. Government unions, for example, might not get everything they want at every turn. These fractures will be where Pritzker’s money becomes a double-edged sword for Madigan. Those deep pockets could provide the speaker covering fire to go against his traditional power base. But Pritzker’s money could also offer Madigan’s House members the same cover should they dare to go against the speaker. For the first time ever in Madigan’s speakership, Democratic lawmakers could have a real choice to seek shelter elsewhere when a tough vote comes around. One key factor in all this is what Madigan wants beyond power: legacy. It’s clearly on his mind. The day after polls closed, Madigan released an odd personal statement under the Democratic Party of Illinois letterhead. In it, he claims Republicans lost because they tried to make the election a referendum on Madigan, but that strategy backfired because the speaker is actually “a champion of smart economic and social policies” and has provided “real, tangible economic benefits to the people and families of this state.” It’s completely out of touch with reality. And Democrats know that. Recall that in 2012, a political action committee closely linked to Madigan paid for mailers attacking … Madigan. The mailers were sent in support of a Democratic challenger running against incumbent Republican state Rep. Skip Saviano. “A vote for Skip Saviano is a vote for Mike Madigan!” said one. “Democrat Speaker Mike Madigan calls the shots for Skip Saviano,” said another. If voters actually love the speaker, Senate Democrats must not have received the memo. Three Democratic Senate challengers ran a week’s worth of TV ads in September calling for term limits on Madigan, before the Chicago Federation of Labor demanded they be taken down. Of those three challengers, one picked up a Republican seat and another is down just 12 votes with mail-in ballots left to be counted. In Madigan’s own chamber, Democrat Anne Stava-Murray pulled off a shocking upset in Chicago’s western suburbs against incumbent Republican state Rep. David Olsen. Stava-Murray vowed to vote against Madigan for House speaker. Madigan remains a black eye for the Democratic Party brand in Illinois. His House members are well aware of that. But for now, they still need his protection. Come inauguration in January, that could change. Austin Berg Director of Content Strategy