Heres a picture of Glenn Beck, back in the half-minute when a few people for some reason considered him to be a relevant news source. (Click to enlarge.)
  • s_bukley / Shutterstock.com
  • Here's a picture of Glenn Beck, back in the half-minute when a few people for some reason considered him to be a relevant news source. (Click to enlarge.)
The Republican War on Public Health enters its second week with an appearance from Glenn Beck. Not surprisingly, Beck thinks the measles outbreak is a "hoax." He muses, "is it possible we've been lied to about the measles, this outbreak?" Beck asks where the measles at Disneyland came from—he's just asking questions, people!—and he basically says if you eliminate the sources of the measles, there would be no measles outbreak. Journalism! Predictably, Beck thinks this is an Obama administration attempt to force Americans to "grab our children and obey the government." Beck also says the number of people suffering from measles is too small to care about, even though he pitched a fit about how Ebola would kill us all late last year. (I embedded the video of Beck's rant at the bottom of this post.) But we expect Glenn Beck to be a crackpot. Hell, "crackpot" is basically Beck's job description! We expect more from presidential candidates like Senator Rand Paul. Don't we?

But Rand Paul is quickly revealing himself as a quack. After his whole "I-heard-vaccines-cause-mental-disorders" shtick from last week, the media uncovered the fact that Paul belonged to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, an organization that helped popularize the nonexistent connection between vaccines and autism. And now people are digging into the AAPS's history and finding a lot of damning material. AAPS also claimed that abortions cause breast cancer (not true) and that HIV does not cause AIDS (holy shit). Paul has belonged to this organization for more than 20 years. Before Paul supporters try making the familiar Paul family claim that a person cannot vet every belief of every organization to which they belong, the Daily Beast quotes Paul in 2009 saying he "relied on [the AAPS for] research, statistics, and views about the role of government in medicine.” When is Paul going to face his first interview about his involvement with the AAPS? Seems like it should be sooner, rather than later, doesn't it?