A second person has contracted Ebola in the United States and the media has gone bonkers.. I doubt that a nuclear bomb landing n Chicago would cause more panic. How about a little reality check here; one person has died. A second person has contracted the disease, that’s two people in a population of three hundred fifty million. There were 30,296 fatal auto accidents last year in this country, just over 30,000 gunshot deaths, 576,691 by cancer, 84,974 by Alzheimer’s, 142,943 by inhaling pollutants.
I watched Martha Raddatz, a brave woman who has spent her life reporting from some of the most dangerous battlegrounds in the world, in full panic mode while interviewing two healthcare professionals this past Sunday. This is ridiculous. First of all, how about a little calm, how about a little control of our emotions? Ebola is certainly a killer disease but even with a few thousand deaths attributed to it, it doesn’t compare to Aids, Malaria, Flu, Tuberculosis, or at least a half dozen other diseases that sweep through Africa and the rest of the world every day.
It’s time we grabbed hold of reality and treated this terrible but controllable disease the way it should be treated, with professional calm and focus.
Michael McCaul Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee was on the tube. Why is it that all the dummies are on committees that have to do with security or intelligence? Anyway, this guy wants to isolate Africa. Yeah, that’ll work.
Peggy Noonan makes a very important statement abut how we are getting the facts from our government when she says that it always seems that the government spokesmen are talking down to us, not giving us all the facts because they don’t feel that we are adult enough to absorb them without panicking. This is probably true but all you have to do is look at the reactions of many in the media to what facts they are given and you absolutely understand why this is happening. Most of the media are in high panic mode all the time.
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And of course it had to happen. A California congressman named Duncan Hunter is alleging that at least ten ISIS terrorists were apprehended trying to cross the border in Texas. Does Hunter’s fantasy world really go that far afield? Do you want him representing you?
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The big unasked question of this election, did Democrats win by Losing the Senate? The answer is yes but only in certain very restrictive circumstances. The big place will probably be in immigration reform where a Republican House and Senate could cooperate to put together an immigration bill and then it would be up to Obama to sign or veto it. The problem is that such a bill, coming from a party that doesn’t want anything to do with immigration, cannot possibly be a fair pierce of legislation. Gioven that, the GOP will begin the process of deconstruction, leading to the 2016 election.
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Time magazine ‘s cover this week features Rand Paul with the headline, “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.” Really? Must be a pretty boring profession. The problem with Rand is that he is running as a Republican and he just doesn’t get what his party stands for. That’s not interesting just boring. He thinks he can grab a large segment of the black vote, a group that hasn’t voted more than 20% Republican since 1960, but he doesn’t see that this is impossible when his party doesn’t want that vote, is doing everything they can to jettison that vote
I watched former Republican Party Chief, Michael Steele, a very intelligent man whose major flaw is that he is a black Republican, embarrass himself on TV this morning by trying to make any sense out of Rand’s position in light of the Right’s opposition to any position that even understands the black community’s rightful demands on many issues. The GOP doesn’t want the black vote because in order to get it they must oppose their own base, which would like the black community to just disappear.
At least Steele doesn’t try to defend that bigotry in his party; his comment on it;. “You can’t fix stupid,” says it all.
But Rand Paul doesn’t seem as intelligent as Steele and he just keeps plugging away at a series of positions that his party won’t support. Yes, he supports a lot of good moral positions but the rest of the Right just isn’t interested. Sure they give mouth service to many of those positions, but when it comes to real answers for immigration, healthcare, minimum wage or the environment, his party just doesn’t want any part of real solutions. . This does not appear to be the way to win a presidential election.
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A lot of noise about the debate between Charlie Christ and Rick Scott in Florida. What an incredible load of bullshit. Christ likes to have a fan at his feet. He likes to keep his balls cool during a debate. So what? But Scott decided to make this into an issue. It’s like they don’t have enough serious issues in Florida, a state that will soon be underwater. So Christ puts his fan under the podium and Scott refuses to come out and debate. Is the absence of a fan the reason for this debate? If I’m a Florida voter, I say, the guy with the fan wants to run the state and the other guy wants to sit in his dressing room and pout. No contest, who I vote for. You will notice that neither man’s party was mentioned here. That’s because party is not an issue here. What’s an issue is which guy wants to deal with real problems and which guy wants to act like an asshole.
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The Pope has come out with some new proclamations about the social issues that the Catholic church has been ignoring for the last couple of hundred years, and that will possibly help to bring it into, at least, the nineteenth century. Of course NY Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the man who is spending over seven million bucks to spiffy up the face of St. Patrick’s Cathedral while closing Catholic schools all over the city, brought his phony charm to the discussion on the side of medieval thinking disguised as friendly familial charm. Dolan’s snake charmer approach is amazingly well acted. His ability to praise a position that he absolutely despises and do it with his trademark insincere smile is a tribute to the Machiavellian approach to religion
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The airbag controversy has brought to the fore a very important reality. Manufacturers of all kinds have been able to avoid responsibility for dangerous, defective installations by agreeing to payoffs to those injured, only if accompanied by non-disclosure agreements. These kinds of agreements must be stopped, must be declared illegal and there must be a government office that has as its sole responsibility the prosecution of manufacturers of defective parts that injure consumers.
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John McCain rambled around on Face the Nation, telling us all why we should be getting into a full scale war in the Middle East and then, if that wasn’t enough senile blathering, he progressed to the Ukraine. He starts out by saying that we should be backing the Ukrainians to fight the Russians. Why us? The only dog we have in that fight, is that we helped the Ukrainians overthrow their legal government. Why don’t the surrounding European nations that are right there facing Russia take up the cudgel? Maybe if they got up off their collective asses and showed a little gumption they would have some effect on Putin’s plans. Hell, they won’t even stop buying oil from Russia. Sure it would cost them a little money, so would a Russian invasion of Poland, Italy or France but they’re too greedy and shortsighted to see any of that.
McCain also thinks that it is a very complicated and dangerous situation to have American medical assets rushed to West Africa to help with the Ebola crisis when that is exactly what needs to be done to get that mess under control but he doesn’t seem to think it would be complicated for us to get into the Russia-Ukraine mess. Poor old John is obviously slipping off into senility.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t support Ukraine by giving them what we can. After all we created this government, so we do owe it some support. Give them all the weapons they can handle, make it painful for Putin to move forward. But if Europe doesn’t have the stones to defend themselves, we should abandon them to their own fate. Putin isn’t looking to conquer the world; he just wants his people to think he is.
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Up in Maine, the craziest governor in the country, Paul LaPage won with 43% of the votes. His Democratic opponent, Mike Michaud got 38% of the votes and Independent Eliot Cutler got 8% of the votes. Now those 8% would probably have gone to Michaud if Cutler had dropped out but he held on and just to prove he is as stupid, ego driven and obstinate as LaPage he went on UP and babbled about why he stayed on. Cutler raves about fear but the fact remains that he couldn’t win, any idiot could see that he couldn’t win and yet he stayed in it and siphoned off votes that may have been cast against LaPage. Just another dumb liberal move by the losing side.