Further to the Ebola update thread below, it seems clear now that the World’s Best Healthcare SystemTM wasn’t prepared to safely treat patients after all, at least not in Texas. Valued commenter d58826 said the following:
It is with morbid ‘humor’ that I watch the events as they unfold in Texas. This is the heartland of profits before people. A state that prides itself on little regulation and what does exist is sold to the highest bidder for them to make a private profit. It is the poster child for cut government spending and every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
It represents the GOP plan to reduce government to the fit in a bath tub and then drown it. The agencies charged with confronting this type of outbreak have seen their budgets cut by 50% over the past decade. Almost 50k government public health workers have lost their jobs as a result of budget cuts. The GOP game plan in action.
The final ‘laugh’ comes from the GOP’s call for an Ebola czar to be named when they will not confirm Obama’s choice for Surgeon General.
d58826 goes on to note that the GOP will probably gain control of Congress despite the massive fuck-ups it authored, of which leaving health officials ill-equipped to deal with an Ebola outbreak is only the latest example. Is this because people are stupid, racist, tribal, etc.? Undoubtedly that’s part of it. But sheer ignorance is part of it as well, and this is a teachable moment.
Joe Biden would be the ideal teacher, in my opinion, and here’s the lesson plan: Go before every functioning TV camera and bring a chart illustrating CDC and public health department cuts. Talk about why regulations and public safety organizations are needed and how the GOP has undermined them in places like Texas.
Reference other incidents that illustrate what happens when industries go unregulated and regulatory and public safety organizations are underfunded, e.g., that plant that blew up a while back in Texas, the latest coal mine disasters and water contamination incidents. Point out the obvious, because it ain’t obvious to everyone.
This approach will not work on hardened partisans, obviously. Nothing will. But the fact is, elections turn on persuading unaffiliated voters, who seem to zigzag right and left in panicky fashion like a herd of antelope menaced by massive prides of lions on either side.
It’s not really about Ebola, which poses an infinitesimal risk to anyone who isn’t a healthcare worker treating an infected patient. It’s about not letting the Republicans once again get away with hamstringing government and then complaining that it’s useless. It’s about countering the Reagan era lie that the government is always the problem.
Back when he was running for president the first time, President Obama said he wanted to be a transformative president like Reagan. Some people (i.e., PUMAs) pounced on this as evidence that Obama was a closet wingnut, but a reading of the remarks in context revealed that what he meant was he wanted to change the perception of government in a similar way, and swing the pendulum back. Well, now’s your chance, sir. And in October no less.
Mr. Twister
Biden will be disqualified by Chuck Todd if he does that.
Botsplainer
That there is nekkid socialist athiest Islamofascist Kenyan Muslin communism straight from the pit of Frank Davis’ soulless illegitimate bastard boy, you morans!!!1!1! We’ll secdee, see ifn’ we don’t!!!!!?!!1!!!
Citizen_X
Politico would run out of smelling salts.
Botsplainer
@Citizen_X:
So uncivil. Tip and St Ronald would have ironed it right out.
JPL
@Citizen_X: May they have a hard landing then.
boatboy_srq
Overheard in passing: apparently there’s a scandal in Texas that public health funds were [gasp] “misappropriated” by individual(s) responsible for them (and apparently expended on h00kers and bl0w), and the hospital treating the ebola cases is nowhere near as well-funded as it should be. Quelle surprise.
@Betty Cracker @top: [Alt]+0+1+5+3=™. ASCII is your friend. ,-)
beth
But fat lesbians! Chimps throwing poo! No wonder we’re all going to die.
Actually, I see on CNN that Joe called the tea party “crazy” at some private meeting. Good for him.
aimai
The Democrats as a party need to be running ads on this basically all the time–pro-government ads that don’t reference any particular candidate at all but simply the party. The Republicans have fox news and a host of paid pundits to push the party and its brand at all times. The democrats have to stop relying on election year tactics and election focused advertising and start developing a full on nationalized plan to delegitimize the entire Republican party. Make voting for the Republican party–not individual politicians–absolutely toxic.
I love the “cut/cut/cut” Ad and I think they should be running a Jon Stewart style “Isis/ebola/” fear roundup followed by Republicans refusing to fund shit in a continous loop. People really don’t know or care what their individual candidate has said about anything. They just want to get a general sense of what the kind of person who runs as a republican or a democrat is going to do. Make that “kind of sense” be kind of horrified.
Punchy
Is this why, in about a month, everyone who coughs in a King Soopers or sneezes in a Chilis will be asked to step outside as the hazmat crew bumrushes the establishment–ala Monster’s Inc-style–and goes isopropyl nuclear on every table, aisle, and diner?
Betty Cracker
@boatboy_srq: HTML is an even better friend, but thanks for pointing it out! Fixed!
Rick D
Stitching together the ebola mishandlings and the fertilizer explosion is appropriate here, and you can reasonably extend that to the Freedom Industries chemical spill, the Big Branch explosion, the Macando Well blowout, San Bruno….
Whereas we once might have responded to these events by examining, reflecting, reacting, revising and reducing future similar incidents, we no longer have the power and will to even do that, so powerful are the protected industries and no great the political inertia. You want to keep giant heaps of fertilizer next to a Texas high school? Knock yourself out.
Locally, we’re trying to coerce the railroads, refineries and regulators to guaran-goddamn-tee the forthcoming Bakken crude trains, which will run through the city, not around it, that we won’t be experiencing the derailments and explosions they’re having elsewhere. The railroads and refiners are demurring, assuring “everything’s fine” and hiding behind the skirts of “protecting trade secrets” as they refuse to say when, where and how large the trains will be. The state and municipalities are trying to force them to make the information public and now they’re fighting back under protection of the Interstate Commerce Clause, saying the state has no jurisdiction.
In the meantime, “Trust us.”
No.
trollhattan
Stitching together the ebola mishandlings and the fertilizer explosion is appropriate here, and you can reasonably extend that to the Freedom Industries chemical spill, the Big Branch explosion, the Macando Well blowout, San Bruno….
Whereas we once might have responded to these events by examining, reflecting, reacting, revising and reducing future similar incidents, we no longer have the power and will to even do that, so powerful are the protected industries and no great the political inertia. You want to keep giant heaps of fertilizer next to a Texas high school? Knock yourself out.
Locally, we’re trying to coerce the railroads, refineries and regulators to guaran-goddamn-tee the forthcoming Bakken crude trains, which will run through the city, not around it, won’t be experiencing the derailments and explosions they’re having elsewhere. The railroads and refiners are demurring, assuring “everything’s fine” and hiding behind the skirts of “protecting trade secrets” as they refuse to say when, where and how large the trains will be. The state and municipalities are trying to force them to make the information public and now they’re fighting back under protection of the Interstate Commerce Clause, saying the state has no jurisdiction.
In the meantime, “Trust us.”
No.
Wendy
What gets me is that the bogus Texas anti-abortion law’s rationale was that abortion should happen in clinics that follow the “safer” regulations of hospitals. And now we see these same hospitals aren’t that safe.
skerry
I love your idea. Now how do we get Uncle Joe engaged?
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: Yea, ask the people of Lac-Megantic.
trollhattan
@skerry:
We promise to have the TransAm detailed, tuned up and new tires installed.
Tone In DC
And, on top of that… it’s not like CSX trains ever derail, or anything.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mr. Twister: Indeed, it would be uncivil to discuss the actual results of GOP policy and not the theoretical results.
Betty Cracker
@Punchy: Remember that saying, “Never let a crisis go to waste”? It applies to fake crises too.
skerry
@trollhattan: Where is your “locally”? I’m near Baltimore and we are starting to organize against these oil trains. There is a proposal to retrofit a facility in the city to export the oil. The trains would need to go right through the heart of the city to reach the export terminal.
Mike in NC
Idiot-Americans soiling themselves about Ebola would gladly embrace Uncle Joe.
Stalin, that is.
scav
Private for profit medicine wending its merry way through the NHS. Hospital refuses to publish report on outsourced eye operation problems
“Defamation”, so that clears up who. The same who who rolled in with a mobile theater and “half of the first 60 patients, many of them elderly and frail, suffered complications including blurred vision, pain and swelling, and the contract was cancelled.” And, we’re supposed to feel reassured because no single cause was discovered, but instead there were multiple factors and issues? All of which we’re (UK-we, not we including me set) not going to get details about because of free-floating lawyer-fear?
Kevin Hayden
Fortunately, Larry Klayman is on the job, ready to deport Obama with his new lawsuit. Because, as we all know, Obama’s just trying to kill Caucasians as a favor to his homies.
d58826
(blush) :-)
Someguy
Good to see message discipline here, that Ebola is the product of Republican funding cuts and hysteria and Rick Perry-led Texas stupidity.
OTOH, if you expect Uncle Joe to have the same level of message discipline and to communicate effectively on this issue and to rally the ‘murrican people, you’ve been drinking too much of the wrong kind of Kool Aid, probably the electric kind.
trollhattan
@skerry:
Sacramento area. The refineries are in the east Bay Area and two different railroads (UP and BN) will be hauling via two routes right through the city (one of which is at best a thousand yards from my house).
Here’s one of numerous articles we’ve seen lately. This could end up in the Supreme Court.
Joe Buck
These days, persuading unpersuaded voters is a lot less important than motivating people who are mostly on your side to turn up at the polls, but mainstream Democrats still don’t get that. They think that there’s a large pool of people right smack in the middle between the two parties, and that moving to the right and attacking elements of their own side will persuade the unpersuaded. But many people are registered independent because they are to the left of the Democrats or to the right of the Republicans, or they somehow think, like Bill O’Reilly does, that they are more credible if they pretend to be independent. What really demotivates your voters is if you appear to stand for nothing but your own career prospects. A candidate who motivates people so much that they’ll stand in line for a couple of hours to make sure that their vote is counted will do well. Boring the public to death is not a recipe for victory.
Face
@Punchy: You mean this kind of hysteria? Nice way to hide possible racism under the guise of public health.
Bobby Thomson
That’s the old view, which was based on a population that was fairly non-ideological and fit more or less into a bell curve. Chasing the median voter seemed to make sense at the time.
People aren’t necessarily any more “ideological” now, in a coherent sense. Most people have very “squishy” political views. However, the population is becoming more polarized. In that kind of environment, it makes more sense to motivate your core supporters and demoralize the opposition, especially when turnout is going to be low. (Supreme Court fights and other nominations historically favor Republicans in elections – Thanks, Holder! – because Republicans understand their importance better than Democrats.) And don’t kid yourself, it will be low this year even with tremendous efforts.
trollhattan
Barely related, TBogg follows the ammosexuals so we can keep our breakfasts down.
magurakurin
hmmm, not in West Africa. Who predicts 10,000 new cases a week.
This is a crisis, for the world. Yes, it isn’t at a crisis stage in the corner of the world where you live, but unless the world wakes up fully here, and gets a grip on the disease in Africa, then I think the geniuses running the hospitals in Dallas and Madrid have shown that there is not a whole lot exceptional about western health systems. I get that Fox news is spewing bullshit, but, some of the condescending snark that is appearing dismissing this disease is worrying as well. I’d cite a recent diary by Hunter over at the GOS. This is some serious shit, and needs to be to treated as such.
Tone In DC
@Face:
Of course, I am entirely and utterly surprised by their stance.
Next thing you know, these folks in Texas will say that Obama caused the Great Recession™ in 2007!
Crusty Dem
Looks like the hospital was completely unprepared, which is bizarre, because standard ED PPE procedures should be more than enough to contain Ebola.. I just wonder what would’ve happened if instead of going to a top 15 hospital in the state of Texas, US Ebola patient #1 had ended up at one of the crappy, for-profit disaster hospitals (Texas has some amazingly bad hospitals, not all in rural areas). We’d be looking at dozens of new cases instead of just 2…
I don’t miss Texas..
Cacti
Salon had a good article about week ago entitled “Why Ebola triggers massive right wing hysteria”.
In particular:
d58826
Frontier airlines is confirming that the 2nd Ebola case flew from Cleveland back to Dallas the day before she presented with symptoms.. Not good news
Pogonip
In American Conservative, Rod Dreher reports that the Texas nurses are saying protocol was not followed with the late Mr. Duncan–or rather, a nurses’ union in California is saying it for them, because the Houston nurses, since they are in Texas, have no union and so fear being fired if they speak out directly.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Crusty Dem: We may be looking at dozens of new cases anyway. Last count I saw was that 76 people may have been exposed once Duncan was admitted, at least a handful of them patients. The disposable shoe covers weren’t even mandatory at first, according to his chart. And I’ve seen claims that his nurses were also caring for other patients in the hospital.
Can we just quarantine Texas?
Mnemosyne
@magurakurin:
As I understand, it, most of the new cases in Africa are of caregivers, either professional (doctors and nurses) or non-professionals (family members or friends caring for each other). The patient who died in Dallas contracted the disease after taking an infected family friend to the hospital, but so far none of his family members in the US have contracted it. There have been no known cases of people catching it via casual contact, even when in an enclosed space like an airplane. In the West, including Spain, the healthcare workers who caught it were not taking proper precautions.
So, yes, it’s dangerous to come into direct contact with an Ebola patient and his/her bodily fluids, especially when they’re in the end stages of the disease, but it’s not nearly as contagious as something like the flu.
peach flavored shampoo
And there’s no reason to doubt the WHO’s prediction, as they wont get fooled again.
d58826
@magurakurin: The CDC has a list of nightmare Ebola scenarios. The ‘mutation to an airbourne virus’ is not at the top of the list. The one at the top of the list is that one or more of the many Indian contract workers in West Africa will return home with the virus before it becomes symptomatic and obvious to airport screening. Many of these people are from rural areas that would be fertile breeding ground for the virus.
Again given what we know of the disease it would not become endemic to the region but it still would be a major epidemic/pandemic.
Tone In DC
I wonder if Rick Goodhair would call that move cost effective.
I keed, I keed.
In all seriousness, I truly hope that NIH, CDC, FEMA and the rest of alphabet soup type agencies are on site and actually listening to their SMEs. This could get pear shaped REAL fast, in a place with so many alleged adults with weapons and xenophobia by the silo.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@d58826: The only good thing about that is that she wouldn’t be contagious if she wasn’t feverish.
The bad thing is that she shouldn’t have been on that plane in the first place.
bemused
@trollhattan:
How soon before we see the open-carry nuts walking around with their arsenal while wearing anti-ebola protection gear?
JCT
@Pogonip: Yes, an often ignored component of the “fight against unions” is that you want people in the public health and safety sector to be protected such that they can speak up when something is wrong or dangerous. Quite the amazing concept.
RAM
@Crusty Dem: I couldn’t help but notice when former President George H.W. Bush needed a recent knee replacement, he didn’t have it done at a Texas hospital, but traveled up here to the Prairie State, the Land of Lincoln, for his surgery. If I had a job of any kind at Texas Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, I’d be scared spitless, because whoever is running the place doesn’t seem to have a clue.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@d58826:
Linky? A quick google just gave me lots of wingers handwringing about the virus going airborne.
scav
As boring and shrieky as it’s going to be, I’d rather be hearing about the cases, possible or otherwise, tracked by airline etc. becuase that is at least evidence the monitoring and tracking system is functioning and doing what it should. Much better airlines with names and identity control than private bus etc lines and myriads of random people just moving through space which is the stage they’re having to contend with in parts of Africa.
d58826
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Sorry, it was a couple of days ago that I saw the article.
peach flavored shampoo
@bemused: How soon before we see Texas grant open-carry rights to Ebola viruses?
JCT
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Why yes, because now they conveniently believe in natural selection/evolution such that the ability of the virus to infect via airborne transmission has be acquired.
RaflW
@Rick D: I caught just a portion of an NPR story in the car yesterday that talked about the EPA exemption for oil and gas exploration waste water. The industry guy, with no detectable quaver or qualm in his voice, said that these wastes are exempt by EPA and therefore “by definition these are not hazardous wastes.”
Well then. I guess if they ruin your well or flow into a trout stream, the toxicity becomes magically delicious because they are EPA exempt.
The level of deceit, as well as some hard core magical thinking, is amazing. I am truly sorry to say that a city like Rochester will probably have to suffer a major railcar explosion before anything really changes.
At least we don’t live in Texas, where a fertilizer plant blowing up makes the GOP double down on freedumb.
catclub
@Someguy:
Rick Perry seems to be very, very, quiet lately in advertising the Texas Miracle. I heard Sec. of Health
Burwell interviewed, but no Perry. hmmm
RaflW
@skerry:
Can I just say, the idea of exporting oil from the US makes me insane. According to my admittedly cursory look at the US EIA web site, the have about 1.8% of the world’s proven oil reserves.
We of course consume oil at a voracious rate. If we ship our oil offshore for short term profit, we’ll have basically nothing left in the ground later, after this generation’s Exxon execs are dead and roasting in hell.
National Security? Strategic holding of producible oil? Fuck that, there’s profit in that fracking! Get richer now now now.
big ole hound
BETTY SHOULD BE THE NEW DNC CHAIR. IT ONLY NEED BE PART TIME MS CRACKER.
Bobby Thomson
@magurakurin: Not applicable here. West Africa doesn’t have the same public health and sanitation systems, and family members handle corpses without gloves. Also, too, lots of people avoid self reporting to the health system to avoid being quarantined or murdered/lynched (a sometimes not irrational fear).
Patricia Kayden
@Face: Damn! That’s awful. Way to stereotype people.
skerry
@RaflW: Totally agree. I think it is an insane idea. So much for the concept of “energy independence”. It’s all about making some people rich while the public bears all the risk.
There is a facility on the Chesapeake Bay in MD called Cove Point, owned by Virginia-based Dominion Resources, which recently received permission by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to retrofit from a natural gas import facility to a liquified natural gas export facility. They have contracts ready with India, China and Japan. Of course, this has nothing to do with fracking. Read the report.
Gov O’Malley actually fell asleep during a meeting about zoning at Cove Point over the summer. Then voted to approve the zoning changes to proceed with construction.
Frankensteinbeck
@JCT:
They already believed in evolution. They believe more powerfully in their shibboleths. What they say, and even what they think they believe, is not what they actually believe.
@trollhattan:
Conservatives want everyone to fuck off and die because they don’t feel in charge anymore. Without the racists, the big corporations would be helpless.
Hal
Ugh. Chuck fucking Todd on Andrea Mitchell twisting Ebola into government bad! All this both sides partisanship! If only someone would get voted in that would end all of this. I wonder who he means?
gene108
President Clinton wanted to do this as well, when he was elected in 1992.
He wanted to show the New Deal era compact between government and people was not the problem and government can be an effective and efficient tool for aiding the citizenry.
This is why he started AmeriCorps, as well as pushed for universal healthcare, and got FEMA to be a well run agency for the first time ever.
He also met with a ridiculous amount of opposition, because if he succeeded all the grifters, who came to power on Reagan’s “government is the problem” mantra would be discredited and their billionaire backers may lose some pocket change to the taxman.
As much as I’d love to think a politician could be “transformative”, the transformation mostly comes by tapping into popular movements and using that base to push for changes at the government level.
FDR had a decades long labor movement, which he embraced.
Reagan had the backlash from Watergate / Vietnam era scandals, as well as a struggling economy and escalating social ills, such as higher crime rates, drug use and teen pregnancy in the wake of Great Society programs that helped fuel anti-government sentiment.
There’s a strong (?) push starting for reversing the trends of the last 35 years, with regards to income inequality and such, but it so far it is not a powerful enough movement to overcome entrenched opposition or give a politician the feeling that championing it, in the face of entrenched opposition would be a winning strategy.
scav
@Hal: Free Market Quarantines have already leapt into place, correct? Hard to see through the brilliance left glowing from the stellar performance of for-profit un-fettered-by-regulation TX hospitals. Because once those bold travel clampdowns start inconvenienceing oil-execs or other businessmen flying to and from an entire continent, let alone, heaven forfend! apply as a blanket proscription of travel to and from Texas™ well, we’ve seen this game before with airport security theater bending to Moloch.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: In retrospect, it’s looking more and more like Tip (and his apprentice, the vile little shit Tweety) was the Jar-Jar Binks of the 80’s.
Cervantes
@Villago Delenda Est:
No idea what you mean. Any chance of a translation?
Crusty Dem
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
It’s just amazing there are 2. This isn’t the flu, you need virus from bodily fluids to make it into your body, just gloves and a facemask should reduce transmission to near 0. The procedures that were done on patient #1 could have elevated the risk to caregivers, but even a single case surprised me.. There are likely some very poor PPE standards in place (far worse than just “no shoecovers”, more like “no facemask”)…
Villago Delenda Est
@Tone In DC:
He did. That was during the Obama pre-election term in the White House.
The utterly illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq was launched during Clinton’s third term, too.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cervantes: You haven’t seen Attack of the Clones, where Jar-Jar is the guy who proposes giving Palpatine vast new powers to deal with the separatist threat?
big ole hound
It would tickle me to the point of no return to see all the airlines stop flights to and from Texas and abutting states stopping all road and rail traffic, then banning all TX drivers licenses and gun permits. Wait, that would be forcing them to form a new country….so sad.
Mnemosyne
@Crusty Dem:
IIRC, you actually need a plastic face shield rather than a standard fabric face mask — the fluids (and hence the virus) can leach through fabric, so you need something impermeable.
I can’t find the article, but there was a woman in one of the Ebola-afflicted countries who successfully nursed her family without getting infected by using a homemade hazmat suit she made from garbage bags and rubber gloves. That woman needs to be given a Nobel Prize, because she will probably save hundreds (if not thousands) of lives by making people aware that they can protect themselves even with limited supplies.
Cervantes
@Villago Delenda Est:
No, I have not seen it, sorry.
Any chance of a further translation of your translation?
gene108
@Rick D:
Considering the media restrictions in covering the Mayflower pipeline rupture, in Arkansas, last March, we are doomed not because the will is not there to take action, but the media seems more than happy to be a shill for those in power, who want their dirty secrets kept hidden or not emphasized at all.
The media can clearly influence people’s attitudes, as seen by the poll in another thread, where 40% of the people are worried about getting Ebola.
When historians (if they exist in the future and are not shills for the powerful as in by gone eras, i.e. plenty of the histories of guys like Julius Caesar, Ramses II, etc. were written by folks paid to make the rulers look good), write about this era the failure of the mass media cannot be ignored.
They utterly ignore actual problems that happen to actual people and focus on demagoguery to drive sales on a scale not witnessed before.
There was “yellow” journalism, but you had to pick up a paper and read it. You did not have the paper piping misinformation into your head 24/7, as you can today, if you have the TV set to Fox News or CNN.
Elizabelle
— Andy Borowitz
Randy P
Been waiting for an open thread to ask this, but it seems we’re not going to have one anytime soon so…
I’ve been seeing some buzz about a voter ID law opinion written by Judge Richard Posner. Apparently he’s a well-respected conservative judge, and this opinion pretty much destroys all the fake justification.
But the opinion is a dissent. So I ask the BJ legal beagles, what does it mean in the general scheme of things? Will this help the fight against voter disenfranchisement laws? How?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Crusty Dem: Yeah, but I think the shoe covers come first on the list of “protective gear to wear”. “Maybe we need the shoe covers” implies no facemask/eye shield. No facemask increases the risk to the caregiver, assuming that she washes up afterward. No shoe covers means she’s likely tracking infectious material around the hospital.
The nurses are reporting that Duncan was not in isolation for some stretch of time while projectile vomiting and the other patients were only kept in isolation for a day before being moved to standard rooms. Hospital administrators resisted putting Duncan into isolation when the nurses requested it.
@Cervantes: Padme was away, leaving Jar-Jar her senatorial proxy. Palpatine manipulated Jar-Jar into proposing a vast expansion of his chancellor’s powers.
Cervantes
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I know that was meant to be helpful, so thanks!
Frankensteinbeck
@Randy P:
This came up with the DOMA and Scalia’s wonderful dissent that turned around and bit him. If I understood the lawyers correctly, dissents have no legal power. However, they can be used as reasoning by judges deciding similar-but-not-the-same cases. That makes them precedent.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
Not only that, St Ronald didn’t have the goddamned common courtesy to give Tip a reacharound, cause St Ronald didn’t roll that way.
Tweety stood in a corner, laughing and clapping like a trained seal as he looked on.
Please don’t shoot me, people – I know its the worst, most awful-to-visualize slash tale in history.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Cervantes: Tip (and Tweety) == Jar-Jar == manipulated into helping the bad guys.
Cervantes
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
OK, now there’s a translation I can recognize. Thanks!
Matthews is not of interest to me. I was interested in the “in retrospect” view of O’Neill. To say that “he was manipulated into helping the bad guys” is, to me, possibly true in some particulars — if one were serious one could discuss instances — but in general I’d say it’s not a good summary of what happened between him and Reagan.
About Ronald Reagan, the Star Wars franchise, and the popularity of both, I faintly recall decades ago reading someone — was it Peter Biskind? — on the subject — but am hard-pressed now to recall the details.
d58826
Ouch – the dow is down 400 points. Just a day of wonderful news!!!!
askew
I’m a little mystified by Betty’s post. Obama has already been proven to be a transformative president just by getting Obamacare enacted and the wave of federal changes on gay rights regardless of what he says or doesn’t say on Ebola.
As for Ebola, the best thing we can do is triple efforts to find something that will slow down the virus. I’ve read that someone had found a successful drug for Ebola that was still in the testing phase.
At this point, the panic over Ebola reminds of the panic over SARS. Daily Kos posters are losing their minds and pushing a ton of conspiracy theories over it, etc. It’s nuts.
Cervantes
@askew: Sturgeon’s Revelation.
AxelFoley
@skerry:
He’s already married.
tejanarusa
@Catclub: Rick Perry is in Europe, on a tour meant to establish his bona fides (cough, choke) in foreign policy. Of course, he made a speech in London that was all dumb platitudes, finishing up w/ an observation on how English people always sound so edumacated & sophistimacated. (Face palm) (I would so like to be out of TX but it’s cheap to live here)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est:
I thought the conservatives have convinced themselves Bill Cinton was a Republican.
Pongo
Worth pointing out that patients sent to Atlanta and Nebraska have not spread the disease, presumably because they were cared for by adequately trained and outfitted healthcare workers. This is more a failure of the Texas healthcare system, Texas Presbyterian Hospital and the Texas Dept of Health, than an indictment of American medicine. It does demonstrate that one weak link has the potential to overwhelm the entire disorganized ‘system’ we have for providing care, though. How unfortunate that Duncan sought help from a weak link hospital in a weak link state.
Just read the complaint filed by the Dallas Nurses Union regarding how Texas Presbyterian mismanaged this situation and put the nurses at risk. If their complaints turn out to be real, it is astounding for the sheer idiocy of hospital leadership. The nurse supervisor had to demand isolation for Duncan and fight the hospital administration for it. In the hours that took, Duncan was left in an unsecured area of the hospital. Nurses who cared for him had to cover their necks and other exposed areas with medical tape (not an effective barrier) because they did not have the right gowns.They had to remove the exposed tape themselves, risking infection. Linens and soiled materials were left in piles on the ground. These are not Ebola-specific issues.If true, this hospital is in violation of very basic infection control standards.
I know there is no appeasing the blame Obama crowd and the CDC should not have assumed the Dallas folks were up to the task of containment and should have taken over like the jack-booted thugs they are accused of being, but I think it is important to point out that Texas is the only site in the US treating Ebola patients that has had an issue with transmission. It is the Texas Dept of Health that apparently bungled quarantining individuals who had been in contact with Duncan and allowed a sick nurse to board a commercial airliner. It is a Texas issue, not a national issue. Texas dropped the ball. Sadly their failure has the potential to amplify transmission now, but the response from the rest of the country has been effective and we need to keep that in mind.
Also good to remember that this ‘epidemic’ has still only affected two people in the US. Two. Not 2,000, not 200,000. Two. Everyone else being treated here brought the infection with them from somewhere else. Yes, it’s scary, but we have really gone around the bend on this and it is time to bring some sanity back to the discussion.
lou`
@Pongo: I think this is a prime example of what happens in a “right to work” state where nurses will get fired if they complain.
It’s a prime example of why we need strong unions.
Mnemosyne
@Pongo:
FYI, I just added this comment to the Ebola thread a couple of spots up since I think it’s more relevant there.
tejanarusa
Pongo – everything you say is true. Wish I thought Texas “responsible” people – let alone voters – would realize the truth of it, and vote in people who will make a change.
Given the Supreme Court allowing Voter ID to be in effect for this election, and the ginned up outrage over the Davis commericial showing Abbott’s hypocrisy (still being called “attack on Abbott’s disability” by mainstream media), I have lost hope for change this election.
I cannot imagine living under an Abbott-Patrick government in this state. Perry is greedy, narrow-minded, shallow, and ignorant, but Abbott and Patrick are pathological, imho.
mclaren
Apropos of nothing in particular, and entirely off-topic, Lockheed claims a “breakthrough” in nuclear fusion power.
Call me intensely skeptical. But willing to be impressed…