Category Archives: national news

Let's quell the Ebola fear

Will we listen to the president of the United States on this one?

Let us not allow fear to overtake the nation as the world seeks a way to head off Ebola, the deadly virus that has killed thousands of people in West Africa.

It has taken the life of precisely one person in the United States. But the media are making it seem as though it is running rampant throughout the country.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/president-obama-ebola-112001.html?hp=l4_b1

President Obama used his weekly radio address today to try to put this issue into its proper perspective.

“Meeting a public health challenge like this isn’t just a job for government,” he said, just days after two Dallas nurses were diagnosed with the disease. “All of us — citizens, leaders, the media — have a responsibility and a role to play.”

That role shouldn’t be to push panic buttons.

“We can’t give in to hysteria or fear, because that only makes it harder to get people the accurate information they need,” Obama said.

As for the administration’s response to this situation (I refuse to call it a “crisis” in the United States), it needs to be tightened up. To that end, the president has selected an Ebola “czar” who is tasked with coordinating the national effort. Ronald Klain is that man. He’s a trusted aide and friend of the president. He is known as a fixer.

I’m willing to let the man do his job. No, he lacks a medical background, but he has access to the best medical minds in the world.

Meanwhile, let’s keep our cool.

Chief justice going soft? Hardly

Conservatives reportedly are getting itchy over some recent decisions by U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts.

Why, he’s siding with some of the Supreme Court’s liberals and that dreaded swing vote on the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He’s just not the dependable conservative they thought they were getting when President Bush appointed him to the court.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/john-roberts-conservative-quake-112000.html?hp=f2

These nervous nellies on the right ought to relax.

I don’t consider the chief justice to be a toady to the right. He’s now holding a lifetime job and is free from the political strings to which he was attached when the president appointed him chief justice. It might be — and it’s way too early to tell — heading down a trail blazed by other formerly “conservative” justices who turned out to be anything but.

Chief Justice Earl Warren took his seat after President Eisenhower appointed him in 1953. The very next year, the Warren Court handed down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that effectively ended segregation in the nation’s public schools systems. Ike called the Warren appointment his biggest mistake as president.

President Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun to the court in 1971 and all Blackmun did was write the Roe v. Wade decision that ruled abortion to be a protected right under the Constitution.

President Ford named John Paul Stevens to the court in 1975, thinking he was getting a conservative jurist to serve on the court. Stevens turned out to be one of the leading court liberals.

And what about Roberts? All he’s done is side with the liberal minority on the court in a 2012 vote that upheld the Affordable Care Act. It was a narrow decision that didn’t bring about the end of the world.

The Supreme Court remains a conservative body. It has three hard-core righties — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Roberts might be tilting more toward the center, hardly to the left. Kennedy remains the pivotal swing vote. The four liberals remain dependably so: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor have formed a Fearsome Foursome of liberal jurisprudence.

The hard right just needs to chill out. I doubt that the chief justice is going to turn on them. Hey, if he does, then he’s joining some pretty heady company among justices who rediscovered their consciences and their principles.

Ebola 'czar' gets expected criticism

Is there any better example of being “damned if you do, or don’t” than President Obama’s appointment of an Ebola “czar”?

Let’s meet Ronald Klain, who is the new manager of the government’s response to the Ebola situation. Klain is a trusted adviser to the president, a Mr. Fix-It sort of individual. He is known as a master government technician who knows how to make things work.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/obama-names-ebola-point-person-211624626.html

He’s not a medical professional. However, he comes into the game reportedly with a good deal of nuts-and-bolts know-how.

Republicans in Congress have been yapping about the president’s propensity for naming these “czars.” He’s got a czar for all kinds of things.

Yet … the GOP wanted him to name an Ebola czar because, they contend, the government’s response to this so-called “crisis” has been tepid, ineffective, milquetoast.

So then Obama puts Klain on the job.

GOP leaders now contend that Klain is the wrong person for the job. I haven’t yet heard who they think is the right person, or even how they would describe that individual.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/17/politics/ebola-czar-gop-reaction/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

I’m not at all certain the president even needed to appoint a czar to do this job.

A surgeon general would have been an appropriate person to lead the nation’s response to this matter, but Republicans have blocked the naming of that individual for reasons that have nothing to do with his or her medical qualifications. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is run by someone who’s qualified to coordinate the effort; but Dr. Thomas Frieden has been criticized — again, by Republicans mostly — his own agency’s failure to manage this “crisis.”

The president is damned yet again for doing what his critics have demanded he do.

Listen carefully to Dr. Frist

It’s always heartening to read about politicians who are actual experts on critical issues of the day speak those issues with calm, with reason and with intelligence.

Bill Frist once served as a U.S. senator from Tennessee. The Republican also served as Senate majority leader for a time before he decided he’d had enough of politics. He then went back to his first calling, as a cardiovascular surgeon who’s also treated patients with infectious diseases.

Indeed, while he served in the Senate, Dr. Frist usually spent part of his time on “recess” going to remote locations in Africa and Asia to treat patients infected with HIV/AIDS.

He is an honorable man.

So we ought to heed this fellow’s assessment of the Ebola situation that’s killed thousands of people in West Africa and precisely one person in the United States of America.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/10/former-sen-william-frist-ebola-crisis-in-west-africa-could-last-into-next-spring.html/

Ebola is going to be a “crisis” in West Africa at least until next spring, Frist says.

Frist was in Dallas, site of the lone Ebola-related death, to take part in a family-planning conference. As Dallas Morning News blogger Jim Mitchell reported, he put the Ebola “scare” into its proper perspective: “Frist estimates that 23,000 people will die of the flu this year, and in America less than ’10 will die of Ebola, hopefully just one.’ And while every death is tragic, the reality is that protocols have to be strictly established and followed. ‘This is not contagious virus like flu,’ he said.”

Frist is one more reasonable voice that needs to be heard as the world searches for a way to stop this virus from spreading beyond its source in West Africa.

According to Mitchell: “While the Ebola crisis in West Africa has lasted longer than he anticipated, (Frist) wants people to know that he is confident it will not spin out of control in the United States even though it might seem that public uncertainty is trumping established science.”

I should add that media hysteria isn’t helping, either.

Pay attention to this man. He knows of what he speaks.

No travel ban from W. Africa

Wait for it.

President Obama’s critics on the right are going to hit the ceiling — if they haven’t already — with news that the president has declined to impose a travel ban from West Africa into the United States.

The Ebola “outbreak” has many Americans scared. Well, the disease certainly has overwhelmed medical professionals in West Africa, but hardly here.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/white-house-rejects-calls-for-ebola-travel-ban/ar-BB9nv04

Why not impose a ban?

Obama believes the advice of the top medical minds in the world that a ban won’t do any better than what’s being employed now and it could be counterproductive by forcing people to hide from authorities in West Africa, thus, allowing the disease to go untreated.

Airport screeners at Atlanta, Washington, Newark and New York are taking temperatures of passengers coming off planes arriving from Ebola-stricken places. It’s a no-touch technology that enables screeners to use laser lights to record people’s temps.

Those who have greater-than-normal temperatures are then separated and examined more carefully.

Once again, the call here is to avoid panic and undue anxiety.

Two health-care professionals in Dallas have been exposed to the virus. They are being treated by the best medical teams anywhere on Earth. Still, many in the media — as well as some in Congress — have been proclaiming some sort of imagined “epidemic” of the disease in this country.

It doesn’t exist. It well may never exist.

How about letting the medical pros do their job?

Right-wing media attack getting out of hand

Right-wing mainstream media talking heads need to get a grip on this Ebola story.

Some of ’em are yammering about demands for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden to resign.

For what?

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/10/14/foxs-cdc-smear-campaign-calls-for-directors-res/201146

Two of the “stars” of this trash Dr. Frieden cavalcade are Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham. They haven’t listen too intently to what their colleague Shepard Smith said on the air recently, that the Ebola “crisis” in the United States isn’t a crisis at all, that we have little to worry about and that — here it comes — we shouldn’t politicize this issue by seeking to lay blame on medical professionals who are trying to do their job.

That hasn’t stopped Blowhard Bill and Laura the Lip from firing off their criticism of Dr. Frieden.

Ingraham likened Frieden to “Baghdad Bob.” Remember that guy? He was the idiot propagandist who proclaimed that Iraqi forces were defeating American troops in 2003 — as Americans were rolling into the Iraqi capital city.

There’s no need at all to demonize Frieden in the manner that some on the right are seeking to do. Indeed, even O’Reilly’s own Fox colleague Greta Van Susteran has proclaimed Bill-O is wrong to criticize Frieden’s work as head of the CDC.

Let’s calm down, shall we?

'Shep' gets it exactly right on Ebola

One of two things has happened.

Hell has frozen over or the sun rose this morning over the western horizon.

How on God’s planet Earth can one explain that a Fox News Channel anchor has gotten it so very right on the media’s reporting of a non-existent Ebola “epidemic” in the United States of America?

Shepard Smith is the anchor. His message is right here. Listen up:

Never Thought I’d Say It, But DAMN #FoxNews Gets It RIGHT on #EBOLA!

Readers of this blog know I am not prone to heaping praise on Fox News, the “unfair and unbalanced” network that keeps saying it is “fair and balanced.” My experience has been that when media keep saying such things, chances are they are neither.

Smith has laid out a perfectly reasonable rationale for why Americans have no reason to panic over news that two Americans have come down with Ebola symptoms. They treated a man who traveled to Dallas from Liberia; that man was infected with the disease and he has died, tragically. The two health care workers treated the gentleman and are now under the care of the best infectious disease medical professionals anywhere in the world.

Smith argues that unless you have come in contact with someone who is exhibiting Ebola symptoms, you have nothing — not a single thing — to fear.

He blasts the politicization of the story and the laying of blame on health care professionals who’ve been accused wrongly of lying about Ebola.

Smith’s best advice in combating Ebola? It’s fantastic! “Get a flu shot,” Smith said, adding that flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. It presents symptoms that are similar to Ebola.

We had a mild anxiety attack in Amarillo on Wednesday when a man was admitted into the emergency room of Baptist-St. Anthony Hospital. BSA ordered a lockdown of the ER after believing he was exhibiting “Ebola-like” symptoms; local media reported the lockdown and the reason for it. Those two events set off a whole lot of chatter around the city about the situation that unfolded at BSA.

It turned the individual tested negative for Ebola; the lockdown was lifted.

However, the angst was palpable throughout the city. Why? Because the media have done generally a poor job of keeping this story in perspective. At least that would be Shepard Smith’s take on it.

He is right. Listen to his remarks. If you do, you’ll feel better. Honest.

Randall County makes a dubious list

It’s not every day that little ol’ Randall County, Texas, gets a mention in a Washington Post investigative story about local government spending.

But that’s what happened recently when the Post included the county in a list of government agencies that used asset-forfeiture funds on things that, um, could be seen as a bit extravagant.

Here’s the Post story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/10/11/cash-seizures-fuel-police-spending/

At issue is a $637 coffee maker that the Sheriff’s Department purchased with money seized from drug busts.

The rationale is a bit odd. Sheriff Joel Richardson said the money didn’t come out of taxpayers’ pockets. It came from drug forfeiture money, the money the cops take in when they bust people for carrying illegal “controlled substances.”

I haven’t bought a coffee maker in a good while. But it does seem as though that $637 is a bit expensive to spend on something that might cost, oh, about a 20th of that price. I think I saw a Mr. Coffee unit at Wal-Mart selling for about $30.

“It’s typical restaurant equipment,” Richardson told my pal Jim McBride at the Amarillo Globe-News. “It’s for any meeting with might have there. Yes, it’s a legitimate expense.”

The Post story chronicles some high-dollar expenses from drug forfeiture funds around the country, including a $5 million helicopter for the Los Angeles Police Department and a $1 million mobile command center for Prince George’s County, Md.

That’s pretty serious dough, but those expenses seem related directly to law enforcement activities.

The Randall County Sheriff’s Department coffee maker? It might be necessary for staff meetings after hours.

But at that price?

JFK conspiracy? I still doubt it … seriously

A few of my closest friends and members of my immediate family know that Robert F. Kennedy was the first politician I grew to actually admire.

I watched him grow from a ruthless operative to a serious leader of Americans looking for a serious change in the political landscape.

An assassin ended that dream in June 1968.

I am dismayed, then, to read that RFK harbored some doubts about the official findings associated with the death of his brother, President John Kennedy, who also was cut down by an assassin on Nov. 22, 1963.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/was-bobby-kennedy-a-jfk-conspiracy-theorist-111729.html?hp=pm_1#.VDvTQFJ0yt8

According to author Philip Shenon, Bobby Kennedy believed the mob had a hand in his brother’s death. The Warren Commission, charged by President Johnson to examine the details of the assassination, didn’t interview RFK, who reportedly had this notion that the mob figures working with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro played a role in the murder in Dallas.

I cannot pretend to know all the details. RFK, then the attorney general of the United States, had access to information very few Americans ever will have. Who am I to doubt his view that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a grand conspiracy?

Well, I keep going back to this fundamental question: How does anyone keep quiet about such a monstrous act over the course of 51 years?

The answer I keep getting is this: Because there’s no one to blab; the one guy who did the deed was himself shot to death in the Dallas Police Department basement two days after he killed the president.

Still, this notion presents another set of questions.

What precisely did RFK know? If he knew something was amiss, why in the world didn’t he say something publicly at the time when the Warren Commission released its findings?

We cannot know the answer to either of those questions. Robert Francis Kennedy is the one man with the answer. We cannot bring him back.

Thus, these theories live on.

Krugman comes to Obama's defense

Paul Krugman isn’t exactly an impartial observer of American politics.

He leans hard left. He writes for the New York Times and other publications. He’s also an Nobel prize-winning economist who knows a thing or three about economics.

He also has determined that Barack Obama has crafted one of the most successful presidencies in American history.

http://www.lovebscott.com/news/rolling-stone-names-president-obama-one-of-the-most-successful-presidents-in-american-history

Go figure that one, eh?

Well, I’ll await the judgment of more historians on the Obama presidency, which still has about 26 months left before he leaves the White House.

Krugman has written a lengthy essay in Rolling Stone in which he lays out his case for the success of President Obama’s time in office.

Here’s a small part of what Krugman has written:

“Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.”

I get that Krugman has his critics. They sit on the opposite end of the political spectrum. They’re going to dismiss his assessment of Obama’s presidency through their own bias, contending that Krugman’s bias has tainted his own view.

Funny thing about bias. We always see it in others, never in ourselves.

I must acknowledge this much, even though it pains my friends on the right whenever we lefties bring it up: Barack Obama inherited a first-class financial and economic meltdown when he took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. He took measures almost immediately to stop the free fall. The government pumped billions of dollars into bailing out auto manufacturers; it slapped important regulations on lending institutions that had loaned money to millions of Americans who couldn’t afford to pay the money back.

All of this drew stinging rebukes from Republicans, who didn’t offer any serious solutions of their own — except to say that the president’s initiatives would fail.

Health care? Oh yes. There’s that. As Krugman notes, the Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect, but it’s working.

I’ll look forward to reading the entire article. I’ll still hold my own final judgment on Barack Obama’s presidency. We need some time to take it all in.