Republicans stripped $900 million in flu pandemic preparedness funds from the stimulus bill and refashioned the budget so that state and local emergency services get nothing.

Positioning for deeper tax cuts, Karl Rove complained that “$462 million for the Centers for Disease Control and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations” is wasteful spending. Tax cuts are not.

House and Senate Republicans bet that they would be able to score their political points without any life or death consequences… but how do so-called free markets manage flu pandemics?

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA

Yeah, right.

I have now lived through three major episodes in my life where the political elite have told me quite plainly that neither I nor my fellow citizens are sufficiently mature to suffer the public prosecution of major crimes committed within my government.

The first was when Gerry Ford told me I wasn’t strong enough to handle the sight of Richard Nixon in the dock. (Ed. note–I would have thrown a parade.) Dick Cheney looked at this episode and determined that the only thing Nixon did wrong was get caught.

The second time was when the entire government went into spasm over the crimes of the Iran-Contra gang and I was told that I wasn’t strong enough to see Ronald Reagan impeached or his men packed off to Danbury. Dick Cheney looked at this and determined that the only thing Reagan and his men did wrong was get caught and, by then, Cheney had decided that even that wasn’t really so very wrong and everybody should shut up.

Now, Barack Obama, who won election by telling the country and its people that they were great because of all they’d done for him, has told me that I am not strong enough to handle the prosecution of pale and vicious bureaucrats, many of them acting at the behest of Dick Cheney, who decided that the only thing he was doing wrong was nothing at all, who have broken the law, disgraced their oaths, and manifestly belong in a one-room suite at the Hague. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sick and goddamn tired of being told that, as a citizen, I am too fragile to bear the horrible burden of watching public criminals pay for their crimes and that, as a political entity, my fellow citizens and I are delicate flowers encased in candy-glass who must be kept away from the sight of men in fine suits weeping as they are ripped from the arms of their families and sent off to penal institutions manifestly more kind than those in which they arranged to get their rocks off vicariously while driving other men mad.

Hey, Mr. President. Put these barbarians on trial and watch me. I’ll be the guy out in front of the courtroom with a lawn chair, some sandwiches, and a cooler of fine beer. I’ll be the guy who hires the brass band to serenade these criminal bastards on their way off to the big house. I’ll be the one who shows up at every one of their probation hearings with a copy of the Constitution, the way crime victims show up at the parole board when their attacker comes up for release. I’ll declare a national holiday — Victory Over Torture Day — and lead the parade right up whatever gated street it is that Cheney lives on these days.

Trust me, Mr. President. I can take it.

Greg Linden:

Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a ‘search problem’ to a ‘recommender problem’ will reap tremendous rewards.

The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true ideologue. He is quoted as saying that:

“I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa’ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorised torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.”

The NYPost studied five years of mutual fund performance:

Scores of piggish mutual-fund managers got wealthy over the last five years but delivered investors poor results, an analysis of fund performance records by The Post reveals.

The fund managers pocketed the high management fees — adding to the funds’ losses while investors were slammed in their 401(k)s and in other fund accounts — but delivered results that didn’t even beat the S&P 500 Index.

That means investors would have been better off ignoring the professional stock pickers…

Update:
Level 4 on Monday, meaning the global health body feels the virus causing the swine flu outbreak can easily transmit between people.

A ‘pandemic’ isn’t at this time, but there is a true emergency, and teams are gearing up worldwide.

Human to Human? Only in close quarters and limited circumstance.

Phase 3
…sporadic cases or small clusters of disease in people, but has not resulted in human-to-human transmission sufficient to sustain community-level outbreaks.

Limited human-to-human transmission may occur under some circumstances, for example, when there is close contact between an infected person and an unprotected caregiver.

However, limited transmission under such restricted circumstances does not indicate that the virus has gained the level of transmissibility among humans necessary to cause a pandemic.

Crof’s blog is a layman’s reporting site held in high regard, News and Resources about Avian and Swine Flu.

“We hack disaster novelists know one big truth: When you stress people, you find out what they really are.

“I hope this stress shows that we’re strong enough to deal with this H1N1 outbreak, and with anything else following it that may be far, far worse…like H5N1.”

Doc Gurley is a certified Internist physician and Harvard Medical School graduate.

Here is a list of ten practical steps you can take to prepare and protect yourself and your family.

Now that America has declared a state of swine flu public health emergency, you may be asking yourself – what am I supposed to do?

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly.

Monopoly is an evil.

For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good. – Thomas Babbington Macaulay

Bertrand Russell, originally published in 1930:

Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive and stunts growth.

It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

At Google Books, The Conquest of Happiness

“We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.” – bob herbert

Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq.

Peterson, a devout Mormon, had graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship. She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003.

Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

Peterson Killed Herself After Refusing to Take Part in Torture

There’s a story about Yogi Berra going into a pizza shop, and he orders a pie. As they pull his pie out of the oven, they ask him whether he’d like it cut into six wedges or eight. Six, he decides. He’s not hungry enough to eight pieces of pizza.

found at Canthook

The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free

Matthew Yglesias says about this book, “…our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security.

“The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders.

“If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium.”

The Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades.

The Russian Federation seeks to emerge as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020, but history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.

Paul Saffo:

We got into this mess because we created a society that sacrificed the long-term good for the many on the altar of short-term profits for the few.

If we can just shake off the illusion of the quick fix, we may discover that more than the current financial crisis can be surmounted for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.

Digest this:

1. It has been projected that 75% of US adults will be overweight or obese by 2015.

2. Weight gain and obesity are more linked to sweetened beverages than solid food.