from whatever happened to baby jane? 1962 film starring bette davis and joan crawford
Before you read this, you may want to make sure you secure any heavy objects nearby, so that you won’t hurl them through your computer monitor.
Republican perversion with starving government has helped land West Africa in an Ebola crisis. steep budget cuts by Congress has set back the NIH work on both prevention and treatment for the disease and that if it hadn’t been for a decade’s worth of cuts. Says its director:
“we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
It’s not just the NIH that’s suffered, and it’s not just in Africa where the cuts are harming people. The Center for Disease Control’s emergency preparedness budget has been nearly cut in half in just the past seven years. That means preparation at home. That means that local health departments in this country don’t have the funding—or the staff—they need to do the necessary preparation and training to deal with any epidemic. Judy Stone, MD is an infectious disease specialist, details the cuts at Scientific American.
The CDC’s discretionary funding was cut by $585 million during [2010-14]. Shockingly, annual funding for the CDC’s public health preparedness and response efforts were $1 billion lower for 2013 fiscal year than for 2002. These funding decreases have resulted in more than 45,700 job losses at state and local health departments since 2008. Again, it is not just the Ebola that is a looming threat. We need to worry about vaccine-preventable but neglected infections like influenza, measles, and whooping cough; the serious emerging viral infections in the US like Enterovirus-D68, chikungunya and dengue, as well as overseas MERS and bird flus, and natural disasters.
Just let that sink in for a minute.
I’m here catching up on the news cycle amd pondering how increasingly ludicrous it is for us to keep pretending that we’re all on the “same team”. I mean, it’s depressing and makes me weep for our bewigged founding fathers, but I still think there’s more dignity in forthrightly acknowledging that the country’s in a cold civil war than there is in pretending that underneath all of the fussin’ n’ fightin’ we all love each other and have common goals and aspirations for our society and love our country, our earth and our children the same. It’s becoming harder to be convinced that it’s just a minute difference of opinion on social issues. The conservative movement has just gone off the deep end. The politicians are rewarded by the voting base for saying the most ignorant or nasty things they can think up with their sad little frightened pea brains, perpetuated by the echo chambers of the interwebs. Plus the penetrating white dread of being a minority, and the mind state of the self appointed guardians of the herd as they react with pants-filling terror to whatever falls outside their narrow range of experience. I can’t pretend that I don’t think the American conservative movement stands for anything other than unalloyed savagery, or that it isn’t a menace to civilized norms.
Sarah Palin’s internet teevee channel had her taking the opportunity to bitch at her political enemies, those unnamed dummies who failed her by not making her Veepee, and thus failed this once-great nation, in perhaps the clearest glimpse into Palin’s internal monologue ever seen:
Sometimes you have good candidates but they have GOP establishment, smooth-talkin’, knucklehead consultants as their advisors. We need to discourage good candidates from thinking that these, DC especially, advisors who are out of touch with, just, normal, everyday Americans, that these advisors know best. Especially advisors with really, really poor records.
They’re dumb, consultants, sometimes they’re dumb, and they almost always give horrible advice, I find. They try to shape and mold the candidate. Instead of letting a good candidate just be that good candidate, that got ‘em to where they are, well now, these advisors come in, y’know they come ridin’ in, what they want to have perceived as the white horse, and they’re gonna save this campaign, and in the meantime they screw up a lot of things.
So these consultants, I’m not impressed. and yet they keep gettin hired! They’re making hand over fist, they’re making big bucks off innocent contributors to candidates, to campaigns, not knowin’ that a lot of their money is going to these professional politicians, because they’re professional political consultants…well, that’s part of the problem. […] Again, we live and learn, and we come back stronger.
I assume that the DUMB McCain-Palin senior campaign adviser she speaks of is John McCain’s former tough-talking, Philadelphia accented campaign strategist Steve Schmidt—whose job it was – before he became a RINO – to knowingly tell outrageous lies in attempts to try to manipulate an entire nation into electing Sarah Palin, some sort of hermetical and menacing Medusa character who figures prominently in the oral histories of the moose community.
Up in Wasilla, it is always the fall of 2008. Up in Wasilla, Sarah Palin is always on her way to ride in on a white moose and rescue John McCain’s awful campaign, if only those DUMB, DUMB advisers would get out of her way…. these DUMB Lone Ranger consultants, a-ridin’ around on horseback imposing their wishes on poor candidate victims an’ re-makin’ ’em against the candidates’ will – What? The hell you say, it’s the candidates who hire them???? Well, who’da thunk it?
Irma Bombeck
Imagine for a moment, the uproar if a business refused to serve someone wearing a crucifix around their neck. They do not want their kids growing up in a society where all citizens are treated the same, because in this country, if your religion allows you to selectively interpret thousand-year-old writings to put some people down, then why should the government not enshrine that religious sentiment into law for all the peoples? Unless it’s Sharia law, because that would be terrorism.
from one of my favorite websites, messynesschic
Behind the security grills and dusty shop windows of a neglected building, hides an unlikely secret fashion museum of footwear dating back more than 70 years. And what do you do when you discover a goldmine of untouched vintage shoes? You put it on the internet of course! Reddit member Oktober75 shared photographs documenting the undoubtedly surreal experience of pulling back the cobwebs inside his family’s old shoe store which once upon a time was open for business, from the 1940s until the 1960s.
Now here’s a thing. Remember how I “reported” on the 9-year-old girl in the pink shorts who killed her shooting “instructor” with a submachine gun, killing him when the fully automatic weapon’s recoil kicked its muzzle toward his head? Well, Bullets n’ Burgers management talked to Mohave County Sherriff’s deputies and provided them with all sorts of useful documentation, except maybe they can’t find the release forms that the girl’s parents signed because the papers were, literally:
“blown away by the wind.”
Sgt. J. described his attempt to get the releases in the report:
Here’s deputy B. Cassidy’s description of his attempt to locate the release forms:
Mighty convenient winds – let’s just call them winds “Sharia” – they have around those parts. Ironically, the same thing happened to GW Shrub’s proof of WMDs in Iraq. Stupid desert winds!
Why the hell is this business even staying open? I mean, wouldn’t the owner – after helping create a future where a nine-year-old will have to live with having blown someone’s brains out and also have to live (at least for another 9 years or so) with the same obtuse parents who let her play with an automatic weapon like it was a freaking toy – wouldn’t that owner just want to give the thing up, quit, go wander the sands like the desert fathers or maybe find a job polishing slot machines in some off-the-Strip casino and quietly think about things for a few years?But that would require that the owner felt “responsibility” or something, which won’t come until after the settlement, when it will have the word “financial” in front of it.Gun tourism and entertainment; the management probably doesn’t do a lot of soul searching or understand the whole empathy thing. I bet the minute they mopped up afterwards and the sheriff and other investigators cleared the spot they opened up, and didn’t even pause to attend the funeral. Probably talked to the lawyer about bumping the minimum age up a year.
UPDATE: Word at the scene is that the wind whisked that release straight north to Cliven Bundy’s ranch where armed gentlemen and their hefty spouses are denying entry to the authorities.
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