The Real Worldview

May 08 2006 Published by under Congress, Disease, Government, Politics, Republicans, Society, Terrorism, The Economy, The President, War

GovernmentPoliticsAfter my last post, I was still news skipping and found another good Roll Call read that covers the disconnect between the GOP, the electorate, and news about the economy.

The question for Republicans — who are increasingly worried by the disconnect between those two sets of numbers — is whether voters can be convinced before they go to the polls in November that a) the economy is doing well; and b) that their Member of Congress deserves to be re-elected because of it.

The answers (despite my slim thread of optimism about our turnout machine above) I fear are NO and NOT LIKELY.

Having just spent some time hanging out back home, with people who don’t follow politics the way this town does, I sense that Americans are hugely uneasy. As a result, their thoughts on the economy cannot be extracted and viewed separately from their thoughts on the world in general. They view it all together, and it’s not a pretty picture.

They see job numbers and the market rising, and they feel good. But they see gas at $3.25 a gallon, and a war in the Middle East that shows no signs of ever ending, and they feel bad.

They truly believe that same war could, given the wrong bit of fuel, quickly become a conflagration that consumes much of the region with our sons and daughters stuck in the middle. What’s worse, is they have lost any pretense that the war was justified.

They see their fellow Americans wiped out in New Orleans (N’awlins for my wife’s family) and a government that couldn’t, and largely still isn’t, helping.

They see dire warnings of a coming disease and feel a fear that is fed by the near constant alarm bells sounded by the government, but they have no faith that the government that is scaring them can protect them.

They see corruption run amok through both parties in Congress from Abramoff to Patrick Kennedy getting off for an offense that would cost them a license.

They see immigration as a huge issue, but see Washington torn between two simplistic solutions – let them all come in regardless of their illegal entry, or round them all up and throw them back over the wall. Neither is workable, but both sides refuse to concede that their plan sucks and refuse to discuss alternatives.

It’s against that backdrop that the GOP must convince the populace that the economy is going great – and it may be. The trouble is, there’s too much else that makes us question the direction in which our nation is heading. That, despite any turnout effort, really does turn this into a game of limiting losses more than of trying to win.

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I’m More Afraid Of FEMA’s Reaction To The Bird Flu

Apr 21 2006 Published by under Disease, Government, Waste

GovernmentDiseaseA new poll out indicates that American’s have little confidence in the Government’s ability to handle a bird flu outbreak. That’s not a huge surprise to me. I have little confidence that the government can handle most of the things we ask of it. My low expectations are rarely exceeded.

Now we have the bird flu. The media and the government have done a fabulous job of terrifying the public. So now I have a month supply of canned goods, water and other essentials stored under my stairs next to enough duct tape and plastic to cover my whole house..

I was only six the last time we freaked out over a breed of virus that was supposed to wipe us out. The government handled that one beautifully. The immunization killed more people than the virus, but that’s ok. It was dealt with in typical government fashion – fix it until it’s broken, then fix it again.

The one person who seems to have this whole thing in perspective, and the one guy getting the least media attention, is apparently the one guy that we should listen to the most. He’s not a professional bureaucrat like the head of HHS. He’s an expert on infectious disease at the National Institute of Health. What’s his take?

“It won’t be what you see in countries in which there is no regulation, in which there is no incentive to compensate farmers, in which the people, who are so poor, when they see their chickens are getting infected they immediately sell them or they don’t tell anybody because they don’t want them culled,” [Dr. Anthony] Fauci [the National Institutes of Health's infectious disease chief] said in Tuesday’s interview. “That is a critical issue that is fundamentally different than what we see in Western Europe and that we will see in the United States.”

It is entirely conceivable that this virus is inherently programmed that it will never be able to go efficiently from human to human,” Fauci said. “Hopefully the epidemic (in birds) will burn itself out, which epidemics do, before the virus evolves the capability of being more efficient in going from human to human.”

If not, we can practice unnatural selection by killing off our own with an unnecessary immunization the way we did in ’76.

Go Government!

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