I read yesterday where collectively illegals are costing the US $338 Billion per year or 58% of our current budget deficit.
The U.N., that bastion of conservative mis-information says Ebola is the next Aids epidemic. http://news.yahoo.com/intensity-ebola-spread-unseen-since-aids-135658348.html
What happens when your Hot Take has no evidence to back it up? Just say it's what "Americans" believe SIMON MALOY Being a pundit means that you have a preternatural ability to speak for “America.” The magic of punditry, the stuff that makes cable news hum, is the ability of the pundit to divine through telepathy or clairvoyance or good old fashioned gut feelings what “America” is thinking about any given issue at any given moment. Once the divination is complete, the pundit goes on television or writes a newspaper column and informs America of how they feel. There are masters of this craft, like Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, whose connection with “America” is so finely tuned that she can sense the minutest vibrations in public sentiment and interpret them for her audience. When news broke that a man in Texas had been diagnosed with Ebola, Peggy Noonan opened her mind to the country and sensed what they were feeling. With the IRS scandal and the Secret Service failures, Noonan discovered, America just wasn’t ready to trust the government when it said the Ebola situation was under control: Ebola will not, all agreed, produce a full-fledged American epidemic. “We are stopping it in its tracks in this country,” Dr. Frieden said. That may be true. But nobody thinks it because government doctors and professionals said it. Americans do not have confidence in what The Officials tell them anymore. The skeptics among you might be quick to point out that Peggy Noonan, as a Republican and a conservative, is herself mistrustful of the Obama administration, so when she claims to be speaking for “Americans,” couldn’t it be that she’s simply projecting her own opinions onto the American public writ large? Well, to all you logic-bound naysayers out there, if Noonan is wrong, then how do you explain the fact that so many other pundits arrived at the same exact conclusion? Like NBC’s Joe Scarborough: Right now, a lot of Americans are seeing what happened in Dallas and looking at your laundry list, what happened with the secret service, what happened with the IRS, what happened with the VA, what happened with ISIS being a JV team. So when anybody, any member of the government says, “Hey, just relax, everything’s going to be okay,” Americans don’t believe that. And National Journal’s Ron Fournier: Trust. There’s that word again. How much faith can the public summon toward an administration that used incompetence as a defense in scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi, and Obamacare; that lied about its surveillance of Americans; and that just recently acknowledged dangerous misjudgments regarding the Secret Service and ISIS? And Fox News’ Gretchen Carlson: What more and more people seem to be asking about Ebola now isn’t that they are necessarily scared about actually getting the disease, but that they’re scared the government agencies responsible with helping us if we do get sick might not be up to the task. So if Ebola becomes a bigger issue, the question still remains: will we be safe? Is it just a coincidence that all these seasoned observers of public opinion came up with the same argument for why the American people obviously don’t trust the government to stop the spread of Ebola? I mean, when four pundits are in such close agreement on an issue, it feels stupid to even question the truth of it. But, in the spirit of science, we’ll put it to the test. Four pundits, all claiming that the IRS scandal and Benghazi and Obamacare and whatever have eroded public faith in “the government” so much that they just can’t bring themselves to trust public health officials when they say that Ebola is under control. Let’s go to the public opinion polls. Hit me with some truth, Pew Research Center! Most Are Confident in Government’s Ability to Prevent Major Ebola Outbreak in U.S. As the Ebola outbreak in Africa continues, and two patients receive treatment in the U.S., most Americans have at least a fair amount of confidence in the government’s ability to prevent a major outbreak of Ebola in the U.S. In addition, relatively few are concerned that they or a family member will be exposed to the virus. Oh… well, what about you Gallup? Majority Have Confidence in Federal Government to Handle Outbreak Americans have slightly less confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle an outbreak of the Ebola virus in the U.S. (61%) than they did about its ability to contain the swine flu in May 2009 (74%). More specifically, 26% today are very confident the government can handle Ebola, and 35% are somewhat confident. However, confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle the swine flu in 2009 did diminish as the outbreak progressed. Well, “slightly less confidence” than they had for swine flu is almost supportive of the pundits’ thesis, if you squint and don’t really think too hard. A 61 percent majority is a pretty strong vote of confidence, particularly given the absurd levels of panic stoked by the press. Unsurprisingly, if you dig through the poll’s crosstabs you see that the public’s faith in the government’s ability to respond to health crises breaks down along partisan lines. Strong majorities of Democrats and independents have confidence that the feds can stand up to Ebola, compared to just 48 percent of Republicans (that’s still within spitting distance of a majority, though). So when all these pundits spoke for “Americans” who just can’t trust the government on Ebola, they weren’t actually speaking for anyone. Well, that’s not entirely true. They were speaking for themselves and committing the Pundit’s Fallacy: I believe X, therefore America believes X. It’s a neat trick for giving your own opinions a sense of weight and significance, and it allows them sneak ideological arguments into their commentary without going through the tiresome business of backing them up. In this case, four center-right pundits advanced the idea that the federal government is dangerously incompetent, making the unsupported assumption that failures in the Secret Service or the State Department’s diplomatic security office are predictive of failures by the CDC and other agencies tasked with confronting Ebola. But they didn’t actually bother to make that argument; instead they recast it as a “lack of trust” by “Americans” that the public health infrastructure can protect them. They had nothing to back this assertion up, but it neatly justifies their own conclusions and worldview. And if “America” believes it, how can they be wrong? Well, America doesn’t believe it. But therein lies another great perk about being pundit. Generally speaking, being wrong doesn’t matter.
DB, Your article and you suffer from what I call the Opinon's Matter fallacy. Polls may matter when it comes to voting.... But they mean nothing when it comes to risk of global warming or Ebola risk and the governments ability to contain it. I saw some top official making an excuse that they don't want to close air travel because it would make things worse. He stated that eliminating air travel would make it harder for workers who are fighting the outbreak. When I see a public official say I wonder what other moron excuses are they going to give next. The FAA can't figure out a way to get air workers there on an aid worker plane?
Where the Hell Is the Surgeon General? When the Sunday morning TV shows needed to talk to an official with the Obama administration about the deadly Ebola virus on American soil, longtime senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer was sent out to reassure the American people. Don’t get me wrong. Dan’s a nice guy, but when there is a health crisis in this country, I want to hear from a doctor, not a political guy with no health experience at all. But thanks to the National Rifle Association, impotent Senate Democrats, and an Obama White House unwilling to engage in a fierce battle for one of its nominees, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy isn’t the person who is speaking to the nation. In fact, November 14 will mark the one-year anniversary of President Obama appointing Murthy as surgeon general, replacing Dr. Regina Benjamin. Murthy had his Senate confirmation hearings in February, but since then? Nothing. All we’ve seen is the kind of bullshit political games that come to define this cesspool known as Washington, D.C., which does more to drive good people away from public service. What are the crimes Murthy has committed? He hasn’t kissed the ass of the National Rifle Association, and has called for gun restrictions in order to keep more Americans healthy. That’s right. A doctor, whose job is to treat the sick and to actually keep folks alive and make their lives better, is being delayed ascension to the nation’s top medical spot because he believes that too many Americans are being shot and killed. And because you have a bunch of weak, impotent, no-guts Democrats who are more focused on their re-election instead of standing up for a medical doctor, Murthy has been twisting in the wind for the last 11 months, and based on previous judicial battles, may never get to serve in the job. In a March 14 piece in The New York Times, Jeremy Peters wrote about the battle over Murthy. “We are recalibrating our strategy around his floor vote,” he quoted one senior White House official as saying, who added that a range of options was being discussed. They included working with Democratic leaders to gain more support, delaying a vote until after the midterm elections, or allowing Dr. Murthy to withdraw. “We expect him to ultimately get confirmed,” the official added, declining to be named because no final strategy has been decided. Seven months later, Murthy is still waiting. I guess that White House confirmation strategy is a well-kept secret. The numbers regarding gun violence in America are clear: it’s a national epidemic. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says: -On average, 32 Americans are murdered with guns every day, and 140 are treated for a gun assault in an emergency room. -An average of eight children and teens under the age of 20 are killed by guns every day. -The lifetime medical cost for all gun violence victims in the United States is estimated at $2.3 billion, with almost half the costs borne by taxpayers. America’s doctors, especially those serving in emergency trauma centers, see the carnage first hand. They know the real toll of gun violence. But doctors don’t discriminate. They want motorcyclists to put on helmets; folks not to drink and drive; for all of us to eat healthier in order to live more productive lives. Using the NRA’s logic, any group that doesn’t want to hear that needs to rise up and protest any appointment of the U.S. Surgeon General. But the NRA is a bunch of cowardly bullies. They have tons of money and are willing to spend it against candidates who would dare support a doctor who believes in gun control. Wow, that is so bad for America. And the Obama administration needs to share some blame for this. They know Murthy’s stance on gun control, and they should have aggressively stood by him. Why appoint the man if you know his views may tick off a powerful lobbying group and cause senators from your own party to run for cover? Murthy has no business sitting around and waiting to be confirmed. The Obama administration should have been raising holy hell, demanding that a pre-eminent doctor get his vote on the Senate floor. They should have led a campaign making it clear that Murthy would be America’s doctor, and should care about the well-being of its citizens. Send Obama to the American Medical Association and the National Medical Association with Murthy in tow to make the case. Use him as the poster child for a nasty, devilish lobbying group being the de facto fourth branch of government. But instead, they chose to tuck and run, hoping those same impotent Senate Democrats hold onto their seats in the midterm election. So what happens when they don’t? Republicans [Ah, Republicans, at last] will control the place then and prevent any Obama nominee from seeing the light of day. Change? Hope? Remember that? I’m hoping the Obama administration has a change of heart in the next two years and learns to fight for their nominees instead of kowtowing to the NRA, Republicans and their own sorry party members. I’m not holding my breath.
Simon Maloy ... https://twitter.com/simonmaloy He sure seems to like to read articles by very effeminate looking guys.