H1N1 Vaccine As Proof Of Mind-Boggling Obama Incompetence

Remember when President Obama “declared a national emergency to deal with the “rapid increase in illness” from the H1N1 influenza virus.” Boy did they ever get the ball rolling after that.

Even as it became increasingly obvious that the administration was falling woefully behind in their H1N1 production goals, they continued to urge people to demand the vaccine.  The result was more typical of Soviet-era bread lines than the U.S.A.

Not only am I not able to get this stupid vaccine, but both my doctor and my dentist have told me that they aren’t able to get it, either.

Even The New York Times pointed a finger at Obama last month in an article entitled as “H1N1 Widespread in 46 States as Vaccines Lag“:

Federal officials predicted last spring that as many as 120 million doses could be available by now, with nearly 200 million by year’s end. But production problems plagued some of the five companies contracted to make the vaccine. All use a technology involving growing the vaccine in fertilized chicken eggs; at most of them, the seed strain grew more slowly than expected.

The manufacturers are “working hard to get vaccine out as safely and rapidly as possible,” Dr. Frieden said. But since it is grown in eggs, “even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster.”

Since last winter’s more isolated cases of swine flu, the expectation that the virus would return with a vengeance in this flu season had posed a test of the Obama administration’s preparedness.  Officials are mindful that the previous administration’s failure to better prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 left doubts that dogged President George W. Bush to the end of his term.

The Obama government predicted 120 million doses, but – as the article makes clear – they have only 30 million.  This is an absolute disaster – and it is entirely appropriate to compare this level of sheer incompetence to George Bush’s “Katrina moment.”

And blaming the delays that will leave Americans woefully exposed to H1N1 is tantamount to George Bush blaming the Hurricane Katrina response on the American Red Cross.  That pig just doesn’t fly, Barry Hussein.

This is not good:

Swine flu, also known as H1N1, may infect as much as half of the population and kill 30,000 to 90,000 people, double the deaths caused by the typical seasonal flu, according to the planning scenario issued yesterday by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Intensive care units in hospitals, some of which use 80 percent of their space in normal operation, may need every bed for flu cases, the report said.

A revised report from the CDC dated November 12 demonstrates that all the kings horses and all the king’s men really don’t have a whole lot of a clue as to what is going on:

CBS/AP) Federal health officials now say that 4,000 or more Americans likely have died from swine flu – about four times the estimate they’ve been using.

If you go back and survey this slowly unfolding disaster, you will find that the Obama government has routinely been wrong by a factor of between 400% – 500%.  At some point you’d think the mainstream media would really start coming unglued over this incompetence.  But not so much (hint: the president is a Democrat).

Are conservatives wrong to blast Obama for this gross incompetence?

Not if history counts for anyting (which it usually doesn’t with liberals).  Amy Geiger-Hemmer writes:

Remember a few short years ago how President Bush was just ripped apart by the mainstream media and blamed for flu vaccine shortages?  Most Democrat representatives acted outraged at the President and his inability to have enough flu vaccines available for the American people during flu season.   Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are two excellent examples:

From:  Hillary Clinton blasts Bush on Vaccine Shortage: (October 18, 2004)

“They’re more interested in tax cuts for the rich than for flu shots for everyone who needs them,” Clinton railed Monday afternoon at a press conference at New York’s Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center.Found this on “The Daily Kos” – so lefties will believe it:

Remember this from October of 2004:

Democrats have seized on the vaccine shortage to accuse the administration of being unable to protect Americans – from either illness or terrorism. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?’‘ Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, asked in an interview with National Public Radio. “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program are you running?”…” (WOW!!!! Imagine if ANYONE would ask Obama this same question?)

And that was just an ordinary flu year.  No “national emergencies.”  No super-flu.  No flu that kills four times as many people as authorities predicted it would.

Not that Democrats (and that includes the mainstream media) are capable of being fair or objective, but if they were only capable of turning their demagoguery on themselves…

This is not only a shocking failure, but an incredibly dangerous and potentially deadly failure as well:

“I’m worried the virus (H1N1) is getting ahead of the public health system’s ability to control it” — Senator Joe Lieberman (I)

And the fact that the Obama administration assumed control of the flu vaccine in an unprecedented way make Obama and the Democrats even more blameworthy yet:

There are extreme shortages of the H1N1 vaccine all over the U.S. As a result, people are getting sick and they are dying. This pandemic is raging, and spreading like wildfire, and for the first time ever the private sector has been removed from the process of distributing the vaccine.

It has been standard operating procedure in the past for private industry to distribute vaccines that were needed for the greater good of the people. Now, however, with the H1N1 vaccine and the Obama administration in charge, the government has taken over all responsibility for distribution of the vaccine to the states via the CDC.  The government has failed so miserably in distributing the vaccine that now the [DEMOCRAT!!!] U.S. Senate is investigating their incompetence and possible corruption.

Picture this if you will, right now in the U.S. Senate, The Homeland Security Committee headed by Joe Lieberman (Independent and former Democrat), is investigating the complete and total incompetence and perhaps corruption, as well as the assertions from some that the Obama administration is playing political favorites with your lives, as it relates to one area of health care while at the same time another Senate committee is gathered trying to hammer together legislation that would allow the U.S. government to take total control over all health care in the U.S.

Lieberman’s committee is trying to determine why the U.S. Government so grossly underestimated the amount of vaccine that would be available and why the vaccine may be available when it’s too late.

“It’s moved with alarming speed and took an exceptionally high toll at a time of year when we don’t encounter a high number of flu cases.  Flu spikes typically occur in January.  We’re in October … and the number of cases is higher than what we usually see at the flu’s peak in January,” Lieberman said this morning.

There are also accusations by some that Blue States are receiving the vaccine in multiples far higher than Red States regardless of population. As an example; Texas, a traditionally Republican stronghold and the second most populous state in the union is ranked at number 48 in terms of vaccinations received.

Is the Obama administration saying that if your state voted Republican then it is okay for H1N1 to kill your kids, or you?

We’re talking about the worst kind of incompetence.  And now we’re talking about the most hateful form of partisan viciousness ever seen in this country from the man whose “core promise” during the campaign was that he would transcend the political divide.

And the point that the Democrat candidate for president asked (see above) in 2004 applies BIG TIME now: “If you can’t get flu vaccines to Americans, what kind of health care program do you think you CAN run?”

Are you going to allow these clowns to run your health care system?  Are you going to trust them with your life?  Are you going to put another 1/5th of the economy under their control?

Speaking of the economy, this isn’t merely a health disaster; it is increasingly likely that it will create a massive economic disaster as well.

I’m sure you are aware that many retail businesses make 70% of their profits during the Christmas season?  What happens if people are afraid to shop for fear of the H1N1 Obama Death?

Consider that what is increasingly likely to become a health disaster is even more likely to be an economic disaster, as H1N1 escalates its attack during the Holidays and the Christmas shopping season, with still no significant stocks of vaccine available.

How much longer can Obama keep blaming Bush for his growing list of failures?

Health Care Bankruptices: More Liberal Lies

What was that line from Mark Twain?  “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”

In the course of the last two days – and watching mostly Fox News, no less – I have at least four times heard an advocate for the Democrats’ health care boondoggle recite the crap statistic that “60% of bankruptcies are due to health care costs,” with nary a reply by the journalist who should be able to separate fact from fraud.

If you’re going to interview a liberal, be aware that lies tend to accompany the movement of their lips.  When you have the latter, you almost certainly have the former.

It’s not that this hasn’t been repeatedly refuted.  It’s that the lies are piling up far faster than the refutation can keep up with them.  Democrats know from Hitler and Goebbels that if they keep telling a lie over and over again, people will eventually believe it.  So we just keep hearing about this massive number of bankruptcies over and over again.

It’s not true.

From ABC News:

Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check

March 05, 2009 12:37 PM

(3 p.m. update: See italicized items with responses from the lead author of the Harvard study, Dr. David Himmelstein.)

President Obama’s kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data.

“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds,” Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.

The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.

A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than “one every 30 seconds.”

The extrapolation of Harvard’s data to “a bankruptcy every 30 seconds,” which Obama also mentioned in his address to a joint session of Congress last month, comes, per the White House, from a 2005 Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a co-author of the Harvard paper. Fact-check.org has noted that even using Harvard’s numbers, it’s more like a bankruptcy every minute; indeed if you add up all bankrputcies in a year you barely get one every 30 seconds. (I’ve e-mailed Warren for comment.) But more to the point is that the Harvard data are clearly inflated, or at best, mischaracterized.

Himmelstein tells me that the reason for the difference is a change in federal law that sharply reduced the number of bankruptcies. In 2005, the year he and Warren wrote their op-ed, there were just over 2 million bankruptcies. Data out just today say that in 2008 there were 1.1 million (up sharply, by the way, over 2007). So this error in the White House claim stems simply from the fact that it’s using out-of-date information. The next question is whether the estimate of “medical bankruptcies” is reliable in the first place.

A good part of the problem is definitional. The Harvard report claims to measure the extent to which medical costs are “the cause” of bankruptcies. In reality its survey asked if these costs were “a reason” – potentially one of many – for such bankruptcies.

Beyond those who gave medical costs as “a reason,” the Harvard researchers chose to add in any bankruptcy filers who had at least $1,000 in unreimbursed medical expenses in the previous two years. Given deductibles and copays, that’s a heck of a lot of people.

Moreover, Harvard’s definition of “medical” expenses includes situations that aren’t necessarily medical in common parlance, e.g., a gambling problem, or the death of a family member. If your main wage-earning spouse gets hit by a bus and dies, and you have to file, that’s included as a “medical bankruptcy.”

When I asked the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, about his definitions of medical bankruptcy back in 2005, he said, “It’s a judgment call,” and added that any death, for example, “to our mind is a medical event.”

A last problem was sampling: The Harvard researchers surveyed bankruptcy filers in five federal court districts accounting for 14 percent of bankruptcies nationally; projecting this to the other 86 percent is sketchy. Said Himmelstein: “Obviously the extrapolation is rough.”

Of such rough extrapolations are presidential pronouncements made. […]

“It stinks to be uninsured. I don’t want to be quoted saying anything else,” Dranove says. “But there are correct studies, and incorrect studies. For academics, the validity of the research methods matters.”

It should for the rest of us, too.

So you see a horrible study – absolutely horrible – that is clearly biased and filled with faulty assumptions and questionable definitions.  But it’s from Harvard, so it must be true.  Let’s run with it.  I noticed CBS and NBC news articles that did just that.  Factchecks?  We don’t need no stinkin’ factchecks.

ABC took that Harvard study, did their own review simply by recalculating the Harvard leftist professor’s own data – and came up with 17%.  But they were also able to find another study that concluded: “about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs.”

A professional named Steve Elias who specializes in bankruptcy cases comes to a similar conclusion regarding his own practice — that health care costs are at best a very minor part of our bankruptcies.

So every time I hear someone say “sixty percent of all bankruptcies are the result of health care costs, so we need to pass Obama care right now!” I know I am dealing with an ignoramus, or an ideologue, or both.

And every time I see that comment uttered to or in front of a journalist who doesn’t respond by correcting the record, I know that there’s yet another journalist out there who isn’t good enough at his or her job to pass muster.

Now, I could have stopped here.  But let me go on – because there are WAY too many lies being told by Democrats.

(CBS) Today the President again insisted that his health care reform won’t force you to switch plans or doctors.

“What I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change your plans under health reform,” said Mr. Obama.

That’s technically correct – but what the president didn’t say is that reform could lead your boss to change your health care plan, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Here’s how: 160 million people are insured through work and their employer actually picks up most of the cost. Under the president’s plan, Americans would be required to carry a certain level of coverage, which means many people would have to increase their insurance.

“Employer premiums will go up, and employers might respond by dropping coverage entirely,” said Michael Cannon, with the Cato Institute. “So if you’re one of those unfortunate workers then it will be a government policy that ousted you from your health plan.”

And if you do choose a public plan, you may want to keep your favorite doctors but they may not want to keep you. Under government health care, they could be paid 20 to 30 percent less.

Here’s another gargantuan Obama lie.  And – while I’m surprised and grateful that CBS took a swipe at it – I fear they didn’t go far enough, and won’t come back to the truth often enough.

A Wall Street Journal article absolutely destroys any claim to credibility Obama has in claiming that his plan won’t force tens of millions of people out of their private health care.

The last thing Obama and his Democrat allies have repeatedly lie about is that “Republicans are opposing reform.”

I would confront Obama by saying, “Name one.  Name one single Republican who is on the record opposing any kind of health care reform.”  It is demagogic rhetoric.  And the president is clearly becoming unhinged to rely on such demagogic attacks to force a clearly unpopular agenda down the country’s throat.

President Obama went after Senator Jim DeMint for his “Waterloo” remark.  DeMint, to his credit, fired right back, and pointed out that as a Senator Barack Obama voted against every Republican effort to reform health care.  So, in point of fact, who’s really against “reform” here?  And why doesn’t anybody remind Democrats how THEY were the party of “no” when Republicans were in charge prior to 2006 (which I might point out was prior to when our economy tanked).

There are way too many lies masquerading as truth claims going on.  It’s time to recognize who is lying to you, and to demand a fair presentation of the facts.

The Left Wing Politics of Hurricanes Gustav and Katrina

Do hurricanes have political affiliations?  Is Hurricane Gustav a Democrat?

Some liberals clearly think so.

Take Michael Moore (PLEASE!!!):

“I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” Moore said. “To just have it planned at the same time, that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for Day One of the Republican convention, up in the Twin Cities, at the top of the Mississippi River.”

Michael Moore isn’t just some far-left loon celebrity like Barbara Streisand; liberals and Democrats throw good money away to hear what Moore says about the issues.

And it’s not just left-wing nutjob idiot propagandists.  Former Democratic National Committee Chairman (I think of current DNC chair Howard Dean and ask myself, ‘what do they put in these guys’ Kool-Aid?‘) Don Fowler thought he was ever so witty when he said:

“The timing, at least as it appears now, is that it’ll be there on Monday. That just demonstrates God is on our side.”

He’s right that Hurricane Gustav will reach landfall Monday.  He’s probably wrong about every other thought he ever had in his life, but he’s right about that one.

Hurricane Katrina killed 1600 people.  Ha ha ha.  Pretty damn funny, guys.  You want another massive death toll just to put a damper on the Republican Convention, do you?

Both men apologized when they realized how evil they sounded, saying they sincerely hoped nobody got hurt.  They both failed to make note of the little detail of the $43.625 billion in damage Hurricane Katrina caused in 2005 – and the billions of dollars the storm cost taxpayers since.

Damn.  I hope the joke doesn’t sound so funny now.

You want to know the really despicable thing?  Throughout the Democratic National Convention (you know, that pile of hot air in Denver last week?), Hurricane Katrina was mentioned over and over and over again.

Natural disasters used to be viewed as, well, natural disasters.  But since the Democratic Party warped into the Demagogue Party, they have become political fodder for the herds of liberal swine to gluttonously gulp down.  The shrill, hysterical narrative: It was all Bush – and his terrible failure of leadership – that caused all this.

As usual, Democrats are either wrong, or lying, or wrong and lying.

First of all, as a Wall Street Journal article pointed out:

I’ll Take Sarah Palin At 3AM Over Barack Obama Any Day

Do you remember that 3AM phone call ad?  Will our President be ready when it comes?

Sarah Palin, apparently, would be awake, alert, and have her rifle in her hands:

HILLARY Clinton supporters may go for John McCain now he’s revealed that his vice president would be one Sarah Palin.She’s the woman to man the red phone in times of emergency.

It’s 3am, the phone is ringing… And Sarah Palin:

Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family regularly ran 5k and 10k races

Barack Obama might be able to give a speech – as long as the teleprompter has been set up and is working right.  Otherwise he’s in a lot of trouble.

Obama might be able to talk tough in a speech, but Sarah Palin can hunt our enemies down and kill them.

I’ll take the fiesty chick with the big gun, thank you.