Saturday, October 18, 2014

Slow Saturday Special: Everything Now OKlain With Ebola Crisis

I thought it was the End of the World, but we got a czar now(?), and from past experience that fixes everything (drug czar, education czar):

"GOP criticizes Washington insider as ‘Ebola czar’ choice" by Noah Bierman | Globe Staff   October 17, 2014

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday chose Ronald A. Klain, a government insider best known for leading Democrats during the 2000 presidential recount, to head the nation’s response to the Ebola virus, a pick that drew immediate criticism from Republicans who questioned his lack of medical credentials. 

?????????????

Klain, who has ties to Massachusetts, served as chief of staff to vice presidents Joe Biden and Al Gore. His task as “Ebola czar’’ is to build a coordinated and visible response amid increasing concerns that the government has lacked one.

A political hack is going to cut through the bush of Ebola?

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Obama has tried for days to demonstrate control of the situation after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted several errors in containing potential spread of the disease.

That hasn't helped. In fact, makes him look like he has no control at all.

Obama has canceled fund-raising trips, committed 4,000 military personnel to West Africa, addressed the public, and made open displays of convening top Cabinet officials. Friday’s appointment of Klain marks a new turn in trying to deliver a centralized response. 

If we have learned anything, centralization and bureaucracy suck when it comes to decision-making, and this looks like a public relations campaign now, not a serious effort.

Klain will report to Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, and to Susan Rice, the national security adviser, according to the White House. He will be in charge of coordinating efforts to isolate the disease here and to combat its spread in West Africa, according to the White House....

I'm seeing martial law. You can argue with troops and cops; can't argue with the hazmats.

Supporters argued that Klain’s ability to navigate government agencies will be more valuable than a medical degree in coordinating actions from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Transportation Security Administration, White House staff, military and humanitarian resources in Africa, and other elements of the response. As Biden’s chief of staff, he helped oversee implementation of the 2009 federal stimulus program.

Or stimuloot, as it is known here, for it did nothing except throw away tax dollars. It's what this government does best.

Markey hired Klain out of Georgetown University in 1983 as his legislative director, when Markey was serving in the House. Klain also ran Markey’s aborted Senate campaign in 1984, before graduating from Harvard Law School and serving as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

Klain, a 53-year-old Indianapolis native, is now president of Case Holdings and General Counsel at Revolution LLC, a venture capital firm owned by former American Online chairman Steve Case. 

It truly is a Wall Street government!

During Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, Klain served as a director of rapid response — a skill that critics say has been lacking in the Ebola cases.

OMG, the administration views this all as a PUBLIC RELATIONS PROBLEM!

Klain may be best known for his role in leading Gore’s legal team during the 2000 presidential recount. (That effort was dramatized in the 2008 HBO movie “Recount,” in which he was portrayed by Kevin Spacey.)

The Negotiator?

Supporters say the recount experience — drafting attorneys and coordinating legal strategies for more than 50 cases in a compressed time period — may be most relevant to the task ahead of him.

“It involved the mobilization of lots of resources, lots of understanding legal situations, and all under a time pressure,” said Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who served as Gore’s senior policy adviser and worked with Klain in the Clinton White House....

Clinton retreads, Bush retreads, Romney/Reagan retreads, I'm sick of them all.

Benedict P. Kuehne, another Florida lawyer who worked on the recount, said, “He’s an excellent crisis manager and, to the extent that a medical analogy is appropriate, he understands how to triage.”

Now get in that operating room!

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Also Friday, a Carnival Cruise ship was refused docking privileges in Cozumel, Mexico, because a passenger had handled one of Duncan’s lab specimens.

I would avoid or cancel the cruise if I were you.

And Governor Rick Perry of Texas joined a chorus of elected officials calling for an air travel ban from West Africa.

On the international front, the Associated Press reported that the World Health Organization has admitted it botched attempts to stop the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, where some 4,480 people have died....

I was told it was more than that, but seeing as they "botched" it why would we listen to anything they say now?

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Kind of an Alfred E. Neuman look to him, isn't it? 

I'm feeling better already.

"WHO says it botched response to Ebola" by Maria Cheng | Associated Press   October 18, 2014

LONDON — The World Health Organization, in a draft document, has acknowledged it botched attempts to stop the now-spiraling Ebola outbreak in West Africa, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.

Not that they had any left with me, but bye-bye credibility.

In the document obtained by the Associated Press, the agency wrote that experts should have realized traditional infectious disease containment methods would not work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.

Porous borders? 

Uh-oh!

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The UN health agency acknowledged that, at times, even its own bureaucracy was a problem.

That's a shock? Any introductory anthropology student can tell you about bureaucracies. The more you have, the closer a society is to destruction -- and look at all the alphabet agencies of the AmeriKan government. 

It noted that the heads of WHO country offices in Africa are ‘‘politically motivated appointments’’ made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.

OMG, they are BLAMING the VICTIMS!

Meanwhile, the WHO declared the West African nation of Senegal to be free of Ebola on Friday, a rare success in dealing with a deadly virus that has rampaged uncontrolled in neighboring countries and prompted alarm around the world.

Is this the end of the three-week incubation of fear, attempted martial law, and now pull-back due to another backfired and mismanaged propaganda campaign?

The WHO announcement on Senegal officially concluded a monitoring period of 42 days, twice the maximum incubation period for the virus, in which no new infections were found.

That they know of.

The last recorded case in the country was a young man who was entering by road from Guinea; he recovered and returned to Guinea last week, the organization said.

In what would be another conspicuous success, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, appeared close on Friday to declaring itself free of Ebola as well. The country would reach the 42-day milestone on Monday, after an outbreak that infected 20 people and resulted in eight deaths.

All sorts of good things are happening in Nigeria

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Still, Senegal’s success in isolating the infection sets an example of good practice at a moment when the organization is trying to strengthen the readiness of 15 other countries in Africa to deal with arriving travelers infected with the disease.

The WHO, a specialized United Nations agency with its headquarters in Geneva, is responsible for coordinating international responses to contagious diseases. 

WHO believes in a failed agency?

The draft document — which included a timeline on Ebola — was not issued publicly. WHO officials said in an e-mail Friday that the timeline would probably not be released publicly. No official at the agency would comment Friday on the draft report.

Peter Piot, the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, agreed in an interview Friday that WHO acted far too slowly, largely because of its Africa office.

HMMMMMMM!

‘‘It’s the regional office in Africa that’s the front line,’’ he said in London. ‘‘And they didn’t do anything. That office is really not competent.’’ 

Called passing the buck from the creator who passed Ebola.

WHO’s other regional directors — the Americas, Southeast Asia, Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific — are also not accountable to Geneva and are all elected by their regions.

Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also questioned why it took WHO five months and 1,000 deaths before the agency declared Ebola an international health emergency in August.

‘‘I called for a state of emergency to be declared in July and for military operations to be deployed,’’ Piot said.

He said WHO might have been scarred by its experience during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when some criticized the agency and said it overreacted to the situation.

Which leads me to note that the horrific death throes (bleeding from orifices) are lacking coverage as well as the current crop of experimental vaccine trials. Just an observation.

In April, during a teleconference on Ebola among infectious disease experts that included WHO officials, Doctors Without Borders, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questions were raised about the performance of WHO experts....

They have now been answered.

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"Texas health workers told to avoid public sites" by Manny Fernandez | New York Times   October 18, 2014

DALLAS — No restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, or other places where members of the public congregate. No travel by airplane, ship, long-distance bus, train, or other modes of commercial transportation.

Such are the restrictions that dozens of health care workers who treated the Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan are being asked to follow for the 21-day maximum incubation period of the virus.

The documents were drawn up by the Texas state health agency and Dallas County officials after an infected nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, took two flights between Dallas and Cleveland in the days before she developed symptoms of Ebola and was diagnosed with the disease.

Vinson’s air travel has stirred fears across the country.

No one to blame but themselves, for they created the fear.

**********

Adding another dimension to the search for Americans possibly exposed to the Ebola virus, the State Department said Friday a hospital employee who might have had contact with specimens of the disease had left the United States aboard a cruise ship.

The employee and a traveling partner, who were not identified by name, have agreed to remain isolated in a cabin aboard the vessel, the State Department said, and “out of an abundance of caution,” efforts were underway to repatriate them. A physician aboard the ship told authorities that the employee was in good health.

News reports quoting an official statement from the government of Belize said the ship was in that country’s waters, but authorities there have refused to allow US officials to evacuate the passengers through their territory. It has been 19 days since the passenger may have processed samples of fluids from Duncan, said Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, Washington Post photojournalist Michel du Cille, who returned from covering the Ebola epidemic in Liberia 21 days ago, has been disinvited by Syracuse University from participation in a journalism workshop this weekend.

That and the NBC crew that is under arrest and in quarantine down in New Jersey show how this propaganda effort is really backfiring. The pre$$ is now getting caught up in it all.

Du Cille and his wife, Nikki Kahn, both Pulitzer prize-winning Post photojournalists, were scheduled to take part in portfolio reviews and critique sessions at the university’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. The school’s dean, Lorraine Branham, said a student who was researching du Cille found out he had recently returned from Liberia and expressed concern. Provost Eric Spina spoke with officials and made the call.

Also Friday, a woman who became ill in the Pentagon parking lot turned out not to have Ebola, Virginia public health authorities said Friday, ending a daylong scare that forced the temporary quarantine of military members going to a Marine Corps ceremony in Washington.

They are martial law exercises and test cases to see how people are going to react to the national declaration of emergency Obama will soon be giving.

Officials at Arlington and Fairfax counties’ public health departments said they are confident the woman does not have Ebola, based on her travel history and questioning by medical officials. They said she was put in isolation at Inova Fairfax Hospital, and that medical personnel took all needed precautions....

So what? As we have seen, CDC blew it on those and admitted it.

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Time for an inoculation:

"Let me address a serious problem. It has come up at another blog and I sense it regardless. Yes... the world is a mess and it is getting messier. This recent emergence of Ebola and other expressions of material darkness being generated by the Satanic elite is/can be very troubling. Along with this growing menace there are all the other looming catastrophes. America, owned by bankers and Satanists (they are synonymous), is being steered into conflicts all over the world and domestically a police state is emergent. One can easily see that this Ebola menace is being generated by the people who run the governments in order to be able to apply martial law. It's a good angle because people are susceptible to going along with evil policies if it appears they are being set into place to protect them. NOTHING could be further from the truth....

When you study this Ebola problem you notice many clumsy, ignorant and unprofessional kinds of behavior taking place. The thoroughly corrupt CDC is behaving like FEMA at Katrina. Sure, you might think, well, they are incompetent. No... that's not it. This is all by design. If they wanted it efficient and capably handled that is definitely possible. That's not on the menu though. You have to keep in mind that confusion, uncertainty, paranoia, fear and helplessness are all products of the ones that have brought the world to this pass. They have been assisted in this tragedy by a cast of millions and millions. That is a powerful environment for little you to negotiate. It's not unlike being adrift on a large ocean and subject to the kinds of weather that comes and goes there. Some boats are equal to the task and some are not and, obviously, a lot depends of the abilities of the captain.

I do not know how far these monsters are going to be allowed to take it all before it comes down on their heads. How may times have you told yourself that you should have moved on, or...

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I post that not only for the different perspective on Ebola, but also because the writer seems to have insightfully captured my feelings as recently expressed here -- and unlike the propaganda pre$$, he leaves me uplifted.