No fly list?
The fellow who had ultra-TB could just as easily have had something far worse, and he flew even though he was told he was on a no fly list. His indignant reaction is priceless:
“I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person,”…“This is insane to me, that I have an armed guard outside my door, when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.”
Maybe he would be better off at one of those special facilities that the US government is allegedly building around the country.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
The article about the alleged “special facilities” linked to this:
President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight…(p)the directive makes no attempt to reconcile the powers created for the national continuity coordinator with the National Emergency Act, which requires that such proclamation “shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.” (p)A Congressional Research Service study notes the National Emergency Act sets up Congress as a balance empowered to “modify, rescind, or render dormant” such emergency authority if Congress believes the president has acted inappropriately….(p)The directive also makes no reference to Congress and its language appears to negate any requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists. (p)It suggests instead that the powers of the directive can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.
Suppose the foregoing is correct–a big supposition at the moment. If Bush’s signing the directive is not an impeachable act, I don’t know what is. However, I’m not taking the matter seriously unless corroboration emerges.
(From the link in the post:
ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback told Corsi the primary intent of the contract was to build temporary detention facilities that could be used in the event of a mass migration crisis…
Yeah, they’re preparing prison camps for Americans who might interfere with illegal immigration. I’m joking…I think.)
May 31st, 2007 at 7:44 pm
So, if you are educated, “intelligent”, etc., you are exempt from passing infections along to others? There must be a special invisible cone that covers such people. I wonder how he caught the bug in the first place.
June 1st, 2007 at 5:14 pm
On the other hand:
The CDC did not quarantine the TB patient before he left, nor did it directly forbid him to fly. If he indeed had made arrangements to enter treatment in Denver, he may have obtained an independent medical opinion. The CDC declined to transport him from Italy. Instead they were going to turn him over to the health-care system of a not terribly efficient country whose government is unfriendly to ours.
My attitude is more critical toward the government more than the TB patient. If this affair is an indication of our preparedness for war or bioterror…
In contrast, consider this, which is of a piece with the administration’s refusal to secure the border:
The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.
The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease…A beef producer…wants to test all of its cows.
Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.
The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.
Even worse, it could lead to a true positive that would indicate incompetence and/or corruption in the Agriculture Department (the public-health risk does not seem to be a driver here).
June 5th, 2007 at 9:51 am
A follow-up to my mad-cow digression in the previous comment:
A highly plausible explanation is that the Agriculture Department’s primary concern is not to protect big business but rather to protect its bureaucratic turf. In fact, the linked post says that the problem with testing all slaughtered animals is that it might produce too many false negatives, thereby enabling the meatpacker to make misleading claims about the safety of its product.
(Via Instapundit, who echoes Buck’s conclusion that the lesson here is “the danger of trusting anything that a journalist says about a legal proceeding.”)