Thursday, October 2, 2014
From: Gary L. Bauer
Ebola In America: Day 2
Forty-eight hours after reports of the first confirmed case of Ebola in America made headlines, the news isn’t getting any better. The more we learn the more questions we have.
We now know that the Ebola victim, Thomas Duncan, DID inform the hospital staff during his first visit that he had recently been in Liberia. That very same hospital had also just performed “a run-through of procedures to follow if an Ebola case presented there.” In spite of this, confusion prevailed and Mr. Duncan was sent home with antibiotics.
Yesterday, we were told that officials were monitoring approximately 12 to 18 people for possible contact. Today the New York Times reports that officials have “reached out to as many as 100 people who may have had contact” with Duncan. Those being closely monitored include five children who attend four Dallas schools.
Understandably, many parents are worried. Some are keeping their kids home today. And, of course, they are being criticized for doing so. But when a hospital fails to follow its own procedures and when the number the people being monitored quintuples in 24 hours, it’s hard to blame parents for having second thoughts about the information they are getting from health officials.
By the way, left-wing demagogues are now using Ebola to advance their racial and ideological agenda. Louis Farrakhan is calling Ebola “a race targeting weapon” created to kill black people.
To Shut Down Or Not To Shut Down
Many of you are asking about Ebola-related travel restrictions. That’s a fair question given that there are more than 13,000 visa holders from countries currently battling this horrific disease. ExxonMobil announced today that it was prohibiting employees from traveling to West Africa.
These questions reminded me that just a few weeks ago, Obama did not hesitate to shut down air traffic to Israel after ONE rocket landed nearly a mile away from Ben Gurion Airport. I don’t think that decision had anything to do with the safety of Americans. It was all about political pressure. Even the Washington Post described the flight ban as “the most direct pressure yet” on Israel “to cut short its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.”
Now that one Ebola victim has landed in Dallas — something Obama assured us was an “unlikely event” — surely he is going to shut down air traffic from the countries most ravaged by this disease, right? Wrong.
Obama’s Press Secretary Josh Earnest yesterday downplayed the risks as “incredibly low,” and expressed his confidence that “the sophisticated medical infrastructure” here “can prevent the wide spread of Ebola.” But that same system failed when it sent Duncan home.
Bad News For Obamacare
A year ago yesterday Obamacare debuted with a disastrous, glitch-plagued website that has cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion. Liberals promised we’d all come to love Obamacare over time. But a new poll finds that 60% of likely voters want Obamacare repealed.
But there’s even more bad news for Obamacare. This week a federal court struck down Obamacare’s illegal subsidy scheme.
As we have previously noted, the plain language of the law is very clear: taxpayer-funded insurance premium subsidies were supposed to be available only in states that set up their own exchanges. The law was intentionally written this way, using the money to entice the states to get on board. Even the liberal “architect of Obamacare” understood that.
But as more and more states refused to expand their own bureaucracies to do Washington’s bidding, the IRS simply ignored the law and made the subsidies available coast-to-coast.
That blatant disregard for the law was too much for Judge Ronald White. “The court holds that the IRS rule is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law,” White declared, adding that “the court is upholding the act as written.”
Stay tuned, folks. This is the second federal court to strike down Obamacare’s illegal subsidy scheme. This issue could potentially gut Obamacare.
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