Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   10/21/2014

Voting integrity and Ebola response

Tonight’s topic and guest speakers are focused on a timely statewide issue that nonetheless has local repercussions. The issue is election (or voter) integrity—cleaning up elections by purging voter rolls of dead and relocated voters. The guests will be Mike and Patty Smith of Corning; meeting starts at 6 PM, Westside Grange.

The Democrat left dismisses the contention that vote fraud even exists, let alone swings election results. The truth is that ballot boxes mysteriously disappear, or even appear; voters move but still vote in previous locations; students vote at home and at their campus precincts; felons and noncitizens get their names added to the rolls. This primarily benefits the Democrat Party and effectively cancels someone else’s legitimate vote.

There are numerous relevant and unflattering (to President Obama and his sycophantic party acolytes) elements to the Ebola story. Going beyond my last 2 columns, I found the events of last week to be astonishing. First, I’ll not over state or hype the situation because we don’t live in a backward, third world nation of poor health and medical practices. America’s path will not replicate a Hollywood disaster picture with infections spread by merely breathing on each other.

Locally, Ebola is an irrelevancy. Similarly, unless you have made poor decisions to use, buy, sell, manufacture or grow drugs, if you have no contact or interaction with the (unfortunately) ever-growing population of gang-bangers, if you haven’t made poor judgments by becoming personally hooked- or shacked-up with an abusive or psychotic partner, and if your world of contacts are people similarly situated to yourself, you have very little risk of being a victim of any violent crime.

By the way, I discovered in my last gun permit class just why it’s true: locally, being a victim of an “active shooter” in a public place or a home invasion by a stranger is highly unlikely. On average, there are about 1.5 gun permits per 1,000 Californians; in Shasta County (it’s likely similar for Tehama County) there are about 30 carry permits per 1,000 people. That means that a gun-carrying criminal is very unlikely to encounter an armed citizen in California—only one or two out a thousand people. Locally, however, the criminal can expect that, out of every 30 or so people, there will be someone with a concealed, legally carried gun. That means at least one in every restaurant, grocery store, business or church. Not the kind of odds favoring a long life for the criminal shooter.

Now, I’ll sum up the remarkable developments on the Ebola front: All of the arguments for not implementing travel bans, or at least restrictions, are bogus and, when uttered by anyone in the Obama administration, endanger the American people. It is irrefutable that, had travel by any non-U.S. citizen from the African nations plagued by Ebola been banned—had that ban been in place from the start, an infected Mr. Duncan would never have entered America and no American health workers would have subsequently become infected. That decision was on Obama alone to make and implement and he blew it to the detriment and ongoing expense of hospitals, doctors, nurses and our general public.

The minute that someone else becomes infected, traceable to Duncan or those nurses, the buck stops with Obama for those infections or deaths. I hope and pray that doesn’t happen; however, Obama can’t appoint his way out of responsibility or culpability. It’s ludicrous to state that authorities can’t track the travel history of anyone legally entering our borders (and once again a border fence could have been built by Obama; Congress voted for and funded it) because passports are stamped for precisely that purpose. I read that Obama is in an angry snit over the poor, pathetic response of his federal government—he should go yell at a mirror.

Then, to pile prevarication on top of outrage, Democrats—with a major assist by the Associated Press—drew first political blood by their Tourette Syndrome response blaming…the sequester. Some hack from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, swung into action whining about budget cuts, “a 10-year slide in research support,” as an excuse for not having a vaccine. Then a funny thing happened on the way to figuratively lynching Republicans for heartlessly pulling the plug on medical research: The Truth Came Out!

Almost simultaneously, Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave the “GOP Cut CDC Funding” story his “whopper” rating—“four Pinocchios,” while the UK Daily Mail and others revealed that the NIH’s budget doubled from 2000 to 2008 and has remained around $40 billion per year for Obama’s entire term. That’s right, the global NIH budget, as well as the sub-budget for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, doubled under President Bush and remained elevated subject only to Obama’s request or a small sequester cut. That massive budget also funded a host of ridiculous projects: “Zombie Novella,” “Origami condoms,” “poop-throwing skills of chimpanzees,” “30-something binge drinking partiers,” “uncircumcised South African tribesmen,” and on and on.

Obama did take time from his endless golfing to appoint as an Ebola “Czar” political hatchet man, Ron Klain, who knows as much about medicine as I know about rocket science. Apparently, we are in the very best of hands, folks, and that’s the sad truth.