Stop Me If You’ve Already Seen This Movie

Holy cow. Er, I mean pig :

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is to investigate claims that the swine flu currently infecting the world was the result of genetic experiments by scientists which then leaked from a laboratory.

The extraordinary claims were made by 75-year-old Australian researcher Adrian Gibbs, who was part of the team behind development of the Tamiflu drug. Gibbs contends the deadly H1N1 strain may have been accidentally born in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and in vaccine research.

Okay, EVERYBODY PANIC!!!! The latest pandemic was released from the lab where scientists were researching viruses and vaccines? Somebody call Michael Crichton! And, um, Steven Spielberg!

Of course, it’s all just a theory. Like the one about how swine flu was really a bioweapon:

The UN scientist is convinced that the swine flu virus, A-H1N1, and Ebola and HIV viruses were in fact manufactured biological weapons.

As proof, they state that the usual process of transmission is that the virus is transmitted from a pig to a human, which is not the case in this outbreak because no case of a pig being infected with the A-H1N1 virus has been registered. Furthermore, the A-H1N1 virus partly contains American pig genes, partly human and bird flu strains and the virus of the Euro-Asian swine flu.

What???! EVERYBODY PANIC!

Meanwhile, south of the border Mexicans have their own made-for-prime-time swine flu conspiracy:

The main example cited is that while Mexicans were panicked into staying at home, the government quietly introduced two new laws.

The rumour is that one was a law that allows the authorities to check people’s internet traffic and emails and the other was a law banning drugs. Another piece of ‘evidence’ is the fact that US President Obama visited Mexican President Felipe Calderon just before the outbreak occurred. What the two leaders are supposed to have concocted together in secret is a mystery.

What???! The American and Mexican presidents conspired to use fear of a deadly pandemic to manipulate the citizenry and rob them of their civil liberties?

Hey, I thought that’s what wars were for! Well, EVERYBODY PANIC anyway.

Dang. Who can we torture to get to the bottom of this?

Play The Swine Flu Blame Game!

Folks on the far right, which appears to be the entire Republican Party these days, have turned the swine flu pandemic into an opportunity to vent their racist spleens:

“No contact anywhere with an illegal alien!” conservative talk show host Michael Savage advised his U.S. listeners this week on how to avoid the swine flu. “And that starts in the restaurants" where he said, you “don’t know if they wipe their behinds with their hands!”

And Thursday, Boston talk radio host Jay Severin was suspended after calling Mexican immigrants "criminalians" during a discussion of swine flu and saying that emergency rooms had become "essentially condos for Mexicans."

Meanwhile, Neal Boortz got all conspiracy-theory-ish:

"[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and the rest are trying to get here. So you give -- you give -- you let this virus just spread in Mexico, where they don't have a CDC."

Hmm, yeah, sure that makes a lot of sense.

There’s plenty more out there for anyone who wants to look. Blame the Mexicans! Blame the immigrants! And by all means, blame the Democrats!

Gosh y’all, this looks like fun! Can I play the Swine Flu Blame Game, too? How about blaming factory farms run by American corporations?

Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.

On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6: [...]

Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

Surprisingly, we've heard very little about this in the media. That may be changing; NPR reported this morning that Smithfield is half owner of the pig farm at the epicenter of the swine flu outbreak.

From their web story:

Townspeople blame their ills on pig waste from farms that lie upwind, five miles (8.5 kilometers) to the north. The toxins blow through other towns, only to get trapped by mountains in La Gloria, they say. They suspect their water and air has been contaminated by waste.

Granjas Carroll de Mexico, half-owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc., has 72 farms in the surrounding area. Smithfield spokeswoman Keira Ullrich said the company has found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in its herd or its employees working at its joint ventures anywhere in Mexico.

[...]

But residents say they have been bothered for years by the fetid smell of the farms. Local health workers intervened in early April, sealing off the town of La Gloria and spraying to kill flies people said were swarming around their homes.

Naturally, when the press arrived to tour the Granjas Carroll de Mexico pig farm, there wasn’t a fly in sight. But the locals say the farms were cleaned up for the media’s arrival.

I’m no scientist and I have no idea where swine flu comes from, but it’s clear to me that factory farms of all kinds are not healthy for people, animals or the environment. I’m convinced factory farming is to a large degree responsible for the rise in salmonella and E. coli contamination we’ve seen over the past 20 years. It’s the free hand of the market run amok in our food supply, where profits rule and people and animal welfare take a back seat to the almighty dollar.

So before we blame immigrants for the swine flu, maybe we should blame the emigrant: corporations like Smithfield Foods who have exported their toxic factory farming practices to countries like Mexico where the rules are lax and no one will complain except a few poor villagers.

Karl Rove Memory Hole

Hat tip to The Nation for catching this Wall Street Journal asshattery from Karl Rove. Back in February Rove outlined in a WSJ column all of the wasteful spending in the stimulus bill:

There's also $4 billion for health programs like obesity control and smoking cessation, $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations. Health care also added jobs last year.

IOW, healthcare added jobs so why does that sector need to be part of the stimulus? Rove had a theory:

It is not surprising that the stimulus package is laden with new spending programs. Congressional appropriators, not job creators, wrote H.R. 1. Much of it is spending Democrats couldn't get approved in the normal course of affairs. And it should not shock Americans that Democratic appropriators would funnel tax dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, unions and other liberal special interests. Putting budgets of political allies above the budgets of struggling families is apparently the new Democratic trickle-down economics.

Yes, pandemic flu preparation is just another spending program that Democrats couldn’t get approved any other way! Just another way for us to put our friends and allies on the government gravy train, sorta the way Republicans did with defense contractors like KBR and Blackwater, except ours are all brown and socialist and poor and stuff.

Right.

This is classic projection. Rove was accusing the Democrats of doing exactly what Republicans had done. Because when that’s how you see the world, then of course you will assume everyone behaves the way that you do.

Rove and folks like Susan Collins of Maine were able to convince everyone that pandemic flu preparations needed to be removed from the economic stimulus, noting:

"Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not."

They said there’s nothing stimulating to the economy about pandemic flu preparations, except when there are:

MADRID — The top EU health official urged Europeans on Monday to postpone nonessential travel to parts of the United States and Mexico because of the swine flu virus, and Spanish health officials confirmed the first case outside North America.

I hope you don’t live in a city dependent upon tourism.

Ooops. Sorry, Nashville!

It would be nice to counteract this European fear mongering by pointing to our brand new cabinet secretary in charge of Health & Human Services (instead of the Utah accountant who is a holdover from the Bush years) and an aggressive pandemic flu preparedness program already funded and already put into motion as part of the economic stimulus package.

Oh, sorry. Republicans are filibustering Obama's HHS pick and put the kabosh on flu-preparation funding.

I can already tell the debate over healthcare reform is going to be fun, fun, fun.

Party Of No: Swine Flu Edition

[UPDATE]:

More from the Cavalcade of stupid:

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse—with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

See, Republicans, this is why American voters dumped y’all’s asses back in November. So why don’t you just step aside and let the grown-ups be in charge for a while, ‘mm’kay?

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Joe at AmericaBlog is apparently the first to notice that the GOP is filibustering HHS Secretary nominee Kathleen Sebelius just in time for the swine flu pandemic:

Never underestimate the willingness of the GOP to put politics over the best interests of the nation. Last week, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell started a filibuster to prevent confirmation of Obama's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.
[...]

Today, at the White House briefing, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, was there as was John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. They were joined by the Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But, we don't even have a head of CDC because the Secretary of HHS appoints that person. And, no Secretary of HHS. In fact, as the White House transcript shows, Napolitano had to make the announcement about the "public health emergency" for HHS.

Thank you, GOP! Thank you, Mitch McConnell.

And thank you, George W. Bush:

For the time being, HHS is being led by Acting Secretary Charles Johnson, a Bush-appointee from Utah who spent most of his career working as an accountant.

Hecukva job, Republicans!