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December 29, 2009
Exclusive: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up! (12/29/09)
Whenever you think general incompetence by those who purport to serve by the consent of the governed can’t get any worse, think again:
“Obama Family Friend Suffers Minor Injury In Hawaii – Ambulance Seen Speeding To First Family's Compound In Hawaii” (CBS News, 12/28/09)
HONOLULU, Hawaii (CBS) ― President Obama left a golf course abruptly while vacationing in Hawaii on Monday after a child on vacation with the first family suffered an injury on the beach.
A senior administration official said that the incident did not involve any member of the first family, and that a young family friend traveling with suffered a minor injury. Sources say a child friend was injured in a "surf board mishap" while playing on the beach, but no additional details on the injury were reported just yet.
The official says the president broke away from his golf game because the father of the injured child was with him on the course.
(read the entire article here)
Yet it took him three days to address the nation about the jihadist attempt to bomb an airliner preparing to land in Detroit. Frankly, we’re speechless.
“Cyber-security chief resigns in protest” (National Policy Institute, 12/27/2009)
The official in charge of coordinating the U.S. government’s cyber-security operations has quit, saying the expanding control of the National Security Agency over the nation’s computer security efforts poses “threats to our democratic processes.”
“Even from a security standpoint, it is unwise to hand over the security of all government networks to a single organization,” said Rod A. Beckstrom, the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) when speaking to United Press International.
“If our Founding Fathers were taking part in this debate [about the future organization of the government's cyber-security activities], there is no doubt in my mind they would support a separation of security powers among different [government] organizations, in line with their commitment to checks and balances,” he said.
(read the entire article here)
The administration has made a lot of missteps in its national security policy, and there should be plenty of resignations – but not this one. Beckstrom obviously has a lot of integrity and realizes the danger posed to security (and other areas) by the hand of big government, which is getting bolder and bolder as it snatches more and more of our freedoms away from us. What would the Founding Fathers say indeed?
“First case of highly drug-resistant TB found in US” (AP, 12/27/09)
LANTANA, Fla. – It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.
Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.
I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad."
It was really bad, and not just for him.
Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country's first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.
Juarez's strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the U.S., according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation's leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.
"He is really the future," Ashkin said. "This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I'm not sure how we treat them."
Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: Antibiotics. U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was "time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won."
Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet — TB, malaria and HIV among them — are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: Overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us.
(read the entire article here)
The article mentions that: “About 60 million people visit the U.S. every year, and most are not screened for TB before arrival. Only refugees and those coming as immigrants are checked. The top category of multidrug-resistant patients in the U.S. — 82 percent of the cases identified in 2007 — was foreign-born patients, according to the CDC.” Okay, credit where it is due. However it makes no mention of the illegal aliens who sneak in, carrying TB and other deadly diseases that were practically wiped out in the U.S. Wonder why that is?
Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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