Common line about Rick: "First he calls for secession, then he begs the feds for help with swine flu..."

Do liberal bloggers and comedians all have a conference call they get on each morning to go over their talking points for the day?

I have seen several dozen blogs, plus Bill Maher and others, all make that same stupid argument about this swine flu deal.

A) Rick didn't advocate secession. Get that straight.
B) Pandemics and potential pandemics are not local. They are by definition a federal or even international issue.
C) Texas is one of a small number of states that bought flu doses two years ago... with Texas state government dollars, not federal dollars.

The Houston Chronicle, in saying "Tight budget kept Texas from buying more flu drugs," got the headline really wrong for an otherwise solid article from the Associated Press (link). The headline should have been something about how almost every state is still woefully unprepared, while Texas got it right by acting two years ago. Some facts follow...

An Associated Press survey has found that more than half the states have yet to stockpile the number of recommended flu-treatment doses. Several cite budget constraints or say it's better to spend health care funds on preventing the spread of disease.

Kolkhorst said she's proud the Texas legislature did something, considering some states didn't buy any discounted anti-viral.

Emily Palmer, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said state officials made the rest of the allotment available to local agencies at the discounted prices.

This week, Gov. Rick Perry requested 850,000 courses, or about 25 percent of the state's anti-viral supply in the strategic stockpile. It brought the number of courses now available in Texas to nearly 1.7 million.

Texas bought about 850 thousand courses two years ago on its own. Because this was seen as a threat to the entire country Texas went ahead and asked the CDC for a quarter of the Texas share of the flu courses. That's the same CDC that Texas subsidizes... Texas pays DC more than it gets back.

My bet... None of these swine flu courses will be used. The swine flu will turn out to be not that bad of an issue.

But it could have been terrible, and idiot liberals like Bill Maher attacking Rick for keeping Maher's a$$ safe really gets under my skin.

The Austin American Statesman included a Washington Post article that makes a really good point about how there is no such thing as a local pandemic (link). Excerpt follows...

LONDON — Teenagers in New Zealand, honeymooners in Scotland, high school students in New York and tourists in Israel all are sick from the same bug caught just days ago on trips to Mexico.

Their illnesses are the latest example of how diseases, from influenza to tuberculosis to cholera, are spreading ever more quickly in an increasingly globalized world. But so, too, are the tools necessary to combat sudden outbreaks of disease: expertise, medicine, money and information.

"Things move incredibly fast; there has been an exponential rise in the numbers of people who move around the world," said Scott Dowell, a physician and head of global disease detection and response for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Though global pandemics are as old as history itself, diseases and the people who carry them have never been able to move so far, so fast. The number of international air travelers grew fivefold, to 824 million passengers per year, from 1980 to 2007.

Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes took smallpox and measles to Mexico on long sea voyages in the 16th century. The current strain of swine flu leaped from Mexico to the far corners of the world on jumbo jets in a matter of hours.

The liberal bloggers and comedians are being partisan clones when they complain in their echo chamber about Rick requesting flu medicine from the CDC. Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher... all of these liberals attacking Rick really makes those of us who already dislike those liberals want to rally around Rick.