Needlenose

There seems to be only one means to achieve bi-partisan support for a bill – lard it with pork.  Or make it a pork-only bill, with cash for everybody’s constituents!

Case in point – 5 members of the GOP, hearing the “Woo pig sooie!” siren call of pork-barrell spending, crossed the aisle to vote for the so-called Jobs Bill.

The Repugs used this to good effect in the early post-9/11 days of the Shrubya Preznitcy to bring Democrat pigs to vote on their bills – Remember those bipartisan bamboozles such as the Agribusiness Handout  of 2008, the original Agribusiness Handout of 2003, and perhaps the most odious piece of legislation ever, the Big Energy Handout of 2003?

That must be why the Health Care Bill stalled out…insufficient pork!

(Barack Obama with John and Cindy McCain at a 9/11 memorial observance last month in New York, via the Associated Press.)

Only really stupid terrorists would unleash germs on an enemy – and terrorists are usually crazy, not stupid.The as-yet-unexplained anthrax spore attacks following September 11th had an effect missing from the twin towers event – they struck terror in the heart of Main Street U.S.A. The Al Qaeda attacks, horrific as they were, seemed isolated, freakish, and…obvious. The anthrax attacks were spread across several states, with seemingly random casualties. But how seriously should we take the threat of germ-based bioterror?

Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t take it seriously at all.  Bioweapons are games for superpowers.   But even if a motley gang of terrorists were given something like a souped-up weaponized smallpox, why would they use it?  Sure, they’d give the Great Satan a black eye, killing a few hundred thousand or even a million people - but the West has groups like the CDC and modern infrastructure.

The major die-off would be in the third-world – in those failed or failing states where the terrorists and their extended families live.  In the earliest moments of a super plague, people would be jumping on planes and spreading the pathogen across the globe.

Terrorists may be crazy, but I wouldn’t call them stupid.