Archive for 2015

HEALTH: 2 New Ebola Vaccines Pass Important Early Test, Researchers Say. “Two new Ebola vaccines have passed an important test, protecting monkeys against the strain of the virus responsible for the current deadly outbreak, researchers reported on Wednesday. Only one dose was needed, and there were no apparent side effects. The vaccines have not yet been tested in people, but safety trials in healthy volunteers will probably begin early this summer, said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and the senior author of a report published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.”

READER BOOK PLUG: From Michele and Richard Bledsoe, The Secret Kingdom.

ANOTHER CULTURE-OF-CORRUPTION COVERUP? House panel wants enviro activist group’s communications with EPA’s McCarthy. “A House committee investigating the destruction of more than 5,000 official cellular telephone text messages by the Environmental Protection Agency wants a major nonprofit activist group to provide copies of all its communications with Gina McCarthy, the agency’s chief, on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. . . . Karpinski’s group has received nearly $90 million in 1,056 contributions since 2000 from liberal philanthropies and individuals, including the Tides Foundation. Tides pioneered the use of an umbrella foundation of wealthy individuals wishing to remain anonymous to funnel millions of dollars in ‘dark money’ to their favored causes.”

ADAM GARFINKLE: Politics As Bloodsport: The troubling remark everyone missed in Tom Friedman’s interview with President Obama—and some ruminations on the sad state of American political discourse.

Our public discourse, even over matters that used to be and still should be above partisan politics, has become increasingly less rational, less responsible, and less civil. For every veteran Bush-hater out there we have now an equal and opposite Obama-hater. Some personal experiences, if I may, to illustrate the point.

It has become embedded in “common knowledge” on the Left in the United States, and certainly abroad, that the Bush Administration generally, and Colin Powell in particular in his February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council, knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction stockpiles in Iraq. It is simply beyond discussion that Administration principals actually worried about that subject; it was all allegedly mere pretext. I have even had people look me in the eye and declare that there is no difference, morally or otherwise, between knowingly lying and simply being mistaken about some point of fact. Such is the underwhelming capacity for moral logic among true Bush haters.

Obama haters are equally certain that the President actually despises his own country and its history, and a certain subset of haters is as certain that he hates Israel and Jews and has conspired from the start to do irreparable harm to Israeli security and well-being. Thus all that the President said about Israel in the Friedman interview, and by implication his explicit acknowledgement of the anti-Semitism of the Iranian leadership, has to be out and out duplicitous to such haters. He is indeed lying through his teeth, they are sure.

Hmm.