tvc184

  It was smart politically because she went from a nobody to a national media darling.    Had you asked a year ago who Wendy Davis was, I doubt you would get 3% of the people having a clue who she was and that is inside of TX. Let there be no doubt that her run for governor is based directly off the publicity from that stunt.    Merely saying that 60% of the public was for the bill doesn't matter as almost any Democratic candidate would have to toe the same party line. The only difference is which face to plaster on the election posters and that move made it her face. 

The race card has a long way to go before it loses its luster. 

    Yes if it can be proven that they lied. Sometimes in investigations people are not really lying but looking at it from a different angle or get a glance and think they see something.    A couple of weekends ago I fish with a couple of Missouri state police homicide investigators (lead agency in the investigation) that are friends of mine. They ran down the incident to me. I can see where some people made claims that might have been completely correct but were taken out of context. Just for an example, let's say that a witness turns just in time to see the shots and see Brown with his arms in the air. That might be a fact. What is not known from that person's viewpoint is what does it mean. Were his hands in the air and he was begging for his life and surrendering or was he charging Wilson and reaching up to grad for his head or pistol or was he perhaps throwing his hands in the air like "what's up dude, are you going to shoot me?"?     That is the problem with eyewitness testimony as opposed to physical evidence. I have seen investigations where police officers were wrong but not intentionally. We had a fatal accident many years ago and an off duty officer from out of state (here on vacation fishing the coast) said the car that caused the accident came roaring out of a business driveway and caused the accident. He did not lie and he saw what actually happened with the car coming too fast out of the parking lot.... but he was wrong. What he saw did not fit the evidence we found at the scene but we had to look at his statement because there was no reason for him to lie and he was a trained observer. The problem is that he saw part of a sequence of events. The car that he saw throwing gravel in a parking lot was in fact there but it was not from reckless driving from that vehicle. Through another witness and the skid marks on the street we were able to piece it together. Another vehicle drove into the oncoming lane while trying to pass on a curve and almost hit the second vehicle head on. The driver of this second vehicle naturally swerved to keep from being killed and hit the gravel in the parking lot. That caused him to lose control and spin back into the road, causing the fatal accident.    The driver that the officer saw that appeared to be reckless driving (and what he saw indicated that) but he did not see it about three seconds earlier because if he had, he would have seen the at fault vehicle commit that act that caused someone to be killed by passing on a curve into oncoming traffic. Again, the officer did not lie and his story was entirely correct but from his one perspective he drew a conclusion that he saw with his own eyes.    That is why you need to look at the entire incident and not only eyewitnesses or a set of circumstances like one guy was unarmed. Taken alone it can render a conclusion that is completely false but are the people that see something telling a lie?    Maybe not. They are seeing a snapshot in time. 

Wendy Davis kind of reminds me of a community organizer running for office.    You look at her credentials and ask, what has she done? Oh, she was a city council member and a two term member of the TX legislature. Her big claim to fame in politics? She filibustered new rules on abortions that eventually passed. She is a political opportunist that sways with the wind.   In that same thinking, anyone that doesn't believe that her filibuster was nothing more than her opening campaign for governor is playing ostrich and putting their head in the sand and ignoring the obvious. It was a smart move as she was a nobody and got national attention for that stunt. But when you get down to it, what else is she other than a good looking woman that wanted to make a big splash? Her accomplishments are.... what? A filibuster?   Oh yeah, and she is a victim. When she lost her first run at the city council of Fort Worth, she sued three media entities including a newspaper because she didn't like their First Amendment right to say that they didn't endorse her. She didn't think it was fair that they sided with the other candidate. It was naturally thrown out of court but I am sure she loves the "victim" game.    Yep, sounds like a community organizer. 

  We have often said in politics that "both sides do it" (mudslinging, propaganda, false claims, swaying polls, etc.) and for the most part it is correct.   I have yet to see any mudslinging in this case from Abbott. 

Get ready for the next excuse to riot when the no bills come down shortly. 

  Because one of them "will" be the winner (whether the general election or primary) and you can sit on your hands and accept your fate or vote for the side you believe the most, mudslinging or not. 

I read the BISD website on budget from a couple of years ago and it was $1.7 million. I think it dropped to about $1.2 million last year.   The current off duty contract labor rate of hiring police officers in this area for off duty jobs/security is $35 in most cases ($50 for short notice jobs).    BISD had (I think) 24 police officers and that included usually non-working officers such as the chief and supervisors. I say non-working as they don't usually ride a district or have specific patrol assignments. Most districts hire off duty officers for their middle and high school campuses since that is where the fights and other disturbances are usually confined to. BISD has 9 such campuses.    9 campuses x 8 hours a day x $35 per hour comes to $2,520 per school day. TX requires students to be in school for 180 days a year.    By using contract labor from BPD, BISD can put an officer on all middle and high school campuses for the entire school day for every school day each year for $453,600. That is because BISD would only be paying for salary. There is no insurance provided to the officers, no vehicle expense, no vacations, no matching social security and medicare, no retirement or basically no other extra benefits. Not only is it a huge savings, they could actually cover way more campuses and not have officers rotating around to try and get coverage.    That is why most districts, if they want police protection, hire off duty city/county officers and not try to fund their own police department.    Of course if outside police officers are brought in that are not directly under the control of the school district, the district has almost no chance of controlling information (covering up) of what actually happens inside of the schools that they don't want the public to know about. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures. 

  I know a small business owner who hires about 40 employees. They are easy common labor type jobs and he they don't make a big salary because of that. One of their benefits however is insurance.  He said that to maintain their coverage at its current level it will cost him an additional $500,000 this year and will increase in the future. The last time I talked to him he was not sure if he was going to lay off employees or cut their insurance and just pay the penalty. Either way, a work force of almost all minorities are about to take a hit because of the mandates. 

In our last negotiations with the city, our payraise was directly related to Obamacare. The city was holding back more than $1 million to wait for the Supreme Court decision to see if the act would go through. When the Supreme Court allowed Obamacare to be put in for effect, it reduced the amount of money that the city had for pay raises. In effect my payraise was cut because of Obamacare. We are currently in negotiations for a new three-year deal at this time. One of the sticking points is healthcare coverage because the newly hired employees are facing severe cuts in what is offered for insurance. As part of our pay package and benefits all employees have always received free to the employee healthcare coverage and they have to pay an additional premium if they want to put any family members on it. The new employees that are hired now have to start paying partly for their own insurance that up until now was always part of their benefit package. Add to that their family deductible have now gone up to $15,000. There is no getting around the fact that Obamacare is costing us a lot of money in pay raises and benefits. I can't wait to see these massive cuts in our health care cost and insurance that Obamacare and Obama administration promised if the bill was passed. Does anyone truly believe that there will be any cuts to healthcare their insurance in the future?

    That is the claim. Anxiously awaiting the claimed results..... but not holding my breath. 

It is easy. You have the presidential leadership way to handle it and the Campaigner In Chief way to handle it. 

  I think that they recognized it before the ordinance was enacted and tried to rectify it so in my opinion, the people know that it is not right. 

  What? Uphold the US and TX constitutions?

This copied directly from the CDC website:   Symptoms of Ebola include Fever (greater than 38.6°C or 101.5°F) Severe headache Muscle pain Weakness Diarrhea Vomiting Abdominal (stomach) pain Unexplained hemorrhage (bleeding or bruising) Symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after exposure to Ebola, but the average is 8 to 10 days.   Maybe my reading comprehension skills aren't so good but it certainly looks to me like fever is included with other "symptoms" (their description) along with other things such as vomiting, diarrhea, etc.   I know what it is, the CDC doesn't know what it is talking and people on this forum know more about it than they do. I can accept that.

Now the director of the CDC says.... Oh, she shouldn't have been told that it was okay.   He said that protocol by the local hospital wasn't followed (does it really matter how it spreads, your mistake, my mistake, a bad protocol, a new and unknown means of transmission such as airborne?) and it was a local mistake.... only to come back today and say the CDC made an error letting her fly.   Does anyone else see this as almost a comedy of errors if it wasn't so serious? 

  I looked up Influenza on the CDC website. One of the symptoms? Fever.   I looked up Salmonella on the CDC website. One of the symptoms? Fever.    I looked up Ebola on the CDC website. One of the symptoms? Fever.   Apparently the CDC thinks that fever is a symptom of an illness. They probably have no clue what they public on their website. 

And could what I just saw be true? She called the CDC and was cleared to fly.... when she had Ebola.    Apparently the nurse was not at fault but the CDC gave consent to fly. 

  Strange, that is not what the CDC says about Ebola (and many other illnesses) on their website. 

I also find a statement by the CDC that the nurse on the flight was likely not contagious before symptoms set it. They go on to say that she had a fever.   I know that I am only a lay person when it comes to most medicine but I thought that fever was a symptom. 

    Here is the problem with that. Yes, it might be (?) be easy to stop from spreading, assuming nothing goes wrong. Your own statement says, "if they'd done things right". Very true and as your statement shows, they did not.    First we had a guy lie and get on a plane and brought it to the USA for the first time ever other than patients being intentionally brought back. Then we have a nurse that was supposed to be using the correct protocol for treating Ebola (or maybe any infectious disease) and yet she got it. I heard a CDC rep say that she did nothing wrong but someone else made a mistake Ooookay.... great. But someone in the health field made a mistake and it spread to a person that was supposed to be protected, not the unprotected masses. Now a second worker got it. Ooookay.... but she then got on a plane which she was not supposed to do. The CDC claims that she had a fever when she boarded the flight. Hmmm..... easy to contain assuming everyone does everything perfectly?    When the first nurse got Ebola, the CDC came out and said that it was only because protocol was not followed.... then they said that the nurse herself was not at fault.... but the don't know who was.... and they are not sure (at the time I saw the interview) what protocol was violated. That is a lot of "I don't know" answers for something that the CDC claims can easily be contained. CDC just as well say: "All we know is that someone must have screwed up because we made a statement that there is no danger".    Now what? Mistakes are being made right now and people are starting to get it when it is supposed to be in a safe environment and then breaking their own rules/protocol such as flying when they weren't supposed to and after a fever was detected. Was she infectious at that point with Ebola? If so, how many people did she now expose and how many people have to be tracked down from that commercial flight?   So will these mistakes spread it outside into a highly unprotected population? Is it now contained?   I am hoping that these mistakes are immediately rectified but the fact is that people that should have known better have caught it and spread it. Apparently the situation is being treated by humans and being human, are prone to mistakes. We have now apparently seen some from people that our government through the CDC said would not happen. For something that is supposed to be easily contained, it does not give me much confidence as the CDC is portraying.    I truly hope that this is nothing but an interesting media blitz. I thought that after Duncan died, we would pass the (claimed) magical 21 days and it would be over with Ebola being eradicated from our country. Hopefully these stupid mistakes will get people's minds right that are dealing with it and quit breaking whatever protocols the CDC has in place. Then hope that those protocols are correct.    But your premise of it not being easily spread seems questionable considered it has spread and inside of healthcare where you would think is the last place it would be. I can see Duncan's family coming down with it but just like the worker overseas that was following protocol and got it also, just how safe are these protocols to make mistakes. 

  I thought of NBC. 

    Yep, they would never think of suicide. 

Yeah but that is Fox News for you.   Wait, that is from the NY Times.................