By James Thompson

 

According to a Houston Chronicle article http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Abbott-photographed-with-militia-leader-5862450.php , the Republican candidate for Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, was caught in a photograph consorting with supporter J.K. Massey in Brownsville. Massey is a convicted felon and was arrested on federal firearms charges four days after the photo with Abbott was taken . According to the Chronicle, Massey had an arsenal similar to that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

 

Many Texans are demanding that Abbott, as Texas Attorney General, denounce Massey for his terroristic activities as a militia leader. Apparently, Abbott’s non-response to these demands indicate his tacit support for right-wing terroristic lunatics. It is already well-documented that Abbott has been the beneficiary of fundraisers staged by Ted Nugent who has gone on record advocating that people should be shot as they come across the Texas-Mexico border. Abbott has failed to renounce Ted Nugent’s activities and hate speech to date.

 

Does anyone besides me see a pattern here? How do Texans think that relations between Texas and Mexico will be affected if Abbott is elected governor? Does anyone think that elevating a man who has consorted with open racists to Governor might complicate trade relations with Mexico and result in a reduction of commerce? Does anyone think that if Abbott is elected, Texas’ public image will be enhanced?

By James Thompson

Led by lame-duck Texas Governor and buffoon-in-chief Rick Perry, the Republican clowns are running amok in their effort to win the hearts and minds (and campaign contributions) of the 1% while alienating the rest of us. The Republican candidate for Texas Governor is Greg Abbott. It is hard to imagine a sector of the population besides the wealthiest of the wealthy that he has not attacked viciously. Most of his campaign contributors are listed among Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires.

Abbott and the rest of the Texas Republican gang have railed against immigrants. Nut case rocker Ted Nugent indicated in one interview that he favored shooting people as they crossed the US border. Ted Nugent is a major fundraiser for Greg Abbott. Abbott has not yet repudiated his ugly, vile hateful rhetoric. Nut case candidate for Lt. Gov., Dan Patrick, has made his major campaign theme “securing the Texas border.” The ugliest of the ugly Republicans have even alleged that immigrants “could” bring the Ebola virus to Texas. The word “could” is fairly loose and, of course, a similar case could be made that billionaires “could” bring the Ebola virus to Texas. Interestingly, Texas Republicans don’t go there. Instead, they fight to make Texas safe for hysteria.

Ted Nugent also has a long history of hatred towards women. Abbott has fought hard to roll back the clock on women’s reproductive rights.

Ted Nugent once referred to our current president as a “subhuman mongrel” and was called out because this is a phrase that was frequently used by the Nazis to characterize sectors of the population they persecuted. Most people understand that this is not a coincidence that Nugent used this phrase.

According to the Wendy Davis (Democratic party candidate for Governor of Texas) campaign, Mr. Abbott has distinguished himself in the field of hypocrisy by seeking all possible benefits of his disabled status while fighting hard to deny any benefits for other people who are disabled.

Mr. Abbott has fought hard for a Texas Voter ID law which will make it more difficult for working people, African-Americans, Latinos, and the aged to cast a ballot.

Texas Republicans have opposed healthcare for the poor and current Gov. Rick Perry has waived off federal Medicaid money.

Gov. Perry has distinguished himself in the past by making veiled references to Texas seceding from the union. Most people understand that these references relate to dreams of restoring the Confederacy and the right to own slaves.

So, if Texans want their state government to be run by racist, sexist, bigoted nuts who will fight for liberty and justice for the 1%, they will vote Republican. If not, they will vote for candidates from other parties.

Published time: October 15, 2014 18:40 Via http://rt.com/news/196268-five-things-know-ebola/ The UN’s health watchdog, the WHO, says there are 60 days left to contain the Ebola outbreak, which has already claimed almost 5,000 lives. This is what you need to know about the killer virus.

1. It has been here for decades

The virus lives naturally in animals, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. The first two recorded outbreak were in 1976. The Ebola virus (EBOV) is one of five members of the Ebolavirus genus, four of which cause lethal hemorrhagic fever. It was previously called Zaire virus, after the country that is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are currently two separate Ebola outbreaks underway. In addition to the one in Western Africa, which has already spread to the US and Europe, there is another one in the Congo. Bats are the natural reservoir of the virus, because they can carry it without getting ill. Apes can suffer from it too. Humans may get infected by eating bushmeat or through feces, after which the virus can spread from human to human via blood, saliva and other fluids.

2. There is no cure

Ebola’s high mortality rate and gruesome symptoms have given it the air of something out of a horror movie. But statistically speaking, the virus was a minor threat, with outbreaks quickly fading out claiming a few hundred lives at most. So it’s not surprising that institutions researching infectious diseases never invested many resources into finding a cure, preferring to spend money on more wide-spread (and, cynically speaking, more profit-generating) threats. The exception to that are bioweapons specialists, who concluded that the virus that could not go airborne and is an ineffective means to attack the enemy (or serve as a weapon for terrorists, for that matter). So when the current outbreak started beating records – in fact killing more people than all previous outbreaks combined – and spreading into cities, nobody had a working treatment at hand. A handful of experimental vaccines are in the pipeline, including three developed in Russia. But they are far from being mass produced, while the virus is spreading.

3. No adequate response

The countries affected by the current outbreak are poor, their healthcare systems are rudimentary, and the tradition-dictated hygiene habits of many of its citizens are not suitable for stopping the infection. Where Western countries can rally experts in biohazard suits, quarantine every person a suspected carrier had contact with and run blood tests, countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have neither the resources nor experience to take such measures. And the problems only start with healthcare: the epidemic spreads panic, fear and violence, causing deterioration in whatever social order is in place. The assistance from international organizations helps a lot, but it’s not a magic wand that can stop the outbreak with a deft wave. Organizations like the WHO have their difficulties too. For instance, the UN’s health body had its budget cut, leaving it with less than $4 billion to spend in 2013-2014. In contrast, the budget of the US agency tackling infections, the CDC, was about $6 billion in 2013. Just like scientists researching treatments, doctors preventing them in the field have to prioritize. Ebola was not a priority, and the outbreak went under the radar for an estimated three months, before it was declared as such by Doctors Without Borders. By that time it was already in Guinea’s capital Conakry, a city of 2 million people.

4. The West is not prepared

Or at least not as well prepared as it should be! Even if Ebola manages to get into developed nations with some travelers slipping through airport cordons, the spread of the virus would not be large. It takes between four to 21 days for an infected person to become contagious, which means once a case is discovered, everyone who had contact with the person can be quarantined and tested before they can spread the disease. But being among the few unlucky victims is little consolation for those who do get infected. And the fact that in the US and Spain, health workers who provided care to known Ebola sufferers got infected, despite knowing what they were dealing with, is less than reassuring. In both countries there is criticism over how the treatment of Ebola patients is conducted and how reports of new suspected cases have been responded to.

5. Epidemic cost: Tens of billions of dollars

Battling the outbreak is difficult and costly. The WHO estimates that by November there could be 10,000 new cases of the disease each week in two months, unless it’s taken under control. This would require having 70 percent of infected people in a care facility and 70 percent of burials done without further infections. Otherwise the breakout would reach a stage, for which there is no plan. The World Bank says in the worst case scenario the economic damage from the epidemic could reach $33 billion. The US Department of Defense said it needs over $1 billion to cover the cost of the effort to fight the disease in Africa. It may send as many as 3,000 soldiers to the epidemic zone, with an estimated cost of $750 million over a six-month period. Other states, world bodies and charities have promised to chip in to stem the tide of the developing outbreak and provide aid to the most afflicted West African nations. In September, the European Union pledged 150 million euros to fight the virus in West Africa. The World Bank Group has pledged US $230 million in emergency funding to help Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone contain the spread of Ebola infections. Last month the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released $50 million to the UN and other international aid agencies working to contain the epidemic. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in tandem with the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, has set aside 34.7 million Swiss francs to tackle the epidemic as well. The price tag of developing and distributing drugs, however, is less than one would expect. Ripley Ballou, who heads the Ebola vaccine program for GSK, estimated the company could make 100,000 to 500,000 doses for just $25 million. The problem: it would take around 9 months. In any such epidemic, however, the real cost comes not from the cure, but treating the consequences of human fear, WHO director general Margaret Chan said. According to Chan, 90 percent of the economic costs incurred from any such outbreak “come from irrational and disorganized efforts of the public to avoid infection.”