Sometimes things just don’t break your way. Susan Collins, intellectually challenged Maine “moderate” Senator, must be wanting to share a drink with Bobby Jindal these days. Why it seems like only yesterday (because it was) that her website proudly reprinted an article from the Wall Street Journal, in which she trashed the idea of using stimulus money to plan for and respond to a flu pandemic. The article’s been scrubbed from her website, but you can see it, in all it’s glory, right here. And you can see right here that she went out of her way to take credit for protecting us from being protected against a pandemic.
Of course, Collins allowed that we should in fact plan for pandemics, only the money didn’t belong in the stimulus package. Only she forgot to say where it did belong, so the money is nowhere. We can only hope that the Democrats up in Maine will make sure her constituents know that she was more interested in pleasing Karl Rove than representing them.
I suspect that as a major event, the swine flu pandemic will fizzle. We must surely hope that it does. But the fact is that we can assure the fizzle if we engage in planning, which takes money. In this case, about the amount of money we are wasting on bonuses for just some of those AIG folks.
UPDATE: I was in error in stating that the money for this is presently nowhere. It did, in fact, get into the regular appropriation bill. I don’t know what role, if any, Collins played in putting it there.
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