H1N1 suddenly appeared in 2009 and then basically went away all by itself: The vaccine rollout took too long, underdelivered, and flopped

There are no outbreaks of H1N1 at the scale of 2009 in the years following. It basically subsided by itself before the vaccine was ready, and when it was, people pretty much ignored it:

In the U.S., the Health and Human Services Department estimated in July 2009 that 120 million doses would be available by October. By late October, only 17 million doses had been shipped — and fewer than that had been administered. By the time vaccine was becoming available, infections had peaked and flu activity was declining sharply.

 

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Sum Ting Wong: Nearly 60 million in US got Mexican swine flu in 2009-2010 and 12,000 died, but we never quarantined millions as China feels it must now

Laugh of the Day 3.0: The thing is, this Google employee PROVIDED the picture

This little piggy stayed home

This little piggy went to Google

Wall Street Journal fears conservatives are winning: Trots out libertarian from Cato Institute to smear Laura Ingraham as nativist

You know Laura Ingraham. She hates foreigners so much she adopted three of them, one from Guatemala and two from Russia, and reportedly almost married a very dark-skinned man.

Here:

Many in the GOP are jockeying for the soul of the party ahead of an anticipated 2014 midterm election victory. Social conservatives are eager to reassert their influence after repeated defeats over gay marriage. Fiscal conservatives make the case for a greater emphasis on runaway spending. And then there are the nativists, who contend that the future of the Republican Party lies in opposing immigration reform. Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, for example, said last month that, “Immigration could be to 2016 what ObamaCare was to 2010.”

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Swine.

It used to be the conservative movement consisted of social, fiscal and foreign policy wings. The libertarians don't have a foreign policy because they believe in open borders, so they had to invent something they could caricature and toss in order to have a simpler, Manichean world in which they, the sons of light, fight us, the social conservative sons of darkness.

Two-front wars are too hard for libertarians.

Catholic Republicans Gang Up On Protestant Todd Akin

Laura Ingraham calls him a liar, Sean Hannity gives a prominent forum to Ann Coulter, who likens Akin to Eliot Spitzer and elsewhere calls him a swine, and Hugh Hewitt encourages him to drop out. Oh yeah, and throw in the VP nominee, well after the deadline.

Christopher Hitchens: You Can Take the Liberalism out of the Brain Dead Liberal . . .

. . . but he'll still be brain dead.

"From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise."

In the New York Times, here.

And for someone who has concluded that the founders were playing swine off against each other in writing the constitution in the way that they did, the absence of the discussion of Attic tragedy is doubly disappointing.

A hole in his education, and that of his Republican rabbi, perhaps. No one knows everything, not even Hitch. Tragedy at 11.

Libertarian Swine on David Mamet

A nice Jewish boy realizes he's no longer a brain dead liberal and what do the libertarians find to complain about?

Readers on both sides of Mamet’s current political stance can take issue with his social conservatism. He is, among other things, an unbending proponent of traditional gender arrangements.

Political conservatism presupposes social conservatism, as Phyllis Schlafly pointedly argued here in the wake of the ObamaCare debacle, the most baneful affect of which was the neutering of the Hyde Amendment.

Libertarianism couldn't stand athwart a toy train and yell stop.  

Kish meir Yiddische Tuchus.

"The Constitution Recognizes That People Are Swine"

Just a little reminder today that there is a kind of hope which is justified: that misguided people can change their minds. In the old days, it was called repentance:

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant.

If you haven't read the rest of David Mamet's 2008 essay, "Why I Am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" in The Village Voice, you owe it to yourself to do so. Here it is.

h/t Terry Teachout@commentarymagazine.com