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Via Oliver Willis a Quicktime response to Intelligent Design for NASCAR dads.

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Out of the blue in his first news conference in a long time the Shrubbery starts talking about the probable bird flu pandemic. Now there are a lot of issues he might have addressed in regards to the response to bird flu, but he decided to talk about the possible need for quarantines and that the military would have to be in charge, so Congress needs to change the law.

Before he talks about the military he might want to clarify who in the Federal government is in charge of a flu pandemic. As reported in August, Michael Chertoff is under the impression that the Department of Homeland Security is in charge, while the Department of Health and Human Services thinks it’s their job.

Now the Shrubbery is talking about the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon doesn’t have the resources for the job. The military is not a police agency. The civil affairs units that are the military equivalent of local government services have been moved to the Reserves and National Guard, and they are tied down in Iraq. The military medical system is unable to adequately care for its current patient load, so how could they care for the victims of a pandemic?

The military is not the solution to every possible problem the country has. If there were some reasonable level of competence in this government, there would be no need to even bring it up.

Given that the military is the one government operation that hasn’t grown under the “borrow and spend” Republicans, why are they being forced to do all the work?

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Ron Franscell is an editor at the Beaumont Enterprise and in addition to everything else that has been going on with hurricane Rita, he has been posting on his blog, Under The News.

After a lot of hard work and jumping through a number of widely spaced hoops, the newspaper is finally putting out a print edition.

The first issue was a recap of the editions that have been on the paper’s website, but Monday they put out their first regular edition which only contained 8 pages, but that was just the local news, no ads, columns, comics, etc. In What passes for Normal, Texas he says that a reader called to cancel their subscription because the paper was so small.

You just can’t please some people.

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They way things are going it will probably be his favorite bank teller or Laura.

Remember, you heard it here first second.

Update: Billmon beat me by 22 minutes and he has a picture. I don’t know if the Shrubbery will search beyond whoever balances his checkbook.

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