“I guess the bright side,” said the skeptical lady on Facebook, “is that 99.98% will survive this ‘pandemic’.”

You’ve seen comments like that: The resort to numbers. Here’s how many die from the flu every year. Here’s how many die in traffic accidents. Why are we making a fuss over this one? Aren’t opponents just using it as an excuse to embarrass the President? Isn’t the government just using it as an excuse to take away our freedoms?

Well, we would say at first, stating the obvious, traffic accidents aren’t lethally virulent. Well, we would say, we have shots for the flu.

Now we just play out the numbers.

Read more »

We have been here before, of course. We have been here many times in the past year, and the story always involves power, and the lengths to which people will go to achieve and sustain it.

And if that were the entire story, we could understand it, the corruption of the individual, the stuff of novels and movies. But the real story is never about one person; it is always about the infrastructure of power, the aiders and abettors, people whose silence can be bought, people whose fear keeps them silent, people whose own power depends on staying in line.

This is how you get rape apologists.

This is also how you get traitors.

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Christ on a stick, from a Wal-Mart in Canton, OH:

“Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” read signs affixed to the tablecloths.

The food drive tables are tucked away in an employees-only area. They are another element in the backdrop of the public debate about salaries for cashiers, stock clerks and other low-wage positions at Walmart, as workers in Cincinnati and Dayton are scheduled to go on strike Monday.

Is the food drive proof the retailer pays so little that many employees can’t afford Thanksgiving dinner?

Uh, duh. Yes.

Meanwhile, in other Wal-Mart news: Read more »

“The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee… made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign. They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?” —Reince Priebus, keeping it classy. [RedState, via Political Wire]

“Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is joining the American Enterprise  Institute, the conservative think tank announced Monday. Lieberman will serve as co-chairman of the American Internationalism Project,  alongside former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).” [The Hill]

“(CHICAGO) (WLS) — A shooting early Saturday morning in Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood claimed the life of one man and wounded another. The slain victim is the son of a woman who has now lost all [four] of her children to gun violence.” [ABC-Chicago]

Chief Romney campaign strategist Stuart Stevens:

On Nov. 6, Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters.

Median household income — the line that separates the top half of Americans from the bottom half — was $50,502 in 2011. However generously you define “middle class” in Our Exceptional Classless America, half that class earns less.

Yes, the Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right.

You go on writing off 47 percent of Americans, folks. We’ll see you in 2016.

Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight. [WaPo]