The Wall Street Journal has been a source of much clarity on the health care bill debacle. Yesterday, it called the Democrats out on their failure to respond to the points Paul Ryan made at the "summit" last Thursday. Of course, there has been one response ... from Ezra Klein at the WaPo (good of him to step up and give it a shot). Here's a detailed reply from Rep. Ryan (link via Verum Serum; but, seriously, this ought to be published somewhere more prominent than Ryan's Facebook page). Those few links provide a lot of insight into some of the critical points of the health care bill debate, if you have the time to wade through them.
Here's an AP article that I found a bit ironic: Scientists defend warning after tsunami nonevent.
Scientists acknowledged they overstated the threat, but defended their actions, saying they took the proper steps and learned the lessons of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed thousands of people who didn't get enough warning.
"It's a key point to remember that we cannot end the warnings. Failure to warn is not an option for us," said Dai Lin Wang, an oceanographer at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. "We cannot have a situation that we thought was no problem and then it's devastating. That just cannot happen."
Caution is always good, but there's that crying wolf thing. Alarms become counter-productive when they turn out to be false. Counter-productive and expensive.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled shorelines for higher ground Saturday in a panic that circled the Pacific Rim after scientists warned 53 nations and territories that a tsunami had been generated by the massive Chilean quake.
It was the largest-scale evacuation in Hawaii in years, if not decades. Emergency sirens blared throughout the day, the Navy moved ships out of Pearl Harbor, and residents hoarded gasoline, food and water in anticipation of a major disaster. Some supermarkets even placed limits on items like Spam because of the panic buying.
You'd think the experts could predict a catastrophic event that was supposedly just a few hours away with more accuracy. Let alone one that's supposedly a few decades away. But the fact is, they can't. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Shabbat Shalom.
