Mid-week edition because, as Ray Magliozzi has observed, “Until further notice, everyone is going to be late for everything.”
President Obama uses a forbidden selfie stick in “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About, Featuring President Obama” by BuzzFeed, to promote HealthCare.gov. Best of all is this peevish reaction from the Wall Street Journal, Fox’s legacy media plaything.
Borowitz:
Alabama Loses Yet Another Fight to Remain in Eighteenth Century
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (The Borowitz Report)—On Monday, the state of Alabama lost yet another fight to remain in the eighteenth century, extending a losing streak that dates back to the nineteenth century.
Alabama, whose first attempt to remain in the eighteenth century took place between 1861 and 1865, has never shown signs of giving up the fight, even after being dealt a string of stunning defeats in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties.
A Letter from Joni Ernst About Measles
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — On Tuesday, Senator Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) responded to the recent measles outbreak with the following letter to the American people:
Hi, it’s Joni!
In recent days, you’ve heard about a measles outbreak among children who have not been vaccinated. Like many Americans, you have probably been asking, “How would Joni solve this problem?”
Some in the media have suggested that politicians should not have opinions about vaccinations because we’re not scientists. Excuse me, but that’s like saying people shouldn’t have opinions about flowers because they’re not bees.
The fact is, many parents are concerned about vaccinations, and for a valid reason: they’ve read something bad about them on the Internet. But the good news is that there’s an alternative to vaccinations that’s cheap, readily available, and totally safe: bread bags.
Take a look at a bread bag. It’s made out of plastic, which means that no microscopic virus can get through it, unless there’s a hole in the bag. That’s why, every morning, my parents sent me to school with bread bags on my hands.
You see, measles are a hand-borne virus. You can only catch them through contact with someone’s measles-infected hand. If every child in America would go to school with bread bags on their hands, why, before you know it, measles would go the way of the Macarena (a dance that used to be very popular but has pretty much disappeared).
Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Maybe because there’s big money behind vaccinations but not behind bread bags. No one makes money on bread bags. They just come with the bread.
So do Joni a favor. Tomorrow, send your kids to school with bread bags on their hands. As my mom used to say, “Joni, if there’s a problem bread bags can’t solve, it’s probably not a problem.”
To your health,
Joni
P.S. Important! This will only work if there are no holes in the bags.
(Awesome historical postscript to the Vaxxer cartoon from The Guardian discussing the Google Doodle that honored Jonas Salk on 28 October 2014:
In 1954, over 300,000 doctors, nurses, schoolteachers and other volunteers across the United States, Canada and Finland took part in one of the most complex and monumental medical trials in history. The plan was to test the effectiveness of a newly-developed vaccine for a disease that was devastating the lives of children across the US: polio.
It was a mammoth task – a double-blind experiment, in which 650,000 schoolchildren were given the vaccine, 750,000 were given a placebo, and over 400,000 children acted as a control group and were given neither. For taking part, each participant was given a sweet and a certificate proclaiming their role as a ‘Polio Pioneer’. The results, announced in 1955, were just as monumental: the vaccine was safe and effective. As a direct result of the development of the vaccine, polio was completely eradicated in the US by 1979.)