Ever since President Obama has taken office, I feel a certain sense of calm. He is making reasoned, pragmatic decisions based on facts and not ideology. Why the left is hammering him for doing so i find to be disappointing. Remember liberals, we are the smart ones. Let's not pull a Bush and let our gut tell us what to do. We have to remember that we can be right on an issue and wrong on a policy. Obama gets it and it is truly calming to my existential angst.

Not all the time, but sometimes he needs to hammer the living hell out of his critics. Such is the case with the craziness about Guantanamo. He's closing the base. He said he would from the beginning (and so did McCain by the way). There are two groups of people that Obama has to open up a can of whoop-ass on to expose as ignorant morons.

First are those people who want to keep the base open. Really? I haven't heard one coherent argument in support of this. Even if you are pro torture, torturing them there is no different than here. Anything else? I'm really serious.

Ok, those people are a minority and maybe not representative of America. However the majority of Americans don't want detainees in the U.S. What? Why? Again, I have not heard one sane argument. Are people THIS AFRAID of these scary individuals? Since when have the American people been so spineless?

And what exactly are they thinking these detainees are going to do? It's not like these people are being released. They are going to super max prisons!!! So the majority of Americans are so afraid, they don't even want these people going to prisons in the United States? Again, I'm really serious. What's the argument they're making?

Are our prisons not able to hold people? Maybe that's the problem.

If you listen to the media or God love him Joe Biden, there's not going to be much left 28 days later.

But what have we really learned so far? Swine flu seems to be spreading, but not a lot of people seem to be dying. In fact, the World Health Organization has downgraded the number of deaths in Mexico from 168 to 16. That's a big difference seeing how we were all so afraid of swine flu (aka the H1N1 virus) primarily BECAUSE OF the mortality rate in Mexico.

There has been one confirmed death of swine virus in America - a Mexican toddler that was visiting the U.S. Any death is a tragedy, but as far as the flu goes, this one has not yet reached the deadliness of the seasonal flu. On average, 200,000 Americans are hospitalized with the seasonal flu every year and 36,000 die (Source). So if last week was an average week, close to 700 people died of the seasonal flu, 1 of the swine flu.

We don't have a large enough sample size to know if swine flu is more likely to kill you once you contract it than the seasonal flu. Given the low incidents and initial mortality rates though, one thing is becoming clear at this point. Statistically you are MUCH more likely to die today from seasonal flu than from swine flu. And probably more likely to die in a car wreck than either of those.