It’s been kind of disturbing watching the news coverage of swine flu escalate throughout the day. So in my attempt to save billions of human lives, I shall now link to CNN for the best advice on how to beat the pigs:

Health officials’ advice is to follow common-sense precautions: Wash your hands, stay home if you’re sick and listen to your local health authorities.

“Very frequent hand-washing is something that we talk about time and time again and that is an effective way to reduce transmission of disease,” Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Sunday at a White House briefing.

“If you’re sick, it’s very important that people stay at home. If your children are sick, have a fever and flu-like illness, they shouldn’t go to school. And if you’re ill, you shouldn’t get on an airplane or another public transport to travel. Those things are part of personal responsibility in trying to reduce the impact.”

The good news, for Americans at least, is that none of the cases in the U.S. have been fatal. It suggests that access to treatment helps quite a bit, though in the case of the couple in Kansas, the symptoms just weren’t that bad. So be safe and wash your hands!

from Ezra Klein:

Obama wants to save tens of billions of dollars by eliminating the [student loan] middlemen. Study after study shows that they increase cost and add no value. But some of those middlemen are in Nebraska. And for all Nelson’s deficit heroics, he’s not so concerned about the debt that he’d harm a local industry. He’s standing squarely against the reform. He’ll be a hero to the private student loan industry. Or, at least, he would’ve been:

An agreement struck between the president and House and Senate negotiators won’t give Nelson that chance. A process known as “reconciliation” allows budgetary measures to be moved through the Senate with a simple majority, rather than 60. Multiple congressional sources say that congressional Democrats have decided to use reconciliation to go after student-lending subsidies, specifically to get around Nelson.

Senator Nelson saw back during the stimulus debate that his contradictory obstruction brought him quite a bit of power and attention. He seemed to be positioning himself to do something very similar with student loan reform. Unfortunately, the gimmick appears to have worn out its welcome, and the poor guy ended up marginalizing himself.

From the previously linked HuffPo story:

The Nebraska Democrat has become the bane of liberal bloggers and other progressive activists for his insistence on pushing legislation in a more conservative direction.

How nuts is it that giving a multi-billion-dollar federal subsidy to businesses, which costs taxpayer money and adds to the deficit for no reason other than to subsidize businesses, is the “conservative” direction? The answer: really nuts.

This image has been doing the rounds, but best I can tell, this is the source. Note the request to preserve spending while cutting the ability to pay for it.