President Obama comes to Tampa tomorrow night, and on Wednesday morning he'll get a briefing at Cent Com at MacDill AFB regarding his strategy for "degrading and destroying" ISIS, or ISIL. (Would it be too much to decide on one specific name for this terrorist organization?)
Before he makes it to Tampa, however, he'll stop off in Atlanta to visit the the Centers for Disease Control. That's where he will announce plans to "dramatically boost the U.S. effort to mitigate the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, including greater involvement of the U.S. military," according to today's Wall Street Journal.
If you've been reading the stories or watching the news coverage about what's happening in places like Liberia, it's sort of frightening. "I could not possibly overstate the need for an urgent response," CDC Director Tom Frieden said after returning from a trip to West Africa last month. That reportedly lit a fire under the president, who realizes that he has to step up and use his bully pulpit to get our country and others to provide more doctors, supplies and portable hospitals to the region.
Obama reportedly will lobby many foreign leaders who will be in New York next week for the U.N. General Assembly to have them kick in funding for the U.N. and the World Health Organization, the organizations leading the effort in suppressing the virus.
The WHO has predicted that Ebola will kill 20,000 people within the next six months.
But the big concern is that the virus could mutate into an airborne form, which one U.S. scientist claims could lead to over a million people dying from the disease. According to the director of the WHO, Margaret Chan, there is not a single hospital bed available in Liberia for any newly infected individuals. Facilities are at full capacity, and resources are exhausted. The rest of the world needs to help the people of West Africa, before it gets worse for them, and for the rest of the world.
In other news....
Domestically, the papers are filled with reports about Hillary Clinton attending Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's last "Steak Fry," as the former First Lady and Secretary of State gets closer to announcing her candidacy for president. But while that was the sideshow to discussions about ISIS, Ray Rice and Roger Goodell on the Sunday morning shows, there was also this: Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee, two left-leaning members of Congress who rarely if ever are seen on cable/broadcast news programs, both had starring turns on TV yesterday morning. Well, "starring" is slightly hyberbolic. They each got five minutes on Meet The Press and Reliable Sources, respectively.