Via America Rising, the pause isn’t even the worst part. Turns out Arkansans have Miss Teen South Carolina representing them in the Senate.

This question is being put to him because he accused Tom Cotton in August of essentially being pro-Ebola, just as Cotton’s fiendish financier masters demand. Pryor made it an issue in the election so now here’s MSNBC letting him follow up by tossing him what they thought would be a softball. Oops. Pryor being Pryor, though, I wonder how much of this ummmmming is doofishness and how much is him hurriedly trying to calculate how a red-state Democrat should respond. Do you pander to conservatives by bashing O or do you pander to the liberals whom you desperately need to turn out?

Judging by the numbers, he should have chosen door number two:

I’m surprised at how high GOP confidence in the feds is — within the margin of error of a clear majority. As you can see from the 2005 data, partisan sympathies heavily influence one’s faith in the feds to handle an outbreak; on top of that, one of the recurring themes in commentary on America’s Ebola jitters over the past two weeks is that it’s partly a byproduct of diminished public trust in Obama’s competence. Put those two things together and you’d think Republican numbers here would be in the 30s or lower. Nope. Maybe the X factor is the difference in the diseases themselves. Bird flu can potentially spread very quickly, through the air; Ebola spreads slowly, through direct contact. Some of the greater cynicism about the government’s response circa 2005 may be explained by the fact that the threat of a pandemic from that virus was much greater.