We Have a Complete Dumbass for President

And a dangerous dumbass. When you encounter a headline like this one:

"Trump comments prompt doctors, and Lysol, to warn against injecting disinfectants"

The Body Count -- Rick Bright

A Reoccurring Feature on Who's Jumping Being Pushed Off Luxury Liner Trump

[Source: AP]
Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), said in a statement that he was summarily removed from his job on Tuesday and reassigned to a lesser role. His lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, called it “retaliation plain and simple.”

Controversy has swirled around the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine since Trump started promoting it from the podium in the White House briefing room.

BARDA is a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services created to counter threats from bioterrorism and infectious diseases. It has recently been trying to jump-start work on a vaccine for the coronavirus.

“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Bright, who has a doctoral degree in immunology, said in his statement, which was released by his lawyers.

“Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit,” Bright said.

“I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections,” he added.

Asked about Bright at yesterday's virus briefing and sideshow, Trump said he “never heard of him.”

“The guy says he was pushed out of a job,” Trump said. “Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. ... I don’t know who he is.”

Bright and his lawyers are requesting investigations by the HHS inspector general and by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that has as part of its charge the protection of government whistleblowers.

Waco

April 19, 1993 -- another day that will live in infamy. The day that some 76 followers of David Koresh, including 25 children, died in an assault by the FBI on the Koresh sect's compound near Waco, Texas.

Just watched the Paramount Network's mini-series "Waco" (which is streaming on Netflix), and over 20 years of assumptions and FBI falsehoods have been sufficiently swept away. The series was based on two books, "A Place Called Waco" by Branch Davidian survivor David Thibodeau, and "Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator," written by the FBI's Special Agent in Charge of Negotiations Gary Noesner, so the series has the advantage of inside information for dramatizing what went on inside the compound during the 51-day siege and also what went on between Agent Noesner, who was trying to coax Koresh to give up, and the FBI command structure whose superior fire power was a big hammer looking for every nail.

The FBI doesn't come off well, but even worse in this presentation were the macho cowboys in the ATF, who launched the whole tragedy by initially raiding the compound with guns blazing on February 28. The ATF was fighting bad publicity over the previous Ruby Ridge fiasco, when an ATF sniper killed Randy Weaver's wife, and they were itching for some grand show of efficient law enforcement to recoup their image. They'd even hired a press agent, according to the mini-series script, and without question they fired the first shots at Mount Carmel which led to the gun battle that killed four ATF agents and wounded a dozen more. That battle sealed the fate of Koresh and his followers. Law enforcement was motivated by vengeance as much as by upholding the law.

David Koresh was no saint -- he was an egotistical and probably unstable self-appointed prophet who had decided that only he could have sex with the women while all the other men following him had to remain celebate -- but was he a dangerous cult leader (emphasis on dangerous)? Probably not. He was obsessed with the end of days and the Book of Revelation and was amassing small arms at his compound, which drew the interest of the ATF, but the FBI appeared to be lying when it announced that Koresh was planning a mass suicide. They also obviously lied when they claimed that Koresh was abusing the children in the compound.

Hostage negotiator Noesner had reached a deal with Koresh, allowing him time to write a manifesto about the end of time. Koresh promised to give himself up when he had his manuscript finished, but the writing -- like all writing -- took longer than expected. The FBI honchos in charge grew increasingly frustrated, and forced the reassignment of Noesner, and with the one calming personality  gone that Koresh would talk to, the FBI unleashed hell. It appears that a combination of tear gas and flash grenades pumped into the building caused the devastating fire, although the FBI apparently maintains to this day that the fire was set by suicidal Branch Davidians.

North Carolina Is Bordered on the South and West By Governors Playing Russian Roulette

According to Jeffrey Billman and the Indy Week Primer, "Confirmed coronavirus cases in North Carolina are doubling about every 12 days—which, all things considered, is good news. When cases first started popping up in early March, they were doubling every two or three days. At this pace, we’ll clip 100,000 cases right around June 1—we’re a little under 7,000 now—but the important thing is that the pace of increase is slowing."

We hope that Governor Roy Cooper won't follow the weak waffling of governors to the south and west of North Carolina who are caving to pressure from Trumpists, who parade their loud opinion that the virus is a bunch of nothing. "Open us up!" they're screaming, and some governors are complying. Foolishly complying? Time will tell.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced that—despite the state's missing its reopening benchmarks— gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, cosmetologists, hair designers, nail care artists, aestheticians, their respective schools, and massage therapists can reopen this Friday. Restaurants and movie theaters can reopen on Monday. Kemp had already reopened the state's beaches over two weeks ago.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee is allowing the “vast majority” of businesses in 89 of Tennessee’s 95 counties to reopen on May 1. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster is reopening South Carolina beaches as of noon today, along with "non-essential" retail stores.

They're listening to people who literally don't know what they're screaming about or people who don't give a royal shit, and never have, about anything but their immediate wants. I'd prefer to listen to people who are deep into the science of a pandemic and who have spent some quality time examining the dynamics of this particular pandemic.

Like New York Times science reporter Donald G. Mcneil Jr.:

I’m talking to experts. I’m looking at the other pandemics I’ve covered. I’m talking to medical historians and making predictions based on data. And so I think a lot of people think that by May or June or August, we’re going to return to something like normalcy. But all the experts I talk to say, no, that’s a fantasy....

...if we all tried to come out at once, everything would look cool for about three weeks. And a week or two after that the emergency rooms would start to fill again, and people would start to die again. Flattening the curve is a notion that people love, but when we say we’re flattening the curve, no, we’re plateauing at a very high level of the curve. That means a steady rate of deaths. So what we want is to see the lockdown last until we get back down to close to what the normal baseline rate of deaths is....

It's going to be a long game of something Mcneil calls "the hammer and the dance" -- the "hammer" being lockdown and social isolation, followed by periods of "dancing" back out into public to tempt the virus to rage back. Historians keep pointing out that it was the second wave of the 2018 influenza pandemic that was the most deadly and devastating.

So let's hope Roy Cooper hangs tough with the ReOpenNC faction of the NC Republican Party.

Who Is Piers Morgan and What Did He Say About Trump?

Piers Morgan, I gather, is a kind of media celebrity, especially in Great Britain, where he has a regular TV show aggressively interviewing government officials and others, but he used to have a show on CNN, and -- more saliently for what he said about Trump -- he won the 7th season of Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice," was a constant cheerleader for Trump during the 2016 campaign, got the first international interview with Trump after the election, and he's one of only 47 people that Trump follows on Twitter.

So ... ouch:





Knowing that Trump followed his Twitter feed, Piers Morgan then poured the selfsame gall out into social media, attaching the CNN segment to the following tweet, evidently and pointedly for Trump's edification:

“Mr President @realDonaldTrump, you won’t want to watch this, but I hope you do,” Morgan wrote. “Please drop your angry, petty, disingenuous, blame-gaming, self-aggrandising daily briefing antics & start being a proper wartime president.”

This was just yesterday, the same day that Trump, at his daily I'm-So-Great-and-Take-No-Responsibility press briefing, turned the boilers up on his "angry, petty, disingenuous, blame-gaming, self-aggrandising" antics, which included verbally lashing a female CBS reporter for asking why he spent all of February downplaying the virus instead of preparing the country for a devastating pandemic.

It's amazing to me that Trump even has friends. It's not amazing to me that he doesn't listen to them. He's incapable of changing, of growing, of rising above himself, of even expressing an ounce of sympathy or understanding for the people who are dying of the virus he refused to take seriously until it was too late.

So I Googled "Donald Trump" + "Adderall"

When it's still too cold to get into the garden, and you can't really go anywhere else in this Plague Year, you decide to check out the rumors. Believe it or not, I'd only run across the accusation that Trump snorts the amphetamine Adderall a couple of times, and in no detail, in sources that mentioned there was a rumor without giving it any credence, because, after all, Roseanne's former husband Tom Arnold was a major source for that rumor, and he was no authority to launch a slander campaign.

But I remember remarking on Donald Trump's persistent sniffing myself, way back during the Republican presidential debates in 2015 and 2016, leading up to the primaries. I noted Trump's persistent, heavy, prolonged sniffs that were also very wet, like I am of a morning when my allegies are well deployed. People were saying on social media that those sniffles could be a result of snorting something.

Trevor Noah devoted a whole segment to Trump's slurred speech but hilariously chalked it up to #DentureDonald:






Who can forget a famous dry-mouth moment?





I don't know the symptoms for sniffing Adderall. Maybe Trump exhibits them. Or maybe he's got textbook ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), which is also a reoccurring rumor with coincidenally a stronger mountain of credible evidence backing it up.

San Francisco psychiatrist John Kruse reviewed the anecdotal rumors about Trump and ADHD:

Reports going back decades assert that doctors prescribed Mr. Trump phentermine. The FDA approved the stimulant medication phentermine for weight-control, but physicians also prescribe it off-label to treat ADHD. Phentermine prescriptions receive less government scrutiny than more tightly controlled stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall. During the presidential campaign two years ago, pundits extensively discussed Mr. Trump’s sniffing, grimacing and hyperactivity....

But Kruse takes us to a different set of Trump behaviors, with an entirely different presidential affect that gives Kruse hope that Trump is indeed on something like Adderall, and an even bigger hope he stays on it. Kruse, like any licensed therapist, has eyes to see what's obvious:

I examined video footage of the border wall Presidential Address [Jan. 8, 2019], comparing it to his other presidential performances. Mr. Trump’s pupils are substantially larger during the Address than during other speeches.... However, even more blatant than a change in the size of his pupils, during the Address he made many fewer head and body movements, many fewer hand gestures, twitched less, and uttered more organized sentences, in a calmer cadence, than he displays elsewhere. While some of this behavior may be in direct response to the structure of reading from a tele-prompter, we have certainly seen him go off track in other speeches, despite help from a tele-prompter. The combination of simultaneous physiologic, behavioral, and cognitive changes in the president’s behavior strongly suggest that during the Address he used stimulant medications in order to behave more coherently.

Kruse's bottomline: Adderall might be making Trump more coherent, not less:

Most people with ADHD have a myriad of thoughts ping-ponging around in their head at any instant. With a proper dose of stimulant medication they can focus on one item at a time and consider it at more depth and leisure. The frenetic behavior, the bouncing back and forth, the impulsivity, the self contradictions of ADHD are all a result of being unable to control attention, and when someone gains control of their attention, they can process their environment and their own thoughts in a more organized, calm manner.

Kruse's summary diagnosis of Trump knocked my compression socks clean off:

Stimulant medications help many adults with ADHD improve their focus on, and engagement with, their worlds. Those who seem most “over-stimulated” to begin with (but are actually under-stimulated) are often the patients who respond most powerfully to ADHD medications. It is not surprising that people have a hard time wrapping their head around medications that produce hyperactivity, rapid and disjointed speech and impulsive behavior in some people and alleviate it in others. Yet Mr. Trump, his immediate circle, and the whole country will benefit from effective treatment for his ADHD. Rather than riffing on his sniffing, maybe we should be supporting his snorting.

If any of this is mostly true, what in the world are we going to do? And what was the purpose of the 25th Amendment?

Senator Dick Burr -- An Accomplished Money-Grubber

Appreciate Jeffrey Billman's IndyWeek Primer for pointing out an article in ProPublica about how Senator Burr sold his DC townhouse to a high-powered lobbyist for what appears to be an above-market price.

 

“Burr sold the small townhouse, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, for what, by some estimates, was an above market price—$900,000—to a team led by lobbyist John Green. That is tens of thousands of dollars above some estimates of the property’s value by tax assessors, a real estate website and a local real estate agent. The sale was done off-market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.”

“The legality of this sale hinges on whether the home was purchased for fair market value. If it was purchased for more than that, it would be considered a gift. Gifts of significant value from lobbyists are generally banned by Senate ethics rules, and those that aren’t are typically required to be publicly disclosed. Neither Burr nor Green disclosed any such gifts. Gifts that are intended to influence official actions are illegal.”

“Burr, it seems, has not gotten the memo that 50 percent of North Carolinians want him to resign. He hasn’t even listened to Fox News darling Tucker Carlson, who said ‘there is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis’ and called for Burr to quit as well.”

Hoo Boy! Wisconsin Gives Trump the Finger

Jill Karofsky

Donald Trump endorsed Republican Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in the Wisconsin vote last week, the man that former Republican Governor Scott Walker had appointed to the state's high court, and Trump tweeted on Election Day a week ago, "get out and vote NOW” for Kelly. Instead, the voters of Wisconsin, much aggrieved by their Supreme Court, which refused to delay the election in the midst of a pandemic, voted for Kelly's Democratic opponent Jill Karofsky. Last update I've seen said Karofsky was leading Kelly by 11 points.

Republican voter-suppression maneuvering leading up to last week's vote is now generally seen as a major miscalculation. People do finally get fed up with the partisan games.

We trust it'll be the same in North Carolina, come November, since we've been seeing Republican boss Phil Berger disparaging easier voting and we've known him for years as a major hindrance to greater ballot access. The North Carolina state Board of Elections has moved to make requests for mail ballots available through an online portal, and the executive director of the SBOE has recommended reducing the requirement for two witnesses on absentee ballots to just one -- but Phil Berger has already signaled his opposition.

Just another brick in his wall. And one more reason for North Carolina voters to be fed up TOO with the partisan games. The Trumpist Party is looking ever more toxic.

When Your Own Children Can't Stand Your Morals

A must-read is Jane Mayer's new lengthy profile of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chief enabler of Trump in the US Congress. Like most New Yorker pieces, it's exhaustive -- but what else are we going to do in a Plague Year but read long pieces about a thoroughly despicable top Senate enabler of the worst president in history?

Intensely interesting factoids in the piece like this: McConnell's three daughters have completely deserted their father's politics:

McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the “predatory economic power” of “banks and billionaires.” One of its targets has been Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly thirty million dollars to campaigns and super pacs aligned with McConnell. Last year, Take On Wall Street condemned Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and argued that the company’s campaign donations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”

Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The husband of McConnell’s middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.

All three daughters declined to comment, as did their mother, Sherrill Redmon, whom McConnell divorced in 1980. After the marriage ended, Redmon, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, left Kentucky and took over a women’s-history archive at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she collaborated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. In an e-mail, Steinem told me that Redmon rarely spoke about McConnell, and noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own.” Steinem’s understanding was that McConnell’s political views had once been different. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she wrote. (Redmon is evidently working on a tell-all memoir.)

McConnell's ex-wife's "tell-all memoir" will maybe make a good stocking-stuffer for next Christmas.