Got My Gushy Campaign Letter from Trump Yesterday. Did You Get Yours?

Everything is "great." Especially our "greatness." "America will triumph yet again." He came that close to saying MAGA.

The letter on White House stationery, with the man's childish black scrawl of a signature, is a campaign letter masquerading as notification from the IRS that federal money has been deposited in our bank account.

One sentence in his letter stood out: "Our top priority is your health and safety." Yeah, right, in the same week that he ordered meat-processing plants to stay open, which have already become death traps for those workers. Add his meandering "the states should reopen" mixed messaging and his wholly inept response to the whole pandemic from the beginning. We know what his top priority is: Getting his name on relief checks, as though he wrote them himself.

I'm considering which deserving candidates I can make donations to. It'll be people who promise to end this Trumpist nightmare.

Movement Grows in Boone Against Predatory Apartment Rental Practices

An AppState student named Dalton George took his concerns about "predatory" apartment rental application fees in Boone to the Town Council member Sam Furgiuele. George had compiled a list of seven grievances against high-volume rental companies which he thought were targeting college-age renters. His list of seven complaints eventually found their way into a resolution which Furgiuele presented for action to the Boone Town Council on April 21st. It passed unanimously. The resolution presented seven grievances:

WHEREAS, the Boone Town Council has been advised of a number of practices that it believes are predatory or unfair, but for which it lacks apparent authority to regulate, including but not limited to the following:

That landlords are charging as much as $800 per apartment in non- refundable fees, purportedly to pursue credit checks on prospective tenants and their parents, but may not actually be paying such high amounts for credit checks or in some cases checking credit with these funds at all;

That certain landlords do not publish or disclose either their actual rental charges and/or the additional application, credit check and other non- refundable fees they impose until the tenant is in the process of applying for housing, neither advising the tenant in advance of such fees so that fair comparison shopping can take place, nor allowing the tenant a way to determine if the amounts quoted are customary for the landlord or unique with respect to that particular applicant, thus leaving open questions regarding possible discrimination against potential tenants to whom the landlord might not wish to lease;

That it has become a practice in some multi-family complexes to impose a series of fines on tenants which are not disclosed or directly included in the leases, but at most incorporated by reference, the lease providing that the tenant agrees to abide by “rules and regulations promulgated by the management” which themselves are freely altered and impose exorbitant fines for such things as placing a pumpkin outside the tenant’s door at Halloween;

That some landlords have made it a practice to rent by the bedroom, but require each tenant to guarantee full payment of the monthly rent for an entire four-bedroom apartment, even though the tenant may not have any prior relationship or knowledge about the other tenants, also requiring the tenant’s parents to not only guarantee the individual tenant’s share of the full apartment rent, but also the other tenants’ shares;

That there are many multi-family housing complexes in Boone which have been built in flood zones and which have been subject to devastating flooding in which the personal possessions of tenants have been destroyed, but the tenants were not properly or effectively advised of the propensity for the property to flood, nor of the landlord’s refusal to take responsibility for damages caused to the tenant’s property by flooding until after the loss;

That some landlords are regularly deducting amounts from security deposits that represent charges for normal wear and tear; and

That many landlords are using leases which are so complex that no person untrained in the law is capable of deciphering their many predatory and one-sided provisions....

The resolution requests that Attorney General Josh Stein "investigate and take action to stop unfair and deceptive rental housing practices in the Town of Boone" and further appeals to Rep. Ray Russell and state Senator Deanna Ballard to "initiate amendments to the North Carolina Residential Rental Agreements Act and the North Carolina Tenant Security Deposit Act to prohibit or establish appropriate parameters and prohibitions addressing the aforesaid practices." Because there is no home rule in North Carolina, the Town Council can't take its own action to regulate unfair practices. It'll take action in Raleigh to fix the problems (and until we have another election, how likely is that?).

The passing of this resolution sparked a concurring outcry among Boone's college-age renters (and others), particularly after The Appalachian reported the news (see the comments) and most especially on the Appalachian State Classifieds Facebook page, which is one of the more active local forums. The abuse of young renters in Boone appears widespread if not entirely universal.

Sunday Morning Laughs

The uncannily spot-on impression by J-L Cauvin. Comedians are our town criers and our Greek choruses for the plague called "Trump."

"How To Medical," By Sarah Cooper

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.