Trumpism Finds a Willing Host in Gaston County

Commissioner Philbeck in white

The all-Republican Gaston County Commission, led by Chair Tracey Philbeck, is pushing in a very Trumpian way to encourage local businesses to defy Governor Cooper's shut-down order and is reportedly "exploring ways to sue Cooper over the restrictions." County government issued a statement that appeared to reopen the county for business at 5 p.m. yesterday.

But not so fast, Ralph. The county issued a clarifying statement, perhaps written by its county attorney, who's obviously less "Trumpy" than his bosses: “From a function standpoint, Gaston County Government will continue to follow all state laws, including Gov. Cooper’s executive order,” it said. “At no point would county leadership ask its staff or county residents to break the law.”

From a function standpoint.

From a different "function standpoint," Commish Chair Tracey Philbeck obviously likes grandstanding for the cameras as much as Trump does. And he intends to have the last word: “Legally they [the mayors of Gaston Co. municipalities] can’t and we can’t tell someone to break the law in an official government document,” Philbeck said in an interview. “But that’s why we wanted to also make clear that we support your right to work. We’re not going to stand in the way of people who want to work.”

Philbeck told reporters Wednesday that the commissioners’ reopening order position was based on relatively low coronavirus numbers in the county [140 infections with 3 deaths] and the availability of hospital capacity. Reopening, he said, would help save local businesses that have been decimated by Cooper’s “one-size-fits-all” restrictions. 

“If we continue the stay-at-home order, it will not have a good effect for Gaston County and we will maybe not have anything to come back to,” he told reporters Wednesday morning during a virtual press conference....

Philbeck told reporters the order he signed allows any business to reopen if they follow social distancing and hygiene protocols.

“We’re giving citizens an opportunity to make a choice,” he said. “The government denied them the opportunity to make a choice.”

Philbeck's "ill-conceived, comically executed and ultimately spineless political stunt" drew condemnation in a Charlotte Observer editorial:  "It’s political theater with real consequences. Businesses could endanger public health or risk penalty, all of which doesn’t appear to bother a commission chair who thought he was making a statement, but was really just making a spectacle of himself."

An Important Reason We Need Our Research Universities

Remdesivir, the drug that has shown early positive results for reducing the recovery time for patients with COVID-19, originated in the labs at the Gillings School of Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. The drug does not cure COVID-19 nor does it prevent infection, but it does seem to accelerate recovery.

“This is a game changer for the treatment of patients with COVID-19 and provides hope to many infected,” UNC epidemiologist Ralph Baric said.

About 20 coronavirus patients at Duke University Hospital participated in the first national tests. The patients were randomized to receive either the drug or a placebo, and both the doctor and patient were not allowed to know who received the therapy. They were all adults who had serious symptoms, such as breathing difficulties that require supplemental oxygen or a ventilator. The study was run by the National Institutes of Health and involved 1,063 hospitalized coronavirus patients around the world.

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.