Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Hey Kids, it's Snifty McGrifter! Idol of the 63 Million! The white power man with the orange powder face! The man with his all tiny fingers on all the bigly buttons! Now, don't you fret, "All is well!"

The House Passed a Modest Bill To Lower Drug Prices-- Yesterday, Thanks To Conservative Greed, Moscow Mitch And Trump, Drugs Prices Went Up Across The Board

What Blows Up Must Come Down by Nancy Ohanian

Keeping drug prices high has paid off well for conservatives. Both Republicans and faux-Dems-- like former House Majority Leader and anti-health care lobbyist Dick Gephardt, now a DNC Super-delegate who will help select the next Democratic nominee— have become wealthy from the PhRMA bribes. Drug manufacturers-- like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen, Abbvie, Merck, AstraZeneca, Nephron, Novartis, Sanofi, Allergan, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline and Novo Nordisk and Abbott Labs have spent millions of dollars bribing politicians and buying scumbag lobbyists like Gephardt.

In the last cycle, here are the dozen currently-serving House members who took the most in bribes from Big PhRMA in just that 2 year period. In a just world they would all be rotting in prison instead of keeping the cost of medicine high. Do you ever vote for any of these criminal characters? (The number in brackets is the amount each has taken since 1990.)

• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $214,150 ($839,550)
• Greg Walden (R-OR)- $207,500 ($650,603)
• Kevin Brady (R-TX)- $163,550 ($457,201)
• Richard Neal (D-MA)- $127,000 ($399,600)
• Linda Sanchez (D-CA)- $123,004 ($335,281)
• Frank Pallone (D-NJ)- $117,200 ($698,170)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- $111,556 ($305,206)
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- $96,000 ($720,572)
• Brett Guthrie (R-KY)- $95,000 ($401,862)
• John Shimkus (R-IL)- $94,500 ($616,485)
• Brad Schneider (New Dem-IL)- $94,268 ($211,133)
• Anna Eshoo (D-CA)- 90,950 ($893,315)

Although Fred Upton (R-MI) didn’t make it into the top 12 last cycle, since 1990 he’s taken the biggest share of PhRMA bribes of anyone currently serving in the House-- and is the single biggest culprit in the efforts to keep drug prices high for the American people. The 10 worst currently serving senators, each of whom has gobbled up some of the biggest portions in PhRMA bribes in their political careers are Mitt Romney (R-UT- $899,718), Moscow Mitch (R-KY- $860,313), Richard Burr (R-NC- $855,451), Robert Melendez (D-NJ- $727,573), Roy Blunt (R-MO- $659,140), Patty Murray (D-WA- $592,527), Bob Casey (D-PA- $572,534), Tom Carper (D-DE- $515,809), Chuck Schumer (D-NY- $485,779) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN- $467,402). If these politicians-- and the executives and lobbyists on the other side of the transactions-- were in prison, American drug prices would be less than half of what they are now.

I take a drug called Vimpat for neuropathy, a common side effect after chemotherapy cancer treatments. Most insurance plans, including Medicare Part-D, do not cover it and it costs, on average $1,126.19 a month. Dick Gephardt has made certain that there are no generic versions available. I bought some in Thailand recently, via Abbott Labs for around $300 a month. Big saving, although that’s still $3,600 year.

Reporters Michael Erman and Carl O’Donnell, writing for Reuters Tuesday, broke an exclusive story: Drugmakers from Pfizer to GlaxoSmithKline to hike U.S. prices on over 200 drugs. In fact most of the big drug firms that bribe American politicians “are planning to hike U.S. list prices on more than 200 drugs in the United States on Wednesday, according to drugmakers and data analyzed by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors. Nearly all of the price increases will be below 10%, and around half of them are in the range of 4 to 6%, said 3 Axis co-founder Eric Pachman. The median price increase is around 5%, he said. More price increases are expected to be announced later this week, which could affect the median and range.”

Soaring U.S. prescription drug prices are expected to again be a central issue in the presidential election. President Donald Trump, who made bringing them down a core pledge of his 2016 campaign, is running for re-election in 2020.

…Pfizer will hike prices on more than 50 drugs, including its cancer treatment Ibrance, which is on track to bring in nearly $5 billion in revenue this year, and rheumatoid arthritis drug Xeljanz.

Pfizer spokeswoman Amy Rose confirmed the company’s planned price increases. She said the company plans to increase the list prices on around 27% of its portfolio in the United States by an average of 5.6%.

Of the medicines with increases, she said 43% of them are sterile injectibles, and many of those increases are less than $1 per product.

GlaxoSmithKline said it will raise prices on more than 30 drugs. The company will raise prices on the blockbuster respiratory treatments it delivers through its Ellipta inhaler, its recently acquired cancer drug Zejula and on several products in its HIV-focused ViiV joint venture, according to 3 Axis Advisors. Price increases ranged between 1% and 5%.

Sanofi said it will raise prices on around 10 of its drugs, with hikes ranging between 1% and 5%. The drugmaker noted the increases are in line with its commitment to not raise prices above medical inflation.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd raised prices on more than 15 drugs, in some cases by more than 6%, according to 3 Axis Advisors. A Teva spokesperson said the company regularly reviews prices in the context of market conditions, availability and cost of production.

…Ian Spatz, a senior adviser at consulting firm Manatt Health, said that drugmakers could be holding to relatively low price hikes in an attempt to stay out of politicians’ crosshairs. Trump, for instance, targeted Pfizer after a proposed round of price increases in 2018, saying in a tweet that the drugmaker “should be ashamed.”

“I’m sure many manufacturers are interested in making sure they are not called out on a large list price increase,” Spatz said.

The United States, which leaves drug pricing to market competition, has higher prices than in other countries where governments directly or indirectly control the costs, making it the world’s most lucrative market for manufacturers.

Trump, a Republican, has struggled to deliver on a pledge to lower drug prices before the November 2020 election. His administration recently proposed a rule to allow states to import prescription drugs from Canada.

The administration had previously scrapped an ambitious policy that would have required health insurers to pass billions of dollars in rebates they receive from drugmakers to Medicare patients.

The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, passed a bill earlier in December that would cap prices for the country’s most expensive drugs based on international prices and penalize drugmakers that do not negotiate with the Medicare insurance program for seniors. Trump has threatened to veto the bill, saying it would undermine access to lifesaving medicines.

Trump won’t have to veto it since Moscow Mitch has refused to allow it— or even more modest plans to be debated, let alone voted on. Michael Owens is running for a congressional seat in the suburbs south and southwest of Atlanta. The current congressman, corrupt Blue Dog David Scott, is perfectly content to see drug prices go up and up-- as long as he gets his cut. Owens, who is campaigning on Medicare-for-All, noted recently that he is personally allergic to shellfish and very aware of the surging prices of an Epipen-- from $94 in 2007 to $700 today. A few weeks ago he told me about his own life or death decision. “Do I pay $2,100 dollars (one for home, one for work and one for my backpack) or do I just try my luck with a $13.00 pack of Benadryl and hope that it gets into my bloodstream in time?… I need Epipens, but I also need a place to live… It’s time to stop the greed, and stand firmly on the side of saving more lives. Our tax money is used by highly profitable, private drug companies to research and develop medicines, and it is time our investment goes back into PROVIDING PUBLIC HEALTHCARE!

Heidi Sloan, a Democratic Socialist, running for a central Texas congressional seat against anti-healthcare crooked Republican Roger Williams, took a less specific point of view, expanding it out to cover a broader range of issues important to the people she seeks to represent in Congress. "I think a lot of the resistance to socialists versus progressives stems from a resentment about purity-- that when socialists insist on a framework that addresses structural issues, when we won't settle for half-measures, we're engaging in purity politics and hurting the left. That critique ignores history, as we would not currently have Donald Trump in office if the Democratic Party had not sent a corporate neoliberal to beat him. Centrists who have troublingly scarce ties or adversarial relationships with working people, labor, and marginalized communities should be criticized because we as a party must have high standards for leadership. We insist on high standards because it is what the working class deserves, and because we recognize that we cannot win unless we have the courage to demand what we actually want instead of what we think they will let us have."

Pelosi's Drug Pricing Plan Is Weak And Likely To Get Weaker Before It Ever Passes... If It Ever Passes

Pelosi's long-awaited drug-pricing plan was finally made public yesterday. Key non-policy top-lines:

• Republicans immediately started calling it "socialist" before reading it
• Progressives have noted that it's quite a bit less than what was promised
• Moscow Mitch butt-boy John Thune (R-ND) said it will be dead on arrival if it passes the House this fall.

The fairly weak plan-- albeit just as hated by the GOP and Big Pharma as a real plan would be-- gives Medicare the job of negotiating prices on 25 (instead of 250) commonly used drugs. By targeting only the most commonly used drugs, Pelosi-- who should be fired by San Francisco voters in 2020-- is purposely leaving people who take less common drugs, out to dry, especially since those are the drugs that are usually prohibitively expensive. (McConnell said if Pelosi's plan passes the House he will refuse to allow a vote on it in the Senate. "Socialist price controls," he lisped, "will do a lot of left-wing damage to the healthcare system. And of course we’re not going to be calling up a bill like that.")

The corrupt conservative New Dems, who are in part financed by the pharmaceutical companies, are siding with Trump to water down all proposals as much as possible. That would have been a good reason to strat the process with a really strong proposal, like Lloyd Doggett's, rather than a sad little puny plan like Pelosi's. If if Republicans and their New Dem allies watered down Doggett's plan, it would probably still be better than the pablum Pelosi came up with. Pelosi put herself in a position where any compromises at all will result in a completely meaningless bill that does virtually nothing, the goal of the Republicans and Big PhRMA.

The main thrust of the plan will allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on as many as 250 of the most expensive drugs, including insulin, per year and apply those discounts to private health plans across the U.S, according to a legislative summary distributed to lawmakers.

The plan will also establish an international pricing index that is supposed to bring drug prices in line with what other nations pay and penalize pharmaceuticals companies that refuse to negotiate with the government or fail to reach any drug pricing agreement. The penalty will start at 65% of the gross sales of the drug in question and increase by 10% each quarter the manufacturer doesn’t reach an agreement, according to the summary.

Pelosi’s proposal also will:

• penalize pharmaceutical companies that raise the price of their drugs faster than inflation
• create an out-of-pocket maximum of $2,000 for Medicare beneficiaries
• and reinvest savings from negotiated prices on finding new treatments at NIH.

Bernie's platform is what Congress should be looking at, rather than Pelosi's pre-compromised plan. Bernie:

The giant pharmaceutical and health insurance lobbies have spent billions of dollars over the past decades to ensure that their profits come before the health of the American people. We must defeat them, together. That means:

• Joining every other major country on Earth and guaranteeing health care to all people as a right, not a privilege, through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program.

And to lower the prices of prescription drugs now, we need to:

• Allow Medicare to negotiate with the big drug companies to lower prescription drug prices with the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act.
• Allow patients, pharmacists, and wholesalers to buy low-cost prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized countries with the Affordable and Safe Prescription Drug Importation Act.
• Cut prescription drug prices in half, with the Prescription Drug Price Relief Act, by pegging prices to the median drug price in five major countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan.

Why should Democrats in Congress compromise with the pharmaceutical industry, the way Pelosi is doing? On Wednesday, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley made a case for giving them some rough treatment. "Purdue Pharma had a big plan," he wrote. Hook people on opioids like OxyContin. Lean on groups like the World Health Organization to look the other way. And then turn their backs on the victims when people became addicted and started dying. That's the opioid crisis in America and it's a signal that health care in our country is in grave danger." It's a multi-pronged assault:

• Companies like Purdue get people hooked on their drugs, then try to weasel out of responsibility for a crisis they helped cause.
• Other drug companies develop life-saving medications, but then jack up the prices and hold patients hostage to their profits.
• They bankroll Republican campaigns, funding people who promise to cut regulations on health care and protect Big Pharma.
• Industry executives, lobbyists, and insiders are appointed to major positions of power, who spend their days undermining our health care system.

"Americans can't afford for Big Pharma to call the shots anymore. I've proposed solutions like barring them from gouging Americans with prices far higher than they charge in other countries, and making them pay for an opioid treatment surge."

He then called on Americans to "help hold Big Pharma accountable for what they've done" and suggests electing Democrats in 2020 is how we do that. I understand where he's coming from, but electing Democrats who kowtow to Big Pharma and Wall Street doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. In his own state, one of the worst corporate whores in Congress, Blue Dog Kurt Schrader, is being challenged by Milwaukie mayor Mark Gamba. "The Pharmaceutical industry in America has been allowed prey on Americans for decades now," Gamba told us this morning. "This latest revelation regarding opioids, and the industry’s active participation in addicting Americans in their moment of suffering is in keeping with their long standing attitude of wringing as much profit out of people during their time of illness as possible. They do so, often, regardless of the actual efficacy or detrimental side effects involved. They also have no qualms about jacking up prices to bankruptcy inducing levels for critical life saving drugs. As Americans we pay dramatically higher prices for the same drug that people in other countries are using. Just google 'insulin price comparisons worldwide' if you want hard numbers. This means that often Americans go without their life saving drugs, and they die. When I’m elected, one of my top priorities will be to pass H.R. 1384 the House version of the Medicare for All act so that prescription drug prices are negotiated, just like they are in most of the rest of the world. It is high time that our entire medical system be focused on providing the best care possible, for all the people, at a reduced cost."

The thermometer above is for 2020 congressional candidates-- like Mark Gamba-- who are running Medicare-For-All-powered election campaigns, campaigns that aren't just passively in support of single payer but are actively talking with voters about it. Please click on it and give what you can.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Yup. The White House is now the Trump Crime Family Social Club. Would it shock you if Sammy The Bull Gravano was the doorman at 1600?

Drugs? You bet. The pill-popping wiseguys and made men (and women) of the Trump Administration now refer to house doctor Ronny Jackson as "The Candyman" as they've brought government drug abuse to new heights. Drugs explain a lot. Just think of that the next time you see Kellyanne, Sarah, or any of 'em yapping on your TV. It's worth noting, too, that we pay any White House drug habits with our hard-earned tax dollars. Criminals? In the White House? Not the first time, but now it's apparently a qualification for "service." Rapists? Can there be any doubt? We've heard more than enough rumors and the way they all so eagerly supported Roy Moore speaks volumes.

Yup. When Señor Trumpanzee was talking about such things being characteristic of Mexicans as he announced his candidacy, he was really just speaking code for himself and his people. These are not "the best people" after all. I'm shocked. Shocked I tell ya!

Trump And His Toxic Regime Aren't Normal-- But "Normal" Has Been Wretched For Too Many Americans

Trump doesn't tell the truth about anything. He never has. He's lied his way through life. And the video above, one of many showing him claiming to be "the least racist person" in the whole wide world, is just another flat out lie. Trump is a disgusting, vile racist, a disgrace for the United States. And most Americans finally see it. A poll commissioned by the Associated Press found that "more than half of Americans (57%), including large majorities of blacks and Hispanics," say that Señor Trumpanzee "is a racist. More than half think his policies have made things worse for Hispanics and Muslims, and nearly half say they’ve made things worse for African Americans." Only 21% of Republicans agree with normal people about Trump's racism.

This morning best-selling author Kurt Eichenwald, explained on Twitter why he quit Newsweek. And the base of the story is Trump's incapacitating drug use. Happy to share:

According to medical records obtained by Newsweek, Trump was diagnosed with a “metabolic imbalance” in 1982 by Dr. Joseph Greenberg, a Manhattan endocrinologist. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know the full meaning of Greenberg’s findings. “Metabolic imbalance” is a catch-all phrase for different conditions and, in itself, is equivalent of a diagnosis of “heart problem.” There are electrolyte insufficiencies, anaerobic imbalances, acid imbalances, and an assortment of related disorders that can have serious health consequences. According to a 2007 peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Managed Care, patients with underlying mental illnesses have a higher incidence of this syndrome.

During the campaign, Trump released a letter from Dr. Harold Bornstein stating that he had been the then-candidate’s physician since 1980 and that there had been no significant medical problems throughout that time. The letter did not reveal that Trump had a second doctor during that time who had diagnosed him with a potentially serious condition.

The medical records and interviews with former officials with the Trump Organization reveal that Greenberg gave Trump a prescription for amphetamine derivatives in 1982 to treat his metabolic problem; the records show that Trump continued taking the drugs for a number of years and the former officials said that Trump stopped using them in 1990 at the latest.

The derivatives were diethylpropion, known under its brand name as tenuate dospan. These drugs are designed for short-term use; studies have concluded that patients can avoid developing a dependence on the drug if they take it for 25 weeks or less. But Trump continued downing the pills for years. According to two people-- someone who said Trump would consider him a friend and a former Trump executive-- the then-real estate developer boasted that the diethylpropion gave him enormous energy and helped him concentrate. A former Trump executive claimed to have picked up the medication while running errands for the boss. This person said the prescription, for 75 milligrams of diethylpropion a day, was filled at least for a time at a Duane Reade drugstore on 57th Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from Trump Tower. The executive said, like many celebrities, Trump used an alias for the prescription.

According to the Toxicology Data Network at the National Institutes of Health, diethylpropion has a high risk of dependency and chronic abuse-- such as taking it for years-- can cause delusions, paranoia, and hyperactivity. Studies in medical journals also report it can result in sleeplessness and impulse control problems, characteristics Trump demonstrated throughout the campaign and in the weeks since his inauguration.

Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, acknowledged that Trump used them as diet pills for a few days in the early 1980s. However, the medical records contradict the assertion of the length of time Trump used the drugs and photographs of Trump from 1982 show him to be quite slender. In a telephone call from Newsweek, Bornstein, Trump’s current doctor, said he would only answer questions if I could identify the location of Mount Sinai. Assuming he was referring to the world-renowned hospital, I replied “Manhattan.” He said that was incorrect, and asked the question again. I asked if he meant the actual Mount Sinai and he said he had not specified anything. I replied Mount Sinai was in Egypt, in the Sinai Peninsula. He said that was wrong and hung up. (While Mount Sinai is in Egypt, the location of the Mount Sinai described in the Bible as the location where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, if that is what Bornstein meant, is the subject of debate among religious scholars.)

According to the former Trump executives and the person Trump considers a friend, his drug use was widely discussed within the company as symptoms of possible abuse began to  emerge. Trump had always been aggressive-- sometime brutal-- in business as well as loose with the truth, but in the late 1980s, things had become much worse. While former employees said he had often been thoughtful and caring to his staff, he suddenly exhibited abusive behavior that at times seemed irrational. His self-aggrandizement grew to delusions of grandeur, his thin skin thinned more, his decisions grew more reckless. While he had always been a liar when it was convenient, he sputtered greater numbers of falsehoods at an alarming rate and seemed to believe them. When previously he would speak in sexist ways that were fairly typical in businesses during the early 1980s, toward the end of the decade he seemed to have no filter and openly said far more inappropriate things about women.

The worst impact of this recklessness may have been on his business; before the late 1980s, Trump usually focused on one major project at a time to ensure everything met his exacting standards. By the end of the decade, his reckless shopping spree was legion: he borrowed billions to open one Atlantic City casino after another, launching another one before any had turned a profit and ultimately creating a business model where he was competing with himself. As the scaffolding under his gaming business started collapsing, he borrowed even more money to buy his own airline. All of those late-1980s businesses flopped, sending Trump companies into multiple bankruptcies. Trump stopped the diethylpropion completely in 1990 under the supervision of a doctor, a former executive with his company said (ending the drug after long-term use causes serious withdrawal problems.) There is no evidence that Trump ever began using them again and, according to people who knew him throughout the 1990s, he returned to his arrogant, aggressive, self-aggrandizing, yet far more reasonable self.

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias went to Trump's other Achilles heel: the overwhelming, unprecedented corruption. Sure, Kushner is integral to that, but that was Trump's modus operandi long before Kushner was even born, back when Trump and Kushner's crooked father were ripping off anyone they could sucker into a deal. Yglesias feels the Democrats can win back Congress by focussing on Trump's corruption, including his "exploitation of loopholes in American conflict of interest law," his collusion with Putin-- "itself just one element in a vast nesting doll of shady dealings and opaque finances that congressional Republicans are helping Trump keep under wraps"-- and a kind of personal corruption that has more Americans daily convinced, correctly, that Trump "is on the take in outrageous ways."

The potential for serious corruption was always implicit in Trump’s presidential bid. We have had wealthy presidents before. But the Bushes, Kennedys, and Roosevelts were heirs to large, diversified fortunes consisting of stocks and bonds that could be placed into blind trusts in relatively straightforward ways.

...There is nothing blind about his finances-- his business empire is merely managed on a day-to-day basis by his adult sons, with whom he is in regular contact and who also work as leading members of his political operation.

His daughter and son-in-law serve as high-ranking officials in the White House, he operates a hotel in the nation’s capital that serves as an informal headquarters for his administration, and he spends a majority of his weekends at his private resorts in Florida, Virginia, and New Jersey.

Some of the grifting that results from this is almost comical, as in the periodic stories about the Secret Service spending thousands of dollars at a time renting golf carts from clubs that the president owns.

But lining his pockets with vast sums of public money is the least of the problems with Trump’s conduct in this regard. The real issue is that by joining one of Trump’s private clubs, wealthy individuals are putting cash directly in the president’s pocket while also gaining access to him. Trump seems to regularly-- and quite openly-- poll Mar-a-Lago members for their thoughts on the issues of the day. But it’s also an opportunity for more subtle lobbying in unprecedented ways.

Republicans are, in a curious way, often less vulnerable to standard money-in-politics corruption narratives. There’s always a solid baseline case that the reason the party of business and small government is making business-friendly regulatory decisions is ideological rather than pecuniary.

Trump’s regressive tax bill, for example, has almost certainly been a huge financial windfall to his club members. But to suggest a corrupt motive for a Republican president to push a regressive tax bill ignores the fact that all Republican politicians for the past couple of generations have pushed regressive tax bills. That Trump used to promise that he would raise taxes on the rich only to flip-flop later is striking, but ultimately not evidence of corruption.

...Politicians have been bribed in the past, of course. But traditionally, to pull it off requires a level of subterfuge that is itself illegal and courts detection. Bribe money cannot be reported as such to the IRS, but hidden untaxed income-- the proverbial cash in the freezer-- has a way of getting you caught.

Trump owns dozens of legitimate businesses, however, so bribe payments can be duly reported to the IRS as hotel rentals or real estate investments or whatever else. And he’s broken with decades of precedent by declining to make his tax returns available to the public, while all his financial disclosure forms reveal is that he owns a lot of shell companies named after himself.

One of the cardinal rules of American election law is that politicians cannot take campaign funds for personal use. That’s a critical line between a legitimate contribution and an illegitimate bribe. Trump, however, has erased this line. This weekend, he’s expected to pop down to Mar-a-Lago not only to relax and charge the government for use of his golf carts but also to appear at fundraisers for the RNC and his reelection campaign.

For a politician to personally pocket campaign contributions is a serious crime, but hosting RNC fundraisers at Trump-owned properties completely eviscerates the spirit of those laws. Meanwhile, taking cues from the top, a general tendency toward poor ethics is spiraling down throughout the government.

Trump’s corruption is contaminating everything

An early Trump administration controversy that now seems almost quaint came when presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway used a television news appearance from the White House grounds to tout Ivanka Trump’s shoe brand. It wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but this kind of low-level legal violation keeps happening in the Trump era, right up to an apparent Hatch Act violation from Jared Kushner as he touted Brad Parscale’s appointment as campaign manager of the Trump 2020 reelection bid.

But the list gets longer and contains more serious violations:

• US intelligence agencies have reports of multiple foreign governments discussing ways to use Kushner’s business interests to compromise his work for the federal government.
• This week, four political appointees at the Commerce Department lost their jobs after they flunked background checks.
• Even as Ben Carson’s tenure at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was facing an inspector general investigation over improper involvement of the Carson family in public business, Carson apparently demoted a career staffer after she objected to his plan to spend $31,000 on a dining set for his office.
• Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was caught improperly accepting Wimbledon tickets and charging the public for his wife’s travel.
• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is flying first-class at public expense so he could avoid having unpleasant interactions with fellow passengers.

These kinds of problems will only grow worse the longer Trump’s own conflicts of interests are permitted to go unabated. Maintaining a high standard of ethical conduct across a sprawling bureaucracy overseen by dozens of political appointees is genuinely challenging, even when elected officials are trying to do it.

When the president of the United States doesn’t care about ethics and the predominant attitude of his co-partisans in Congress is that ignorance is bliss, corruption will grow like mushrooms in the shade.

The GOP is all in on Trump’s corruption

Democrats running in 2018 obviously must and will talk about their ideas on health care, jobs, education, environmental regulation, and more. Still, there is fundamentally no escaping the reality that Trump himself is the central political issue of our time. That’s especially the case as long as the economic and military environment remains basically benign.

And while there’s plenty about Trump to criticize, not every target out there is actually all that sound.

In particular, while dwelling on Trump’s racism is probably smart in some parts of the country, it runs the risk of implicitly conceding that Trump is on white America’s side. The truth, however, is that Trump is on Trump’s side. He’s governing fully within the contours of a baseline pro-business agenda that differs from standard Republican fare largely insofar it involves personal enrichment in an unusual way.

And, critically, the entire congressional Republican Party is in on it. Republicans can easily distance themselves from Trump’s temperamental issues-- Paul Ryan often sniffily declines to comment on stray Trump tweets-- or dismiss the Russia issue as some kind of “deep state” conspiracy. But the basic reality is that the reason we don’t know who is paying Trump is because Republicans in Congress don’t want us to know.

And importantly, when Democrats are seeking to motivate their own base to turn out, checking Trump’s corruption is a promise they can actually deliver on in the short term. Trump’s clubs’ financial records can be subpoenaed. His tax returns can be released. Current and former government officials can be brought in to testify.

None of that will eradicate the inherent conflicts of interest involved in the current arrangement-- for that, Trump himself will have to be defeated-- but the veil of secrecy around Trump and money truly can be lifted. But to get there, Democrats will need to elevate the issue out of its current sleeper status and find a way to put it on the front pages.

A Dual Scourge: Prescription Drugs And Con-Man Donald J. Trumpanzee

A few years ago the CDC reported that the 10 highest prescribing states for narcotic painkillers are in the South, with Alabama, Tennessee and West Virginia leading the nation. Last year it was reported that unscrupulous drug manufacturers and distributors have pumped hundreds of millions of prescription opioids into small-town West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, encouraging drug addiction. These communities have something in common besides rampant drug use and drug overdoses: these communities took Trump at his word when he said he would make their problem a top priority of his administration if they elected him-- and they helped do just that. Of the 100 counties in the U.S. addicted to prescription drugs, 99 were Trump counties-- the only one that wasn't being an Indian reservation. In fact, study after study has shown that the same misery and hopelessness that fuels prescription drug abuse fuels support for Trump, authoritarianism and fascism.

This week, NPR reported that Trump and his regime have decided not to emphasize treatment but to go back to the same old GOP prescription: the pointless, failed war on drugs. Greg Allen reported that "more than three months after President Trump declared the nation's opioid crisis a public health emergency, activists and healthcare providers say they're still waiting for some other action" while the regime has "given no signs it's developing a comprehensive strategy to address an epidemic that claims more than 115 lives every day. The President now says to combat opioids he's focused on enforcement, not treatment."

Trump spent just over a minute of his 80-minute State of the Union address talking about opioids. In a speech this week in Cincinnati, he had a few more comments. The opioid epidemic, he said, "has never been worse. People form blue ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers and the drug dealers."

The President's mention of "blue ribbon committees" sounds like a slam on one he convened last year, chaired by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie-- the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. The commission issued more than 50 recommendations. The administration has so far followed up on just a few of those recommendations.

Some officials and care providers who work on the frontlines of the opioid crisis, however, are scathing about what they see as a lack of action from the White House. Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, who served on the White House opioid commission, says he's "incredulous" that, after declaring a public health emergency in October, the President still hasn't requested any money from Congress to combat the epidemic.

"I mean this is just a mental health crisis of the first order," Kennedy says, "and this administration has done nothing."

...Here are things critics point out the administration hasn't done:

• There is still no head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In October, Trump's nominee to the position, Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., withdrew his name after reports linked him with a bill that limited the DEA's ability to investigate abuses by opioid manufacturers and distributors.
• President Trump still hasn't nominated anyone to head the Drug Enforcement Agency.
• The administration hasn't asked Congress for any new funding to address the opioid epidemic.

Roughly 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, and data from the CDC indicates deaths are rising. Kennedy says what's needed is a coordinated federal response similar to the one in the mid-1990s-- when the U.S. spent $24 billion a year to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.

"We're talking about a major league crisis and they're taking credit for little things, while the whole country is burning down," Kennedy says.

Instead of a big boost in funding, the Trump administration is focused, in many cases, on cutting spending.

In the 2018 budget, the President recommended cutting the Office of National Drug Control Policy budget by 95 percent, and may do so again this year.

"It's very hard to make sense of," says Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford and former policy adviser to the drug czar's office in the Obama administration. "I mean, it's like closing a fire station in the middle of a wildfire."

A law signed by President Obama that designated a billion dollars to help states combat opioids runs out of money this year. Humphreys has seen no sign President Trump intends to ask Congress to renew that funding.

"The 2018 budget had a $400 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration which is the lead agency that funds treatment in the United States," Humphreys says. "So, the administration's impulse seems to be not to spend more — in fact to spend less."

The White House is preparing to act on one of the recommendations of its opioid commission-- that it launch a campaign to educate the public, especially young people, on the dangers of opioids. The campaign is being developed not by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, but by a team in the White House led by Kellyanne Conway.

And as far as helping prescription drug addicts with marijuana, Trump seems to be allowing Jeff Sessions to go on a jihad against legal medical marijuana, something progressive Democrats-- though not elderly establishment Democrats-- are ready to go to war over, as we saw yesterday. If you would like to help the campaigns of the progressive Democrats campaigning on a platform that includes legalization of marijuana, Blue America has a page dedicated to that specifically which can be accessed by clicking on the ActBlue Green Wave thermometer on the right. Remember, even the latest poll from Fox News found a record number of voters nationally favoring legalization. The poll shows 59% of voters in support of legalizing marijuana, which is up from 51% in 2015, and 46% in 2013 (the first time the poll ever addressed the issue). Only 26% favored making "smoking marijuana" legal in 2001. Today just 32% of voters agree with right-wing crackpot and KKK supporter Jeff Sessions that marijuana should be illegal, down from 49% in 2013.

Roger Stone And Alex Jones Publicly Float The Widespread DC Rumor That Señor Trumpanzee Is Drugged Up

So Breitbart's crackpot shtik about a coup and Trump being held hostage in the White House by "the generals" seems to have faded away, at least for now. Instead, we have Alex Jones' latest conspiracy theory, a kind of corollary-- the generals or someone has Señor Trumpanzee drugged up. So this goes beyond what we already know about his addiction to snorting chopped by Adderall when he's stressed (something his cosmetic surgeons in West Palm taught him how to do years ago).

Everyone I know-- from my friends, relatives, casual acquaintances to psychologists, psychiatrists and the kid who bags my groceries at Gelson's-- says Trump is crazy or in some significant way mentally impaired. Even Jones, an admirer, admitted Trump seems out of his mind. On his lunatic fringe InfoWars comedy show he claimed "high level" sources confirmed a plot to control Señor T through drugs, He insists Señor is being sedated. (As you know, Trumpanzee and the Ramones, who all died mysteriously and prematurely, were neighbors in Queens.)



Jones wants everyone to be clear that he doesn't blame Trumpanzee for being a basket case. "They drug presidents," he confided in the lunatic who listen to his show, "because the power structure wants a puppet. The president [he meant the Trumpanzee] needs his blood tested by an outside physician he trusts." Travis Gettys at Raw Story on Monday:

The 71-year-old Trump has a family history of Alzheimer’s disease, and analyses have found he showed some symptoms of age-related cognitive impairment-- including observations that he shows symptoms of late-day confusion known as “sundowning.”

“I’ve talked to people, multiple ones, and they believe that they are putting a slow sedative that they’re building up that’s also addictive in his Diet Cokes and in his iced tea, and that the president by 6 or 7 at night is basically slurring his words and is drugged,” Jones said. “Now first they had to isolate him to do that. But, yes, ladies and gentleman, I’ve talked to people that talk to the president now at 9 at night, he is slurring his words, and I’m going to leave it at that. I’ve talked to folks that have talked to him directly.”

Jones compared Trump’s behavior to former President Ronald Reagan, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease that likely started during his time in the White House.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I was told this by high level sources and it was evident and especially after [Ronald] Reagan was shot in his first year in office when he was acting like Trump, and doing the right things, that he never really recovered,” Jones said. “They gave him cold blood, and his transfusion that causes brain damage. They slowly gave him small amounts of sedatives. It’s known that most presidents end up getting drugged. Small dosages of sedatives till they build it up, Trump’s such a bull he hasn’t fully understood it yet.”

This isn’t the first time one of Trump’s associates has attempted to explain away rumors about the president’s mental health.

Roger Stone, a Jones associate and longtime Trump ally, previously acknowledged whispers in May about the president’s possible mental decline by claiming the rumors were intended to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the president from office.

And my pal Roger Stone?

"He is slurring his words on various times, and that’s what's concerning. Let’s be very clear: I have a source at The New York Times, a reporter who expressed to me a concern that in a conversation they had on the phone with the president that he was slurring his words. The president does not drink. The president certainly does not do drugs. The president is sharp as a tack. Now, let’s give some credibility to... Now, in the president’s defense, could he be exhausted? Yeah, he works very hard for the country. He is passionate about his desire for an economic revival, for a boom. He said it to me, “Wait and see. You’ll see. When I get my 15 percent tax rate this economy is going to cook like nothing you’ve ever seen, it will be the greatest advance in job creation this country’s ever seen.” He is deeply committed and passionate about this. But I have now heard not from one, but two different sources, that he seemed disoriented and was slurring his speech in conversations. To me this is a tip off that he may be being medicated. Is General [John] Kelly above this? No."

And this isn't the first scare about Señor Trumpanzee's mental competence from the loony right. In early July, Kali Holloway started the speculation about his sundowning problem. Trumpanzee, she wrote, got off Air Force One after a golfing excursion to Bedminster but instead of getting into the flag-festooned limo waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase, wandered off in a different direction, getting several steps off course until a Secret Service person redirected him to his car. It was a moment in which Trump briefly appeared "befuddled and out of sorts." Watch.

Sundowning, according to the Mayo Clinic, “refers to a state of confusion occurring in the late afternoon and spanning into the night...that may affect people with dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease.” Though numerous commentators have suggested Trump’s behaviors correlate with well-known dementia symptoms, he has not been publicly diagnosed with dementia or any other mental health conditions by a medical expert. Growing concerns about Trump’s mental state are speculative, and based on a pattern of potentially worrisome behavior illustrated by the following incidents.

1. He wandered off in the middle of a foreign press event.

Trump met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint press conference in May. In the middle of the event, as Netanyahu stood for photos, Trump got up from his chair and wandered away from the Israeli leader. A few seconds later, staffers ushered him back toward where he should have been standing. 

2. He forgot to sign an executive order at an executive order signing press event.

Back in April, Trump invited media to watch as he signed two orders focused on trade. He gave brief remarks at the event, then left the podium before signing the documents. Then he absentmindedly opened a door and headed for another room. Mike Pence had to tap the president on his way out to remind him about the unsigned orders. After a brief discussion, Trump continued walking, and Pence followed him out the door with the paperwork.

3. He didn't realize Rudy Giuliani was sitting directly in front of him.

At a press event highlighting Trump's executive orders on cyber security, the president was seated directly across from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. After a brief speech, Trump introduced Giuliani-- who again, was sitting right in front of him-- and began searching confusedly around the room. “Where’s Rudy?” you can hear Trump asking in the footage, as Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly directs his attention in the right direction.

4. He couldn't correctly name the country he’d just bombed.

Trump discussed the moments leading up to the U.S. bombing of Syria in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. Describing a dinner with Xi Jinping, Trump informed Bartiromo that he told the Chinese president, "We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq.” When Bartiromo corrected Trump on the country, he paused for a beat, then seemed to recognize his error.

Trumpanzee is well-known for projecting his own neurosis onto everyone else. Here he was during the campaign accusing Hillary of being on drugs: