OK, as I understand it this new bill is actually a huge gift to pharma companies because it allows them to target a vulnerable and desperate population to sell drugs that have not been shown to provide any kind of effect. So a classic Trump move masquerading as something benevolent.
6 Likes
Today Trump pardoned well-known shitbag and Obama extreme-conspiracy theorist Dinesh DāSouza, who pled guilty to felony charges of campaign fraud in 2012. Trump says that Dinesh was ātreated very unfairly by our government!ā (in other words, heās trolling Obama)
Heās also stated heās planning to pardon Rod Blagojevich and Martha Stewart, because why the fuck not really
5 Likes
Taking those into account, the qualifications for getting a Trump pardon appear to be:
- Discrimination / contempt of court for continuing to discriminate
- Campaign finance law violations
- Petty (or not-so-petty) corruption
- White collar financial crimes
Seems like a pretty telling list.
8 Likes
"Uhā¦ what? The top Senate Democrat on the Russia investigation actually said in effect that the Democrats, if they captured the Senate this November, wouldnāt even continue the probe once they took over? The write-up also quoted Warner directly as seeming to equate partisan pressures on the committee from left and right, and expressing the view that Americans āwill be tired of it if this is not wound down in this calendar year.ā
As one of his constituents I am sooo over his pattern of being a poli-douche lately.
Hey Mark, we wonāt ābe tired of thisā until the orange asshat is in jail.
11 Likes
Leave it to the Democrats to turn a grand slam into a triple play.
Every fucking time.
11 Likes
Iām not reading that shit.
Or dead. Either one works for me.
6 Likes
Deadās too easy.
I want Trump humiliated, broken, and broke; forced to live among the āforgottenā Americans he pretends to give a shit about. Rather than send him to jail, letās put him and his awful kids on a small farm, and tell them they can eat whatever they can grow, but nothing else. I think itās a tossup who will become a hamburger first, Eric or Tiffany. Donāt much care though, itāll make great reality tv either way.
8 Likes
Oh, sweetieā¦ I never said how.
6 Likes
Ah. True. Cersei style then?
1 Like
See here:
Note also that Pelosi has been once again ruling out impeachment:
Which should not actually surprise anyone with an awareness of history:
https://twitter.com/disco_socialist/status/1002000551482183680?s=21
So why did the Establishment Democrats put this much effort into #Russiagate when they knew all along that it was never going anywhere?
Because it provided useful cover for their own corruption and collaboration, and was a weapon that could be freely used to attack both left and right.
https://twitter.com/inartic/status/1001352313913556992?s=21
ā
As always: the situation is not hopeless. But the answer does not lie with the current powers that be. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourself.
8 Likes
1 Like
If it be said that the President, by successive pardons of constantly recurring contempts in particular litigation, might deprive a court of power to enforce its orders in a recalcitrant neighborhood, it is enough to observe that such a course is so improbable as to furnish but little basis for argument. Exceptional cases like this, if to be imagined at all, would suggest a resort to impeachment, rather than to a narrow and strained construction of the general powers of the President.
1 Like
'Splain?
Surely you donāt mean blowing up the Sept of Baelor with wildfire; even as vile as most of DC is, thatās still heinous.
In my fantasies, that sink hole on the WH lawn erupts, opening up a portal straight to the special Hell, and a legion of cenobytes swarm upon 45 and all his opportunistic ilk.
6 Likes
Thatās how itās supposed to work in theory, yes. That theory relies upon the presumption that Congress isnāt filled with 2/3rds fascists and 1/3rds quislings.
It also has the problem that impeaching Trump wouldnāt actually remove the fascists from power. Competence is not a virtue in a fascist; President Pence is worse than President Trump.
The situation can be saved, but the Courts and Congress are not the mechanism to do it. All of the establishment factions are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
3 Likes
2 Likes
A hypothetical that hasnāt been acted upon since the opinion was issued in 1925.
Hereās the thing: there are various abuses of power that could be thwarted or at least blunted by a Democratic congress. For instance, oversight committee could investigate Trump and his Administration, instead of covering up the scandal of the day. It would be nice to have subpoena powers.
Other abuses of power are not so easily curtailed by a feisty Congress. The power of the president to pardon is very nearly absolute, and the appropriate remedy is arguably impeachment.
2 Likes
Theralizamaub pretty neatly encapsulates what I see as the problem with Right to Try laws. Itās initial human trial was catastrophic; all of the subjects had severe infusion reactions and were hospitalized with multiple organ failure. Though the subjects all survived, the company testing the drug did not. A few years after the disastrous Phase 1 trial, the compound was picked up by a new group, and passed Phase 2 and 3 trials as a rheumatoid arthritis therapy. That second lease on life was the result of good, thorough science that generated solid data sets. One-off, Right to Try treatments in terminal patients do not generate good data sets - they generate data points that are impossible to replicate and which are useless as tools for development.
The people I know in drug discovery (Mrs. Faffenreffer, for one), do not look on Right to Try with much favor. The industry as a whole seems to view the law as a scientific and ethical tar pit, into which they will sink resources and from which they will get very little back. Politicians support Right to Try because the optics on not doing so are terrible; no one wants to be the guy that stood between Aunt Harriet and a drug that might have saved her life. So the laws get put in place, even though the medical, scientific and pharma communities donāt support them. The net effect will probably be both less severe and far worse than we can imagine. On the one hand, big pharma, will likely continue to do business very much as usual without much concession made to the new law. On the other hand, a new space will open up where unscrupulous woo pitchmen and snake oil salesmen (see Burzinski, Stanslaw and Paltrow, Gwyneth) will market their fraudulent, possibly life threatening wares.
6 Likes
I had Ellaria Sandās final act in mind, but now that I think about it, Trump doesnāt care about anybody else enough for that to be effective.
Swarmed by cenobites is probably a better ending.
1 Like
When you have consensus here, you know itās probably bad.
4 Likes
