October 14-17: Big Pharma Buys GOP Politicians

 

10/14/17: Having served 267 days in office, Trump has now spent 61 days at his own golf courses. 

You figure he needs a little exercise and fresh air on the links, because he must be feeling glum. 

Since the last week of March more than 150 national opinion polls have been conducted, asking Americans if they approve or disapprove of the job he’s done. He hasn’t been in positive territory once.

When the GOP hated Obama for going golfing.

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10/15/17: It’s Blind Americans Equality Day, proclaimed by President Trump. Finally, a group he hasn’t insulted. 

Or groped. 

We hope.

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10/16/17: Guess who’s looking unpatriotic now! Don’t be morons, Trump fans! It’s your boy! 

 

“The last best hope of earth.” 

In a fiery speech Monday night Senator John McCain – yes, that war hero – torches the president. Deeply concerned with the policy direction being charted (if you can say anything Trump tweets about is “charted”), McCain has this to say regarding the current occupant of the Oval Office: 

To fear the world we [Americans] have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. 

 

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YOU KNOW who else predicted Trump would be a “national disgrace” if ever elected to office? 

General Colin Powell.

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10/17/17: Congressman Tom Marino withdraws from consideration to lead the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. What went wrong? According to Republicans, it was all Obama’s fault since he signed some bill into law! Who sponsored that bill, and pushed for policies that were worse? Who snuck in a policy change to the bill that went unnoticed? 

Marino. 

What the bill did was make it harder for D.E.A. and the Justice Department to curb suspicious shipments of opioids. This was back when the drug was first flooding the nation’s streets and fueling an epidemic of drug overdose deaths. 

And need we mention what this proves again!!! Government regulation of big corporations is a terrible idea. 

These corporations are run by saints who have only the purest motives. If major drug manufacturers want to sell more painkillers, why would anyone want to interfere with their painkilling efforts – and free market profit-making? After all, the drug industry spent $100 million lobbying Congress from 2014 to 2016. Mr. Marino raked in $100,000 in donations himself.

 

Republican Senator Orrin G. Hatch, who shepherded a similar bill through the Senate, defended his efforts. He reminded everyone Obama signed it into law. What Hatch did not remind anyone was how he received a $750,000 shot to his re-election campaign from – yes, Big Pharma. (See: 6/7/17.) 

(For additional fun with the pharmaceutical companies, read about the “fine work” of GOP Congressman John Shimkus here.)