Assinus politicus - Assclown Of the Year

It has come as a rudely unpleasant shock to WA state senator and walking braindead jackhole Maureen  Moron Walsh [R - Retardia] that nurses do not, in fact, "play cards for a considerable amount of the day". Only someone who's never performed worthwhile labor in their adult life, and/or has a resting IQ in the low teens, somewhere just north of fungus, could managed to get both feet thusly inserted in their own gaping mouths, with their empty head simultaneously shoved so far up their own hindquarters so as to choke off the passage of light or oxygen. But it always cheers my heart when some elected functional moron's political turkey timer pops up to let us know they're done.

Someone on the Twaddleverse helpfully added her WA office number:
(360) 786-7630.
How cute. Have fun. Maybe you could invite Moron to a nice card game at your hospital shift.

I will personally pledge to contribute to every opponent she faces in her next primary, and every other party's candidate from opposing parties in the general election, the next time this sorry sack of sh*t is up for a vote. She needs to be kicked RTF out of the state house for being that egregiously stupid in public, and based on her speech, we're guessing this is one of her brighter and more coherent stupid utterances. The rest certainly have to sound like she's having a stroke, every time she squawks and squeals. If she has the good grace to quit now, quickly, I'll contribute a like amount to Alzheimer's research and money to care for actual retarded people.

Were I in WA state, I would be gathering signatures for her immediate recall, as being too stupid to suck air and a waste of skin has to be a disqualifying factor in holding office, even in a community like Walla Walla.

But in true form, the memes and Twittterlanche on her head have been properly brutal.

“Nurses … probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day” is in the running for most inane, indefensible, disgraceful thing said by a legislator this year (even though the competition is really fierce). — Ajai Dandekar (@ajai_dandekar) April 20, 2019

When world-class retards tell you you're retarded, YOU'RE REALLY RETARDED. - A.

(And yes, I made that, but Kathy absolutely tweeted it.)

I'm also pretty sure Joy Behar ( "Why is she wearing a doctor's stethoscope?") could send along a few tips on coping with being the biggest jackass in America today to state senator Walsh.

More here.

I'll be dog-goned if I'm not piling on to this monumental level of stupidity.

And a personal benediction to Sen. Moron Walsh:

Don't worry, Sh*t-For-Brains. No nurse would ever treat you like you just treated a few millions of us.
Or...would they?
Sleep tight. Take your vitamins.
And may God have mercy on you when (not if) you end up in a hospital needing care.
No one else will.
You might want to think about getting some gold-plated Costa Rican medical policy.
For the rest of your life.
And for pity's sake, do the world a favor: Change parties.
You're already overqualified to be a Democrat socialist, so by all means, run down and sign up today. You'll increase the IQ of both Republicans and Democrats in WA state the minute you do that.

But walk tall, sweetheart.
Earning Assclown of The Year honors in April has to be some sort of record, even for a politician who's overmatched by celery bunches at the grocery store in a contest of wits.

You might have thought someone who'd had a heart attack and gotten two cardiac stents a couple of years back would have been a wee bit more circumspect, but remember, this is a politician we're talking about, not someone with a functional brain, let alone one connected to their mouth.

Jesus rose from the dead today. But, you, Bright Light, should invest in a shroud and a cemetery plot.
Hey...is that a fork sticking out of your back?
Yeah, you're done.

Welcome To My World

h/t IOTW

IOTW links to a story called "Why it’s so hard to get mentally ill Californians into treatment"
(besides the obvious answer, which is because my fellow Californians keep electing them to office):

(EXCREMENTO, CA) For years, Diane Shinstock watched her adult son deteriorate on the streets.  Suffering from severe schizophrenia, he slept under stairwells and bushes, screamed at passersby and was arrested for throwing rocks at cars.Sometimes he refused the housing options he was offered. Sometimes he got kicked out of places for bad behavior.  Shinstock, who lives in Roseville and works on disability issues for the state of California, begged mental health officials to place him under conservatorship—essentially, depriving him of his personal liberty because he was so sick that he couldn’t provide for his most basic personal needs of food, clothing and shelter.
But county officials told her, she said, that under state law, her son could not be conserved; because he chose to live on the streets, he did not fit the criteria for “gravely disabled.”

RTWT.

This is my life, every day for 20 years in the ER, and every other ER, nationwide, especially so if the community is larger than 50K people, and if it doesn't snow there in the winter, multiply that by a factor of 10.

We didn't have 500,000 visits a year at the Busiest ER On The Planet™; we had 1000 regulars who came in 500 times apiece.

I've now been to...fourteen ERs in three counties in nearly twenty years doing this, and it's no different anywhere you go.

Schizophrenia is like heroin addiction: it's a social death sentence, and it's almost never getting any better. The worst part, for family, is that Suzy or John (mostly John, victims are about 1 1/2 times more likely to be male than female) is perfectly normal until late high school or early college, even honors students, and then that last bit of wiring in their heads doesn't go in right. It short-circuits, and they stop being normal, brighter-than-average kids and become, frankly, batshit crazy. I can only imagine the never-ending horror for parents of raising a child, getting them safely past all the normal hurdles of growing up, sending them to college, thinking things are okay, and then watching them completely melt down before your eyes.

Meds help, but only if someone with schizophrenia takes them.
The meds make them feel "weird" (which is what we who aren't schizo call "everyday life" 24/7/365/forever), but they seem fine. So they decide they're not sick, and don't need the meds. And become actually weird, hearing voices who aren't there, seeing people and things that aren't real, and end up in my patch, barking, frothing mad. So we re-medicate them, they get put on a psych hold, they get better, go home, and the cycle repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats.

Frequently, after burning all bridges with family, friends, and everyone else, and being thrown out of every care facility in an entire time zone, for cause, they end up on the streets. Where they "self-medicate". I.e., with pot, meth, heroin, benzodiazepines, alcohol, bath salts, paint, glue, or pretty much any substance they can get into their hands, and their bodies.

In a lucid moment, a juvenile patient once confided to me, straight-up, that he got wasted because when he got The Voices In His Head drunk or stoned enough, he couldn't understand them or hear them any more. Pure medical genius, right there.

Oh, and The Voices? They never tell you "You look great!" "Everybody loves you!" "You're a wonderful human being!"

That would be too easy, right?

The Voices always say "You suck. Kill yourself. Everyone hates you. Why don't you die?"

Go watch A Beautiful Mind. Or every scene with Gollum in the LOTR movies. (No points for guessing which sections of those latter movies I will completely skip over, wholesale, in that entire trilogy, because it's too much like pulling a shift at work, except without getting paid.) There was even a great TV MOTW with James Garner as the sane brother, and James Woods as the nut, that they showed in nursing school, because the writers and actors got it so right.

The article tries to pin this mess on Reagan (color me shocked), for signing Lanterman-Petris-Short in CA in 1967. But every other state was doing the exact same thing, and in fact LPS was in the legislative pipeline and conceived under Democrat CA governor Pat Brown, Moonbeam's father, before Reagan was even thinking about politics.

The state - in fact every damned one of them - wanted to get rid of psych hospitals long before One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (which was outdated tripe from 30 years earlier when the film was made, but why let facts interfere with a good screed, right?), simply because crazy people don't pay their bills, you do. So warehousing them in Bedlam was nothing but a money hole the size of the Grand Canyon, nationwide.

And the do-gooders got together with the penny-pinchers, and decided collectively that since psych hospitals were so terrible, understaffed, under-funded, and yet still too expensive, because staff needs salary and crazy people need food and medicine, why not just turn everyone so "unjustly imprisoned for life" out onto the street?
What could possibly go wrong?
"The state budget will save millions!"

Whereas instead, as we all experience daily, they're free to run into traffic, attack people, burglarize and rob and steal to get money for drugs/alcohol/whatever, crap on the streets, and generally validate every reason that we have for why we used to throw a net over them and lock them up for life.

Which we can't do, because you have to be a "danger to self, danger to others, or gravely disabled", the definition for which last means that if you are mentally with it enough to scrounge garbage to eat out of a dumpster, drape yourself in trash bags when it rains, and construct a cardboard pallet and hovel to sleep on and in, you're not "gravely disabled."
Just...eccentric, and living an "alternative lifestyle choice".
Don't believe me, ask the district attorney, the state bar association, and the Do-Gooders League Of America. This ain't a California thing, it's a U.S. of A. thing, coast-to-coast.

So they're free, and now everyone else has to lock their doors, put up bars, keep their kids inside, and pack heat, so that these literal lunatics can run wild and free.

Brilliant.

And the article shows that TPTB haven't figured it out, even after 50 years' time.

The do-gooders just want them to be free (and to hell with their best interests, or anyone else's).
The rent-seekers want more money, and no rules for them.
The families want somebody else to solve (and most importantly, pay for, their batshit crazy uncles, cousins, brothers, and sons).
And the police, the hospitals, and the courts are simply tired of dealing with their bullshit, and that of the interest groups who want it to continue more than they want what we have now to stop.

My bent is a libertarian approach.
After three trips to hospital on a 5150 for being off your meds, we throw a net over you.
We put you in a helicopter, and we drop you off on one of the Channel Islands currently inhabited mainly by goats.
Once a week, the helicopter flies over, and they kick out food bundles.
There are no trees, and the islands are 30-40 miles away, in waters best described as sub-arctic even in July; those people aren't swimming or floating back, ever.
If the family is all broken up over this, they can pay for private care. They can visit them on Shutter Island whenever they like. They can bring them food, clothes, or anything else to make their stay more pleasant. They can even bring doctors and medicine there to address any other needs. The whackjobs are now free to chase butterflies, run around naked, or even try to fly off the cliffs; I don't care.
I don't want them euthanized, or harmed in any way. I want them free. Over there.

What they aren't free to do, is continue to run around in traffic, assault people and each other, crap on your porch, or walk around in society off their meds.
Three strikes, and you're out.
Now they're free, and so are we.

The do-gooders have tried it their way. So have the penny-pinchers.
Now it's time to solve the problem.

F**king It Up By The Numbers

 

Today's tale of How Not To Do Your Jobs:

(PITTSBURGH) Eugene Wright of Meadville says police and medical workers got the wrong man when they transported him to the local hospital this summer and injected him with anti-psychotic drugs against his will, thinking he was someone else.
"The experience that I went through, this should never happen to anybody. It's very simple to check ID," said Mr. Wright, 63. "These people need to be held responsible."
Mr. Wright and his wife, Carolyn Wright, made their allegations in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday against the police in Meadville, the Meadville Medical Center and a local crisis center, Stairways Behavioral Health.
Mr. Wright had the misfortune to have the same name as another Eugene Wright, a psychiatric patient who police said had issued threats at his doctor's office, his suit says.

RTWT.

Long story short: they did, in fact, have the wrong guy.
"But they were acting in good faith!"

Yeah, right up until that failure to look in his wallet, or call his employer or the ortho doc to confirm they had the right guy- or not. Times everyone from A to Z. No exercise of due dilligence equals gross negligence and depraved indifference to the consequences. And deserves a prison sentence.

So Innocent Bystander gets hauled away to the nuthouse.

And now, I'm the Pittsburgh D.A., by the power of the Internet.
What happens?

Officers Sh*thead and F**kstick are suspended without pay for battery, kidnapping, false arrest, false imprisonment, criminal conspiracy to do all of the above, and making terroristic threats. They deserve to be fired for cause, and referred for criminal prosecution.
The representative for Stairways who accompanied them gets charged with making a false report, criminal negligence, and accessory to all the charges against the Meadville PD.
Any nurse(s) who gave the medications has their license suspended, and is charged with criminal medical battery on a patient and gross professional negligence, along with false arrest and false imprisonment. Their license(s) gets revoked by their state board, and they get referred to criminal prosecution.
Ditto for the ordering MD at the hospital.
All of the above: the PD, the crisis center, the hospital, the nurse(s), the doctor, get civilly sued for the maximum penalty that a jury will accept. The chief of police, and the CEOs of both health facilities are also named as co-defendants civilly and criminally for gross incompetence and criminal negligence leading to battery, medical battery, kidnapping, false arrest, and false imprisonment.
Oh, and sue the orthopedic doctor and his staff for failing to make a complete report. They deserve some love in this too. 
The cardinal rule I've observed in a couple of decades in the E.D. is that the more you're arguing with someone, the exponentially greater the likelihood that they're right and you're not. Break the chain early, and double check, especially when it's as easy at it would have been here to sort it out with certainty.

It was the responsibility of the nurse treating that patient to make sure he/she had the right patient - not just the one the doctor pointed at, but that he was indeed the mental health case in question. When nothing more than an ID check and one phone call would have raised the question and undone the entire chain of errors here, there's no excuse, for anyone involved. Some criminal arrests and indictments would drive that home satisfactorily.

I don't have the medical record info here, but if the patient was not in any way an imminent danger to himself or others in the hospital, there was no reason whatsoever to administer ANY medications to him under any circumstances. If the record shows that he did nothing but raise the obviously valid legal and medical point that they had the wrong guy, and was not physically combative, they should be fired and sued just for that act. That's medical battery all by itself, even if he was the correct whackjob in question.

There should be five to ten people facing actual state and federal prison for this incident, and the plaintiff deserves a mid eight-figure payout to drive the point well home.
And then every staff member of the PD, crisis center, and hospital, down to admitting clerks, has to undergo mandatory training by the state, at their employers' expense, on properly validating the ID of a mental health patient in crisis adequately and properly.

When you have someone frothing and barking on scene, that problem is solved. But when you send your minions to round up people in the community, and end up kidnapping the innocent off the streets and hooking them up as psych cases, it needs to leave a mark, in both the criminal and civil divisions of the superior court, and at the federal level. (Posit this guy as someone with a valid CCW and carrying when the cops roll up, and let your mind wander how it turns out. One or more people dead, because a clerk had his/her head up their own ass. That's why everyone who screwed this pooch should be fired and criminally prosecuted, and not just sued into poverty.)

This is utterly unconscionable and inexcusable behavior at every level, and several people need a long, quiet time in a small gray cell - let alone some frequent group sex sessions in pound-you-in-the-ass-prison - to contemplate the responsibilities of their former jobs, and the rights of the people they're supposed to be serving.

After that, they can get jobs greeting people at f**king WalMart for all I care.
They're shitbags as human beings, and if it were my relative or yours involved, the full measure of justice in this kind of case would require baseball bats and some emergency dental and orthopedic surgery. Blowtorches and pliers might possibly be involved.

$#!^ Tom Frieden Says

                        

Tom Frieden, head of the CDC (and lest we forget, his sidekick Anthony Fauci at NIAID),

have been tireless throughout this crisis.

Tirelessly spinning, tirelessly lying, tirelessly stupid, and tirelessly wrong.

"Ebola is highly unlikely to come to the US"
FAIL
Ebola got here within days of those statements.

"We know how to handle Ebola"
FAIL
We mishandled it every step of the way.

"We have protocols in place"
FAIL
"Protocol" implies some standard; what we had were widely misunderstood guidelines, honored about like the Pirates' Code.

"Any hospital can handle Ebola patients safely"
FAIL
To date NO hospital, outside the four BL4 isolation wards, can handle Ebola safely.

"We're working with local officials and hospitals"
FAIL
Local officials and hospitals hadn't even heard of you nor from you, and you didn't think to even send anyone there until days and weeks after that was flagrantly and painfully obvious.

"Ebola is hard to catch"
FAIL
It's so easy to catch, the merest failure to completely protect from it transmitted it flawlessly to two nurses covered almost head-to-toe. It's only pure good fortune - LUCK - that following your B.S. didn't infect 74 other workers at THP-Dallas as well, just for starters, and luckier still that it appears you haven't managed to kill anyone.

"There was a breach in the protocol"
FAIL
The protocol itself was horribly flawed and years out of date. MSF/DWB knew years ago how to dress people in the Third World to handle this safer, but the CDC followed the "Not invented Here" bias, and needlessly exposed hundreds of health workers and got 2 nurses infected with this deadly disease before they changed their protocol, and disseminated it widely.

"We shouldn't impede air travel here"
FAIL
We've already funneled arrivals down to just five airports, possibly in the nick of time, and even that is too little too late, as they only stop the symptomatic arrivals. They will do nothing to stop asymptomatic carriers of Ebola, just like they failed to stop Thomas Duncan. The minute Duncan v2.0 gets here (when, not if, according to the latest UK medical study) that little lie will be naked in the open all by itself, and the penultimate chicken will have come home to roost.

"We know how Ebola is transmitted"
FAIL
Even our top scientists don't know that, and say so. It's even on the CDC website. If you KNEW how it was transmitted, you'd know why a small area or two of exposed skin allowed two nurses to catch it from just one patient.

But most striking in this, is what you won't hear Frieden (or Fauci) say:

We're sorry. We don't know. WE WERE WRONG.

They have yet to own up to their own mistakes, their own grand pronouncements, their own personal cavalcade of monumental blunders, bluster, and bullshit.

They haven't apologized to the two nurses who got infected following their dreadfully insufficient protocols.
They haven't apologized to the hundreds of other health care workers they exposed, by those same flawed and outdated guidelines.
They haven't apologized to THP-Dallas, for letting them take a bullet that anyone of sense knew NO hospital in this country was prepared for (nor even yet is).
They didn't apologize to the officials in Dallas and Texas, for leaving them holding the bag while CDC pondered things from afar.
They haven't apologized to hundreds to thousands of people in Dallas, Cleveland, and travelers in between, for their exposure to this disease by their own incompetence, hubris, and blatant blind stupidity.
They haven't apologized to the government of the United States, for so egregiously misleading them on our actual knowledge, preparedness, or capabilities to deal with this disease, and for continuing to mislead them about the best courses to deal with it.
And they haven't apologized to 316 million Americans, for so carelessly, thoughtlessly, stupidly, and recklessly allowing this disease to rampage so far and wide, putting so many of their friends and neighbors at fear of or in direct risk of infection, and for so blindly allowing it to ever arrive here in the first place by not only allowing, but demanding, that the door be kept wide open to its arrival, knowing how all of the preceding would inevitably follow.

You won't hear any of this, because that's what men do, and what leaders do:
They take responsibility for their actions, they acknowledge their failures, and they seek to make amends.

They don't dissemble, obfuscate, shuffle their papers, and stare stunned into the headlights of the oncoming train while innocent people are about to die.

And they don't blithely risk the lives of those innocent people, nearly killing them, nor try to blame other people for their own shortcomings, in order to bolster their own delusional conviction of their own wisdom and infallibility.

You have to get that your careers are over, and than any alleged medical credibility you might once have possessed to bring to this or any future health crisis is shot to hell as effectively as a duck hit by a minigun firing a dumptruck full of bullets, right? RIGHT?!
You two, right now, are the co-captains of the LZ Hindenburg.

If actual men and leaders were in those posts, they'd do all those things, resign immediately for having failed so monumentally, and either get on a plane to Monrovia to quietly try and atone for and clean up their mess, or retire to their private studies, set their affairs in order, and have a brief conversation with a gun loaded with a single bullet before doing the right thing.

Walk tall, you festering piles of putrescence.
Hope that the entire nation has the attention span of a fruit fly.
A more just society would see you swinging from a handy lightpole after a hasty curbside judicial proceeding.
And it may yet.

                        

Things Fall Apart

 President and his CDC and policy advisors pose for picture after latest Ebola strategy meeting.

Doctors and nurses in Liberia flee hospitals:

A new and remarkably candid on-the-ground audit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the Ebola crisis in Liberia said that doctors and nurses have fled hospitals in the infection zone and that obstacles to killing the virus remain.

 And the lack of medical staff seemed to surprise the report authors. “Before the epidemic, six physicians served all four counties. At the time of the evaluation, only three physicians remained; the others had left Liberia because of the epidemic. In two of four hospitals assessed, nursing staff members were not coming to work or had abandoned facilities; in another hospital, health care providers had not been paid for three months but were still providing basic care,” said the analysis.

Mission creep: We've gone from "none whatsoever" to "several dozen". Next stop: lots!

A few dozen U.S. troops will have exposure to laboratory samples from potential Ebola patients by running testing facilities in Liberia, the head of U.S. Africa Command said.
While most of the 4,000 troops authorized to deploy to the west African country won’t have direct exposure to the virus -- as Pentagon officials have previously emphasized -- three or four specially trained personnel will run each of as many as seven testing labs, Army General David Rodriguez said today at a Pentagon news conference.

Bear in mind that we don't have MOPP gear that's made for Ebola; our military stuff is intended for chemical agents far more than for dealing with oozing blood, or bloody vomit and feces:

The JSLIST can be worn in a contaminated environment for 24 hours. In addition, JSLIST users must keep track of how long the JSLIST suit has been out of its original packaging bag, and how many times it has been washed. The limit for wearing the suit is 45 days total and the limit for washing it is six times. Once the suit is taken out of its bag, it's good for a maximum of 120 days. After any of these limits have been reached, the JSLIST suit is good only for training. Such overlimit suits are turned in and FOR TRAINING ONLY is stenciled on the outer surface.

The suits are also hot as hell, and we're talking about equatorial Africa here.

Ten days ago, Ebola getting to the US was "unlikely".
They keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means:

The Ebola virus becoming airborne is a possible but unlikely outcome in the current epidemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Tom Frieden said Tuesday.  

A change in the way Ebola spreads would make the virus significantly more dangerous. The disease kills roughly half  90% of the people it infects, and lacking a vaccine or cure, its traceable chain of transmission through bodily fluids is one reason officials believe they can contain it.

Top. Men.

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta/AP) — CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said she was shocked and horrified at the lack of screening for Ebola at an Atlanta airport after coming back from Liberia.
Speaking to HLN on Monday, Cohen described what happened when she was going through customs at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
“I expected that they were going to take my temperature, they were going to ask me lots of questions, but they didn’t,” Cohen said.
Cohen explained she told the airport official that she just came back from Liberia covering the Ebola outbreak.
“I said, ‘I’m a journalist. I’ve come back from Liberia, I was covering Ebola.’ And the gentleman who was helping me – the officer – he started to hand my passport back and said, ‘Welcome home,’ but instead said, ‘Wait a second, I got an email about passengers like you. Hold on a second.’”
Cohen continued: “And he went and conferred with someone and he didn’t know and they conferred with someone else. And in the end he said, ‘You need to watch yourself for signs of Ebola.’ And I said, ‘Well, what am I watching out for?’ and he couldn’t tell me.”
Cohen’s producer and photojournalist were also not told of the signs to check for.
“I was travelling with two colleagues – a photojournalist and a producer – and they weren’t told anything and they also said they were journalists who had been covering Ebola,” Cohen told HLN. “So we were all kind of shocked and pretty horrified at the lack of screening in U.S. airports.”

So by all means, let's keep throwing gasoline on the fire!

The spread of Ebola across Europe is "quite unavoidable", the World Health Organisation has warned as four people were in hospital after a Spanish nursing assistant became the first person known to have contracted the virus outside Africa.WHO European director Zsuzsanna Jakab has said more cases will spread in Europe.

"It is quite unavoidable ... that such incidents will happen in the future because of the  extensive travel both from Europe to the affected countries and the other way around," she said. 

Gotcha. The house is on fire, but blasting it with water is right out of the question.

And lastly, even the WaPo Opinion section can no longer stave off the obvious logic of shutting off the air pipeline to Ebola Central, as I hinted directly and explicitly to that very WaPo the logic for here and fully advocated here, several days beforehand. Welcome to the party, guys.

Now if only someone can throw an armlock on the serial fabulist in the White House, and overcome his boundless supply of malice and incompetence to wring out of him one stray intelligent thought, before his kakistocracy kills us all.