http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/thomas-hopkins-d-o/ Now, sit. Dooowwwwn. Roll over. Play dead. Acquit. Good boy!
How Susan Collins Froze the Women’s Movement
So that’s why a woman can’t be elected president. Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
You know Suzie. She’s one of the dimwit GOP Senators who agreed to a trial without witnesses or evidence obtained in the second half of said trial. She also, as expected, voted to acquit Trump.
All of that would be understandable — or at least explainable — had Collins simply followed the example set by her lemming colleagues. But, she couldn’t help but try to tactically dodge a political hot potato that ended up hitting her square in the face — and the face of all women seeking equal footing in the workplace and beyond.
When asked during an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell whether she thought Trump would feel free to run amok with Senate protection, Collins said this:
“I believe that the President has learned from this case” and that Trump “will be much more cautious in the future.”
This is an astounding statement, one that suggests political naivete, constitutional softness and, most damaging, an unfitness for the job — a reputation no non-white male can afford to shoulder, particularly in the heat of a presidential race.
How do you possibly say that, after three years, on live TV and still maintain a straight face? Name a single lesson (other than that bankruptcy isn’t a presidential deal breaker) that President Napalm has learned in that time. To be presidential? Nope. To treat the leaders of of other nations with a modicum of diplomacy? Nuh-uh. To pronounce “origins?” Come on, a president can learn only so many words. You know how long it took him to memorize “quid pro quo,” let along announce it? It’s unfair to ask impossible tasks. “Origins.” As if. (If it didn’t want to be mistaken for a fruit, it shouldn’t have spelled itself so similarly to “oranges,” right Donnie?)
For Collins to say Trump will learn his lesson is her claiming the check’s in the mail. And it conveys the very stereotype that Republican women cling to when they say they want a no-bullshit leader: That women are too soft, too forgiving, to malleable to play pro sports with the boys. Hillary Clinton won the popular election by 3 million votes and penised Washington still took it away We know why GOP men resist scrapping the college: It’s their last rung of political power. But I’ve yet to hear a single GOP woman call for reform. Perhaps there have been. But I haven’t heard it, maybe because women don’t reap the headlines we do. Another reason to change stewards.
Bernie Sanders took a lot of shit last week for reportedly telling Elizabeth Warren that a woman could not be elected president of the United States. Whatever you think of that claim, Collins just echoed it — in a much more public and poisonous venue: the halls of the Senate.
Warren’s mediocre performance in the first two Democratic primaries, while not a reliable barometer for the country’s air pressure, suggests the uphill battle any woman faces seeking public office. And that won’t be helped by Collins’ Pollyanna prediction for Trump, because here is what he did the first week of his acquittal:
- Established an official channel at the Department of Justice to deal with information about Ukraine, as well as Joe and Hunter Biden, being collected by Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
- Announced congressional investigations into the Bidens.
- Fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (and his twin brother) as well as Gordon Sondland, the former ambassador to the European Union, after Vindman and Sondland testified in the House impeachment investigation.
- Protested the “harsh” sentencing guidelines for convicted felon Roger Stone, prompting a Department of Justice’s reconsideration of those guidelines and the resignation of the four federal prosecutors involved in the case.
- Targeted senators — including Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney — who didn’t vote with him on impeachment.
- Held an unofficial “celebration” ceremony at the White House, where he declared victory, held up “Fake News” headlines, praised his friends and supporters and promised a day of reckoning for his “persecutors.”
What do you think, Suzie? Which one of those will teach Donnie a lesson?
Call ‘The Pharmacist’ for Refills
Spend enough time as a reporter, and you’ll quickly learn: There comes a moment in any interview when you tell yourself, ‘This is the quote. This is the interview. This is the story.’
The same must happen with non-fiction movies.
Sometimes when you watch a documentary – particularly one of the new wave of true crime serial documentaries – you can’t help but imagine the moment when the producers first met their key interviewee and, within a couple of minutes, realized they were looking at factual-film-making gold.
Dan Schneider, the hero – and here, that’s not hyperbole – of Netflix’s rollicking new four-parter, The Pharmacist, is such an interviewee. An open-hearted, grey-haired bear of a man who is articulate and eager to tell his shattering tale, often through thick tears and repeatedly invoking God as a helper and witness, Schneider has an attribute even the best sources don’t usually offer: he has recorded, on film or audio cassette, everything he has been through, meaning The Pharmacist has a vivid immediacy most documentaries can’t achieve.
Appalled at the lack of police interest in the case and with acute grief occluding his instinct for self-preservation, Schneider launched his own investigation, hunting for and interviewing suspects and witnesses while ignoring strong advice not to proceed. In the hope of one day presenting his evidence at trial, Schneider taped all his phone calls and even spoke his private thoughts into his recorder, as if narrating his own story.
That story, of who killed Schneider’s son and how he found them, is a breathless thriller with a sensational twist in the middle. But, in episode two, The Pharmacist reveals that Danny’s murder is merely a horribly tragic prelude.
Indeed, Schneider’s investigations did not end with the killing. He used his day job to look into an even bigger problem than crack: opioids. Oxycontin prescriptions are coming through his pharmacy’s door far too often, clutched by patients too young and not in enough pain to warrant taking the drug. When he recognizes a young user in a news report on her premature death, Schneider takes his audio equipment and his unstoppable curiosity and picks up the case: thanks to one rogue doctor, there are young people on their way to dying early just like Schneider’s son did. But unlike Danny, some of them can be saved.
What follows is a rapidly expanding narrative of medical, corporate and law-enforcement corruption, doggedly chipped away at by a lone individual who simply won’t shut up and be quiet. The you’re-kidding-me revelations that power any good true crime doc come regularly – the moment when a simple piece of investigative work by Schneider makes the DEA, FBI and local sheriff’s office all look stupid is a corker – as The Pharmacist scores interviews with all relevant parties, holding some of them back for maximum storytelling impact.
The show is blessed with several compelling talking heads apart from Schneider himself, not least a reformed big-pharma drugs rep who announces yet another abrupt shift in the plot by dramatically barking, more than halfway through the series: “That wasn’t the end! That was … the beginning!”
In the last two episodes, we arrive at the real point of The Pharmacist, as it pulls back to look at the history of a national opioid crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives since Schneider correctly outlined its mechanics at a local level. It is a story of inhuman capitalist greed on a huge scale, described here as being on a par with the lies told about tobacco in a previous century. The final twist is that when the scandal goes national, the humble Louisiana pharmacist keeps up with it, scaling up the same fussy, stubborn common sense to help stem the tide.
The Pharmacist raises an impeccably important global issue, but its power as television all comes from one individual. Schneider, always dogged by sadness (the program never forgets young Danny’s loss) but resolute in his faith and his desire to right wrongs, also has the self-awareness necessary to be a truly great documentary protagonist:
“I was driven,” he says in one of many wry examinations of his own motives. “Other people would say ‘obsessed’.”
