Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 31m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM, and her Common Council at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1937, Daffy Duck first appears, as a character in the animated short Porky’s Duck Hunt.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Olga Khazan reports How France Cut Heroin Overdoses by 79 Percent in 4 Years (“And the United States could, too”):
In the 1980s, France went through a heroin epidemic in which hundreds of thousands became addicted. Mohamed Mechmache, a community activist, described the scene in the poor banlieues back then: “To begin with, they would disappear to shoot up. But after a bit we’d see them all over the place, in the stairwells and halls, the bike shed, up on the roof with the washing lines. We used to collect the syringes on the football pitch before starting to play,” he told The Guardian in 2014.
The rate of overdose deaths was rising 10 percent a year, yet treatment was mostly limited to counseling at special substance-abuse clinics.
In 1995, France made it so any doctor could prescribe buprenorphine without any special licensing or training. Buprenorphine, a first-line treatment for opioid addiction, is a medication that reduces cravings for opioids without becoming addictive itself.
With the change in policy, the majority of buprenorphine prescribers in France became primary-care doctors, rather than addiction specialists or psychiatrists. Suddenly, about 10 times as many addicted patients began receiving medication-assisted treatment, and half the country’s heroin users were being treated. Within four years, overdose deaths had declined by 79 percent.
➤ Zane Anthony, Kathryn Sanders and David A. Fahrenthold report Whatever happened to Trump neckties? They’re over. So is most of Trump’s merchandising empire:
Before he ran for office, Donald Trump made millions by selling his name to adorn other people’s products. There was Trump deodorant. Trump ties . Trump steaks. Trump underwear. Trump furniture. At one time, there was even a Trump-branded urine test.
Now, almost all of them are gone.
In 2015, Trump listed 19 companies that were paying him to produce or distribute Trump-branded consumer goods.
In recent weeks, only two said that they are still selling Trump-branded goods. One is a Panamanian company selling Trump bed linens and home goods. The other is a Turkish company selling Trump furniture.
Of the rest, some Trump partners quit in reaction to campaign-trail rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. Others said their licensing agreements had expired. Others said nothing beyond confirming that they’d stopped working with Trump. Their last Trump goods are being sold off, often at a discount: One cologne is marked down to $9.99 from $42 for a one-ounce bottle.
➤ Lisa Friedman and Kenneth P. Vogel report Scott Pruitt’s Idea to Update an E.P.A. Keepsake: Less E.P.A., More Pruitt:
When Scott Pruitt wanted to refashion the Environmental Protection Agency’s “challenge coin” — a type of souvenir medallion with military origins that has become a status symbol among civilians — he proposed an unusual design: Make it bigger, and delete the E.P.A. logo.
Mr. Pruitt instead wanted the coin to feature some combination of symbols more reflective of himself and the Trump administration. Among the possibilities: a buffalo, to evoke Mr. Pruitt’s home state, Oklahoma, and aBible verse to reflect his faith.
Other ideas included using the Great Seal of the United States — a design similar to the presidential seal — and putting Mr. Pruitt’s name around the rim in large letters, according to Ronald Slotkin, a career E.P.A. employee who retired this year, and two people familiar with the proposals who asked to remain anonymous because they said they feared retribution.
➤ Stephen Colbert of The Late Show has a bit of fun with Sean Hannity’s embarrassing conflicts of interest:
Sneak peek of ‘Hannity’ tonight… pic.twitter.com/qud8et2cba
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) April 16, 2018
➤ Here’s How NASA’s TESS Spacecraft Will Hunt Exoplanets:
“Ashes, ashes, all fall down”. So sayeth the Grateful Dead. It was a hell of a day in the swamp.
It is looking more and more like Trump is seeing two trains coming from him from opposite ends of the tunnel. In between Mueller and the SDNY Fibbies is not a comfortable place to be. His nasty tweets about the FBI are coming back to bite him. He is being pursued with great relish. Trump will not win this war.
Isn’t it interesting how far Trump-TV (aka FOX “News”) has fallen lately. The boardroom, operations management, and on-air talent have all been decimated by “female troubles”. Yesterday the H(annity)-Bomb dropped that Trump, Elliott Broidy and Hannity share exclusive access to their very own tame fixer. And furthermore, the FBI has any existing evidence that was at Cohen’s. Both Cohen and Broidy are Deputy chairmen fund-raisers for the RNC. I’m guessing the RNC gets sucked into this pretty quickly, if not already.
Hannity has made a career, lately, of trashing the FBI. Wouldn’t it be a shame if proof of something tawdry, even if not directly involved in this case, were to fall off the back of the FBI evidence truck? Cohen seems like an unlikely choice for real-estate law advice. Hannity is worth many millions, and could afford to hire some lawyer that actually practiced in that field if he needed real-estate advice. Employing Cohen brings up the eternal question: Who did Hannity do, and how did he do them?
Hannity’s blatant on-air shilling for Cohen is going to be an interesting test for what is left of FOX Newz. He is robustly conflicted and exposed as such, but will it matter to FOX or their mesmerized viewers? My guess is no. Between Trump raiding their employees and various peccadillos, FOX is getting a bit short of commentariat talent. They will soon be down to running Judge Janine re-runs in prime time. Even Alan Dershowitz, a man not easily embarrassed, got up in Hannity’s face yesterday about his conflicts. I imagine that punted him down to the FOX booker C-list.
Jim Jordan (R-OH) was on CNN yesterday. Don Lemon spent about five minutes trying to get Jim to admit that anything Trump has ever said was a lie. Jim would not budge, and insisted that everything Trumps says is gospel truth. This is the level of delusion that reigns supreme in the current, and soon to be extinct, Republican party. Jordan is running for speaker. What more do you need to know??
Hannity – if there’s every been a single living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s Hannity. He’s not acting, he’s not pretending, he truly is an ignorant dunce who doesn’t see that he is. That doesn’t excuse his show, and even Hannity’s not so dense that his words can’t be held against him. He’s just a very dense man. (I believe – truly – that most people are sharp, and if they weren’t society wouldn’t function so well as it does. Hannity, however, is truly and sincerely one of the few people who’s truly dim. Unthinking, ill-read: that’s Sean Hannity.)
Murdoch and sons aren’t dense, of course, but they’ve dished this foul meal to America, and they’ll keep doing it. Slop night after night, and no matter as long as it’s profitable.
Unexpected, historically, how these law and order conservatives have become anti-FBI propagandists. There’s a dark one underlying motivation: support Trump, support those who have doubts about racial equality, smear the poor as lazy, and find a way to tie the Clintons to the bubonic plague.
Much of that’s been their line for years, but as you note, the anti-FBI line of attack both is extreme and counter-productive. They sound like Russians, even Soviet-era Russians. True civil libertarians wouldn’t conjure Carlson’s and Hannity’s screwball theories – a good critique is a sound one, and they’ve no concern with soundness. These are men battening on the ignorance of their viewers.
Jim Jordan (R-OH by way of Jonestown before the last serving) might just as well be a cultist. Odd, how these men are like that: one sees them now for what they always were, unleashed to express their genuine, disordered views. In an earlier time, they would have been kept in the shadows – Trumpism draws them out.)