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Monday, November 02, 2020

It lools like quack, quack, quack. Millions of tax dollars down quackery rat holes, politically connected to be sure, but rats can be social animals.

Quackery and Trump are like hand in glove, the AP reporting, Strib carrying the feed: 

WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina.

Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.

 Zurlo's company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists.[...]

 In one government email obtained by the AP, an official said Kadlec, whose job as assistant secretary for preparedness and response is to help guide the nation through public health emergencies, was “all in” on Plasma Technologies.

This was the case despite misgivings from the scientists he oversees. One of them said the company would be just another “mouth to feed” that would distract from other important work on the pandemic. [...]

The AP reached out to more than a dozen blood plasma industry leaders and medical experts. Few had heard of Zurlo’s company or its technology, and would not comment.

Zurlo, the company’s founder and a former pharmaceutical industry executive, told the AP in an email that the renewed interest in his company is being driven by COVID and other diseases.

[...] Top government officials began to take notice of Plasma Technologies after Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and two-time presidential candidate, became part-owner, according to the records and AP interviews.

[...]  Santorum, who’s held no elective office since 2007, remains influential among social conservatives, a key part of President Donald Trump’s political base. Santorum has extolled the president’s handling of the pandemic on national television in his job as a CNN commentator, arguing that the nation’s response would have been worse under a Democratic administration.

Trump "didn’t botch it,” Santorum said recently in response to charges that the president had done a poor job leading the country through COVID-19. “I mean you guys keep blaming Trump. This is a local decision.”

HHS would not comment when asked whether Santorum’s public backing of the president led to a company he has a financial stake in getting a government contract.

Zurlo has deep ties to the Republican Party. He has contributed thousands of dollars to Santorum’s campaigns and to other GOP campaigns and political action committees. He entertained Santorum and his family at the mansion Zurlo used to own on Kiawah Island, an exclusive golf resort in South Carolina. They would play golf during the day and enjoy evenings overlooking the Atlantic, according to Michel “Mitch” LaPlante, a former business associate of Zurlo’s who attended several dinners with Santorum and Zurlo.

The business relationship between Zurlo and LaPlante turned ugly after those days of hobnobbing on Kiawah. A real estate deal they had invested in together fell into foreclosure, leading to a suit seeking more than $700 million by their mortgage lender. Each man sued the other for fraud and severed their business ties acrimoniously.

Zurlo founded Plasma Technologies in 2003, according to articles of organization and other records filed with South Carolina’s secretary of state. The company’s most recently listed address is Zurlo’s condominium in Charleston’s French Quarter.

The company has no other presence in South Carolina — or any other state — even though a U.S. government spokeswoman told the AP that Plasma Technologies has “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston.

Any crony of Rick Santorum is suspect, and a plasma company with no facilities seems to quack like a quack operation - Santorum a part owner making the quacking louder and more suspect and abject!

THE MESSAGE IS SIMPLE:  VOTE TRUMP, THE WASTEFUL CRONY-SERVING RACIST BASTARD-SNAKE-ENABLER, OUT! 

 

---------------------------------- Hat tip ---------

image is from DownWithTyranny.blogspot.com - by  Nancy Ohanian, who in 2019 was awarded the National Press Foundations' Clifford K. & James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons. Other Ohanian political art has been "fair use" used by Crabgrass - including in the sidebar

___________UPDATE___________

The Santorum related ghost operation gaining tax money from the Trump administration is mirrored in part by another ghost operation Dan Burns highlighted, per original reporting by CREW. Too many ghosts having more ties to Trump than to Halloween. Burns' website https://mnppannex.blogspot.com/  currently has much recent interesting posting, tightly written and worth checking out today.

________FURTHER UPPDATE_________

Mail-in ballot mania is the topic of recent left.mn posting. My recollection is that ballots postmarked before the election but received later were counted back in the Franken-Coleman recount days. Also, I recall a story of a ballot package back whenever which was allowed to languish at an Anoka County post office dock, before the Franken-Coleman recount; with it found after the election and with the ballots counted. This is a hearsay story, and may be apocryphal. 

With the Trump flying monkey crowd now running and ruining the USPO via decommissioning a substantial part of its mail sorting equipment a reality, the reliability of postmarks will be uncertain, although postmarking is early in the process of receiving, sorting, and delivering. We shall see.