In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've been posting on the information I've seen that there's in fact no realistic way OSHA can enforce a mandate that all employers of more than 100 people require them to be vaccinated in the name of "workplace safety". In fact, given the constraints of regulatory rule making, this would likely take so long that any COVID crisis would be over long before such a rule could go into effect. This report on a question posed by a reporter to Press Secretary Psaki makes the situation even clearer. The absence of even a scintilla of material to indicate the White House or any federal agency is organizing an action plan of how to structure the guidance itself is telling. The silence of the machine tells us it is not turned on. The bureaucracy has not been triggered. The machinery of the federal government has not been instructed to begin any process to execute on the instruction that OSHA will, “ develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more ...

The news aggregators, if they mentioned this story at all, put it somewhere below Dog the Bounty Hunter in yesterday's developments, but this kept me thinking all day : House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Monday that passage of the $550 billion [sic] infrastructure bill must not wait for President Joe Biden's multitrillion-dollar safety net bill, saying the larger package is not yet ready for a vote. . . . "I told all of you that we wouldn't go on to the [infrastructure bill until] we had the reconciliation bill passed by the Senate. We were right on schedule to do all of that, until 10 days ago, a week ago, when I heard the news that this number had to come down," Pelosi said, according to the source. "It all changed, so our approach had to change. . . . The development indicates that the vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill is likely to happen in the House on Thursday, whether or not there is a deal on the separate bill by ...

One thing that puzzles me in the current state of legislative action is how little skepticism there is among journalists and commentators across the board over whether any of their do-or-die agenda items will succeed at all. I've been bringing little to my perception other than my experience of everyday people who promise to get things done but don't, and I see similar patterns at the national level that keep being confirmed. This may be because elites are simply insulated from ordinary affairs that need basic planning skills and competence in execution. So when I saw Speaker Pelosi moving the deadline for Monday's vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill to Thursday while getting the $3.5 trillion package done as well, and getting the continuing resolution through the Senate on top of that, I pretty much knew nothing like that is going to happen. This story simply confirms what I've been seeing here and there for weeks: The $3.5 trillion package, written...

I said yesterday that today would be a test of Bruce's Law, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." The much-predicted September 27 vote on the bipartisan $1.5 trillion infrastucture bill has been moved to September 30 , or maybe just "sometime this week". (I've been calling it the $1.5 trillion bill, but I've seen numbers from $1.2 to $1.7 trillion.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a new date for the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, after committing to moderate Democrats in August that the vote would take place by Monday, September 27. On Sunday, in a "Dear Colleague" letter, the speaker told Democratic lawmakers the House would begin debate on the bill on Monday and hold the vote on Thursday. . . . Pelosi told ABC she believes the House will pass the infrastructure bill "this week," ...

On Thursday , I began to formulate what I'm calling Bruce's Law, which might be expressed as, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." In fact, when you might expect the office to be a beehive of urgent actitity on Saturday and Sunday, things will be dead quiet, and nobody will be there. The New Yorker piece I linked yesterday , which is aimed at an elitist audience sympathetic to Biden's agenda, reflects the conventional wisdom surrounding tomorrow's key deadline to vote on the $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package: On Wednesday, Biden spent five hours with Democratic members of Congress, in various groupings, in search of an elusive deal, and will surely be working the phones right up until Monday’s deadline for the House vote on the infrastructure bill—and beyond. There it is, we'll be working on it all weeken...

The other day I saw a story that confirmed my surmise about having OSHA issue a national workplace vax policy, as Biden had announced: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has yet to release a draft to force private businesses to mandate coronavirus vaccines or implement rigorous testing requirements, nearly two weeks after President Joe Biden made the demand. The normal rule making process involves not just drafts, but public comment periods, advance notice, and so forth. But as I posted on September 16 , OSHA doesn't have the staff or budget to enforce such a policy, which in any case is months from implementation. But employers who would be affected can't file suit against the policy until it's published and goes into effect, which delays likely reversal in the courts. In fact, we could even think this is deliberate. It reminds me of the complaint in a recent New Yorker piece : The Biden Presidency, on both...

Media coverage of he Gabby Petito case has resulted in a focus on missing white woman syndrome, which Wikipedia characterizes as the observed disproportionate media coverage, especially in television, of missing-person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls compared to the relative lack of attention towards missing women who are not white, women of lower social classes, and missing men or boys. The entry then cites what are essentially critical race theory explanations for the phenomenon: Charlton McIlwain defined the syndrome as "white women occupying a privileged role as violent crime victims in news media reporting", and posited that missing white woman syndrome functions as a type of racial hierarchy in the cultural imagery of the West. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva categorized the racial component of missing white woman syndrome as a "form of racial grammar, through which white supremacy is normalized by implicit or even invisible stand...

The current situation for the Democrats is bringing me back to my corporate days. Time after time, deadlines are slipping, customers are getting fed up, but Mahogany Row is just holding crisis management meetings with nothing coming out of them. That's when I began to learn it was time to update my resume. Facing growing unrest in the Democrat party, President Joe Biden plans to host meetings at the White House on Wednesday to save his $5 trillion domestic spending agenda. First, Biden will meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to discuss his $1.5 trillion infrastructure deal that has passed the Senate, his partisan $3.5 trillion climate and entitlement bill, and a continuing resolution to raise the debt limit and fund the government. Well, I've been there. The big deadline comes on Monday, September 27, when Speaker Pelosi is supposed to hold a vote on the $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, without which...

The story we've seen is that at the Justice for J6 rally last Saturday, some of the very few ordinary citizens in attendance spotted a suspicious-looking man who appeared to be carrying a gun. They reported him to police, and since absolutely nothing else was going on other than hundreds of FBI, police, and reporters waiting for something to happen, the police in riot gear detained him, and the episode was fully documented. In the view above, the man is dressed in black, with a black bandana style mask covering much of his face a la Antifa. He appears to have identified himself with a badge, surrendered his weapon, and given little other direct information as to what he was doing. According to the RedState blog , Now the word is out where this guy was from. He is a 27 year old CBP officer from New Jersey. So yes, he was a federal agent. Fed on Fed arrest. He was allegedly detained for possessing a gun on the grounds of the Capitol but he was not prosecuted after they fou...

Alexander Pope had this couplet engraved on the collar of a puppy he presented to Frederick, Prince of Wales in the 1730s: I am his highness’s dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? The implication is, of course, that everyone has a master for whom he must roll over and do tricks. One of the questions that I almost never heard addressed in my years studying in English departments was how writers must actually get money The assumption seems to have been that the act of producing metaphors was so inherently valuable that they all essentially lived F Scott Fitzgerald style lives. This was in the 1960s and 70s. There may be other, post-modern interpretations now, but I doubt if the actual business of writing ever gets much attention. My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and for many years, we had only a simple tube TV with a rabbit ear antenna, which meant that much of watching was limited to PBS and the News Hour. Republican thought was represented by David Gergen...

My mother, who had a career in government after starting with the Republican National Committee, told me at a fairly early age that there are, or at least should be, no surprises at the policy level. (She fancied herself a lizard person.) Legislative leaders have the votes wrapped up well before actual votes take place. That's why parties have whips. Of course, she started her career in Washington when Lyndon Johnson was president, so this may have affected her outlook. So I'm amazed at the story that's been developing over Democrat disorder over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, said to be the centerpiece of Biden's program, except that I'm increasingly convinced that Speaker Pelosi is the one who's running things. If there are questions about Biden's competence, I think they apply as well to Pelosi, who's actually giving the orders. As of this morning, President Biden's two major economic agenda items hang in the balance this ...

It's plain that the QAnon Trump conspiracy theory of the January 6 Capitol demonstration has been collapsing for months, and news reports on the Justice for J6 rally in Washington yesterday indicate that it was attended by roughly 400 people who were at least not clearly identifiable as FBI or provocateurs, although of even the presumptive ordinary citizens, it's hard to know how many of those were also agents of some sort. A fascinating episode was captured in the video at this tweet , wherein Capitol police in full Star Wars Trooper regalia surround an individual dressed as an Antifa type, complete with black bandana mask, only to discover that he's undercover -- and not just undercover, but given his outfit, clearly a government provocateur. Without arresting him or cuffing him, they escort him from the scene, at that point to keep reporters away. And that was the big event of the afternoon. From occasional remarks by conservative YouTubers, especially after the ...

Via the New York Post: A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted against green-lighting COVID-19 booster shots Friday for most people — throwing up a major hurdle for President Biden’s plan to dole out a third dose to most Americans. But the independent panel, which reviewed a 23-page FDA briefing document highlighting recent studies, recommended emergency use of a third dose for Americans over age 65 and those at high risk of severe infection. . . . The FDA is not bound to follow the advice of the independent advisory panel but has followed its guidance so far on COVID-19 vaccinations. Overall, the panel voted 16-2 not to recommend a third dose for people 16 years and up while unanimously green-lighting it for people 65 years and older. This decision clearly undermines the current COVID narrative. and the mainstream media now appears to be backing off boosters, which Dr Fauci had been assiduously promoting. Via CNN, Indeed, even the FDA's official...

It's been pretty much conventonal wisdom that President Biden is a puppet, and someone else is pulling the strings. Over the past couple of weeks, I've become convinced it's Cruella De Vil, better known as Speaker Pelosi. What clinched it was the report fromm Bob Woodward's new book, Peril . According to the New York Post , A transcript of a call [between Gen Mark Milley and Speaker] Pelosi two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, obtained by the “Peril” authors, has her ranting at Milley about Trump’s access to nuclear weapons. “If they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this? … “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.” Milley reportedly responded: “Madam Speaker. I agree with you on everything.” The Army, of co...

On Monday, I speculated about the impact of Biden's workplace vaccine mandate on OSHA. It turns out that I underestimated the problem : “[B]efore the first legal challenges against the mandate roll in, the Biden administration faces the more immediate conundrum of whether the chronically resource-strapped Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is up to the task of enforcing it,” Business Insider noted Tuesday. “It’s reeling from deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration, and its fines are relatively low and often fought out in long court battles,” experts told the outlet. The Trump cuts left just “1,798 total OSHA inspectors, federal and state, coming out to one inspector per 82,881 workers and just $3.97 budgeted per covered worker,” according to Business Insider. According to a similar report from Reuters, “OSHA now has an estimated 800 safety and compliance inspectors to cover the more than 100,000 private-sector companies affected by the new...

Current vote tallies suggest Larry Elder has overwhelmingly lost the California recall election; he conceded last night. I was briefly optimistic when polls showed the race even, but more recent polling and analysis of the mail-in voting proved to be, if anything, too sanguine about the eventual outcome, which was disastrous for Elder. I've seen little analysis so far of the reasons for this. One factor, I think, goes to Rush Limbaugh's frequent reply when people urged him to run for office: he'd say he knows how to attract a radio audience, but he knows nothing about how to attract votes. The applies all the more to Elder, who has been an also-ran host at lackluster Salem Media along with figures like Hugh Hewitt and Sebastian Gorka. I occasinally tuned into his radio show when I was in the car now and then, but I found nothing to maintain my interest. He was saying many of the right things, but nothing new or compelling. I think this carried over into his campaign, w...

It was noted during Biden's visit to Boise yesterday that at the point where he began, "Can I ask you a question? . . . One of the things that, ah . . . I've been workin' on with some others . . . is . . ." his handlers cut his feed. By now, this isn't new. On one had, there was a story last week about how his handlers cringe and mute the volume on their own screens when the boss goes off script. On the other, everyone who's had to put up with Uncle Ted knows this signals the start of a ponderous and rambling discourse that's meant to display in tedious detail what a genius he is. But once again, I disagree with the people who think this is a sign of mental decline. I knew Uncle Ted. He was like that all his life. The main thing that got him going that way was a few too many Old Fashioneds. This actually reminds me of the story that went around during the 2020 campaign that began with the quote from Obama, "Don't undere...

I haven't seen much discussion about what the actual COVID mandate that Biden announced last Thursday will actually look like. For instance, various groups, unions, and states have announced they'll file suit against the mandate, but they can't even start until OSHA publishes the actual rules -- so far, I've seen nothing about when this will take place. But let's say the rules go in, and they turn out to be fully constitutional, no problem, the Supreme Court refuses to intervene in any of the cases that come out. What could go wrong? We really don't have solid numbers on exactly how many people would be affected by the current mandate. Anywhere from 60 to 80 million in the US are unvaxxed. We don't know how many work for companies that come under the mandate and would need to fire unvaxxed employees. Nor do we know how firm the unvaxxed will be when faced with getting the shots or losing their jobs. But we're starting to get a taste of how thi...

Two data points over the past week bought to mind the image above, which is explained on this site : [Nelson] Rockefeller, then vice-president of the United States, was on a campaign swing through upstate New York on Sept. 16, 1976, with Sen. Bob Dole, who had been selected to be President Gerald Ford’s running mate for the 1976 election. When someone in a group of heckling leftie SUNY Binghamton students gave Rockefeller the finger, Rockefeller gave it right back, much to the delight of Dole in the background. At the time, Rockefeller’s finger flashing was scandalous and the gesture was referred to thereafter as “The Rockefeller Salute”. Rockefeller refused to apologize for his outburst. “I was just responding in kind”, he said, neatly avoiding the point that the apology was not expected to go to the hecklers but to the general public. Bob Dole was asked by a reporter why he didn’t join Rockefeller in “the salute”. He replied, “I have trouble with my right arm”. This was a depart...