In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One of the first things I learned more or less in adolescence is that there are no surprises in politics, especially for someone at the level of the US House Speaker. The result of Impeachment 2.0 was never in doubt. She could bully her party in the House to vote for impeachment, but the Senate was going to follow its own rules, and it was understood from the start that there would never be the votes to convict. So why was Speaker Pelosi so angry with Mitch NcConnell? He was playing the game. In fact, I have a sense that most political leadership recognizes slmost all the time that they and their opponents are playing a game by an established set of rules, and scripted outrage is part of the whole show. What Pelosi did was pretty clearly not scripted. It was an angry rant over an outcome that was never in doubt. It was made all the more feckless by being delivered through a mask in a lisping mumble. The ncouraging thing is that these people are in fact incompetent.

I may have been premature in placing my old blog on inactive status. Over the past week or two, there have been important developments in the field I'd been covering there: The pastor of an important parish in the US ordinariate, St Barnabas Omaha, was removed for financial mismanagement, placing that parish's survival in question The Anglo-Catholic parish that in 1976 started the whole idea of a Roman Catholic personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, CA, appears to have lost the income producng property that sustained it and will probably not survive The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that established the personal prelatures for the disgruntled, the idea that originated in Hollywood, is now threatening to close the one in Austrailia for lack of growth and lack of money. I have a post on the other blog covering this last development .

Amid news that the national Republican Party has donated $250,000 to the Recall Newsom campaign, I've already noted that Gov Newsom has been remarkably passive. It's plain that the vaccine campaign is faltering, with Mayor Garcetti calling the number of dosess delivered to Los Angeles "unacceptable". Both Garcetti and Newsom are on the same side -- why isn;t Newsom taking the same line? By the same token, statistics show California is actually administering less than 70% of the doses it receives. I assume the others expire on the shelf. Where's Newsom? According to the Sacramento Bee , Democrats, meanwhile, are circling around the governor as he goes on the defensive. Last month he lifted stay-at-home orders across the state and is pushing hard for a deal with the Legislature on reopening schools. In recent weeks, he’s been traveling to vaccination super sites around the state to promote his work on the coronavirus pandemic, one of the key points of cri...

Via Fox News , Los Angeles is temporarily shutting down several city vaccination sites in the coming days after it burned through its limited allocation of first doses for Moderna’s vaccine. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made the announcement during a briefing Wednesday, noting that the city distributed 98% of all doses received. The closure will affect sites at Dodgers Stadium and the other four non-mobile vaccination sites on Friday and Saturday, with reopenings eyed for Tuesday or Wednesday. "This week we only received 16,000 new doses. 16,000," Garcetti said during the briefing. "That’s about the number of doses we give out every single day. That is unacceptable." The week’s allocation is a reduction of 90,000 doses from the week prior, the mayor said. However federal officials involved with the COVID-19 response struck an optimistic tone this week, with the Biden administration claiming vaccine supply has increased from 8.6 million doses delivered to...

Yesterday, the CDC updated its masking guidelines . We've been in this pretty much a full year, the pandemic surges and wanes, and the CDC's answer is we need to wear two masks now instead of one, since nothing else has worked. After months of demands for federal health officials to update mask recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines Wednesday that include wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic. The updated guidance follows the release of new research from the CDC which tested various masks in a lab setting and found evidence that combining a cloth mask over a surgical mask could dramatically reduce both the spread of the virus to others and exposure to the virus oneself. So over the course of a week, he CDC has done "new research" into whether two masks are better than one? Exactly a week ago, Dr Fauci was saying there was no scientific evidence, just do it...

So I'm seeing headlines about Statement on crossing state lines for vaccine , COVID-19 vaccine lines growing across states , HOLLYWOOD ELITE CUTTING LINES , and so forth. My wife stopped by a local Subway, and the lady behind the counter, seeing my wife was a member of the eligible over-65 cohort, asked if she'd gotten her shot yet. My wife replied that we've checked, and there's so far no realistic way we can get one, even though we're eligible. The lady behnid the counter said she had a friend who paid to get it, but then he bragged about it, and now he's under investigation. I've done web searches on whether there's a black market in the vaccine. A few articles say there "could" be one, but it's only for the wealthy, and anyhow, it's Trump's fault. But the Subway lady's friend doesn't sound like he's rich and powerful -- at minimum, he wouldn't be investigated if he were. So it seems like stuff is happening, b...

The 2021 Super Bowl ratings, like the 2020 election results, were delayed. When they finally came out, they reflected the continuing decline of the Super Bowl as a media event. According to the New York Post, CBS announced on Tuesday morning that 96.4 million viewers watched the game across all their platforms, “including the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports and NFL digital properties, Buccaneers and Chiefs mobile properties, Verizon Media mobile properties and ESPN Deportes television and digital properties.” . . . Last season’s Super Bowl, a Chiefs victory over the 49ers on Fox, averaged 102.1 million viewers across all platforms. Some in the elite, who apparently weren't paying close attention, complained that the fans in the stadium were clearly not social distancing. Even though the ones in the stadium could be excused, since they were cardboard cutouts, it does strike me as a valid point -- if corporate policies require employees attending Zoom meetings from home to ...