In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Yesterday I speculated that Dr Fauci, in the course of overstaying his 15 minutes of fame, could potentially fall victim to revelations of kickbacks or MeToo. But my wife pointed out that his million-dollar prize for "defending science" was exactly a payoff, in the same way that Hunter Biden's recent book deal , which involves an undisclosed payment for a manuscript that will inevitably be ghostwritten, is a payoff to both Hunter and his dad. Well, a hooker is paid a speciric fee for a particular sexual act, and this is against the law. An excort is paid for a particular amount of time, in which activities are not specified, and this is perfectly legal. The same principle is at work here. So what was Dr Fauci paid for? He already earned $417,608 in 2019, the highest paid employee in the US government. (That amount probably doesn't account for other lagniappes, bonuses, deferred compensation, and the like) A milllion bucks is chump change, but so far, I haven...

In yesterday's news: Dr. Anthony Fauci has won the $1 million Dan David Prize for “defending science” and advocating for vaccines now being administered worldwide to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The Israel-based Dan David Foundation on Monday named President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser as the winner of one of three prizes. It said he had earned the recognition over a lifetime of leadership on HIV research and AIDS relief, as well as his advocacy for the vaccines against COVID-19. In its statement, the private foundation did not mention former President Donald Trump, who undermined Fauci’s follow-the-science approach to the pandemic. But it credited Fauci with “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition during the challenging COVID crisis.” “As the COVID-19 pandemic unraveled, (Fauci) leveraged his considerable communication skills to address people gripped by fear and anxiety and worked relentlessly to inform individuals in the Unit...

If 2020 was the year of the dumpster fire, I'm beginning to wonder if 2021 won't be quite so bad, mainly because things are shaping up where the people who are trying to make things bad for us in the plebs are incompetent. Let's take a few current events, the Trump "impeachment", the TJ Ducklo "resignatiom", and Gavin Newsom. It's hard to figure out just what the Democrats and a few Republicans had in mind with trying to "impeach" a president who'd already been voted out, who was completely out of the government at the time the "trial" occurred, and over which the chief justice, presumably an authority on its constitutionality, apparently declined to preside. The foreordained result was acquittal, which surprised no one but Speaker Pelosi, who lost her temper. They narrowly beat Trump in November. The best I can surmise is that the Democrats deeply feared the potential for Trump running again in 2024 -- but as the conven...

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...