In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...