In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm continuing to look at current public figures through the lens of what I learned working for incompetent tech managers. One of the key characteristics I began to see with all such incompetents was an inability or unwillingness to recognize the calendar. A deadline can be set many months away, and even a detailed project plan can be made and approved, but somehow people at that level of incompetence can't quantify days, weeks, or months and match those quantities to levels of effort. Let's look at the current tasks that face Sen Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. By general consensus, his most important one is raising the debt limit, which Treasury Secretary Yellen has been insisting must be done by roughly October 18, now less than two weeks away. But there's actually less time than that, because the Senate goes on recess next week. Schumer's problem is that he has a 50-50 Senate, with Minority Leader McConnell able to keep all 50 Republican votes in line...

What I learned from workling for incompetent tech bosses was that past a certain point, their credibility was shot with everyone. and they were either out the door, transferred, demoted, or kicked upstairs. Usually, though, that point was too late to save the business. It's starting to look as if Speaker Pelosi and President Biden have reached a similar point. Over the weekend, she set a new "deadline" of October 31 to pass the infrastruceure bill (BIF). In a "Dear Colleague" letter released on Saturday, Pelosi said that “more time was needed” to pass the infrastructure bill along with the larger, $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package after scrambling over the past two days to get enough votes. . . . “There is an October 31st Surface Transportation Authorization deadline, after last night’s passage of a critical 30-day extension,” Pelosi wrote. “We must pass BIF [bipartisan infrastructure framework] well before then – the sooner the b...

My uncle was a lieutenant in the Army in the mid-1950s. When he got out, he left his collection of manuals with my parents, where I found them in our attic. Among them was the Manual for Court Martial, which I eagerly studied. One of the offenses I discovered was Contempt Toward Officials, which struck me as so strange that I still remember it. Although the wording has changed slightly since the time I read it, the current version is probably very close: Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct. This immediately came to mind when I learned of Marine LTC Scheller's YouTube video : In August, Scheller posted a video denouncing senior military lea...

The thing that's struck me about the whole BIF-BBB drama of the past couple weeks is how much it keeps reminding me of the incompetence I saw at the tech companies I used to work for. The constantly repeating pattern is of organizations that have months to finish a project, but nothing gets done until the deadline is just days away. Then the bosses who let this happen cover it up with a frenzy of promises and happy talk until here's simply no option but to admit the whole scheme has collapsed. One little-noticed vignette came out this week when it was revealed that Sen Manchin gave Sen Schumer a written version of his $1.5 trillion top line in July -- but Schumer neglected to tell Speaker Pelosi about it until just this past week . Then Pelosi's response was just to continue the happy talk about how we're gettring closer and closer until even she was finally forced to give up the game. Why did Schumer not tell Pelosi about Manchin's top line in July? It seems t...

Speaker Pelosi worked all weekend to get a deal on the $1.5 trillion infrastuture vote, except it was only Thursday. Why am I skeptical of this whole story? Earlier in the day, Rep Hoyer was pretty sure the big vote wasn't going to happen. The No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives had a one-word answer when reporters asked if he was confident the $1 trillion bill would pass in a vote scheduled later in the day. "Nope," said Representative Steny Hoyer. CNN also reported during the day , A source familiar with the whip operation of the House Progressive Caucus tells CNN that the group just completed a status check with their members and their number of “no” votes remains “solid.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the caucus, has said repeatedly that at least half of her members were prepared to vote "no" if there wasn’t a guarantee around the wider spending package. That would mean somewhere in the range of 45 to 50 "no" votes. T...

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 ...