In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

So now I'm seeing that the Democrats plan to finish an agreement on the BIF and the BBB by October 31 . Both the House and Senate have been on recess this past week , with key figures like Speaker Pelosi and Sen Sinema in Europe. The House and Senate do return next week, but the House will be working only four day weeks until the 31st, while the Senate will at least be wrorking five day weeks. Although I had earlier seen December 3 as a deadline, November is going to be pretty much of a loss, with both houses in holiday recess for two weeks. But a Washington insiders' newsletter says , We’ve pointed this out before, but Democrats truly are nowhere when it comes to finishing this reconciliation package. The “serious progress” that has been made is not really evident to us, or to the lawmakers involved. → Democratic leaders on the Hill have been unable to reach agreement on a topline number. This is key to everything and is at the heart of their stalemate. → Progre...

The controversy over United Airlines's vaccine mandate has brought to the fore a key question for people who request exemptions based on religious or conscientious grounds. United's original policy states: "Given our focus on safety and the steep increases in Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths, all employees whose request is approved will be placed on temporary, unpaid personal leave on October 2 while specific safety measures for unvaccinated employees are instituted," said United's memo to employees. "Given the dire statistics...we can no longer allow unvaccinated people back into the workplace until we better understand how they might interact with our customers and their vaccinated co-workers." Although the employees' unions were slow to react, six individual employees did file a class action suit against the company, which is covered in a lengthy, obtuse, and poorly organized piece in Breitbart News . United Airlines orig...

I'm skeptical of stories that pilots and other staff at Southwest are pushing back against the effectively non-existent vaccine mandate by calling in sick. First, the union, and other corresponding unions, make it clear that any such effort is an illegal action and by definition can't be organized. Second, there are other possible explanations for the crunch, and third, people have only so much sick time to use this way. However, this doesn't mean workers covered by collective bargaining agreements don't have recourse. The same Southwest pilots union that says it isn't behind a sickout has filed suit against the airline . The Southwest pilots association filed a motion for a restraining order against the airline on October 8. “Several times since August 30, 2021, Southwest Airlines has taken new unilateral actions which violate the status quo between the parties in further violation of the Railway Labor Act,” the motion states. “Most recently, on Octobe...

Two weeks ago, the news was that Vice President Harris had brought in a crisis managemet team to help her public image. LORRAINE VOLES was one of two hires, along with former Obama speechwriter ADAM FRANKEL, reported by both the Washington Post and CNN over the weekend. Both worked for the vice president during the transition, and “offered to be of assistance,” an official from the White House said. A Harris aide said Voles and Frankel began their new roles in August. Although the White House official didn’t use the word “crisis,” Voles is well known as a public relations and crisis communications expert. She most recently led crisis communications at George Washington University and at Fannie Mae, after serving as a strategist and adviser to HILLARY CLINTON’s 2006 Senate reelection race and 2008 presidential bid. In the late ‘90s, she helped AL GORE craft his message as vice president. Now she’ll help Harris with long-term planning, her policy agenda and with “organizational d...

Speaker Pelosi has been at the back of my mind as I've considered the question of whether the Latin mass made more reverent Catholics when it was the norm, but an incident inolving her in Rome this weekend brought it to the fore: Pelosi was given the honor of meeting with the Pope on Saturday. Pelosi was also invited to do a reading during Mass at St Patrick’s Catholic American Parish in Rome. But there was some form of a “security incident” according to Paulist Fr. Steven Petroff, rector of St. Patrick’s, who was saying the Mass. The Rome correspondent for The Epoch Times described it as Pelosi being “heckled.” We know little else about the incident, except that according to Fr Petroff, there was some type of disruption that caused her security detail to take her out of the mass before she could do the second reading, which would be Hebrews 4: 12-13: 12 For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two edged sword; and reaching unto the division ...

For some time, I've been in the habit of revisiting what I thought I knew about the Catholic Church when I was a lot younger, vis-a-vis what I've learned since converting. Just in the last few days, it occurred to me that I knew a lot of Catholics in high school, college, and early adulthood, and that shouldn't be a surprise, since Catholics are the largest religious denomination of any sort in the US. Not only that, but I was always at least somewhat interested in Catholicism, though I was raised Presbyterian. If nothing else, I wanted to know how so many people could be so wrong over so many centuries. I was born in 1947, as were the Catholics whom I knew in my age cohort. I could probably list two dozen names among fairly close friends, as well as girls and women I dated, and they would have been a large proportion of people who were more than just acquaintances in my youth. And this means we can extrapolate: if they were early baby boomers like me, they would have b...

Over the past few days, I've noted an anomaly: Maine is being hammered with COVID cases despite having one of the highest vaccination rates in the US: A week ago, I noted Maine was having a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations. This happened despite 84% of everyone over 12, 85.3% of everyone over 18, and 98.4% of everyone over 65 are at least partially vaccinated. M aine's policies on masking follow CDC guidelines . But here's a graph of Maine's COVID cases as of this morning: On the other side of the country, Los Angeles County's statistics show a remarkable difference: In contrast to Maine, only 77.9% of the population is fully vaccinated. While the county has an indoor masking requirememt, as opposed to Maine's recommendation, the effectveness of masks is at best debatable -- but given the disparity we see here, so should be the effectiveness of vaccines. In fact, LA County is even mooting dropping its mask mandate : “I’m very cognizant t...