In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This morning, the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Given all that isn't happening with the BBB, the BIF, and the debt ceiling, yesterday's big news was the elevation of Dr Rachel Levine to the rank of four star admiral, a breakthrough for transgenders. The crack journalists at the RedState blog posted a word salad headline: Democrat Counter to Glenn Youngkin Enthusiasm Enters Into the Pathetic . But with everyone else on virtual vacation, I can at least fall back on the Roman Catholic ordinariates for recovering, or maybe not, Anglicans. Let's take the case of The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali : {T}he former Anglican bishop of Rochester, England, was received into the church Sept. 29 by Msgr. Keith Newton, head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which was established in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI for the corporate reception of Anglican communities. I'd noticed Bp Nazir-Ali on occasion when he was still in Rochester as a co...

Media reports from both ends of the spectrum on what's being hyped as "negotiations" on the BBB and BIF bills are in a strange never-never land. I noted yesterday that the Washington Examiner says the BBB is "still unwritten", but this doesn't stop CBS News from referring to a 2,465 page bill and listing a series of line items. So how does Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Examiner, who wrote that piece, still have a job if someone from CBS can give a page count? CBS calls it the standard $3.5 trillion in that piece, but this story by Sean Moran , who happens to be a a congressional reporter for Breitbart News, calls it "the $3.1 trillion reconciliation bill, or the Build Back Better Act". This is just one of the many discrepancies over the actual numbers for both the BBB and BIF that I've seen in recent weeks. The only conclusion I can draw is that none of these people is working real hard. Sean Moran goes on ...

Back in August, I was frustrated that nothing was happening in the news, but at least I could justify it, because it was August. But as of this morning's headlines, still nothing. The big event is the death of fully vaxxed Colin Powell from COVID. But right after that, a major aggregator has Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus getting trolled for mask-shaming some dude in an elevator. Nothing's happening. So this may be one reason for a steady stream of speculation about who's pulling President Biden's strings, mostly focusing on Barack Obama . Most recently, commentators have noted that Obama is campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia when Biden would probably be a net negative there. The problem is that if Obama were in fact pulling Biden's strings, it's hard to imagine that Biden would be doing as disastrously as he is. But Obama himself reportedly said , “You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” Obama may be campaigning for M...

But the clip above shows he's been paying attention. I've been focused on the putative Oct 31 deadline to pass BBB via reconciliation, but Rove speaks to the bigger picture: by the White House schedule, the debt ceiling extension, governmnent funding, the BIF, and the BBB must all be passed by December 3. He makes the point that Sen Schumer doesn't want to use reconciliation to pass the debt ceiling extension, because this leads to a "vote-a-rama". CNN explains this : Usually in the legislative process, lawmakers can use a series of procedural maneuvers to avoid voting on amendments. But in a budget reconciliation process -- which Democrats are using to advance their sweeping package -- you can't do that. Lawmakers cannot hold a final vote on a reconciliation bill until all the amendments have been "disposed of," or in simpler terms, "voted on." The practice involves votes on a series of amendments that can -- and usually do -- stretc...

Further to yesterday's post, I'm still not seeing any willingness by congressional leftists to recognize a need to make serious reductions in their reconciliation package to get anything through, although President Biden is now making noises in that direction President Joe Biden publicly conceded Friday that the dollar amount of the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill was going to shrink during a speech at a child care center in Connecticut. 'We're not going to get $3.5 trillion, we'll get less than that. We're going to get it. And we're going to come back and get the rest,' he said, addressing a room partially filled with Democratic lawmakers. But this suggests to me that there's no serious coordination taking place between the White House and congressional Democrat leaders. He went on to say, But the question is how much of what is important will we get into the legislation. I’m of the view that it’s important to establish the...

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...