2021: The Year Of Incompetence?

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 conventional wisdom goes, thngs can happen next week that change everything, why spend so much energy and prestige on what might or might not happen in 2024? And of course, the Republicans who were squishy on the "trial" probably ended their careers.

If Pelosi and Schumer were trying to make things bad for the plebs,, they didn't display competence in the attempt.

Now let's look at TJ Ducklo. (I'm not sure what I'd do if I had a surname that reminded people of a duck. It's possible, given the report of his threats against a Politico reporter, that he compensates for the unserious name by trying to terrify people, which I guess is one strategy, though it didn't work out for him here.)

I've already noted that his boss, Whte House press secretary Psaki, has quickly earned a reputation for incompetence herself, and she certainly lived up to it in l'affaire Ducklo. First, it comes out that Ducklo threatened, insulted, and abused Tara Palmeri in a profanity-laced rant. only weeks after the president assured his staff that doing this would get them fired on the spot. (Palmeri, acrtually, comes off in her public persona as not much more serious than Ducklo. This whole thing just looks like a spat among the high school social set.)

So press secretary Psaki's reaction, rather than to follow the announced policy and fire duckboy on the spot, is to ask him to apologize or something, which he doesn't quite do. So then, certainly under pressure from other high school movers and shakers, she announces duckboy is to be suspended, without pay, for a week. When that doesn't work, duckboy finally resigns a few days later -- doubtless, as some commentators have suggested, with the assurance there's a prestigious job for him at CNN or someplace like that.

But, as other commentators have also suggested, the one thing they never did was what Biden said they would, fire duckboy on the spot. This was all a tiff between the prom king and the prom queen anyhow. The White House staff and press corps came off yet again as an incestuous cabal of the unserious.

Last we have Gov Newsom and his asociates, who appear to have been caught napping by the recall campaign, which as of this writing has almost certainly achieved the required 1.5 million signatres and will likely reach 2 million by next month's deadline. For weeks, Democrat insiders had been dismissing the effort, simply repeating the mantra that "no Republican has won statewide office in 16 years". Nevertheless, the last governor to be recalled was a Democrat, and he lost to a Republican.

Now the story has shifted. Newsom is polishing his image. I think he needs more than polishing at this point. There are a couple of problems for Newsom even if he beats back the recall effort. The first is that the campaign, which at this point is likely to take place, will be expensive and drain Democrat resourcres for 2022.

The second is that a recall election differs from a regular gubernatorial election in that there's no primary, there's just a range of candidates against one incumbent. The winner just needs a plurality, assuming the governor is recalled. This means that, depending on how the campaign shakes out, other candidates can split Newsom's vote, even if they're Democrats.

Insiders, who'd been dismissing the recall up to a few weeks ago, have already said it's now too late to stop the election. It doesn't look so far as though Newsom has thought to do much more than polish his image.

You don't get figs from thistles. Nor do screwups very frequently accomplish what they set out to do, however nefarious their intent.

Incompetence On Display

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.

Anglican Stuff

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.

Why Is Newsom Quiet?

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 criticism for his administration.

The problem is that the teachers' unions don't want to reopen, and Newsom isn't going to buck them in any serious way. Visiting vaccination sites would work if it were better publicized, and if he took the line that he's working to end the lockdowns and masks, but that's not the party line. The Biden program is that this will go on indefinitely.

In an appearance at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Biden told staff “You know that wearing this mask through the next year here can save lives, a significant number of lives.”

Mumbling through his own mask, Biden also blamed President Trump for the vaccine roll out being delayed.

“While scientists did their job in discovering vaccines in record time, my predecessor – I’ll be very blunt about it – did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said.

Even for people who've had both doses of the vaccine, the line is now that they've still got to wear masks -- in fact, it sounds like they've got to wear two masks now.

So far, I'm also not aware of any statement from Newsom on last week's Supreme Court decision overturning the California ban on indoor worship. The problem overall is that the Blues are displaying no indication that they want anything but a new normal, masks, distancing, continued restrictions on restaurants and churches, restrictions on travel and assembly, with the goalposts constantly moving.

The Republicans are starting to wake up, while the Democrats are stuck on Impeachment 2.0. They seem to be fixated on a potential Trump run for president in 2024, while the issues that elected him in 2016 are still out there. Anything can happen to Trump, but the issues remain, and smart politicians will seize on them. Upcoming news cycles will inevitably feature the Newsom recall, focusing on how he, and by association Biden, have done nothing but make things worse since the 2020 election.

The $250,000 from the national party to the recall campaign is, as observers have noted, little more than a token amount. But it's well invested.

Mayor Garcetti Shuts Down LA Vaccination Sites

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 states weekly, to 11 million, or a 28% total increase across the first three weeks. Garcetti said that overall increase has yet to trickle down to Los Angeles.

My wife said, "Garcetti must not like Newsom," since the problems with vaccine distribution are among the issues behind the Recall Newsom campaign. Garcetti might almost be characterized as questioning the credibility of CDC statistics, too.

But the problems in California, as I've posted recently, go beyond a single shortage of a single vaccine in a single week. The state has generally announced that everyone 65 and older is "eligible" to receive the vaccine, but actually setting up an appointment is effectively impossible, and anecdotal accounts suggest at least some vaccination sites apply a de facto racial test to applicants.

Gov Newsom has been oddly passive in response to reports that the recall petition will easily surpass the 1.5 million signature requirement to place it on the ballot. It's hard not to assume that if he were even to express a credible interest in breaking the vaccination logjam, he could beat the recall. Last summer, he had daily press onferences on COVID. Why can't he simply resume those and at least seem to want to solve the issues?

Part of the problem appears to be the party line: things are great! Everyone's eligible! We're in COVID paradise! Here's Dr Fauci:

As vaccine demand continues to far outpace supply, the nation's leading infectious disease expert made a stunning prediction. "By the time we get to April, that would be what I call for lack of better wording, open season. Namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category can start to get vaccinated," Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

But vaccination sites still need doses and that's a big problem for Maryland. "We need more damn vaccines," Governor Larry Hogan said. "We have no control whatsoever over this supply problem."

The CBS story at the link is skeptical, at leaat by implication:

Mr. Biden announced the U.S. had just signed contracts for 100 million more doses each of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The vaccines would arrive by the end of July, he said.

So Fauci, the administration's front man for COVID, says everyone will be "eligible" by April, but Biden says there won't be supply before July. This sounds a little like life in the former Soviet bloc -- everyone's "eligible" for a car and an apartment, they just need to get on the 16-year waiting list. People didn't buy that.

If Newsom and Biden were serious public figures, Fauci, who contradicts himself weekly, would be out of the picture, and both Newsom and Biden would be giving daily updates. Even the media seems less willing to cover for them.

Double Mask Double Talk

Yesterday, the CDC updated its masking guidelines. We've been in this pretty much a full year, the pandemic surges and wanes, and the CDC's answer is we need to wear two masks now instead of one, since nothing else has worked.

After months of demands for federal health officials to update mask recommendations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced new guidelines Wednesday that include wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks at a time to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

The updated guidance follows the release of new research from the CDC which tested various masks in a lab setting and found evidence that combining a cloth mask over a surgical mask could dramatically reduce both the spread of the virus to others and exposure to the virus oneself.

So over the course of a week, he CDC has done "new research" into whether two masks are better than one? Exactly a week ago, Dr Fauci was saying there was no scientific evidence, just do it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no evidence showing two masks are safer than wearing one, despite saying otherwise last week.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference,” Fauci said during a video livestream interview with the American Federation of Teachers.

. . . His comments come after saying last week that wearing two face masks “likely” provides more protection than wearing just one mask.

I just can't imagine a bunch of CDC lab techs suddenly putting in 20-hour days, working through Super Sunday, to conduct thousands to tests on what masks worn in what combination are safer -- but this is the clear implication of Fauci's remarks. In fact, the implication of the CBS story in the link is that the CDC suddenly did this "after months of demands". Right.

The fact is that over much of the past year, an enormous majority of people have worn masks. In California, you can't buy gas, shop for groceries, go to the post office, go to church, or get a haircut without a mask. Even joggers, who are technically exempt, wear them. The big exception appears to be public transit, where mask rules aren't generally enforced, but this is a government function, oddly enough, when almost everythihng else is enforced privately.

But with 98% of the citizens wearing masks 98% of the time, the virus waxes and wanes irrespective. Nobody gets to ask Dr Fauci why two masks instead of one would change this, but if someone did, I'm sure he'd answer it's "just common sense". But then, why not enforce 12 feet social distance instead of six? Is that "not common sense", maybe because it's just more obviously absurd than wearing two masks? It sounds like they're making things up as they go along.

The new rules about how to wear them, too, srrike me as something made up to sound good. Two disposable masks won't do it. It has to be a disposable mask under a cloth mask, not over it. What about two cloth masks? They don't say. But if I have two cloth masks, will that work? Would a black one need to be outside a red one? These are sartorial restrictions, a new dress code for the new normal, to go along with liturgical revisions and de facto bans on fornication.

I just don't know if anyone will start enforcing the new rule -- two masks required to enter -- or if the mask monitors will also deny entry to someone wearing just two disposable masks. We'll have to see. Citizens will likely cooperate rather than cause a hassle if it happens.

What happened to the vaccine, by the way? Everyone's getting their shots now, right? If the vaccine's gonna solve the problem, why are they talking about two masks now, when everyone's gonna have their vaccine soon?

The Vaccine Is Turning Into A Disaster

So I'm seeing headlines about Statement on crossing state lines for vaccine, COVID-19 vaccine lines growing across states, HOLLYWOOD ELITE CUTTING LINES, and so forth.

My wife stopped by a local Subway, and the lady behind the counter, seeing my wife was a member of the eligible over-65 cohort, asked if she'd gotten her shot yet. My wife replied that we've checked, and there's so far no realistic way we can get one, even though we're eligible. The lady behnid the counter said she had a friend who paid to get it, but then he bragged about it, and now he's under investigation.

I've done web searches on whether there's a black market in the vaccine. A few articles say there "could" be one, but it's only for the wealthy, and anyhow, it's Trump's fault. But the Subway lady's friend doesn't sound like he's rich and powerful -- at minimum, he wouldn't be investigated if he were. So it seems like stuff is happening, but the media isn't covering it, at least not yet.

My wife sent me a link to a vaccine tracker from a local news station. As of this morning,, this is what it shows:

Two things don't seem to fit. One is that California's populatoni is 39.5 million. If roughly 4.9 million doses have been administered, this is 12% of the population. That would be pretty good if it were the case. But the state is still in Phase 1a of the target population, which is those over 75 and front-line workers -- and by the account at least of the Kaiser health plan, they're still working on this group. But those over 75 in California number only 1.7 million. And they're not done with these yet.

Nevertheless, LA County and other areas have lowered the eligible age to 65. There are 1.9 million Californians between 65 and 74. This gives a total of 3.6 million Californians over 65. According to the tracker with today's data, this is far below the 4.9 million doses the state says it's administered, but the situation on the ground appears not to relfect this -- again, Kaiser says that due to shortages, it isn't even done with the over 75s.

The 4.9 million total doesn't distinguish between first and second doses, and we don't have a good count of how many "front line" workers are in this total. But it does seem like, if 4.9 million doses have actually been administered, the state should be much farther along than it seems to be.

This leaves out the separate question of why the tracker says 7.4 million doses have been received, but only 4.9 million have been administered. The story nationally seems to be that some number of these are going bad on the shelf. In California, this could be fully a third of those delivereed. Sonebody needs to ask questions.

This story from San Francisco may provide some additionial insight:

Hing Yiu Chung lives in a racially diverse San Francisco neighborhood hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. While vaccines have been difficult to come by, the 69-year-old got one by showing proof she lives where she does.

She had to wait in line for two hours with other seniors, some who were disabled or leaning on canes, for a chance at a couple hundred shots available each day through a local public health clinic in the Bayview neighborhood.

. . . The experience wasn’t ideal, but targeting vulnerable ZIP codes is one way San Francisco and other U.S. cities and counties are trying to ensure they vaccinate people in largely Black, Latino and working-class communities that have borne the brunt of the pandemic. In Dallas, authorities tried to prioritize such ZIP codes, which tended to be communities of color, but backtracked after the state threatened to reduce the city’s vaccine supply.

The implicatoin is that an Asian woman is lower priority than black or Latin, unless she can show she lives in a neighborhood with enough blacks and Latins.

An LA County press release suggests a similar implicit policy is in force here:

About 25% of all vaccine doses were administered to White residents, 25% to Latino/Latinx residents, 18% to Asian residents, and 17% to residents who identify as multi-racial. African American /Black residents have received only 3.5% of all administered doses highlighting a glaring inadequacy in the vaccine roll-out to-date. Examining data on vaccinations of residents 65 and older indicates that 20% of this age group have received at least one dose of vaccine. However, we are alarmed by the disproportionality we are seeing in who is receiving the vaccine; American Indian/Native Alaskan (9.3%), Black/ African American (7.2%), and Latino/Latinx residents (14.3%) have lower vaccination rates than White (29.4%), Asian (18.2%) and Pacific Islander residents(29.4%). This early data shows us that we need to make it much easier for American Indian/Alaska Native, Black/ African American and Latino/Latinx residents and workers to be vaccinated in their communities by providers they trust.

So far, it's hard to avoid thinking that even if we showed up at a vaccination site, we'd be subject to a racial test. But if there are so many millions of doses coming in, why is there such a shortage? And why is there apparently a black market, and not just for the super-wealthy?