Testing Bruce's Law

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 weekend, right up to Monday! Well, the first question is whether that's in fact what they're doing. Are they in the office? Are the phone lines humming? Well, no.

President Joe Biden left the White House on Friday for another weekend away from Washington, DC, as Democrats continue fighting over his planned $5 trillion in spending.

The president spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the phone in the afternoon before he boarded Marine One for Camp David.

. . . The White House cited “progress” in a readout of the call sent to reporters after Biden left.

“The three agreed to stay in touch about their outreach through the weekend,” the readout concluded.

Well, how close to agreement are the various sides? Even before the cliffhanger weekends I experienced in my corporate days, I had a pretty good idea of how much work needed to be done to meet the Monday deadline and how realistic a goal it was to finish it in a weekend. (Actually, the programmers had been goofing off for many months, and a single weekend never made a difference.)

What puzzles me is how difficult it's been to find realistic estimates of the House whip count. The numbers in most stories seem very small -- it's the Squad, AOC and a half dozen harpies, versus the House moderates, eight or ten who forced the September 27 vote on Pelosi some weeks ago. But the actual numbers, as far as I can tell, are much larger:

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Friday that 50 House Democrats will oppose the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill, which is scheduled for a vote Monday.

“Pramila Jayapal told me at least 50 of her progressive members still plan to vote to sink the infrastructure bill if it goes forward Monday,” a CNN reporter tweeted. “She added that leadership taking some steps to move ahead on the big reconciliation bill is ‘not enough.'”

. . . When Jayapal was interviewed Wednesday on CNN, she explained she is concerned the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package will not pass the House if the Democrats give up leverage and pass the $1.2 trillion bill without its far more expansive cousin, which is full of far-left goodies.

Well, what about the Republicans? We're told that Speaker Pelosi can lose only a few Democrat votes, but if she loses 50, can the Republicans make up for it and pass the package? It doesn't look that way, according to Politico:

Fewer than a dozen House Republicans are expected to vote for the $550 billion infrastructure bill — which got 19 Senate GOP votes last month — according to multiple lawmakers in the party.

If House Democrats keep pushing their two-track plan for a party-line social spending bill and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, they can't expect many GOP passengers on that second train.

. . . Those numbers are still in flux, the members said, addressing the closely held vote count candidly on condition of anonymity.

Being Politico, the piece is sanguine about the possibility that the House Progressive Caucus can be prevailed upon to decouple the $1.5 trillion bill from the $3.5 trillion bill. But as of Friday, it was fairly plain this wasn't going to happen.

In the meantime, Biden is at Camp David, but he's sure gonna keep in touch.

This will be a key test of Bruce's Law. My bet is there's no vote tomorrow.

There's Actually No Vax Policy

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 the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them. Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible. . . . the Democratic Party is barely a majority party in the U.S. Congress. It’s a fifty-fifty Senate, and a fifty-fifty world. In a purely practical sense, the challenge for Biden is that he hasn’t got to the hard part yet.

But as far as I can see, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Biden's intent is to look like he's Doing Something about COVID, but his choices are all bad ones. Anyone who actually means to enforce vaccine passports, like Mayor DeBlasio, runs into the problem that many people who are denied entry for not having a passport are going to be minority, especially African-American. They claim with some justice that the policy is racist.

There's another conundrum here. The well-publicized New York brawl at Carmine's restaurant started when a staffer "accused [three women] of presenting fake COVID-19 vaccine cards". Wait a moment. What's an authentic COVID vaccine card? How can you tell a fake?

For instance, my barber shop, in a spontaneous policy, requires "proof of vaccination". My wife and I keep our vaccination cards in our home safe for the simple reason that if we lose them, some future policy could cause difficulties if we don't have them. So for my barber and anyone else who asks, I made a photocopy of the card and keep it in my wallet. But it's clearly a photocopy. My barber accepts it, but why should he? You can't use a photocopy of a driver's license or a birth certificate. Did the Carmine's staffer refuse to accept a photocopy? Is a photocopy "fake"?

There's no rule, because there's no actual policy. An employer who fires people for not being vaxxed in advance of an official OSHA policy runs a great deal of risk, especially if many affected are minorities. But this becomes the employer's problem, not Biden's, while the employer has no recourse, because he can't point to any actual policy that he's following, while on the other hand, he can't sue OSHA for redress, either. Meanwhile, Biden can claim he's Done Something.

And the ambiguity gets worse. On September 9, Biden strongly implied that in addition to the two jabs last spring, people would be required to get the boosters once they were available (which Biden at the time said would be nearly a week ago, September 20). But now, Dr Walensky of all people says the CDC is not changing its definition of "fully vaccinated".

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the definition of “fully vaccinated” won’t change when COVID-19 booster shots are rolled out—at least in the near future.

Well, the FDA isn't completely on board with the boosters.

While they endorsed it for those who were 65 years and over, as well as those at high risk of severe disease, they didn’t endorse it for everyone else. That blew up Biden’s plans for a huge roll-out. Two senior FDA officials even quit last month, reportedly over what they felt was a rush to push out the shots for everyone in the country.

My wife and I are over 65. Barring any surprises, which I don't rule out, we'll probably get the boosters, but as of now, we have no idea when, where, or how we'd get them, except if it's anything like the first jabs, we can't just call our doctor at Kaiser, we've got to go to a cattle pen. But even if we didn't bother, it looks like for the foreseeable future, our existing vax cards will work.

Unless they change their minds.

Missing White Woman Syndrome

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 standards".

But let's differentiate betweern two separate media, TV news programs and the true crime genre, either in print or on cable TV. (True crime cable TV shows are often based on books by specialized true crime writers like the late Ann Rule.) The accusation that TV news focuses on missing cute white women is probably true, but I don't think you can say this says something about the culture as a whole.

For starters, what appears on TV news is determined by TV news editors, who are themselves largely upper middle class white people. They're working from "instant" events that cross their screens, and the stories they decide are important are driven by a herd mentality common in the press. Gabby Petito will be important until the story fades and there's a hurricane or something else to replace it.

However, this type of TV network news has steadily been losing its audience. I don't think it's out of line to suggest that upper middle class white news editors are increasingly out of touch with the plebs, who simply aren't buyng the old formula as much. This says good things about the plebs, as far as I can see, while those critiquing news coverage via CRT are speaking from their own limited academic bourgeois perspective.

But let's look at the true crime genre of books and cable TV series and specials. These are out of the "news" category, since they often cover subjects like serial killers Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, whose cases are now 40 and 50 years in the past. Beyond that, Gacy's and Dahmer's victims were males, which doesn't fit the missing white women characterization.

In fact, Ted Bundy is in many ways unique among the well-known killers in that he did single out attractive, young, middle-class white women, while others, like Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, singled out street prostitutes of various racial backgrounds, in fact they were Lumpenproletariat. To true crime fans -- I think I can speak as one -- all such cases are of equal interest.

And as a true crime fan who doesn't follow TV news, I was pretty much impervious to the Gabby Petito story until early this week when the missing white woman theory caught my attention. But this is a phenomenon of TV news that says more about TV news than its shrinking audience.

This is not to say that there aren't poorly produced true crime shows, which are in fact often about missing white women. In fact, there's a "missing" subgenre on cable that covers cases that remain unsolved, often white women, with extensive weepy interviews with the victims' mothers and sisters. But these come more from Oprah Winfrey and seem to appeal to people who like to watch other people cry on TV. Nor are they particularly upper middle class; the mothers and sisters have tattoos and show deep cleavage.

But in addition, the actual detectives who are interviewed on the better true crime shows sometimes make the point that truly innocent victims are rare in the real world. The "missing single mom" often turns out to have three kids from two baby daddies and went missing because, after all, she was entitled to go bar hopping on Saturday nights, and what's going to be done with the three kids turns out to be problematic, because the dads sure don't want them.

I avoid shows like that.

What Could Go Wrong?

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 Sen Sinema won't support the $3.5 billion bill, and without which the House moderates won't support it, either, except the House leftists want that bill tied to the big one, which the others don't want.

Back when I worked in tech, I'd see the same thing, the customer is expecting the big project to be delivered next Monday, but I know full well it's not half done -- but the bosses promise everyone's gonna work all weekend to finish it. So I have to come in Saturday anyhow, and lo and behold, nobody's there. The first time I saw this, I was pretty upset. I couldn't imagine how anyone could allow this to happen. But of course, it did. A couple of bosses would get fired in advance of the whole company closing its doors. I just got used to it, always have an updated resume off site at all times.

I guess this might be called Bruce's Law. When there's a life-or-death deadline just days away, if the bosses say they'll work all weekend to fix it, all they're doing is buying a few more days of same old-same old. It's the "then a miracle occurs" in the plan. I'm not the only one who suspects this is coming:

Radicals are holding the infrastructure bill hostage, demanding the $3.5 trillion budget bill be voted on first. That’s not going to happen. The bill is just too big and too complicated to get done before the deadline of September 27 to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill agreed to by Nancy Pelosi and moderate House Democrats.

They're gonna work all weekend to fix it.

One reason employers don't like to hire older workers is they've been around the block a few too many times.

More Comes Out On Saturday's Fed Provocateur

The story we've seen is that at the Justice for J6 rally last Saturday, some of the very few ordinary citizens in attendance spotted a suspicious-looking man who appeared to be carrying a gun. They reported him to police, and since absolutely nothing else was going on other than hundreds of FBI, police, and reporters waiting for something to happen, the police in riot gear detained him, and the episode was fully documented.

In the view above, the man is dressed in black, with a black bandana style mask covering much of his face a la Antifa. He appears to have identified himself with a badge, surrendered his weapon, and given little other direct information as to what he was doing. According to the RedState blog,

Now the word is out where this guy was from. He is a 27 year old CBP officer from New Jersey. So yes, he was a federal agent. Fed on Fed arrest. He was allegedly detained for possessing a gun on the grounds of the Capitol but he was not prosecuted after they found out he was a police officer.

According to Fox News,

Generally, under federal law, law enforcement officers are given reciprocity to legally carry their weapons in other states, even those with restrictive gun laws. But the law has an exemption for government property or military bases where it is illegal to carry a gun, like the U.S. Capitol.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said prosecutors were "not moving forward with charges" but did not provide additional information about the decision.

Two law enforcement officials said the officer was not at the rally in any official capacity. The officials could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general was also notified of his arrest.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it was aware of the arrest and was "fully cooperating with the investigation."

Something's hinky. New Jersey is more than 100 miles from DC. There were across-the-board recommendations to stay away from Saturday's rally, which just about everyone but reporters, police, and undercover feds followed. But one federal officer from New Jersey decides to attend in an "unofficial capacity" with a weapon, dressed like Antifa. Once he's caught, his agency mumbles something about integrity, but the US attorney decides not to prosecute. But they'll cooperate with any investigation that sorta maybe takes place.

Here are some thoughts I have.

• The most innocuous explanation is this guy is a junior wannabe who goes to DC from New Jersey on his own dime dressed as an Antifa, hoping he can incite an assault on the Capitol and then become a big hero by stopping it. Or maybe incite an assault on the Capitol and get a bunch of people clubbed and shot to prove how bad Trump is. Or something.
• But anyone with any kind of law enforcement experience knows you basically act within your training and policy, and any deviation must either be approved by your superiors or you're held accountable. For him to freelance this would be a career-ending move. Worse, it could land him in the slammer. Not many cops are that dumb. Maybe there are more federal agents who are.
• Who else knew about it? His supervisor? But if his supervisor cooked it up independently, that would also be a career-ending move that would risk prosecution. Everyone at that level must have had some assurance that if anything went wrong, it would all be made right. And so far, the US attorney says no prosecution.
• So I've got to think someone ordered something like this from much higher up, but it was badly bungled by our boy from New Jersey. My little daemon tells me the whole frammis is basically a great grand-nephew of the Watergate burglary fiasco, sloppily planned by a bunch of incompetents and bungled by amateurs.

I have a theory that just crossing a state border into New Jersey lowers your IQ by 30 points. My wife scolds me about this, but this may confirm my view.

Who placed the call to get this going? My money's on Pelosi.

Pray Tell Me, Sir, Whose Dog Are You?

Alexander Pope had this couplet engraved on the collar of a puppy he presented to Frederick, Prince of Wales in the 1730s:

I am his highness’s dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

The implication is, of course, that everyone has a master for whom he must roll over and do tricks.

One of the questions that I almost never heard addressed in my years studying in English departments was how writers must actually get money The assumption seems to have been that the act of producing metaphors was so inherently valuable that they all essentially lived F Scott Fitzgerald style lives. This was in the 1960s and 70s. There may be other, post-modern interpretations now, but I doubt if the actual business of writing ever gets much attention.

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and for many years, we had only a simple tube TV with a rabbit ear antenna, which meant that much of watching was limited to PBS and the News Hour. Republican thought was represented by David Gergen and then David Brooks. Gergen seems to have made his living as some sort of professional intimate to presidents, but Brooks has always written a column, supplemented by being a talking head.

Thus Brooks has always needed someone to write for in order to earn a living, or as Samuel Johnson would have characterzed it, a Patron. The need to see something other than the cringing phony Brooks on TV was a major factor that drove my wife and me to cable.

So why is Brooks suddenly off the reservation?

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that the “underlying issue” in President Joe Biden’s underwater approval rating is Jimmy Carter-esque “incompetence.”

Brooks said that coronavirus is one issue bringing down Biden’s approval numbers, even though that’s not really President Biden’s fault.

He continued, “I think the border’s a strong one. I think pulling out of Afghanistan the way they did, not the pullout itself, but the way it was done. I think a lot of Americans were embarrassed and felt a little ashamed. But the underlying issue is Jimmy Carter. The underlying issue is incompetence. I thought these guys were the pros. I thought they were the experts. But in case after case, they don’t seem to be as professional as I thought they were.”

Brooks later discussed the nuclear submarine deal with Australia and stated that while it’s a good deal, “why not call France? … We didn’t call our allies before the Afghan pullout.”

Brooks does not write a comma, not a semicolon, that he's not told to write. His whole career has been an exercise in flaunting his single elite undergraduate credential to lend the appearance of thoughtful reflection to whatever bromide his Patron approves.

Looks like even the New York Times is off the reservation.

Why Is The Reconciliation Package A Cliffhanger?

My mother, who had a career in government after starting with the Republican National Committee, told me at a fairly early age that there are, or at least should be, no surprises at the policy level. (She fancied herself a lizard person.) Legislative leaders have the votes wrapped up well before actual votes take place. That's why parties have whips. Of course, she started her career in Washington when Lyndon Johnson was president, so this may have affected her outlook.

So I'm amazed at the story that's been developing over Democrat disorder over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, said to be the centerpiece of Biden's program, except that I'm increasingly convinced that Speaker Pelosi is the one who's running things. If there are questions about Biden's competence, I think they apply as well to Pelosi, who's actually giving the orders. As of this morning,

President Biden's two major economic agenda items hang in the balance this week as Democrats continue "intense discussions" on their $3.5 trillion spending plan and some Republicans are warning that their support for the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill could evaporate after Democrats "linked" it with reconciliation.

"It's gotten completely off the rails," Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan told Fox News. . . . "We've worked for quite some time to negotiate a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which did not include any of this additional spending. We've got the president to commit to it. We've got the Senate to pass it," Hogan said. "And then the House is now saying if we can't jam through our $3 and a half trillion of other stuff that we took out of this compromise bill, that they're not going to do it."

Last week, President Biden was supposed to have brought the two senate Democrat holdouts, Sens Manchin and Sinema, on board. But Manchin didn't change his public position, and over the weekend, it came out that Sinema not only didn't come around, but she gave Biden an ultimatum. (Can you imagine LBJ getting an ultimatum?)

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) delivered a tough message to President Biden at a private meeting Wednesday, Playbook reports: If the House delays its scheduled Sept. 27 vote on the bipartisan infrastructure plan — or if the vote fails — she won’t be backing a reconciliation bill.

“Progressives think if they band together and threaten to kill the infrastructure bill, it will convince moderate members to go along with the larger reconciliation package. But multiple sources — including a senior Democratic aide and several in the centrist camp — tell us the left is misreading their colleagues.”

At this stage, it looks less and less likely that either bill will be passed this fall. The status of any putative agreement between Pelosi and moderate House Democrats to vote on the smaller infrastucture bill separately from the $3.5 trillion package on September 27 seems increasingly unclear, given the stated intent of House progressives to defeat the smaller bill if it isn't linked to the big one.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal told Politico that the majority of her coalition, which comprises 96 members, has privately shared it is prepared to thwart the infrastructure bill in protest unless it is a package deal with the Democrat-spearheaded measure.

“Even if there were Republicans that come along” to support the Senate infrastructure in the House, Jayapal said, “we will have more individuals, more Democrats who are going to vote it down without the reconciliation bill.”

In fact, it almost looks as if Sen Manchin is in the position of brokering a solution:

Manchin reportedly told workers at a Procter & Gamble facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia, that he wanted to pause all negotiations on the $3.5 trillion bill until 2022.

. . . Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the House Majority Whip, said Sunday that Democrats might need to spend more time hashing out the differences between the party’s different wings.

“Sometimes, you have to kind of stop the clock to get to the goal,” he said.

“It may be $3.5 [trillion]. It may be close to that, or it may be closer to something else,” suggested they may change the spending levels for the mammoth legislation.

But I can think of two problems with any delay. First, the talk we're starting to hear from Manchin and Clyburn suggests that a delay would come to allow renegotiation for a lower total in the $3.5 trillion package, which would amount to a defeat for the progressives, and for that matter Pelosi-Biden. Second, a delay into 2022 as Manchin proposes would push the vote closer to the election, already assumed to be bad for Democrats. What assurance can they give that the new negotiation wouldn't last through September-October 2022, the worst possible outcome?

And of course, the need to delay the package would simply illustrate the incompetence of Pelosi in particular, who can't control her own caucus.

I kept thinking over the weekend about the image of Pelosi tearing up her copy of Trump's State of the Union address. You can see in her face her confidence that she's the one in charge. The real problem in 2021 isn't in fact Biden. He takes his orders from Pelosi.