Dual Narratives At The Highest Level

Two recent stories provide what I think is an insight into high-level thought processes in Washington. The first is from Friday in Politico:

The White House is looking to Sen. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) to help thaw out its frosty relationship with Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) in hopes of resurrecting President JOE BIDEN’s Build Back Better plan.

Two senior Senate sources said that Warner, one of Manchin’s closest friends and his former housemate, will be involved in any future BBB talks. Manchin has said publicly that he’s not negotiating with the White House. Privately, he has been even more pessimistic.

. . . Spokespeople for both Warner and Biden demurred about the specifics of the Virginia senator’s exact role in the effort to win over Manchin.

“Sen. Warner and Sen. Manchin are good friends,” a Warner spokesperson told Playbook. “They talk regularly, sometimes about policy and sometimes just shooting the breeze. I wouldn’t call those conversations ‘negotiations.’”

But yesterday, according to the New York Post,

Sen. Joe Manchin has yanked his proposal for a $1.8 trillion compromise on President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan off the table, according to reports — potentially the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party’s signature social-spending agenda.

The West Virginia Democrat’s about-face was reported Saturday by the Washington Post, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.

The report came days after Manchin told the media that he was no longer discussing Biden’s long-sought bill with the White House.

. . . With the Senate divided 50-50, lockstep Democratic unanimity is required for the budget bill to become law.

But insiders say he would be a “no” vote even on his own compromise, as a result of the White House’s blistering response when Manchin put the kibosh on the bill in a Dec. 19 Fox News appearance.

As best I can surmise, White House people are doing their best to feed a narrative into legacy media that efforts are still underway to pass the BBB, while Sen Manchin, the most visible obstacle, seems to be increasingly frustrated that his position is being mischaracterized in those efforts. I don't think his Saturday statement is just a coincidence.

Other stories seem to project the same unwarranted optimism:

According to a report, Democrats are so desperate to eliminate the Senate filibuster — which would enable the Democrats, who control the Senate, to pass legislation regarding voting that would be highly favorable to them— that two former presidents and celebrity Oprah Winfrey have contacted Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is considered the pivotal vote in the Senate, to pressure him into accepting the filibuster’s demise.

Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have joined Winfrey in the cooperative effort to persuade Manchin, according to Politico.

“Manchin has told colleagues that his phone line has been lighting up with prominent names outside the Senate in recent days. He’s heard from former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and talk-show legend Oprah Winfrey, plus former staffers to both Manchin and former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), according to a person familiar with the talks,” Politico reported.

At whom are these stories directed? The public at large is yawning, and indeed, his home state constituency likes him twice as much as they like President Biden. Attempts by the White House to spin things to make it look like Manchin will cave are either feckless or completely counterproductive, which is what we saw yesterday.

So who benefits from the false optimism? I'm convinced it's the current Democrat leadership, Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, and their immediate staff, who are maintaining their positions by enabling the leadership's fantasy that things are just on the verge of being turned around. But this is nothing but fantasy.

Stein's Law: That which cannot continue must stop.

"Donald Trump Was The True Winner"

Even the legacy media is acknowledging, as Newsweek did, that Donald Trump was the true winner of the January 6 commemorations.

After the storming of the U.S. Capitol, GOP insiders told The Intelligencer they had lost patience with Trump, whom they predicted would face waning influence within the party. Trump's closest allies also feared that his role as the riot's catalyst would hurt his legacy and the party.

However, Civiqs' daily tracking polls have shown that following the tumultuous 12 months since the riots, Trump's standing among Republicans is largely unchanged.

Just before the insurrection, 83 percent of registered Republican voters surveyed said they had a "favorable" opinion of Trump. That rating stayed above 80 percent every month until August 2021, and was still as high as 76 percent by the end of December.

CNN went a little farther and acknowledged that the problem isn't just with Republicans.

It was only a little more than a month ago when President Joe Biden, asked about another head-shaking revelation regarding his predecessor, seemed to balk at a mere mention of the man.

"I don't think about the former President," he claimed, pausing for dramatic effect before walking offstage at the White House. But on Thursday, it was evident Biden has actually been thinking quite a lot about Donald Trump.

. . . As he prepares to enter the second year of his presidency, advisers say Biden is still adamant about not allowing his predecessor to overshadow his administration. But on the one-year anniversary of a historic day, Biden not only signed off on the fiery tone he brought to his speech marking the occasion at the Capitol, he also helped write some of the lines himself.

The Babylon Bee was even more incisive:

As a dismal job numbers and economic data were released this week, many are regretting Buffalo Guy didn’t manage to body-slam Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and seize the presidency.

The superviolent insurrection on January 6th was initially met with disdain by a majority of Americans, but though they may disagree with the methods, they now find themselves wishing Biden was not the president.

. . . Experts agree that in addition to creating more jobs, Buffalo Guy would have restored a sense of grace and dignity back to the White House.

We're in an odd set of circumstances. On one hand, there's so far not much evidence that the 2020 election was actually stolen. And on the whole, most voters are behaving as though it was legitimate and are trusting their ability to work through the political process to resolve the issues.

On the other hand, the result on the ground of the 2020 election has been, as I've been saying, a quiet constitutional crisis notwithstanding its apparent legitimacy. This is the subtext of the Babylon Bee story: if the crazies who surged into the Capitol had actually taken over, maybe things would even have turned out better than they have with Biden, Harris, and Pelosi.

It's plain that the unspoken issue is that a year after the election, Donald Trump hasn't gone away. As Rush Limbaugh would have put it, Trump is living rent-free in Biden's head. As of now, Trump is the overwhelming favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination, and will likely defeat either Biden or Harris if either is the 2024 Democrat candidate.

Indeed, the whole intent of the January 6 commemoration was to cook up some sort of consensus that Trump must be made somehow ineligible to run. It that, it failed, and it even unintentionally focused even closer attention on the failure of Biden's leadership.

I Don't Think We've Seen The Last Of Brandon

As a non-lawyer who nevertheless got a lot of experience covering lawsuits in the former blog, I'm particularly interested in developments with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown's efforts to find a sponsor in the face of corporate NASCAR's wish to make him just go away. No lawsuits have been filed yet, but they're plainly just offstage, yet the usual independent media legal commentators have so far had nothing to say. They're still preoccupied with Ghislaine Maxwell, which has turned out to be a bore, or January 6, ditto.

There are three parties to this matter. The first is Brandon Brown himself, who had been developing a promising career as a driver, and who had just celebrated his first major win as Talladega, AL spectators chanted "[redacted] Joe Biden!" in the stands. An interviewer attempted to sanitize this by saying they were actually chanting "Let's go Brandon!", but perversely, this immediately became a meme for the other expression in the national consciousness, to the extent that a Christmas caller was able to get an unwitting Biden himself to repeat it on national TV, to the glee of just about everyone but corporate NASCAR.

Corporate NASCAR is the second party. It was already highly uncomfortable with the implicit association of those sentiments with its audience and brand, and it had already made attempts to suppress "Let's go, Brandon!" at its events, as well as assiduously suppressing merchandise that implied any NASCAR endorsement of the chant. As for Brandon Brown himself, it was clearly NASCAR's wish that he be quietly airbrushed from the picture. Sorry, guy, breaks. Nothing personal, just learn to code.

Brown himself, however, had already said in various public statements that he wished to continue a NASCAR career, where he had become a promising second-tier driver, but the completely involuntary association had made it difficult to get sponsors. Enter LGBcoin, which Fox News describes as a collectible meme coin associated with the chant but is apparently a cryptocurrency. According to the story,

Brown’s team received approval from a racing operations employee for its sponsor and paint scheme on Dec. 26, but NASCAR indicated that sponsorship needed approval from higher-ranking officials.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced its decision to not approve the sponsorship.

The situation has turned into a polarizing story with lots of chatter about whether the sponsorship was approved and then NASCAR backtracked, or whether Brown’s team should have known that NASCAR senior management wouldn’t approve the sponsorship based on a meeting with the team in November. The largest investor into LGBcoin is threatening a lawsuit, citing damages to those who invested in the cryptocurrency, the value of which dropped in the hours after NASCAR’s decision.

LGBCoin is the third party, which has interests allied with, but not identical to, Brown and his team, and it is clearly already threatening legal action. James Koutoulas, the investor, retweeted a summary of the situaion as he sees it (click on the image for the full text):

Someone smart on @NASCAR @Reddit Re @LGBcoin_io pic.twitter.com/68eQPd2ROw

— James Koutoulas (@jameskoutoulas) January 5, 2022

The Brown team's version is more restrained but makes the same basic point:

"The bottom line is that Brandonbilt Motorsports followed the standard process for sponsor and paint scheme approval and received approval from a NASCAR official empowered to make those decisions, and who makes those decisions on a regular basis. This official then confirmed and reiterated that we had received approval in a phone conversation after the announcement was made.

. . . "Like every team, we rely on productive and friendly working relationships at all levels of NASCAR. Unfortunately, NASCAR leadership's handling of this situation now threatens to strain our relationships and places us in an incredibly awkward position, yet again."

It's hard not to surmise from both these statements that lawyers are working on the matter as we speak. It sounds to me as though there is written confirmation of a sponsorship approval from NASCAR, as both Brown and Koutoulas refer to it. In that case, the legal principles behind both the Brown and Koutoulas strategies would at least be tortious interference by NASCAR with a contract between Brown and Koutoulas, as well as bad faith. Bad faith in turn would allow punitive damages. In fact, "Joe Blow was not authorized to approve that deal", which is essentially NASCAR's position in public statements, is a standard bad faith tactic.

In addition, NASCAR has historically approved political sponsorships, including BLM but also Trump 2020, as the photo at the top of this post indicates. The problem for NASCAR is that their choices look arbitrary.

On top of that, Koutoulas has strongly implied, and Brown has implied more subtly, that they will create a public relations firestorm for NASCAR. The first upcoming NASCAR event is the Daytona 500 on February 19-21, a little over a month away. It will be interesting to see what sorts of chants emerge from the stands then.

My wife, a retired attorney, thinks both NASCAR's inside and outside counsel have been AWOL. Get out the popcorn.

Omicron Is Proceeding As Expected

Just before Christmas I said,

This is the looming problem with the received narrative. It's putting out Ponzi scheme numbers on how fast things are gonna get worse, such that if they don't get a whole lot worse in a matter of weeks, they'll start to lose any remaining credibility. Remember that they're claiming cases will double at a rate ranging from every 1.5 to 3 days, such that by sometime next month, everyone in the world will be sick, and there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. But if things do get a whole lot worse, they look just as bad, because after more than two years, they've proven themselves utterly feckless to deal with the problem and lose any remaining credibility anyhow.

The day before that, I said,

But "if it's true" that the variant's doubling time is two to three days, with eight days to Christmas as of yesterday and thus up to four doublings, we're actually talking about roughly 300,000 new cases per day by Christmas, aren't we? By January 1, we're up to over a million new cases per day. By January 31, we're talking something like the entire US case total to date per day, about 50 million. Two days after that, 100 million per day. Two days after that, 200 million new cases per day, after which we quickly exceed the US population in new cases per day.

As of January 4, the US was said to have its first day of a million new cases, but I've seen skepticism about how such a number could be derived so quickly amid a shortage of test kits, and I suspect with those other observers that the number was higher, which tracks precisely with my estimate from December 18. In other words, in a matter of weeks, there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. In addition,

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 now accounts for nearly every new case of the virus blanketing the U.S., according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The new strain represented 95.4% of sequenced COVID-19 cases during the week ending on New Year’s Day, while the once-dominant Delta variant made up just only 4.6% of sequenced cases, the CDC said.

But this occurs as vaccine or testing mandates have caused a run on test kits. But the chart at the top of this post indicates that as Omicron "cases" increase exponentially in the US, hospitalizations and deaths have either remained level or slightly declined, with the vast majority of cases either asymptomatic or indistinguishable from the commmon cold.

As of December 16, President Biden predicted,

"For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death... for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm," Biden continued. "But there's good news. If you're vaccinated, and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death, period."

But via Alex Berenson's Substack, these are the actual current proportions of people (apparently in Ontario) in the hospital but not the ICU with COVID/Omicron, vaxxed, partially vaxxed,and unvaxxed:

So far, neither President Biden nor the rest of the public heath establishment has been updating its narrative or its planning to accommodate the current Omicron phase of the pandemic, which appears in the US to be following the pattern seen in South Africa and the UK, a sharp, steep increase in infections that quickly replace the Delta variant but are far less severe.

The problem is that the second horn of the dilemma is still there: the public health establishment will lose credibility because it's continuing to cry wolf over a quickly diminishing crisis.

More For Fermi's Paradox

I mentioned Fermi's Paradox the other day, the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for its existence. I was watching a new TV series, Expedition Deep Ocean, which covers what seems to be in some measure a vanity project by hedge fund guy Victor Vescovo to dive to the deepest points of the world's oceans. (The internet gives him a net worth of $1-5 million, which is your normal bourgeois couple these days, but the show claims he funded a $50-million dive vehicle from his own resources. Guy seems just a little hinky to me, but let that go.)

The big thing that struck me about the first two episodes of the show was images like the one above from the bottom of the deep-sea trenches from "landers" with cameras and bait that are sent to the bottom at the same time as the main sub. At depths of over 25,000 feet, in water with sub-freezing temperature and completely dark under extreme pressure, little shrimp-like creatures swarm to get the bait like bugs drawn to a patio light.

Here's my immediate problem with this. Why didn't we see this with the first Mars landers? Professors of cosmology will tell me this is a silly question. It's because in the history of Mars, the frammis equation dislocated the continental shift, which in turn degraded the nitrogenous humors and deprived the planet of Van Allen belts, such that the solar winds bewildered the mRNA capacity of the genetic folderol, or something. But before his happened, maybe three or four billion years ago, life reached a certain point, but then it went away. According to the models. We're gonna find the fossils, any expedition now.

But the pro-alien life faction turns around and argues just seconds later that on earth, microbes live in boiling water around volcanic vents on the ocean floor, and bacteria thrive a mile under Antarctic ice. So life is so robust that it must exist under conditions that we would think impossible, like, say, on Mars. Just look at the pictures Victor Vescovo brought back from the South Sandwich Trench, shrimp-like creatures swarming the base of the lander!

Except we go to places like Mars and Venus, where Science Tells Us there's no reason there can't be life under those conditions, and we don't find it. And it seems to me that if there were life, it would be swarming like the life we keep finding in the most inhospitable places on earth. Even Walt Disney saw that in The Living Desert. And beyond that, on earth there are both fossils of old swarming life and swarms of new life. Even if the big asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, somehow the cockroaches kept on keepin' on. Why didn't it persist on Mars if it had no problem doing it here?

Life swarms. Life persists. Those seem to be properties. It sure isn't swarming on Mars.

Fermi had a point. Where is everybody?

That's So 2021!

Among the first headlines of the new year is this one in the Washington Post: House Democrats begin preparing for the post-Pelosi era. The story says,

After almost 19 years as House Democratic leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) is expected to step down at the close of this Congress, ending a historic career. . .

The key phrase is "expected to step down", which is new. As of just last December 15, the headline on CNN was Pelosi will stay around to lead House Democrats through the next election -- and perhaps beyond.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will stay until at least after the midterm elections, extending her nearly 20-year run as the House's top Democrat after she turns 82 and, perhaps, beyond.

She is planning to file and run for reelection in her San Francisco district next year -- at least for now -- in keeping with her pattern of deciding about staying in Congress after the elections, when she likely will have won an 18th full term.

And sources familiar with Pelosi's thinking say she isn't ruling out the possibility of trying to stay in leadership after 2022, despite her original vow to leave as the top House Democrat.

Sounds like things have changed in just a little over two weeks. Indeed, as of last Thanksgiving, the legacy media was gleefully fact-checking rumors that Speaker Pelosi had bought a $25 million retirement home in Florida.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi did not buy a $25 million mansion in Florida this week, contrary to claims circulating online.

. . . A spokesperson for Pelosi also told Reuters that the claims made online are fabricated.

“This is completely false,” Deputy Chief of Staff for Nancy Pelosi, Drew Hamill, told Reuters. “There’s no such pending sale nor is the family looking or interested.”

VERDICT

False. Nancy Pelosi did not buy a $25 million mansion in Florida this week. A realtor involved in the sale of the property told Reuters that the buyer is a local resident. The listing broker for the property also told Reuters Pelosi did not purchase the property.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.

It certainly looks like legacy media, with the Pelosi machine firmly behind them, was actively stamping out rumors of retirement up to just before the holidays, but now the official narrative seems to be changing.

Well, we're officially in 2022, the dreaded year of the midterms, and we're in a continued quiet constitutional crisis, with the speaker third in line if the president and vice president find themsleves no longer available.

For now, the speaker is the low hanging fruit.

Panic Pushback!

Over the holiday weekend, the elites belatedly began to realize they're losing control. Almost as soon as Brandon Brown announced his sponsorship deal for the 2022 season in a December 30 Tweet, NASCAR walked it back:

NASCAR is walking back its approval of driver Brandon Brown's sponsorship with LGBcoin after initially approving the deal, according to Brown's spokesperson.

. . . Brown's spokesperson Maxwell Marcucci told FOX Business that NASCAR pulled back its approval of the sponsorship deal on Dec. 30, after the partnership with LGBcoin was announced.

"After the announcement went live on Thursday morning, NASCAR acknowledged to us late that afternoon that we had received approval but that they now needed to discuss this at a higher level," Marcucci said.

A NASCAR spokesperson told Motorsport.com that Brown's team "jumped the gun" by announcing the partnership on Dec. 30.

Marcucci says that NASCAR's statement runs "counter to facts of the situation."

In a statement provided by Marcucci, Brandonbilt Motorsports received approval on the sponsors from a NASCAR Racing Operations official on Dec. 26.

According to the statement, the approval of the partnership was "unambiguous" as an opening portion of the email from the official said "The sponsors are approved..."

The statement acknowledged that the NASCAR official offered feedback on a minor graphic design change "to ensure legibility on the track at 170mph."

This will be fun to watch, especially if NASCAR risks dumping its fan base by withdrawing approval. Major league sports is only slowly learning its own lessons from going woke. I suspect that unless NASCAR immediately returns to the anoounced program, this could get very expensive for them at minimum, but it could easily destroy the franchise.

But there's more! Dr Fauci is walking back last week's revised CDC quarantine guidance:

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky spoke about the CDC change to the guidance — that they would be halving the isolation guidelines if you got COVID, from ten days to five days if you were asymptomatic. Fauci indicated that the reason for the guidance was due to economic factors and not having society grind to a halt with the increase in the number of people getting the Omicron variant. Dr. Walensky also said that testing would not be required to end isolation because the PCR testing could still show positive even for up to 12 weeks even if you were no longer contagious.

That caused a lot of pushback from people with some wondering why they were suddenly changing the guidance now and still others wondering about the testing requirement.

Prepare for yet another Fauci flip flop.

Fauci told ABC in interviews on Sunday that the CDC is reconsidering what they just said last week.

. . . Fauci told CNN the CDC would likely be issuing a new testing recommendation to end isolation.

Fauci’s flip flop on testing then raised even more questions as to whether this was about politics and pushback, not public health.

“The Biden Admin CDC has done this nearly every step of the way with Covid,” Dr. Nicole Saphier tweeted. “They put forth a recommendation and within a week change it because of external pressure. If they are following the science, this wouldn’t happen. In 2022 we need less politics and more science.” “As a result of external political pressure, the CDC and FDA have become compromised and have very little credibility at this point,” she also tweeted.

The problem continues to be credibility. Oddly, we're hearing reports that Sen Manchin is back to negotiating over BBB, two weeks after saying he was a firm "no". But the whole Manchin story has turned into something iffy, whether you believe Manchin's own side or the White House. The bottom line is loss of credibility, which seems to have become the theme for the past several days.

The year is off to an interesting start.