Month: January 2021

I told a friend tonight, who asked me to post something positive, that I would, and I will I told her, I have something in mind, and I do.

This is not it, it will come soon enough, in a day or two. It is being written in my head as most things are before I set them down. The thought comes. It becomes an idea and then the idea is put into words. So to my friend, it is now a thought that has become an idea that will in a day or two be put in words and posted here.

But meantime on this day of celebration and reflection, a day on which the below haunting anthem was invoked(I think by President Biden and how grand it is to say that title and name together) I got to thinking as we all got to thinking.

One of the things I thought about is that among the many I know from my time,I am one of the few who did, who served. No, nothing heroic, not close, not hardly. Got lucky, got orders for Panama after basic and infanty training at Ft. Dix.

I ended up working in an office at USARSO, which stood for United States Army Southern Comand – all of Latin America. I wore a USARSO patch on my uniform as I spent my 17 months at Ft. Amador in the then Canal Zone, safely ensconed in an office clerk’s job with a permanent pass in my pocket and Panama City a very few miles away, and at the end went home safe and sound — even as casualties mounted in Vietnam.

But, I do not regret it. I do not regret that in these oh so fraught times I can say this: I don’t know about you, but I served.

And in serving I learned a lot that I took with me these 50 years since about people, about the people who do.

So I know how little soldiers really could know when first they are sent into battle. I know – absent extraordinary luck – I would not have had the reflexes to survive. I have always known that, known it since basic training even when I was young and quick.

But I didn’t get called to do that, didn’t have to and so I have lived all these years since and thought about a few in my basic company and then my infantry training company and wondered, wondered if they made it out. Did you make it out and home Willis? I wish I knew.

But – but I’ve lived ever since with a sense of what it could be like, and how much so, for anyone to whom it ever fell to be called to battle for this country of ours, to be called in the words of this anthem, to give their best.

Listen now to that “American Anthem” because part of bridging the gap,ending the “uncivil war” as the president correctly called it today, is to end indifference or, worse, diffidence for those those who do.

And so it came to pass that without a national federal plan there is near complete frustration, anger and,for some, panic as to if, when, where or how they will get their first Covid-19 vaccinations.

The urgent need for that (again, identified by this Blog 8 months ago and then again last month) comes into sight with the start of the Biden presidency as President-elect Biden has addressed it and put an experienced, competent, capable executive phalanx with great depth of public administative experience in charge.

But, but two things.

First, it is clear the new administration inherits a mess it will need to sort out before they can get on with a rational, fair, nationwide vaccination program. They don’t know exactly what they’ll find because the disastrous out-going administation won’t tell them everything about its hand-it-to-the states vaccination foul-up.

Second, it is clear that if governors like New Jersey’s Phil Murphy cannot be blamed for the failure of the mess handed to them by the Trump administation, they can be blamed for failure to do the one simple, basic task of effective government – communicate.

I look to New Jersey for an example given that it is my state.

New Jersey established a universal official online vaccination registration site. I found it by word of mouth and passed that word on to others I know. Social media however is full of complaints about the registration site working only with difficulty or not at all.

On a personal but important note, in my time as an AP reporter at the New Jersey State House, granted that’s a long while ago, there were by recollection at least 22 daily newspapers in the state of which a third have since folded or combined with others.

Back then of those 22 a full dozen maintained full-time reporters at the State House as did the Associated Press (three of us) and the now defunct United Press International, as well as four major out-of-state papers including the Philadelphia Inqurier and the New York Times. On Press Row at the state capitol 35 reporters went to work every day, numbers that swelled to 50 on legislative days.

With that many reporters covering and looking for news every day, problems like the vaccination registration site’s limitations were exposed quickly. With so large a competitive press corps, the Murphy administation would have been hounded with questions and pressed every day to provide the answers and fix the problems. Then every paper would have a story every day about the registration site with information on how to get to it and use it, doing a major part of the job of informing the public.

But like all recent governors, this governor has no idea, not really, not hardly, what it means to deal with a real press corps, especially in a crisis. And the hard-of-hearing, insular New Jersey Legislature knows even less.

Today the State House press corps is a shadow of that of those bygone years, diminished not by the quality of reporters but by the lack of them as newspapers failed financially and reduced staff. For example, two large newspaper chain, Newhouse and Gannett, between them own a dozen New Jersey newspapers with homogenized capitol coverage from their respective, diminished skeleton State House bureaus.

Yes, state and local news is available on-line but no, it does not have the same impact when it does not arrive on your doorstep every morning or afternoon. A New Jersey governor today does not see 30 reporters or more arrayed before him at a regular news conference. It would take shutting down the George Washington Bridge for days on end to get that big a media turnout anymore and, after all, what governor would ever do such a thing?

Well then, what can Gov. Murphy do now to keep the public informed even if the information is only what I heard him say in an MSNBC interview two days ago. He said the state does not have the vaccine supply it needs. We know that governor but you need to explain that and more every day until you do, until we do.

How? How then for him to communicate with us citizens (us voters)?

The vaccination registration site operated by the State of New Jersey asks every registrant for an email address and phone number.

These are the means to communicate. Send out an email every day governor that reaches every registrant to keep them informed, use the mobile numbers the state collected to text us. Tell the public what you know every day even if it is to say we don’t have the supplies yet, we are working on it, we have a plan to give you a schedule and a site at which to get your shot when the supplies come.

This is not rocket science. It is not preening before the camera as Murphy is want to do – no particular blame there, he is after all a politician and politicians are actors who can’t sing and dance but love the stage (Murphy by the way can – he can sing well). That’s part of the attraction of politics and part of the job. No politician loves another voice nearly so much as he or she loves his or her own. We get that.

The governor doesn’t have to do more than approve a daily message script and have someone hit send.

But neither he or his staff have figured it out nor apparently has staff told him it needs to get done, which suggests his people don’t know it. How do I know? Because they haven’t done it.

I, you, we in New Jersey who have registered have not had one message back from the state. Not a one.

This is a re-elect year for Murphy, a resonably popular man who is an enormous favorite to win a second term, facing as he does a wrecked, diminished Republican Party in a decidedly blue state.

But…But letting this get away from him, letting confusion, panic and despair increase about when how and where there will be vaccinations is just the kind of failure that looks for blame.

You don’t want to be the man or woman in charge when the public looks for someone to pin the blame on for that. You don’t want to be blamed if the public decides the distribution is fixed and unfair, and it will if it doesn’t get information.

Is Murphy the only governor in this box? No, it is clear from reporting around the nation that many other governors are and that they too are failing to communicate well. An occasional 2-minute interview on CNN or MSNBC is in no way an ongoing effective communications/PR effort or, as they call it these days, Comms (sounds so much better than public relations).

The only governor in the country up for reelection this year is Murphy (Virginia also has an election for governor in 2021 but it is a one-term state so it will not have an incumbent governor on the ballot).

Given that fact, Murphy needs to get this right and do it fast or face a lot of trouble in this, his re-elect year and become a caution to other governors.

So, Phil, love to hear from you. Send me an email. Send us all an email.

“Our plan is going to focus on getting shots into arms, including by launching a fundamentally new approach, establishing thousands of federally run or federally supported community vaccination centers of various size located in places like high school gymnasiums and N.F.L. stadiums,” Mr. Biden told a radio station in Columbus, Ga., on Friday (Jan. 8).

As noted, this was and is a federal project to be done at major sites available to the public not a scattershot state effort in drug stores.

People who now how to operate government will be running the government -and making it work.

(Even as this was being written, President-elect Biden all but declared, DO NOT DO THIS and in fact it would be beyond stupid for Democrats to poison the incoming president’s administration even before it begins. Don’t attribute wisdom to the House and Senate, there is little there. They are legislators, the lowest form of political animal).

12 Days. Patience, 12 days.    

By now, the day after the Day of Shame (it needs a name and for now this will do), millions of words have been written.

In 100 years, trillions of words will have been written about yesterday’s events. For good or ill, of historical necessity in 100 years historians will have written as much about the Trump administration and its Gotterdammerung as they have written about the Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations and their long-lasting historic and political consequence.

You write about what’s most important whether for good or bad. I have a shelf of books on the Third Reich. I have another on the American Revolution.

This brief writing is not to add to the recriminations, analysis, protestations, chest beating and bewailing. It is written to say breathe U.S.A. Take a deep breath and understand calmly that in 12 days there is a nation that needs government restored — and restored swiftly and competently.

In the immediate moment there are calls for invocation of the 25th Amendment or impeachment, conviction and removal of Trump from the presidency.

With the calendar where it is, both are stupid ideas that should be shut down. I hope you hear that Speaker Pelosi.

First, the 25th Amendment says this concerning who can temporarily remove the president:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide…”

Are executive departments literally only the cabinet departments? Or does the term include others? The CIA is not a department but it is a cabinet level executive agency. Ditto the EPA. Who would sort that out if it ever had to be? The courts. Even in a hurry, courts don’t hurry.

If it means solely the department secretaries and the attorney general, then do acting heads of departments qualify since they have not been confirmed in office by the Senate? There are plenty of those in what’s left of Trump’s rump government. 

In the alternative, Congress has not passed a law clarifying or delegating this hazy authority to anyone else (it probably should be about doing that).

Let’s put aside the 25th for those and other reasons — common sense reasons – the kind of common sense that guides President-elect Biden, who were he an advisor to another president-elect would no doubt council against calling for any such action with but 12 days to Inauguration Day.

Impeachment? There are three historic cases of presidential impeachment that reached the Senate, including the one this term.

That was rushed, but even rushed it took about two months from start to finish. There are 12 days left in Trump’s term and even in the sad and sorry state he has reduced it too there is a government mostly poised to obstruct further madness.

There isn’t time to impeach, and it is the wrong time in the wrong circumstance to create the first 25th Amendment precedent.

If yesterday our country looked like a Banana Republic – and it looked and was a lot worse, having been aided and abetted by more than 130 Republican members of the House and Senate – then ask yourself what Banana Republic legislatures do when mobs break in, disrupt, even overturn governments?

Usually, often, they reconvene, turn around, blame someone and expel him or her from office and immediately move to charge, try and imprison or exile the person they tar with a blame they share.

That is what it will look like, and be like, if from charged emotion and outrage, acting out some pure political theater, there is a concerted real attempt to remove Trump at a minute to midnight at the very end of his woe-begotten term of office.

All the troubles he faces after Jan. 20 have trebled now. That’s his problem. Let’s not make his problems any more of a problem for the United States of America. We have had enough and more than enough of that.

Joe Biden has to start his term with as clean a board as he can have. It is a ruined enough thing now, our country. To engage in Trump-removal at the bitter end will only add bitterness, complicate Biden’s work and turn the start of the Biden administration into an unending focus on the end of the catastrophe that is Trump.

President-elect Biden has a whole lot to do in his first three to six months in office, months that start in only 12 days and must begin with prompt confirmation of his cabinet and top security advisors – and that with as little friction as possible.

He does not need any more congressional stupidity. He does not need to provoke the Republicans, the crazies, lunatic fringe. 

He does not need that even though they deserve the harshest judgement now and when this is all history. 

President-elect Biden does not need it because in 12 days he has to govern. 

We don’t need it because we need him to be able to govern.

On May 10 last year — remember last year is now 2020 — this blog posted an article that described the need for a wholly federally-directed effort to discover, produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines on a scale comparable to the Manhattan project.

The following is from that article:

“From start to finish, from top to bottom this must be, should be a federally directed project to cause researchers to work together as they did at Los Alamos, to test and accelerate testing of suitable vaccine candidates collectively not competitively, to produce one or more vaccines with government command through the Defense Production Act over those pharmaceutical companies with the capacity to ramp up manufacturing swiftly.

“Production, allocation, and distribution of a vaccine or vaccines should be planned, coordinated and carried out with government direction but not by the market because in the market there will be price gouging, favoritism, discrimination, tampering — all the things that in George Orwell’s imagination made some animals more equal than others.

“It should be done on a scale organized by region, by state, by county and then within each county on a prescribed town by town and city by city timetable that enables local health authorities — supported by local law enforcement to maintain order at vaccination sites — to schedule your vaccination, mine, everyone’s with certainty, clarity, fairness and public calm.“

Think about the date, May 10, fully 8 months ago and think about what we are reading or hearing incessantly on the cable new shows: That the December target for vaccinations was 20 million but as of Dec. 31 the number administered was less than 3 million; that 19 million doses were shipped in December but so far only 11 million had been accounted for on arrival, that the states are in charge of distribution, largely through Walgeens, CVS, Walmart and some but not all supermarket chain pharmacies like Shoprights in New Jersey.

Governors, finding themselves charged with responsibility for this are taking different routes. In most states no one can tell you much of anything it seems. In Florida we have seen TV footage of long lines of older people waiting in line for hours and hours for vaccinations, another tribute to the incompetence of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Would you want your fate in the hands of the maskless lady, South Dakota Gov. Christy Noem?

In my state, New Jersey, a friend brought to my attention a state website describing some but not all general and particular information about the state’s plan to distribute and administer vaccines. My bad on that – I know how to get to the State of New Jersey website and thanks to her for brining it to my attention. But it does not provide key information about how to register or apply for vaccination. Where is the public information campaign that should be part of this, a vital part of it?

Lately the CDC, once the paramount health agency in the United States and admired worldwide for its knowledge and expertise– but like everything in and about the federal government hollowed out and wrecked by Donald Trump and his gang of gangsters, incompetents, knaves, fools, miscreants and malcontents – lately the CDC says the second tranch of vaccinations should be given to essential workers and those over age 75.

Who’s an essential worker? Well you can read or hear news definitions of those who are. It sure has to include all those people working in food markets. Who is and is not essential? Who decides that? Governors? The CDC? A roulette wheel?

Do you know anyone over 75 who has been notified about where and when to be to get a vaccination? Probably not because – because there is no central plan. Because this could only have been, should only have been a federal program and project from top to bottom.

Instead in so typical and usual avoidance of responsibility, Trump has thrust that job onto the states in the greatest demonstration of incompetence, cowardice, and unfitness for office in the 230-year history of the American presidency.

How would we, the United States of America, have done in WWII if that had been a 50-state project? Yes, that is exactly the right analogy.

What agency knows where everyone over the age of 75 resides and how to reach them? Answer: The Social Security Administration

In fact who knows where everyone who has a Social Security Number can be found? Again the Social Security Administration. Who knows where every legal alien resident with a Green Card or a valid visa of any kind is? The Department of State, maybe the Departent of Homeland Security (let it do some good for a change), and if non-citizens are working legally they also have Social Security numbers.

One way or another, the federal government knows more about us and how to find us than any other level of government. Some find that repellent, some find it inevitable in our data-driven world. But like it or not, it’s a fact. I didn’t ask for a draft card all those years ago. The U.S. Selective Service knew where I could be found and sent it to me.

Th right vaccination program needed and needs to be one in which all 330 million of us, in orderly turn, are notified to be at such and such a location at an appointed time on a specified day to receive the first inoculation and to be notified again for the second, since thus far all vaccines require two shots.

Where? At a Walgreens, Walmart, CVS, a Shopright pharmacy? No, no, no, no, and no. At public facilities like armories, now-empty school gyms, senior citizen centers. Innoculated by who? Not by pharmacists unless they are drafted to do so, but by public health professionals, National Guard medical personnel, qualified EMT personnel and so on and on.

Then what? Then how do we know, how will we know who has and has not been vaccinated? How will we know whether it will be safe to enter a restaurant even if vaccinated?

An official, verifiable registation card like my long ago draft card, like the Medicare card seniors carry would be one means of proof, issued on site after the second shot – not the first but the second.

How to enourage those who would refuse vaccination? Well, to be admitted, require everyone to show that card at any public facility and at optional private ones like restaurants, theaters, museums (not supermarkets, which belong to a category of essential services that also would include health facilities and health providers).

Yes, there are civil liberties issues in this but there are civil liberties issues in being told to remove your shoes at an airport security check, or to open a purse or bag at a ballpark entrance or to enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art, any museum. The lie in Libetarianism after all is that, actually, we all do stop for red lights.

We are told and see evidence that the Biden administration is preparing to take this on in a big way. Whether it can federalize this now as suggested here or if instead the best plan will be to rationalize the state-centered mess it inherits, one thing is certain: It needs to take hold of the distribution and administration (the actual shots in arms) as fast, capably and calmly as can be done.

Could that have been done in the past 8 months by a competent president and administration? History says it could have been. Can it yet be rescued?

Yes, if it’s under federal agency control — not federal political direction — with all the funding it needs and the most competent management possible; because to distribute and administer 660 million vaccine doses (two shots each) is a project on a scale unlike anything since the end of WWII. Can it yet be done through the states? Yes, but with one federally mandated set of rules, procedures and expectations, not 50.

To do all that efficiently and effectively within the next six to nine months without corruption, without infection by a black market, with price controls, federal funding, under federal command calls for capability, commitment, management, and accountability.

We haven’t had any of that for four years. It is on the way.