Peeling the Onion

For more than a decade we watched right wing zealot Zombies in the Republican Party eat its flesh, bore from within until – until the only result could have been Trump, until it became the thing it has become.

Now we see the “progressive” lumpen left proles of the Democratic Party gorging and gorged bloodily on their coveted cable television interviews as they turn a governing majority into a century-long failure.

Democracy cannot suvive zealots. Democracy lives at the center and Democrats lately have moved the center but still, that is not enough for its Zombie zealots who do not understand and do not care that democracy dies at the far extremes.

If the House “progressives” want to force Sinema and Mancin to choose sides and move toward the President then they need to get both bills passed now, right now. Passage of both will give the President and Schumer the leverage they need to press Sinema and Manchin.

Anyone with the least understanding of politics knows that.

To get something, you need something else. Right now the president and the speaker and the majority leader have almost nothing when they try to get the two recalcitrant senators to yield something.

But if they can hold two House-passed bill over the heads of the senators from Arizona and West Virginia they’ll deal. They’ll have to deal. Especially Sinema because she has to know if she does not she will get a primary and she will lose it. Before she can run parse the center in Arizona she has to give her state party what it wants and expects from a Democrat: Or Arizona Democrats and tens of thousands more around the country will take her out.

Manchin? He’s another deal. He’s from woebegotten West Virginia. He understands the place and knows how far he can go and yet keep the chance of going back to the Senate, where he knows Schumer has to suffer a lot of his being Joe Manchin to get his vote to maintain the majority.

But even Mancin can still go a long way if he has to but; but he just does not have to as long as there is no leverage against and over him. As long as his progressive party fellows do the lifting for him. If they won’t suport the president and the legislation, well then why should he? Why should he risk walking the plank in West Virginia?

Without two House-passed bills there isn’t and won’t be any leverage to use with Maching. Without the House passing both post-haste it is not his fault, it is the fault of the House “progressives.”

But House Democrats are being consumed by the disease of extremism and they will take the nation and its future with them unless – unless Ms. Pelosi, perhaps the greatest speaker in the history of the House, can save us from them and them from themselves and from the wrath of Democrats later.

I believe she will succeed this one last time. If she does not, it will not matter for another 30 years.

And I, like so many I know, will be long dead.

But my grandchildren, and yours, will be left to live in the rubble that AOC and the rest of her buddies will dance on, being interviewed on cable TV, which clearly is more important to them than getting this done.

They are far, far, far worse and far, far, far a danger to the future of the United States than Trump and his looney legions.

Those people are ignorant, stupid and failed. The Democratic progressives?

They are willfully arrogant and bent on political and governmental self-destruction because – because they do not understand politics because they come from places where they do not need to learn to understand it, because they have no sense of responsibility and – and because they would rather be on TV than actually get done what they holler about must be done.

After all, if you get it done, cable hosts don’t really need you anymore. Do they? No, they don’t.

And then – then you are a political Zombie.

Ford Motor Company has announced it will make the largest investment in its history, $11 billion to build three factories that will create 11,000 jobs to build electric cars.

It is part of the company’s plan to manufacture only electric vehicles by 2035.

That’s a good idea, in fact an essential industrial program motivated by the need to level climate change and provide the cars the public will come to expect to get going on that project of the century.

But there’s a catch or two right now – big ones. Where are you going to charge your electric car when there are multiple times more of those than gasoline powered cars like the one you drive now? And how long will it take to charge it?

At a charging station, right? But where are the charging positions to fuel tens of millions of vehicles in the United States every day?

Actually, they do not – do not – exist.

Depending on the source, there are about 165,000 gas stations in the United States.

Given that some have two gas pumps, some have four and some have 20 if we take an average of 10 at each station that would mean 1,650,000 gas pumps in the country.

The real number is probably far higher but let’s use that.

Depending on sources, there are fewer than 50,000 electric car charging positions in the U.S. and they are mostly of a kind that charge slowly, very slowly in fact compared to the time it takes to fill up a gasoline tank.

Do the math. If gasoline pumps and current electric fueling positions were comparable, and they are not for now because of technology, the deficit is 1.6 million positions. Let’s leave it to experts to come up with the actual figures but the illustration gives us a good layman’s notion of the gap.

Example: In New Jersey the law says if you sell gasoline to anyone, you have to sell it to evryone. That ‘s why a Costco gas station plaza in Mercer County New Jersey has to sell gasoline even to non-Costco members. That plaza by observation fuels thousand and thousands of vehicles every week. It has about 20 gasoline pumps. It does not seem to have an electric charge station.

Clearly, we are several million fast-charge positions away from what we will need in a very few years. nThe second big problem with electric car charging is time. By all estimate current technology can fully charge a car at a charging position in about 20 to 30 minutes. But if you are used to a two-miute gasoline fill-up, that does not fit your busy life.

Even if we reach a point in an unknown future when many if not most auto owners can fully charge their cars at home, then estimates say it now takes six to as many as 12 hours to do that. That’s not just not ideal, it’s no good. Advancing the technology has to move with the development of charging positions.

The pending infrastructure bill must be passed to encourage and provide support for that investment, one that in turn has to be made by the oil and auto industries with the kind of public incentivation provided by the infrastructure legislation.

It contains an initial federal contribution of $7.5 billion for charging positions. But measure that against an estimate from one source that puts the total amount needed to build a large enough national network of charging positions at $50 billion.

Ford can make all the electric cars it wants as it takes forward its plan to transition in 15 years to manufacturing only electric vehicles.

But can it sell electric cars if the charging stations to fuel them are few and far between and if the technology has not been advanced to make them reasonably comparable in efficiency to gasoline pumps?

With other automakers, like Tesla which already bulds its own, Ford will have to invest in electric charging stations.

We need the infrastructure bill now – right now.

Yesterday in fact and, if anything, we need more of it.

It is now illegal to be a woman in Texas.

If you see a woman in Texas, call a Republican.

Meantime, while everyone is rightfully worried about girls and women in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken over Texas – and very probably the U.S. Supreme Court.

Will Rogers said, “America has never lost a war or won a peace conference.”

This time we did both.

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan is where empires go to die.

I am old enough to remember the scenes shown on television outside Little Rock Central High School at the start of the 1957 school year.

This is exactly the same. The only thing diferent is that 65 years later these ignorant rednecks have changed parties.

Where once they were Democrats they are among the Republicans who have turned Tennesse crimson red.

Read this, watch the video and understand how hopeless these hateful, hating, ignorant southerners are, just the same as every gerneration in the south. Hopeless, hopeless,hate-filled, frightened animals.

As much as things change, they remain exactly the same and nowhere more so than in the American south.

Ths is how they fry the chicken now in damned Dixie. We can’t fix this country until we fix the south and it defies fixing.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/anti-mask-crowd-uncontrollable-tenn-school-board-meeting-florida-texas-schools-mask-mandates-181606106.html

ANYONE WHO CANNOT AND WILL NOT SHOW OFFICIAL PROOF OF VACCINATION SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED INTO OR EVEN NEAR ANY SCHOOL ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT YEAR.

And that’s all there is to say about that.

Anyone who says different is a damned fool or – or a Republican.

At ShopRite supermarkets this week if you spend at least $10 you can buy:

A gallon of whole milk for $4.06

A loaf of store brand white bread for 74 cents

20 pounds of store brand white rice for $9.89

A 15 ounce can of store brand red kidney beans for 61 cents.

A pound of 80/20 chopped meat for $4.06

With the right coupons you can buy:

A picnic pork shoulder for 99 cents a pound

Chicken drumsticks or thighs for 99 cents a pound

A can of Maxwell House Coffee for $1.99

4 cans of Progresso Soup for $5

A head of iceberg lettuce for 99 cents.

If you have a young child this week you can buy her six pairs of Haines white socks for kids for $4.49. You can buy two 15.5 ounce containers of Purex laundry detergent for $4 to wash them with -when you can afford the laundromat.

Now, suppose you are a single mother with two children, let’s say a 9 year-old boy and a 7-year old girl, you somehow manage child care and you work 40 hours a week paid at the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage.

Your gross weekly check is $290, $15,080 a year.

After the mandatory 7.65 percent FICA deduction for Social Security and Medicare your net weekly check is $268, $13,936 for the whole year – assuming no deductions for federal or state income taxes or for state unemployment/disability insurance, though of course there will be.

Somehow on less than $14,000 a year, even with food stamps, federal chilren’s health insurance and maybe some rent assistance you have to feed, house, cloth and provide medical care for yourself and two children, while you keep the lights on and the heat working.

You have to manage to do that in a country that says you are officially poor if the annual income for a one-person household is $12,880, or $17,980 or less for a three person household like that of our working-mother and her kids.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established the federal minimum wage. It took effect that year at 25 cents an hour. It reached $1 an hour in 1956, $5.15 an hour in 1996, and $7.25 an hour in 2009 – and there it has stayed.

In its first 71 years, the federal minimum wage increased 29 times, on average of about once every two and a half years, about every 30 months. By this historical measure it should have increased in 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019 and now, at the start of 2021.

It should have increased at least by a few pennies five times. It hasn’t budged in 12 years.

In the 12 years since a Democrat House and Senate last raised it, the minimum wage has remained unchanged with Republicans in control of at least one house of Congress or both. They remain opposed to an increase now.

The buying power of $7.25 in 2009 today is $5.97, while keeping pace even with that low wage would put it at $8.64 in today’s dollars, notwithstanding very modest inflation the past dozen years.

The federal minimum wage covers most workers but not all and so every state has its own wage law even if it is simply to peg it to the federal level or to assure that minimum wage workers are better paid than at the federal rate.

According to the New York Times the actual federal minimum wage is earned by 1.1 million workers, bad enough except tens of millions more earn wages suppressed by the artifically low federal hourly wage floor.

The highest state minimum wage this year is California’s, $14 an hour for businesses with 26 employees and otherwise $13 an hour. The highest universal state minumum wage is that of Washington, $13.69 an hour.

The lowest state minimum wages are those of Wyoming and Georgia, $5.15 an hour. Imagine that. In the year 2021 the state minimum wage in those two red legislature states is what the federal minimum wage was in 1997. Choose your word for that – cruel, stupid, mean, barbaric. How about all of them?

Seveteen states, including Pennsylvania, set theirs at the $7.25 an hour federal level. In all 17 Republicans control the legislatures. Most also have Republican governors.

As a matter of interest, state rates this year in New Jersey are $12 an hour, $13 an hour in New York and $13.50 an hour in Massachusetts. The New York Times reports that 20 states and 32 cities have or will move the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years. No state is there yet.

In the private sector the retail behemoths Amazon, Walmart and Costco, with conditions and caveats such as excepting part-time workers, exceed all state statutory minimum wage levels. The first two are at or moving to $15 an hour while Costco just announced a move to $16 an hour.

Opponents of minimum wage increases – Republicans, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce – always contend that small businesses cannot afford hourly wage increases. Always that is not the case. Always the economy grows, the demand for lower wage workers increases and businesses expand revenue and profit.

As cited this week in the New York Times, a study by a University of Massachusetts economist examined 55 minimum wage increases including 36 in the U.S. In every one it found only a negligible short-term impact on employment.

Opponents always say it is inflationary to raise the minimum wage. Too much money chasing too much and too many goods and services is classically inflationary. But bare minimum wage earnings are not, are never too much money. If massive tax cuts are not deemed inflationary, how can nominal increases in the minimum wage be?

There is broad agreement among economists of every political persuasion, notably and especially at the Federal Reserve, that present low interest rates will prevail for a very long time.

Even at 1.4 percent as it was last year in the pandemic-slowed economy, $1 in 2020 is worth but 98.6 cents today. Still, low inflation is cumulative. It has reduced the dollar’s purchasing power about 18 percent since 2009.

If the federal minimum wage increased to $15 an hour, our working mother would go from a weekly income of $290 to $600, from an annual pre-tax income of $15,080 to $31,200, substantially above the federal poverty level at which she and her two children cannot now subsist much less exist.

Two children would be lifted out of extreme, cruel poverty. They would just be very poor instead of being in the most terrible, dire need.

It’s uncertain, unlikely even that having a hot dog at a July 4 picnic unites this country anymore.

You know there is the mustard v. ketchup issue. Everything is an issue.

So when President Biden speaks to national unity and its expression in Congress through bipartisanship, we hold our breath and wait to see what can happen, what will happen – with small expectations.

Continue reading “Bipartisanship? Don’t Hold Your Breath”

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.