The Brandon Game

 

They say fortune favors the prepared, but in some cases merely proximate suffices. Never did I feel that MetLife stadium in the “Meadowlands” of New Jersey was some kind of windfall, especially with the play over the past decade of its residents, the football Jets and Giants. But fortune looked kindly last weekend when Army and Navy pulled in and played their annual battle royale, and my wife and I jumped at the chance to finally attend this great game.

A normally unremarkable train ride to the game was highlighted by, of all things, the marketing folks at the commuter rail line, New Jersey Transit. Hardly the model of military precision, they managed to hand out some seriously high-quality fabric face masks with the game logo for use on the journey. I’m not much of a believer in masks outside of the operating room or on Halloween, but if I had to wear one, it was something I could do with pride. It was, for lack of anything else, a uniform for the day.

The modern spectacle of today’s sports industry requires an entire army (pardon the pun) of entertainment before you even get to your seat. “Fan Festivals” of music, community demonstrations, and quasi-athletic demonstrations are de rigueur for any pro event (or Alabama football), begging the question of why you need to even watch the actual game. Army/Navy is no different, but with a very, very special set of skills. No Chevy dealer here selling a lucky raffle ticket for a used Camaro. Right after the metal detectors you come to an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber mounted gun. Alas, the good Army folks wouldn’t let me take it back to Manhattan to help clear the human detritus of drunken SantaCon revelers. I mean I am a taxpayer, so why can’t I take it for a spin? Befitting the military medical corps, there was a first aid demonstration nearby. But this wasn’t anything with your high school health class CPR dummies. The mannequins had battle injuries; one with a foot missing and another with his liver falling out from a stomach wound. Small patrol boats, helicopters, and plenty of other Defense Department goodies were strategically arranged like stocking stuffers at Macy’s during Christmastime.

By the time we made it to our seats, we were in full patriotic mode. Cadets and midshipmen were scattered across the field and military brass were walking around engaging in prodigious inter-service back slapping. Then again, that is Pentagon signaling that the latest weapons system is now another billion dollar over budget. But heck, everyone was in too good a mood to care.

Even half time wasn’t like any other game I’ve been to. Of course they played Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Except they had Lee Greenwood on the field singing the song. With a 50-yard-long American flag. And coordinated fireworks. They even had some DOD suit swear in a recruit class that had just finished basic training. It must have been a head trip for some recent high school grads getting cheered by 82,000 people after being called, well whatever they call you in basic training, for the last two months.

But what I was really looking forward to was the President walking in just before the coin toss. You see it every year on the news. Except he wasn’t there. Perhaps Madame VP would take his place—I mean there’s no law the President has to be there, and maybe he was busy jetting around the world making our planet a safer place.

Nothing.

Maybe there would be a video message encouraging a good game and thanking the players and assembled military personnel for their service.

Still nothing.

In the big picture there was nothing wrong until the periodic “U-S-A” chants started. The problem popped up with another chorus that accompanied this cheer, “Let’s Go Brandon.” It was then clear that the administration knew that this was going to be a PR nightmare. The typical video from this event is of the strong Commander-in-Chief (or VP) striding confidently onto the field, waving to the crowd and saluting servicemen. But what was going to happen this time? Joe shuffling along, looking lost and fiddling with his mask? Kamala in heels, pantsuit, and mask, addressing the crowd with that weird, giggling screech of hers? It was a reminder of the recent Afghanistan disaster waiting to happen.

After what was a few hours of spirited, if not somewhat mediocre, football play, we returned home, emerging from the desperate bowels of Penn Station in search of a cab. Unbeknownst to us, there was championship boxing starting in an hour at Madison Square Garden, and the ticket scalpers were circling in force. “Tickets, who has tickets to sell/who needs tickets” was the constant refrain. While attempting to exit the obit this hellish gravitational pull, I still had my mask on, probably subconsciously trying to protect myself from the sidewalk smell of human excrement and even more belligerent SantaCon revelers.

As one scalper passed us, he interrupted his rap to yell at us, “Who won the game?”, as he must have seen the imprint on my mask. “Navy, 17-13” I yelled back, thus fulfilling my civic duty and providing critical information about spread.

And then the one truly sad thought of the day hit me. A sad thought about our country. Did anyone at the White House even know the score? Did they even care?

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

A View On The View

 

The past 20 years has been a golden age for what is known as “reality TV.” Starting off with CBS’s Survivor, the format now has more variants than COVID, with the Real Housewives franchise an inexplicable powerhouse. While not my thing, the market is the ultimate arbiter of what is popular, and I could care less who spends their time viewing these less-than-real lives. But when our highest elected officials are either party to, or victim of, such antics, we need to start asking a lot of questions.

Even if, like me, you don’t watch daytime TV, you probably have heard of, and may have seen some of the histrionics from, ABC’s The View. This otherwise insufferable gabfest, inexplicably aligned under the network’s news division, grabbed headlines on Friday when two of their hosts had to leave the show mid-airing because they tested positive for COVID just before Vice President Harris was to come on the show. The video led the news for the entire day, playing out as if a national crisis had been averted.

Except nothing, absolutely nothing, about what happened was true.

While it turns out that the show’s hosts are regularly tested for COVID, the requirement for a rapid test came from the VP’s office. Why, you might ask? Good question. The hosts are all vaccinated. The VP is vaccinated with the vaccine that she famously said she wouldn’t-trust-because-Donald-Trump’s-administration-developed-it but now everyone must have the jab. So if the vaccine works so well, and everyone has been vaccinated, why does anyone who comes within six feet of the VP need to be tested? Never mind.

And as to that national crisis of potential infection? Oh, it was a false positive. For both tests. If a false positive led to the tirade of some overhyped actor, none of this would matter. A real-world concern would be for international travelers, as a false positive would send you to quarantine in a foreign country because you have to test negative, even if you are citizen and have been vaccinated, to get back into the US. But the greatest concern is that this false positive involves the executive leadership of the government, and its utter failure here reflects a national inability to move forward from COVID.

We see the trickle down of this ineptitude everywhere. In New York City, you have to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask to see a movie. To sit down in a restaurant, you need to show proof of vaccination, but you don’t need to wear a mask, which is odd because when there was no vaccine all you had to do was wear a mask and take it off when you sat down at the table. Of course elsewhere in the state, or other states entirely, none of this applies.

And while the internal policies of one city may not be important, when the President gets it all wrong, then it just adds fuel to the political fire. Imagine a President who gives out off-the-cuff medical advice on vaccination based on no discernable medical research. When it was Donald Trump, everyone pilloried him; when it was Joe Biden telling everyone to get a booster shot, it was merely “a premature suggestion awaiting further confirmation.” When that confirmation was, at best, limited and tepid, there was a White House victory dance affirming that the most seriously immuno-compromised should get a booster. This was hardly the triumph of great science.

To take it a step further, does the White House really want a COVID triumph? With each new variant there seems to be another reason not to move forward, just ominous mentioning of “not wanting to return to lockdowns.” The only reason I can even keep track of the mutations is that I had to memorize the Greek alphabet as a fraternity pledge, but that was nearly 40 years ago, which seems to be as long as the COVID crisis has been going on. But we are at a point where we face a stark choice: how much can the government control the most basic elements of our life, like walking into a restaurant. As only a political scientist can appreciate, you know the world is upside down when free-market Republican governors have to use the most draconian instrument, authoritarian executive orders, just to keep businesses open.

Each side from The View COVID drama seems to be very quiet, just sending out little feelers in the press to cover themselves. Conspiracy theorist might say the whole thing was a setup for ratings; more innocently it may have been a bunch of underlings who screwed up the works. Who knows? But I do know there are hard-core anti-vaxxers who won’t believe a word the government says. I’m not part of that crowd, but when this administration runs our country’s COVID policy as a reality show, do you blame them?

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

This Is Our Responsibility

 

It was described as a humanitarian crisis. Frantic travelers trying to escape on the next available way out. Scores of men, and the occasional woman, lying on the ground—disoriented, unkempt, hopeless. It may have sounded like the evacuation of Kabul airport, but in reality it was how one particular political candidate accurately called New York City’s Pennsylvania Station.

Those who walk through, see, and more importantly, smell Penn Station could only take solace that their commutes don’t include the inner-most circle of Hell, the Port Authority bus station that sits a mile or so away. Absent that lowest level of salvation, any observer could easily confuse Penn Station as some overflow outlet for a homeless shelter. And so last week while Afghanistan was descending into its own conflagration, mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa showed up for a press conference to decry the wretched state of affairs at the busiest train station in America.

As if on cue, a homeless man walked right in front of Sliwa’s podium and interrupted the remarks. In a nod to our surreal times, the man was shirtless yet managed to have a clean-looking mask looped around both of his ears. A cop offered to take the man away, but Sliwa demurred and engaged in conversation. We found out that the man came from Guyana six years ago; had been hospitalized at Bellevue numerous times; was supposed to be on medication—an all-too-familiar litany of despair. Almost casually, Sliwa asked an innocuous, almost obvious, question, “Would you rather be somewhere else but Penn Station?”

It utterly destroyed the man.

The man’s body started to curl inward and his lips lost the battle against quivering. And then the tears started to flow. Crying of a man who was utterly broken; crying at the realization that all his life meant was a few square feet on Penn Station’s filthy floor; crying that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, in life.

Sliwa calmly consoled the man, telling him, “That’s all right, we’ll take care of you. This is our responsibility.” This wasn’t some war cry for government spending on social programs or even a jab at the current the current Mayor (although a crystallization of all his failures). No, it was a declaration of what our leaders should do—that is, take responsibility. Sliwa doesn’t run a homeless shelter, can’t give him medication, and certainly can’t undo this man’s awful circumstances. But here he showed how a vast, taxpayer-funded bureaucracy had abandoned any accountability and how we, as a city, cannot accept the current state.

Sliwa’s display reminded me of the phrase “compassionate conservative” that George W. Bush used to throw around. The left snickered at him for it and I feel it was mostly because he never had the chance to show what it really meant. But in this brief campaign interaction, Sliwa showed exactly what it meant. It means acting on the root Judeo-Christian values of helping our fellow man. It means holding those in power, those who are stewards of tax dollars, accountable for their failures. It means that one man or woman can change not only one other person’s life, but also the lives of many others, if they are willing to stand on their principals.

There are, as they say in the business world, many, many problems to unpack for this unfortunate man from Guyana. I’m not sure medications and a shelter cot are even a start to any kind of a solution, but it’s a start that has to happen. And Sliwa’s winning the mayor’s race is such a long shot that I doubt any Vegas bookie would lay odds on it. But one thing is for sure—for a few seconds on a hot summer’s afternoon, Curtis Sliwa made New York City a better place. For that we should thankful and follow in his footsteps.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The List Is Not Life

 

On Thursday America suffered collective pain and indignity with the ISIS bombings at Kabul airport. The slaughter that included 13 US service members was bad enough; the response from the White House was even worse. I ask—no really, I am pleading—is anybody running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania?

Times of crisis usually bring out the best of presidents and their speechwriters. From FDR declaring December 7^th, 1941 a “day that will live in infamy” to Reagan mourning the Challenger’s crew “slipping the surly bonds of earth,” the right people at the right time say the right things. George W. Bush managed to improv through a bullhorn on the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers and channel a nation’s anguish and anger. Even Obama’s highly scripted, pointy-headed professorial declarations were, at their base, well-crafted and professional. And for Donald Trump, the Teleprompter was merely something of a guide, rather than a script, to follow, but his discussions of fallen service members were always respectful.

Then there was Joe Biden’s performance on Thursday.

Besides being late in the day and late for the appointed time, the prepared remarks were, at best, a rambling descent into the incomprehensible. The only good thing was that his speech was short and as it finished I thought the worst was over. And by worst I mean Joe talking, as his usual tactic when his vacation is interrupted is to shuffle away without taking questions before heading back to Camp David.

But no.

And here is the exact moment when the wheels officially came off the Biden bus. I repeat it verbatim, copied directly from the White House’s official transcript:

“Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O’Donnell of NBC.”

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the President actually announced to the entire world that he had a list of reporters on which to call, and that “they” (whoever “they” are) who gave him this list are somehow running this show. Is there no advisor, aide, or press rep that can tell Joe that this is the one thing you would never, never say? Everyone knows presidents (or anyone facing the press corps) have favorites and they get asked first. It’s not even relevant or important. But why would you even think to mention it? Is there a mind at work? Did you forget that this interaction is about the killing of US military personnel and not how you run a presser? Apparently not, because then Joe thought he could be funny.

Now calling on the press has always been a bit of a game. Sam Donaldson was Reagan’s jester—the wild gesticulations and screaming above Marine One’s rotors contrasting to his never-moving shellacked head of black hair was always funny, especially since Sam didn’t realize the joke was on him. It was all an act of political theatre, and Reagan knew how and when to play the part. Inexplicably Joe thought that humor, a smug joke, was in order to end this affair. Again I quote from the White House transcript:

“I’ll take one more question…

THE PRESIDENT: Whoa. Wait, wait, wait. Let me take the one question from the most interesting guy that I know in the press.”

That’s right. When the world wants to know what the United States will do after a terrorist attack, you should start poking fun at…the Fox News reporter. Instead of treating those who had just sacrificed their lives with the respect they deserve, Joe went for a tone-deaf goof that reduces their deaths to accidental bystanders at an amusement park mishap.

Over this weekend I will give pause and pray for those we lost and their families. I will think of all the good things about this country and how lucky we are to be in it. If I could, I’d even go around the White House and see if there are any adults who can straighten things out and get our citizens home from Afghanistan. One thing is for sure—nobody needed to help me put together this list of things to do.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

One Is The Loneliest Number

 

Central to the Biden image masters' message during the 2020 campaign was Joe’s common touch and five decades of Washington, D.C. experience. And while campaigns aren’t trials seeking the truth, this weekend’s unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan showed how far from reality that campaign image was.

We were sold a story of Joe from Scranton—the everyman American who rose to power but always kept those working-class roots. Fast forward to Joe the President monitoring the world from Camp David. The White House photo showed Joe by himself in an empty situation room. And even though every chair around the table had a pen and pad of paper at the ready, there wasn’t a living person in sight. Everyman Joe is now every Zoom conference Joe—which is no way to run this nation’s foreign policy. Then again, as has been pointed out by any number of observers, the clocks in the Camp David situation had the wrong time for both London and Moscow. I don’t expect any President to grasp the numerical nuance of every international time zone and the permutations of daylight savings time. I do expect, however, somebody working under the President to know how to set the clocks.

But it was the utter emptiness of the situation room that really, really disturbed me. There’s a famous photo of the White House situation room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. There were cabinet secretaries, military brass, and all manner of advisors jammed together like the back of Spirit airlines plane. In fairness, it could have been the front of a Spirit airlines plane as well. But the image conveyed the importance of the moment—the most important people were together as a hugely daring and dangerous military action was taking place. Choose your crisis—Cuban missile, various Middle East wars, terrorist attacks—the world expects to see the President’s closest advisers contorting themselves to whisper advice into his ear. Even during the height of the Covid news conferences, President Trump had a bevy of advisors surrounding him. Yes, Trump mostly wanted to talk, and had an unnerving habit of hovering over those who were speaking, but it showed that there was a team in place working on this problem.

Not for this administration.

I’m not sure what the image masters are trying to tell us about Joe. Is this issue just not worth his time and the time of his cabinet? Is it that Joe knows this so well that all he needs is a video screen to work this all out? Or is it just that he was awake and out of his pajamas? Whatever the picture was supposed to tell us, the ensuing official statements showed how little Joe has learned during his 50 years in D.C. mixed with the subtlety of a Taliban delegation at a women’s rights conference.

The Sunday morning news shows had Joe’s cabinet blaming Trump and the Afghans. Nuance and thoughtfulness, something you should learn from 50 years in politics and government, were out, and absolution of responsibility was in. This might have been a spin game until Monday afternoon when Joe teetered into the White House and delivered remarks in person. He didn’t just repeat the blame, he doubled down, and not-so-subtly threw Obama under the bus as well. And in case there was any confusion, he adamantly claimed that this result was inevitable, it was just faster than we expected. In other words, nothing here to see.

There will be inquiries about what US intelligence knew and how they briefed the President concerning Afghanistan. There will be hearings about how the President’s cabinet and advisors helped form this current “policy.” But the last 48 hours have been about images, starting with Joe Biden staring at a video screen and ending with him shuffling from a rostrum, all by himself. And while it may be lonely at the top, it doesn’t seem that anyone wants to be around this President.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Oxy Dilemma

On an otherwise unremarkable grey and cold January afternoon two years ago in the Washington, DC area, my mother and I were returning to her apartment in time for lunch. Excitedly, my mom offered a variety of dining options, focused mostly on her proud inventory of fresh breads, cold cuts, and cheeses. She wanted to put the meal together, but I assured her that I was fully capable of assembling my own sandwich, especially in her present condition. You see just 24 hours earlier, almost exactly to the minute, a surgeon had tied off the final stiches to my mother’s hip replacement. That wild look in my mom’s eyes and frantic speech was the Oxy taking over her body.

This all came to mind last week with the news that a group of pharmaceutical companies, distributers, and litigating states had reached a settlement concerning abusive selling and distributing tactics of Oxy. By now we are familiar with the story of Oxy, the miracle drug that, unlike other powerful medicines, would save patients from excruciating pain with barely a chance of addiction. Society (and a fair chunk of the medical industry) all took a bite from this apple of pharma Eden and, just like Adam and Eve, were cast out from paradise. While nobody will publicly take any of the blame, now there’s $26 billion to start repairing some of the damage.

I would be more hopeful if some of the money would do some good, but the signs are not promising. While not allowed to fill state budget gaps, the money can go treatment centers (nice, but kind of after the fact), pill and needle disposal education (which doesn’t address using too many pills or shooting up drugs), or providing funds for first responders (and while paying for more NarCon sticks is great, it would be better if folks didn’t need it in the first place). So while the landmark tobacco settlement at least tried to promote better behavior from the tobacco companies (no more billboards, super-slick marketing, or Joe Camel cartoons), after the Oxy agreement we are still left with an extremely powerful narcotic, legally manufactured and distributed, and freely prescribed by medical professionals. Isn’t this how we got here in the first place?

After getting my mom comfortable in her bed and dulling her mind with daytime TV, I went about a week’s worth of playing a combination of loving son (OK, I am a loving son) and Nurse Ratched (I couldn’t let her fall because she forgot to use her walker or accidently let her start in on her 6:00 PM wine). One important role was to keep track of her medications, and part of that meant a bottle of 40 Oxy pills—one every six hours. The first few days required full Oxy dosage, but after that we had a good rapport of me offering pills at the allotted time and she would figure out if she needed them. Once in a while she would ask for one unprompted, and I was happy to oblige. It may have been amateur pain management, but I think we made a good team and kept her from suffering unnecessarily. In the end she went through about half of the bottle, with 20 or so pills still left. Had mom wanted, she could have shilled those extras on the street for $20 a pop, and traded up her Two Buck Chuck for some excellent Trader Joe’s Reserve wines.

And while some states now have requirements for electronic prescription submission and ID requirements to pick up meds such as Oxy, is it right to prescribe that many pills in the first place? I’m sure the medical literature from all the studies indicate that ten days of four Oxy pills may be safe and, technically, not addictive, but would you want to wake up from no pain or responsibility? No doctor, or their office, wants to have patients ask for more pain killers, much less having them go through the hassle of traveling to the drug store and picking them up while still hurting. But shouldn’t we start with the bare minimum prescription and then work our way up? While medicine is so advanced that you can replace a hip and send the patient home the next day, has the medical community abdicated their responsibility to monitor care, especially from powerful pills, in the name of convenience?

I ask these uncomfortable questions because nine months after mom’s hip surgery she had a knee replaced (she couldn’t do both at the same time because they were on opposite legs). In a déjà vu moment, the kind orderly wheeled my mom to the hospital pharmacy where she would pick up her discharge medications. Befitting the fact Halloween was only weeks away, we trick ‘o treated a grab bag of post-surgery meds and headed to her apartment for another week of recovery. There were 40 more Oxy pills.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Would You Buy A Car From This Government?

Whether on late night TV or blaring from a radio, you’ve probably heard the pitch countless times: “Come on down to the lot and have your kids enter for a chance to win free in-state college tuition; lease your dream vehicle and qualify for a million-dollar lottery card; finance with us and we’ll give you Mets tickets; buy a car and we’ll even pay your outstanding parking tickets.” We’ve heard this schtick so often and for so long we probably don’t even register it anymore. The last new marketing campaign to come from Detroit was “employee discount” rates, and that was what, fifteen years ago? The problem here isn’t that car buying is still a weird universe of its own, it’s that local politicians are using the same techniques to encourage people to get the Covid vaccination. The four examples above are all true offers from state and local officials this past month—whether Mets tickets can be considered an “incentive” is a discussion for another day.

No matter your age, income, or neighborhood, it is impossible not to know that the Covid vaccine is around, available, and free (well you don’t get charged—our grandchildren are screwed when the financing for this hits their tax bills). And while initial lines to get the vaccine resembled refugees trying to gain entry into a friendly country, for the past few weeks the numbers have slowed down considerably. We are at the point where, for various reasons, millions of J&J shots may go unused by the end of the month and will no longer have approved viability. While I happily rolled up my sleeve this April, it seems that there is, in a Jimmy Carter kind of way, a national malaise about Covid and the vaccine. Sure there are petulant anti-vaxxers, but their total numbers are a rounding error against the general population. Perhaps we are now at a national boy-who-cried-wolf inflection point when it comes to believing anything the government says.

The populace has always been leery of boasting politicians, but they have never believed every word from them anyway. Where new wounds have been opened is from the permanent bureaucracy, and it has only itself to blame. At the beginning of Covid, Dr. Fauci’s words were as close to Moses’s tablets as we could come. A year later he’s become a caricature of himself, wearing two masks to a hearing with the national infection falling like a dead Wuhan bat and millions of people getting vaccinated. While it’s easy to whack at the Fauci piṅata, none of the political or bureaucratic institutions have gotten anything right about Covid. We can’t even figure out if the virus came from a lab or wet market. We can’t even get the Chinese to admit it came from China.

We now live in a circular firing squad of distrust. The passenger who is taken off a plane for not wearing a mask points to BLM rioters who ravaged cities for the sole purpose of stealing and destruction. The otherwise law-abiding citizen loses faith in the police when the cops did nothing about the stealing and destruction. And everyone looks at governors who arbitrarily called their jobs “non essential” and threw otherwise law-abiding and police-respecting citizens into unemployment for no discernible reason.

Traditionally, Americans in times of true crisis are willing to inconvenience themselves and temporarily subordinate their rights for the greater good because we trust a terrestrial authority. The past year has given every doubter and naysayer a lifetime of ammunition to simply ignore authority. Why trust authority when, if it comes to maintaining law and order or merely distributing a vaccine, life is just a lottery ticket? Should we care? Absolutely. Because the last thing anyone takes seriously now is the people to whom we should have at least some deferential respect and obedience. Sometimes your life, or the lives of many, depend on it. But it seems that all these leaders do is fumble around and bemoan their missing masks, from the President on down.

If there is a happy tale to tell, a friend of mine got his J&J shot earlier this year and reported unusual efficiency at the vaccine site. He also noted the National Guard was running the operation, so at least one governmental organ could show how to make things work. Perhaps we could commandeer a few car salesmen to work the airwaves, asking us how they can get a needle into our arms instead of how to get us into their cars. Sure some screamer may slap down a C-note and proclaim that for a hundred bucks you can drive away with a new car, but somehow it works. Nobody likes buying a car, and nobody really trusts the car salesmen. But they know how to make a sale, and for our collective health we can’t do any worse.

 © 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

220

 

Being blessed with good health, my annual physical tends to be a routine affair. So this past December nothing much was different with the exception of my doctor wearing his mask throughout the appointment. Obviously some of our banter centered around Covid and how the vaccine, which was just rolling out to health care workers, was going to change things. Almost to himself, my doctor asked, “Once people are vaccinated, what are they going to do with the millions of tests that they won’t need anymore?” Five months later I got the answer, and it wasn’t what I was expecting. Tests were helping the most elite institutions and hurting those who needed help the most.

While late-April baseball is always something of crapshoot weather-wise, when you get an invitation for the luxury suites at Yankee Stadium, the possibility of a rain out is soothed by guaranteed overhead cover and a private bathroom. And so my wife and I were the beneficiaries of generous friends and off to the Bronx we headed. But first, I had to get a Covid rapid test that morning to prove I was not infectious. Beyond the limited seating capacity requirements that are common in the region, New York requires attendees of these kinds of events to show proof of full vaccination (I had only had my first shot) or a negative test. As annoying as it was for my nostrils, I passed with flying colors and handed over my insurance card to the urgent care clerk for processing. I had no idea what it might cost, but I figured even if it were a $50 deductible, I would still be way ahead against the $150 bottle of Grey Goose our hosts had ordered for the suite.

It would be a couple of weeks later when I opened my explanation of benefits that I realized how wrong things were going. The “billed rate” was $350 and I figured, like any other test, the payout would be along the lines of 10-20%. How wrong I was. The “negotiated rate” ended up at $220. I didn’t have to pay a thing, but either my company’s policy did or maybe they and the government shared the bill. But stop and do the math. Even with only 10,000 fans allowed, that’s $2.2 million a game just for the fans. Multiply that out over 81 games and it’s larger than the GDP of many countries. While the season progresses and more fans get vaccinated there won’t be a need for as many tests, but you can be sure that staff will have to get tested regularly, if for no other reason to try to protect the team should somebody allege that they got Covid at the game.

And more to the point, to what end do we need this testing, if indeed the efficacy of the rapid test is to be trusted? Even if somebody came down with Covid, there wasn’t any way to trace the fact I was there: My name wasn’t on the ticket, I never used my credit card, and my ID was never recorded. Sure, we went through the kabuki of social distancing (well, those in the general stands did). We played nice and wore masks as we entered the stadium, but soon after most fans’ masks, like the Yankees offense that afternoon, never showed up again.

So why the anger at what seems what sounds like a 1% of the 1% problem? The suite attendant. In casual conversation I asked how things had been during the season. While not complaining, he said that he usually worked one suite and it kept him busy all game. Now, he hustles five suites and barely makes a payday. When you think that the stadium sometimes needs upwards of 4,000 people to work a game, and you cut that by 80%, you don’t have to guess how many families are struggling. And while Democrats have always belittled “trickle-down” economics, they might want to ask the people for whom the stream has run dry. Yet it is Democratic governors who are creating the greatest inequity, this time through a “vaccine gap,” that is hurting the people who need the most help, the ones who can’t work from home, or the ones who don’t have Giancarlo Stanton’s astronomical, guaranteed contract.

While the CDC gave its updated “recommendations” last week (and it’s telling that they phrased it in terms of can/can’t and not should/shouldn’t), other states such as Florida are ending the class, err, vaccine, wars by barring businesses from even asking about vax status. Given that over half a million Americans have died from Covid, it is abundantly clear we were never going to protect ourselves in some bubble wrap of lockdown, partial capacity, or as a neighbor in my building still does to this day, pressing elevator buttons with your elbows. Risk is a part of life, and if we aren’t going to try and move forward, we are going to bankrupt our country. $220 at a time.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Ides of May

 

The Old Roman Senate, Scene of Caesar's Demise 

Friends, Republicans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to explain Liz Cheney, not to praise her. Today Republicans ousted their Chair of the House Republican Conference, the number three leadership position. Over the last few weeks, like any Shakespearean drama, the foreboding was clear. But how did we get here, and what does it mean?

In Congress there are various types of members. Some see it as a steppingstone to executive power—be it Governor or President. Some wait patiently over years, sometimes decades, for a committee chairmanship. A few are just there for the publicity—seemingly (or in their own minds) owing nothing to party leadership. Think AOC for the Democrats and Matt Gaetz for the GOP. Their importance in the legislative process is inversely proportional to the time they spend on TV, Twitter, and people talking about their time on TV and Twitter.

And then there is House “leadership,” starting with the Speaker and their mirror in the minority, and then some combination of deputies and whips on each side. They come from districts that, absent indictment (although not always) or catastrophe, are so safe they don’t even have to campaign for themselves. Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities spoke of certain political types as having “favor banks”; House leaders are a combination of the Treasury printing favors and the Federal Reserve distributing them.

Against this backdrop Liz Cheney falls into the scene. Fall isn’t quite the right term—more of moving slightly from behind the curtains to the stage front. Make no mistake, Liz Cheney is whip smart and well spoken, putting her ahead of about 95% of her Hill colleagues. During the Bush 43 campaigns and administration she and her sister were a powerhouse duo supporting and defending their father in the fiercest of ways. And to add to her superpowers, she and her husband are raising their five children. At age 54 she was poised for a long run to the top, but of all things couldn’t grasp what should have come naturally—leadership.

Part of the party leadership deal is giving up some of your passions, absent anything that would hurt your constituents, for the greater good of the party. You slug out Sunday morning talk show appearances simply because you have to, not because anybody cares. You make deals between members to keep them happy, not because the greater good of the country is served. You also signal what you want, ultimately to be Speaker, and forgo other electoral temptations. While hardly monastic, the reward for this life is immense political power and national influence. So, and improbably in just her third term, Liz Cheney staked her claim.

I can’t say I agree with Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach the President either on fact or as a leader in the party, but so she did. And while riling many feathers, she defended herself in front of her conference, winning a confidence vote mere weeks after having been voted into leadership in the first place. And here is where it all goes so wrong. Instead of using that second vote to secure her power and become politically untouchable she…persisted. Why? Leaders don’t make gratuitous power grabs in public—it’s a quiet takeover that even the vanquished acknowledge was inevitable when it is over. Strength accumulates by not flexing it in public. Yet for whatever reason Liz Cheney seemed to think that the Trump fight needed constant, and public, flogging. Was there some ancient grudge break to new mutiny between the Trumps and Cheneys? Who knows. But what also became clear was that, like it or not, the Trump show remained popular within the party and it needed to be stage managed since it wasn’t closing anytime soon. So like another well-known Italian drama, Casino, the bosses had had enough with Liz Cheney. And while not buried in an Indiana cornfield, her long-term political future is hardly a sure bet.

The irony here is that Liz Cheney’s behavior of battling, battling, and battling, unable to let go, unable to see the bigger picture, was just like Trump. It’s also what brought her down.

Et tu, Donald?

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Evolutionary Political Tree

 

With all the money and people the Democrats can tap for professional wordsmithing, why is it that their top candidates, and now President, can’t stop pissing off the very people they need to vote for them? Between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (who have a combined cumulative public speaking experience you could measure not in years but geologic eras), these leaders of their party have given Republicans verbal fodder to last a generation or, in more familiar terms, as long as the Neanderthals were our ancestors.

Just yesterday President Joe accused the governors of Texas and Mississippi of “Neanderthal thinking” when they announced lifting almost all Covid restrictions in their states. Not since Hillary’s line about Trump supporters being a “basket of deplorables” have the Democrats given the opposition the gift that keeps on giving. To this day conservative media uses “deplorables” as shorthand for elites who look down on working class masses with only high school educations. The very people who used to vote for Democrats. The same people Hillary mocked were all too happy to put that deplorable name on t-shirts and parade around in their own form of mockery all the way to the 2016 voting booths. Even in 2020 it was a cry at the Trump rallies, and short of 50,000 votes (legal and otherwise) across three states it would have propelled the Donald to another four years in the White House.

More importantly, Joe’s words reinforce, at many levels, the difference between elites and deplorables/Neanderthals. Not two weeks ago Texas went very Middle Ages electric, which is to say the power grid went off for a variety of reasons. After the lights went back on, Texas Governor Abbott could have pulled an Andrew Cuomo—that is deny, call it politics, and then go back to business as usual. But Abbott was front and center: the system failed and the legislature will come up with a remedy. There was no blaming green energy, shared power grids, or other DC salon discussion points—just plain talk that here is what happened and here is how we are going to fix it.

A bigger question for Joe is, do you really want to give Texas Republicans more ammunition? The state is poised to gain several congressional seats, all of which are redistricted by the Republican-controlled state legislature. I’m sure somebody in an Austin conference room already has a map out with labels “Neanderthal District-1, Neanderthal District-2, Neanderthal District-3…” And let’s not forget Florida, who I guess would be merely prehistoric on Joe’s Covid fighting scale. They will gain congressional seats from failed states such as New York, and I’m guessing they aren’t inclined to hand out goodies to the Democrats either. But in Texas, where Democrats have made significant inroads during recent statewide elections, do you really need to start off every campaign stop by distancing yourself from the leader of your party? When you are measuring victory by thin slices of the electoral college, I wouldn’t start by insulting the very places where you are trying to flip votes. Even Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday said he disagreed with opening up states, but didn’t go down the route of evolutionary name calling.

There are no perfect, or even very good, answers about what restrictions have worked, especially in light of destroying “non-essential” livelihoods, wiping out a year and a half of schooling, and, as the courts keep ruling, breaking the limits of governmental authority. It’s been a fairly poor experiment, and now some states are taking bold action, especially in light of the vaccine rollout. It’s the philosophy, right down party lines, as Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves put it, “’It was never to prevent all possible spread of Covid-19, it was always about protecting the integrity of our healthcare system.’” That question will not get answered here.

Say what you will about Neanderthals, but they weren’t too shabby making and using tools and their cave drawings could hang in any modern gallery wall, especially compared to some of today’s art. And maybe Joe was just having a grumpy old man day that people weren’t staying off his mask wearing front lawn. But what distinguishes our species from others is our large brain compared to our body size, a brain that remembers things on election day. And a brain that can create some great t-shirts, t-shirts I can’t wait to see on the campaign trail.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Excelsior, Ever Lower

 

As a side hustle over the years, I’ve been a photographer at many philanthropic and political galas. It’s not my favorite work, but the pay is usually OK and if you do a good enough job, they invite you back the next year—a little like a work annuity. So it was in the early 2000’s when I was covering the annual fundraiser for a prominent local environmental group. It’s a gig I had done before, and many of the same folks were there from previous years. There’s a kind of code at these events when it comes to pictures, with photographers keeping an eye out for celebs willing to have their photos taken with civilians (those who pay to go to these things). With a subtle nod of the head, the celeb smiles and extends their arm around the civilian, and I click away.

Thus I thought nothing of it when I saw a politician, who not-so-secretly was about to launch a statewide campaign, talking with a civilian. They seemed to know each other in a vague way, so I naturally asked if they wanted a picture. The civilian, we’ll call him Bob, stood up straight, adjusted his tie, and flashed a grin across his face, and the politician…looked at me. It wasn’t a blank look, but a highly unresponsive one. He turned to the civilian and simply deadpanned, “Oh Bob wouldn’t want a picture with me” and then calmly walked away. It was hardly the usual behavior of a an out-of-office politician gearing up for a major campaign, and both Bob and I were just plain confused by the whole thing. Then again, the politician in question was Andrew Cuomo.

In the Donald Trump model of life, any news, meaning any mention of your name, is good news. Accusations of obstructing justice and illicit female relationships were swatted away like contestants on an Apprentice episode. For Andrew Cuomo, the same accusations these past few weeks have been a political nightmare, and there has been nowhere for him to simply walk away.

Perhaps it’s all genetic. Cuomo’s dad Mario, the former New York Governor, was known to be just as thin-skinned and as much of a bully to the Albany press as Andrew. He’d call a reporter at eight in the morning to complain about some petty umbrage he took to a recent article. Now complaining to, and about, reporters is an ancient political art, but calling them only a few hours after they got to bed was considered a hostile act. But even Mario had to compromise, given that Republicans controlled the State Senate and significant parts of upstate and Long Island. For Andrew, political opposition has been wiped out across the state and he has steamrolled his way to absolute control. Of course the last steamroller in Albany, Governor Eliot Spitzer, had his own control issues, namely with prostitutes, and it cost him his job.

Perhaps Andrew Cuomo thinks this will all blow over. This is the same Governor who managed to shut down the state’s Moreland commission on government corruption when the investigation started to knock on his door and that of his supporters. A few minor characters went to jail, but somehow Cuomo managed to bully and bluster his way out of the whole affair.

But then there are the women.

First was senior aide Melissa DeRosa admitting, like John Dean at the Watergate hearings, that the Cuomo administration had deliberately obstructed a Department of Justice investigation into the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents. And while Biden’s DOJ announced they would open their own investigation, nobody can figure out why it will be in the Eastern District of New York, some 150 miles away from Albany, when staff from the Northern District of New York could walk two blocks to Cuomo’s office at the state Capitol building. One gets the sense this will be as successful as a 2019 health inspection at the Wuhan wet market.

But now there are more women kissing (albeit non-consensually) and telling. Two former staffers have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, and just as I am typing this sentence a third woman has come forward recounting Cuomo copping and unwanted feel. At first Cuomo forcefully denied anything happened, sounding much like Trump in his own, weird Cuomo-esque accent. But a funny thing happened—all of a sudden Cuomo’s story is now one of being playful, adding a little humor to the serious business of government work, lightening the mood. Denials now have a different storyline, which is to say it’s not a denial.

Yet Cuomo still is grasping to whatever power he has. Instead of acquiescing to the obvious, Cuomo suggested that he appoint his own special investigator about these allegations. As a sign of his diminished standing, the entire Capital laughed that idea away and the State Attorney General will grant a private attorney, with full subpoena power, authority to investigate the matter.

There are two things I’m sure about. First, Cuomo will fight all of this to the bitter, bitter, end. His chances of higher office, heck a fourth and final term as Governor, have melted away like the winter’s snow. He has nothing to lose and may just try to run out the clock, hoping his well-practiced skills of obstruction and deceit will work one more time. We’ll see how that all goes. And the second thing—just don’t ask to take a picture with him.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Irregular

 

A January ritual was for my mom to drag my brother and I down to Bloomingdale’s to hit the annual white sales (now a woke police non-compliant name). The only obstacle between us and a great deal was my dad’s one, immovable rule—the sheets on the bed at home could be any color, as long as it was white. This ran into the other immovable truth—white sheets never went on sale. Mom would politely ask the sales clerk about what white sheets might be on sale, and the clerk would politely shake their head that none were on sale, but “are you familiar with irregulars?”

Irregular sheets weren’t from some oddball company but ever so slightly not perfect—some finished stitching might not be exact or a hem was not quite at the right angle. Whatever the case, the manufacturer chose to sell them at a substantial discount rather than trash it and eat the entire cost. And so like your friendly bartender who remembers that they have a secret stash of your favorite whiskey, the sales clerk would reach to the back of the top shelf and produce these “irregulars.” Nobody was the wiser, the store made money, and my dad slept just fine. With tomorrow’s inauguration, I have that same feeling—I want to think that everything is right, but I need an expert to show me that what went wrong isn’t ruining the whole thing.

I’m no stolen election ranter, but there’s plenty out there that needs a better explanation, not just for the facts but to help put the nation at ease. This is a distinctly different time from 2000 where we were entertained by the site of a couple of civil servants with magnifying glasses trying to determine the veracity of a hanging chad. It was focused, out in the open, and at least somebody could come to a consensus. And while the Democrats could never seem to shake off the fact that George W. Bush won (weren’t all those polls saying Gore would dominate?), Congress got legislation passed to fund modernization of voting infrastructure. Of course Congress never seemed to get around to updating the Post Office so that they could get the ballots on time to that updated voting infrastructure, but change in Washington is not a rapid thing.

Unlike Joe Biden writing his own speeches, I’m happy to give appropriate credit to Scott Johnston of The Naked Dollar column for laying out the idea of a national election investigative commission. We’ve used this kind of vehicle before, and I think the 9/11 Commission serves as great standard. We all knew that, before the terrorist attacks, the CIA and FBI were legally prohibited from sharing intelligence. It was only after open hearings and a comprehensive report that we all found out the utter dysfunction between the intelligence agencies. More troubling was the utter lack of creative thinking going on throughout the government, that somehow 20 men with penknives and a few hours of flight school training killed more people than at Pearl Harbor. The upshot was a complete rethinking of internal and external security as well as refocusing how we view threats across the world.

Of course there are plenty of 9/11 conspiracists out there who will never be satisfied. So be it—they probably find puppy pictures and warm spring days a sign of mind control. But there is too much video out there of poll watchers being denied rightful access, ballots procured from under desks, at least one confirmed case of results flipped, and other questionable activities to be ignored. Add to that a mix of administrative fiats married with judicial ascension to change otherwise infallible state voter laws and you have the recipe for years of voter dissatisfaction. After the election the courts dismissed most of Trump’s lawsuits for lack of standing, which I leave to the lawyers to sort out. But it gives Congress a chance to put evidence under the brightest TV lights their hearing rooms can shine, to dig deep, and to call witnesses and make them squirm to justify their actions.

Most of the action would focus on states that Democrats run or in areas of their local control. The mistake for the Democrats would be to call this a partisan witch hunt as their excuse not to have hearings. In the end much of what we will find out will probably be that inept government employees chose the exactly wrong time to be inept—during a close election (wait, wasn’t Biden supposed to win by 11 points?) under the watch of grainy security cameras. Unless there was some 1960 Kennedy-in-Illinois action going on, the Democrats would have the upper hand every time the Republicans cry foul in the future. It’s my firm belief that the naked truth will clear the air and restore some, if not most, of the faith in our voting system. But takeover power has a way of clouding long-term judgement, and thin majorities find a way to slip into the minority in the oddest of ways, leaving only vengeance and more mistrust.

So tonight I’ll go to sleep more annoyed that we are in perpetual and inexplicable lock down than with Biden’s inauguration tomorrow. And while my wife and I have a comfortable bed with high-quality sheets, something tells me my rest will be a little bit…irregular.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Untweeting

 

Well The Donald is now “permanently” banned from Twitter, and Apple and Google have quickly followed suit in banning some alternate social media apps from their respective stores. Many see this as some great moral victory, although for what greater good is unstated. I see it as a dangerous, short-sighted move that is going to backfire, but not in the ways many people think.

While I spend (too much) time on Facebook, I don’t have a Twitter account as anything worthwhile on Twitter finds its way into mainstream media, which is more an indictment on lazy reporting. But it wasn’t until two Christmases ago that I really understood the power of Twitter. At our neighbors’ holiday party, an investment banker admitted that he had no social media account and didn’t really pay attention to any of it.

Except for Twitter. This, he admitted, was the first thing he read getting out of bed.

Why, of all things, Twitter? As he explained, “I need to know what the President said first thing in the morning. It’s what the markets are following.” And there, in all its naked power, was why Twitter mattered, and how it had gotten completely out of control. It was also a story I had heard nearly 30 years ago when many of Big Tech’s employees were infants or not even born.

The story was in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, his book about Wall Street powerhouse Salomon Brothers. One particular hazing ritual was to ask the trainee class to quote the morning’s LIBOR rate. New to the industry, there was silence primarily because nobody knew what LIBOR was, and the few who did had no inkling as to why it was so critical first thing in the morning. Yelling and ranting at Marine drill sergeant levels ensued, and suffice it to say the mistake was never made again. And while the method may have been extreme, the message was clear: LIBOR was what the markets were following, and so you need to follow LIBOR.

Twitter, then, has reached the level where it is LIBOR of communication, and the problem is that those who run the company are in way over their heads. While “permanent” in the digital world is almost an oxymoron, banning Trump is the great public step in social media’s taking sides in the political debate. This won’t end well for the tech companies, primarily because they are utterly unable to take responsibility for any of their actions. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, big tech is literally unblinking when they say their business is for the public good. To which I remind everyone that there are two options in life: clean up your act or the government will do it for you, and the latter is never the better choice.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley there’s a happy place where if the Democrats run everything, their businesses will be protected. By the paper width of a few ballots, some of questionable veracity, they got their way for now. And I wouldn’t bank on now lasting that long, and when it ends, the loss of Section 230 protections, among others, will be devastating. The bigger loss will be in talent and vision. At what point will the best and the brightest in engineering start looking elsewhere for unicorn paychecks? The point when it stops being engineering and starts to be a social movement, like banning a prominent public official. It’s the point where you are no longer what the employment market follows first thing in the morning.

What happens next? If I had to guess the finance folks at Twitter will take a long look at how banning Trump, and the loss of his followers, will affect the bottom line. You’ll know how that analysis went if Trump is reinstated because he “has agreed to reform his behavior” or some such nicety in the press release. But don’t look to Salomon Brothers or LIBOR for answers either. A few years after Liar’s Poker came out Salomon became embroiled in a scandal where they fixed the price of government bonds. The government does not look kindly at that, and Salomon was swiftly absorbed into another bank. And the paramount LIBOR? The banks colluded to fix that rate for years and it had to move to another exchange before it will be decommissioned in the next few years. Nothing may be forever, but for Jack Dorsey he might remember that Myspace was the dominant, unbreakable leader with money pouring in and talent beating down its doors. That is until it was gone in less time than it takes to type 280 characters.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Against The Odds

 

The New Year gavels in another session of New York’s legislature, and one thing is clear: the search for money to plug the state’s gaping deficit is first, second, and third on the agenda. Once again a Cuomo is looking to gambling to raise significant amounts of money, and once again it looks like a Cuomo will botch the whole affair.

Gambling (in the form of table games and slot machines) had long been forbidden by the State’s constitution, with then-Governor Mario Cuomo managing to push the envelope a bit by working with upstate Indian tribes to build casinos on reservation land. Never heard much about them? Not really surprising—the gaming offered tepid rewards, the locations were hard to get to, and there were no arenas for concerts.

Son Andrew managed to get through changes in the state’s constitution (an impressive feat) to legalize, in limited quantities, real casino gaming. The result? The highest grossing tables in the country lie not off the glitz of the Vegas strip but off the ass end of Aqueduct Raceway, home to an otherwise despondent horse track and even more despondent bettors. Before Covid, the only thing limiting growth there was the physical footprint of casino’s walls.

But then the sports book took everything over.

In what might be the only contribution from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, his administration sued, and won, for the right to operate sports books outside of Nevada. Long the sole domain of Vegas, the most successful sports book in the country is now at the ass end of Meadowlands race track, home to the most despondent form of horse racing, the trotters, and across from Met Life stadium, home of the even more despondent Jets and Giants. But in all of this there is one great lesson: the tri-state area has money to bet and has shown an unbridled willingness to put its money on the table. Could there be one more, great leap?

Absolutely—your phone.

Online sports betting is now the last great gambling frontier in New York, and the Governor is enthusiastic about it. Almost. His position about the current proposal is, “That makes a lot of money for casinos, but it makes minimal money for the state. I’m not here to make casinos a lot of money, I’m here to raise funds for the state. So, we have a different model for sports betting.” This was the same model that drove the local Off Track Betting (where even I would go to put down the occasion wager on a Belmont Stakes race) out of business because the state taxed it so much that it was the only bookie that couldn’t make a profit. Even in blue New York City there was no political appetite to subsidize this government fiasco.

Some might see this as a great metaphor for Democrats vs. Republicans, that corporate profits are such a bad thing that they have to be taxed into the ground until the very business ceases to exist. Others might see the socialized medicine analogy that only government knows what is right for its people. What everyone sees, and the numbers bear it out, is some $500 million a year in tax revenue for New York State. How Cuomo thinks he is going to rake in this kind of money without the private sector working hard to make the very money he is going to tax is unclear. There’s no over/under on whether it would work given that it flies in the face of any viable business model.

Nobody should be under the illusion that New York’s economic salvation will come from DraftKings ringing on their phones. And let me be very clear that I recognize gambling, particularly the sports book, and especially a phone app, can destroy a person’s life with a few swipes. But there is a way for casinos to make money, the state to gain robust revenue, and, not incidentally, decimate the illegal bookmaking market. I’m just not betting the Governor will know how to do it.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.