The Second Time Around.

When you elect grifters to manage a country, don't be surprised if they set the dumpster on fire and walk away with their pockets stuffed with cash.

The Emotionally Challenging Next Phase of the Pandemic, by Juliette Kayyem (The Atlantic)

The end of summer is a bitter reminder: America’s coronavirus ordeal won’t end when 2020 does.

 ... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got some Americans’ hopes up with its recent instruction that states should be ready to distribute a coronavirus vaccine in the next couple of months. President Donald Trump is desperate to convince the public that a vaccine to COVID-19 will arrive by a politically convenient deadline: “maybe even before November 1,” he said Friday, or “some time in the month of October.”

But Trump’s Operation Warp Speed is an election ploy, not a guarantee of scientific progress. Drug companies that are competing to develop vaccines are banding together to resist political pressure to take shortcuts in safety testing. On NPR Thursday, Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said that an effective vaccine by the end of next month is “extremely unlikely” and that population-wide distribution of a vaccine could take until the middle of next year.

In other words, the American coronavirus crisis will end—just not soon. “With a combination of public-health measures with a vaccine that’s reasonably good,” the infectious-diseases expert Anthony Fauci told me in a recent online interview, “by the time we get around through 2021, we can start having some form of normality. Maybe not exactly the way it was, but certainly different than what we’re doing right now.” Fauci’s prediction is based on the best-case scenario in which, “as we get into 2021, we should start seeing a substantial number of [vaccine] doses available.”

This timetable comes as difficult news. Summer is ending. Americans were told that this season, the season of outdoors and open windows, would create the best conditions to manage COVID-19 ...

The coroner surveys employment opportunities: "I investigate death, that is my job. I am surrounded by freaking incompetence."

As an observer on Twitter pithily wrote, "(It) might be relevant to note Ms. Knable is a candidate for County Council."

I'll add: As a Democrat.

Damn -- that Adam fellow already scrubbed her clean. Meanwhile, the reporter can't go wrong with such strong material.

Floyd County Coroner: 'I am surrounded by freaking incompetence'; council denies funding request, by Chris Morris (CNHI Utica)

NEW ALBANY — They came and asked the Floyd County Council for $35,000 to get them through the remainder of the year. They would have settled for $6,645 to get them current with their bills.

But all Floyd County Coroner Leslie Knable and Deputy Coroner Stefanie House left with was an appointment to meet with two council members, and Auditor Scott Clark, to try and clear up outstanding bills and other issues associated with their budget ...

... Knable and House also questioned why the council always seems to give the coroner's a "hard time" when additional appropriations are requested.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

"You are asking us who is dropping the ball. That is your job," she said. "I investigate death, that is my job. I am surrounded by freaking incompetence."

John Rosenbarger: Yes, it's a design flaw, and yes, we know who designed it. Why can't we do anything about that?

Today's drive to Indianapolis shouldn't be much different than a daily jaunt down Spring Street, so let's pop the tabs on a six-pack of Rosenbarger Light.

Main Street Deforestation Project: If John Rosenbarger's lips are moving, chances are he's lying about traffic diversion. Here's why.

In other words, Main Street should be the officially designated through route bisecting downtown from east to west. It should be signposted as the One True Through Route. In particular, through trucks should be compelled to use it.

Of course, it's a design flaw. Guess who designed it?

Jeff Speck on John Rosenbarger's 12-ft wide Spring Street traffic lanes: “A 12-foot lane is a 70 mph lane."

England and Rosenbarger claimed victory, by changing absolutely nothing. They built two unbuffered bike lanes next to 70 mph traffic lanes. They did nothing else, and they want you to believe that what they did was heroic and innovative, primarily so one of them can run for office again while the other keeps his job -- again.

Until the reign of error is over, citizens are treated to recurring rounds of double dealing.

ON THE AVENUES: Bridge envy in a time of 18-wheelers.

Trust me on this one: When I’m elected mayor, Rosenbarger will become the highest paid cigarette butt remover this city has ever seen, leaving him free to mutter like a plucked peacock about the eternal stupidity of his political bosses, and the boundless depravity of the general public, but deprived of his ability to punish us any further with Gail Wynand-style “improvements” to the street grid.

Even his greatest achievements must eventually give way to the cold, hard logic of t he intersection.

Rosenbarger giveth and He taketh away; thus shall autos be glorified at the Beechwood intersection with Charlestown Road.

Recalling that John Rosenbarger regularly has hailed this situation as proof of his urban design prowess, read on as Chris Morris gives us the LOL punch line.

The city did not have to buy right-of-way to expand the intersection. Rosenbarger said the bike lanes through the intersection will be absorbed for the road expansion.

But as the photos show, there are no bike lanes through the intersection.

We'd need a matchbook cover to list the achievements.

Answer the question, John Rosenbarger: Can Jeff Speck's ideas work here, or not?

Rosenbarger's appearance at the FAN Fair followed much the same script, including open public doubt as to whether what he is paid to do, can ever actually be done in this city.

It begs a rather obvious question:

Then why pay you at all?

Ever since he decided to use the FAN Fair as a forum to explore the dimensions of his own under-achievement, I've decided to call his bluff. I'm not going to swallow the duplicity any longer. You shouldn't, either.

Ranting on John Rosenbarger's fundamental contradictions in the aftermath of an atrocious day in the neighborhood.

Rosenbarger spend quite a lot of his time yesterday mumbling about the unacceptable costs of congestion, which pretty much proves something I've been saying for a while about inbred political cowardice, and although I'll have more to write about this with time, what I think about this, I phrased in the form of a tweet to Jeff Speck yesterday afternoon:

@JeffSpeckAICP When your city planner outlines complete street options by parsing 50 shades of traffic congestion, you grasp political fear.

He retweeted it, and that makes me feel very good.

Then again, Speck's never seen anything like it, either. Verily, New Albany remains the place where brains go to atrophy. Here's the bonus: Jeff Speck in New Albany: “I’ve never seen anything like that in America."

"Making S**t Happen at GoDaddy.com," and other famous campaign slogans.

It's what you get when you cross mayoral candidate Irv Stumler's tag phrase with the material currently on his web site, which actually leads nowhere.


Can't that GoDaddy dude just run for mayor and cut out the superannuated middle man?

No live blogging tonight.

Here in Scribnerstan, the Internet is once again inaccessible. I will take notes when it seems appropriate.

Hackhackhack ...

City council president Larry Kochert admits to breaking the law, but had fingers crossed behind his back at the time.

Your correspondent approached city council president Larry Kochert at 11:00 p.m. last evening, just after his atrophied and erratic gavel signaled the conclusion of New Albany’s latest shameful exercise in legislative ineptitude.

I asked: “Do you have any intention of running a meeting fairly while you’re still here?”

The question was repeated to him at least three times.

Kochert’s response: “What did you do with your leotards since you’ve lost weight?”

As mating rituals go, it was almost endearing. I have decent legs, I guess, but this come-on almost qualifies as a “hunka-hunka burnin’ love.”

Moments before, in a startling eye-opener, CM Kochert had openly admitted to breaking the law, the therein lies another instructive story pertaining to his escalating unsuitability for office.

It helps to know that last night’s designated set piece of amateur troglodyte theater (parts are assigned on a rotating basis) centered on providing Kochert’s old friend, DICK STEWART, with ample public speaking time to air a self-serving complaint that he is the victim of calculated political persecution stemming from his own questionable decision to blatantly plant numerous of his political yard signs in public rights-of-way, which according to clear and specific passages in the city’s ordinances, is plainly illegal.

STEWART helpfully provided the audience with photos that showed the universally improper places where his signs had been planted prior to being uprooted by the city after complaints, the latter almost certainly phoned in by STEWART’S antiquarian cohorts in the Coup d’Geriatrique bad thespian troupe.

The drama of STEWART’s typically buzzing, gnat-like lamentation of victimization was delayed from his original target of public speaking time at the council session’s beginning, when only agenda items are to be addressed, to non-agenda public speaking at the conclusion of the plodding, rancorous demonstration of native dysfunction – but not before president Kochert, in the first of at least two dozen abject instances of failure to exercise control over the meeting, sought to allow his incontinent lapdog territorial pissing rights.

Hours later, when public speaking time resumed, the whole spectacle finally played out, and city operations director Tony Toran came to the end of a forceful defense of his decision to enforce the law on the books in response to the complaints, Toran pointedly asked Kochert how the council president knew that signs had been planted in the spots depicted in STEWART’S photos, when none were there any longer to be seen.

“Because I helped him put them there,” responded Kochert, whose contempt for ordinance enforcement – while well documented over a period of decades – certainly has never been so brazenly (and breezily) conceded in public.

That’s your council president, folks. Rest assured that the civilized world isn’t laughing with him.

A full catalogue of the evening’s many grating reminders that our sitting city council, as currently constituted by people who can’t get along, and artlessly “administered” by a president who has no desire to administer, is beyond my ability to relate this late in the evening, or perhaps ever.

Verily, you’re read it all before.

Another bizarre and contrived conspiracy theory, this one pertaining to the city’s sanitation contract, was excitedly unfurled, duly refuted, and the resolution calling for immediate action tabled with recommendation of cowardice. The resolution’s sponsor, CM Donnie Blevins, subsequently melted down publicly and began predicting reprisals, famine and locusts. In default mode, CM Steve Price prattled nonsensically about carts, horses and doing things little by little. CM Dan Coffey, an uncharacteristic voice of reason for most of the meeting, lost his religion in an outburst against STEWART, but for once, you can’t blame the Wizard of Westside. Candidate STEWART’s pneumatic prodding is a pestilence of Biblical proportions.

Unfortunately, most ordinances requiring substantive decision making were endlessly debated sans direction from the chair, then unceremoniously tabled so that the whole, endless, vituperative process of unregulated foolishness can flare up right where it left off. One that did come to a vote was defeated. It was the second reading of an effort by CM Coffey to overturn the savagely debated recent firefighter hiring ordinance and revert to previous practice.

The crowd in attendance openly hooted and jeered these diverse and assorted travesties. The gavel was silent as unreconstructed trogs heckled public officials. Voices were raised, screaming sessions erupted, and through it all CM Kochert remained utterly devoid of the slightest considerations of impartiality and subtlety in openly playing favorites in his role as presiding officer. By the standards of my well-deserved and uncontested ouster earlier this year, half-a-dozen could have been ejected last night, and were not.

As with Kochert’s sadly characteristic decision that breaking the law if perfectly fine so long as it enables him to score political points, his increasing unwillingness to exercise control and do something about the escalating chaos during council meetings reinforces a legacy of astounding underachievement that would be laughable if not so harmful to any hope of progress in the city of New Albany.

There is nothing novel or surprising in any of this. To consistently enable disruption and dysfunction is to expect disruption and dysfunction in return, and so it is. We can hope only that the cleansing power of the forthcoming elections will remove those impediments to professionalism that currently control the council.

The last thing Larry Kochert said to me Thursday night presumably was meant to be facetious: “You’re a fine citizen.”

I can’t say that I disagree with the councilman, seeing as one obligation of citizenship beyond the obvious imperative of obeying the law is the exercise of free speech -- to point in the direction of ward-heeling political hacks whose historically exaggerated powers now are diminishing, and to say clearly and without reservation:

“They're a big part of the problem, and they need to go away if we’re ever going to accomplish something in this town.”

But, barring a miracle, this council is not going to accomplish anything of substance for the remainder of the year -- unless one views fisticuffs as a form of legislative victory. The stakes for the city are far too high, but that’s the way it will be, in spite of well meaning efforts by a few council persons to reverse the trend. The obstructionists are too old to learn, too angry to compromise, too dense to “see the big picture,” or all three at once.

There’s no love coming from the current group, and if you care about the city of New Albany, it may be time to go to the mattresses.

It can no longer be doubted that we’re on our own.