Discredit Where Discredit Is Due

We’re 12 days away from being rid of Bugout Joe Biden and his technocratic though dimwitted minions.

As the coming months unfold and more and more institutions come to realize that backing the Biden organized crime family was not the smart play, we are likely to give thanks that Biden and his monkeys, well, bidened everything up. Their incompetence has been the country’s salvation.

To put it another way, Biden is a crook to the core and always has been, but he is too stupid and now too senile to be very good at it. His cleverness is as absent as his redeeming qualities.

In this space I have taken issue with a company that has received a lot of federal money that has been awarded on the supposition that it would be used to bring reliable high-speed internet to parts of the country that otherwise could not get it. And I still think that Frontier Communications, a company in an unholy alliance with Verizon, has much to answer for. But after some research it seems that Frontier’s manifold sins and wickedness are misdemeanors compared to the felonies of the Biden administration and its broadband scam.

(I was lucky enough to get internet from Frontier before the moribund Biden was dragged from his crypt to protect us from Bernie Sanders five years ago, so I have internet most of the time, rather than an empty promise of it sometime in the future.)

You have surely heard of the Biden administration’s expenditure of $7.5 billion to build charging stations around the country for electric vehicles, and the reports that only eight actually got built. In righteous indignation, the Associated Press points out that no, 214 got built. (Which, given the sales of electric vehicles, might be all that end up being needed.)

There have been so many goofy Biden administration expenditures of your future grandchildren’s money that a listing of them all would run many pages. We may never know who was responsible; certainly it wasn’t Biden, not the sharpest potato masher in the drawer even before his (half) wits left him. What those projects have in common is that all of them, every single one, was a failure.

Which brings us to the administration’s grandiose plan to, it claimed, bring high-speed internet to the nation, for which project $42.5 billion was allocated three years ago. It was called the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (because the letters spell a word, “BEAD”). Would you like to know how many people have actually gotten connected? If you guessed “none, not a single one” you are spot on.

“It's hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of broadband when it hasn't expanded broadband,” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein observed last week. “Change is what gets built, not how much money gets appropriated to build.”

The reliably Democrat-leaning Politico reports that the administration offers some excuses: “The administration says that it has connected millions of households to the internet through other pots of money, such as the pandemic relief packages, and that the $42 billion program has brought other benefits, such as returning some telecom manufacturing to the U.S.” Those claims do not survive inspection, which is a polite way of saying that Biden and especially those around him are, as Bugout Joe himself would put it, lying dog-faced pony soldiers.

In an earlier report, Politico noted that Biden-net came with strings attached. “The rules require states accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces[,] and hire locally.”

It will not surprise those who have followed the Biden administration that seemingly noble goals in fact often (well, always) disguised motives that have nothing to do with the task at hand. For example, the use of union labor — Biden would have never been elected to anything without the thumb-breakers at local unions in Delaware, a state known for corruption-by-design. So of course the BEAD bill included a requirement that union people be used to build the still-nonexistent broadband networks.

Perhaps in anticipation of an inability to hide his family’s activities forever, it also required companies to give preference to “individuals with past criminal records,” though there is no requirement that anyone be even slightly competent in stringing and connecting fiber-optic cable. There were certain environmental requirements as well, as if “climate change” were caused by the phone company.

(Any organized crime outfit — and face it, that is what Biden has always tried to head, with useful idiots such as pickle-heir-by-marriage John Kerry running interference — is always looking for new opportunities for corruption, and “climate change” is a fertile field for expanded crookery.)

The Washington Times shaved away some of the obfuscating whiskers in a June article on the federal broadband scam. “Alan Davidson, who runs the program as head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, praised the pace of the BEAD program. He told lawmakers in May that the first two years were consumed by ‘planning and preparation.’

“Mr. Davidson said 2024 ‘is a year of execution —- the year for which we’ve been planning.’”

If the two years of planning included nothing insofar as connecting people to broadband is concerned, they succeeded. Otherwise, they didn’t.

“States and territories approved for funding, he said, ‘will be embarking on the challenge and subgrantee selection processes that will fund providers to build networks.’” See anything there about getting people connected to the internet? Of course you didn’t. It was at the bottom of the to-do list — if it was there at all. In May, Davidson said the “year of execution” will now be 2025 or maybe 2026 — well after Biden, Davidson, et al. have entered unemployment. Government employees are seldom fired for failing to accomplish the tasks assigned to them, but Davidson — indeed, much of the Biden administration — will probably be among the exceptions. (Also those who did their jobs, if there are any.)

But if you look at what Davidson and his fellow apparatchiks were trying to achieve, you will be grateful for their lack of success. It was never about getting anyone connected to the internet. It was always about graft. That is all Bugout Joe ever knew; it’s probably all that his few, now-diminished neurons still tenuously cling to.

As I was digging into all this, irony erupted.

Some snow came down around here the first part of the week. You might have heard about it.

We knew it was coming and I did my best to prepare. That’s fairly easily done, though it produces an inescapable tension, as focusing on a hazard inevitably does. There was plenty of propane, though I’ll need to get more before the month is out.

I keep a lot of food in the freezer, and could keep more but for the three plastic gallon milk jugs full of water that I keep there, too. The reason is that a full freezer and refrigerator holds its cold during a blackout far longer than an empty one does. And if things get bad, the jugs can be thawed for drinking water (albeit with that distinctive freezer flavor). That’s more important in the summer, but it still applies in the winter.

Frozen food can be cooked, even in a blackout, on a gas stove. You know, those things Bugout Joe, Ketchup Kerry, and the gang are trying to ban. I have a gas stove. (Wonder what would have happened if you had told senescent old Joe that you wanted to prohibit coal stoves., fueled by the product of union miners.)

There was talk of freezing rain, and one of life’s certainties is that when there’s an ice storm electrical power is unreliable. This meant making sure the generator was in good nick. The tank was full, but I remember one February a few years ago, when the snow came, the power went out, and that night the temperature fell to 21 degrees below zero. Fahrenheit. The power didn’t come back for two days. I was never so happy to have a woodstove! Anyway, the generator gets about three hours per gallon of gas and its tank holds seven gallons, so I needed to get more.

This is always nerve-wracking, because I have a bunch of those cheap — in construction, not in price — red plastic gas cans. They come with spring-loaded spouts that work a couple of times at best, not that it much matters because they don’t fit very well anyway, so gas always splashes out where they screw on. Driving with the windows down when it’s 25 degrees outside, so as to avoid being killed by the fumes, is no fun, nor would be the explosion if the windows are kept closed and there’s some electrical spark that sets off the volatile gasoline. I had an idea and much to my surprise it worked.

I have some of those ultra-strong paper towels called something like shop rag on a roll. I thought that if when I filled the gas cans I put one of the blue towels over the opening before screwing on the spout, it would keep gas from sloshing out. I tried it. It worked, and in fact it acted as enough of a gasket that it didn’t even get the towels very wet. So: a handy tip.

I have digressed. The snow hit us but the ice didn’t. Nevertheless, as I have noted elsewhere, any precipitation (or no precipitation at all) practically always results in failure of the Frontier Communications network.

This time it didn’t.

For a little while in the early hours of Monday the internet and phone went down, as expected. But then, within an hour or so, as unexpected, they came back, and have been just fine ever since except for the couple of times the power went down (and even then, all was restored in a few minutes). I never had to fire up the generator.

It could be that Frontier has finally gotten its act together, though that’s more of a stretch than I’m willing to make. (I welcome their proving me wrong.)

More likely, Frontier-Verizon has noticed that the president who will be inaugurated Monday-after-next has become pals with latter-day robber baron Elon Musk, and that Musk owns a reliable internet satellite company that would probably be delighted to provide wireless service to us, the far-flung masses. Starlink is expensive now, but with, oh, I don’t know, $42 billion in subsidies it might be cheaper. One supposes that the existing telecommunications monopolists, among them Frontier-Verizon, are quaking in their expensive loafers. Free-money-from-Biden is no more.

(I have received reports of people calling their internet providers with complaints that got resolved with uncharacteristic speed after the magic word “Starlink” was invoked. If so, thanks, Elon. Anything that forces them to be on their best behavior is welcome.)

Yet it was eye-opening to realize that even at its worst Frontier has been orders of magnitude better at delivering internet service than the $42 billion Biden-net, which never delivered internet to anyone, ever was.