In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The House Republicans have subpoenaed Joe's brother James's bank records as part of their impeachment investigation. Wondering why I'd never thought to do this before, I went to Wikipedia, and wonder of wonders, I discovered Jimmy has no separate entry -- he's lumped under "Siblings" in an entry for Family of Joe Biden , which reads in its entirety: James B. "Jim" Biden (born 1949), healthcare executive In fact, the family calls him "Jimmy". Well above this entry is a two-paragraph chronicle of the family's pets. It sounds as though for whatever reason, we aren't going to find a single source on Jimmy that will be productive. In fact, you have to negotiate the results of web searches carefully to avoid the usual puff pieces, and stories with any substance seem to date at the latest from 2020, before the election. There doesn't seem to be any place where you can find anything like a conventional CV. I asked Google, "...

One point I keep making here is that it's misleading to focus on the Hunter laptop as any sort of key to the Biden family shakedown. While it covers the period from 2010 to 2019, and it has lots of distractions, it leaves out two key periods, Joe's time in the Senate from 1972 to the start of the laptop timeline in 2010, and much more important, payoffs to Joe after 2019, which begins to cover his time as president. In addition, it's misleading to focus on Hunter, because it looks like Joe's brothers Jim and Frank were in on the hustle as well. Beyond that, the laptop only hints at one feature of Joe's interregnum between 2017 and 2021, when Joe, out of office, seems to have been treated as the likely next president well before the 2020 election and was accorded courtesies consistent with that expectation, such as informal coordination with the Secret Service, although former vice presidents are not entitled to protection. We know very little about how this w...

For someone who claims he isn't running for president , Gavin Newsom sure is in the news a lot: California Gov. Gavin Newsom told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo he will not be making a 2024 presidential run and will instead continue to back President Joe Biden. “I have deep respect, reverence for Joe Biden as a person, his character, his decency and his capacity to do great things,” Newsom told Cuomo. “That’s why. I’m not worthy of that conversation. This guy deserves it, and we as members of the party deserve to have his back.” Newsom has been considered as a possible Democratic presidential contender by some analysts, but he has repeatedly said he will not run in 2024. Nevertheless, his presence at the Republican debate in Simi Valley tonight, although ostensibly as a Biden spokesman, raises other possibilities : CBS13's Steve Large spoke to political strategist Doug Elmets about Newsom's presence. Steve: "Why would Gavin Newsom want to be at the Republican ...

I woke up in the middle of last night suddenly thinking I hadn't really looked into the whole Nord Seam Pipeline issue at all, and over breakfast this morning, I discovered that Seymour Hersh, who last February had published a controversial piece on Nord Stream , has just updated his views. The February piece is behihnd a paywall, but as of now, his update is available for free . This summary of Hersh's February story says, In his online article “How America took out the Nord Stream Pipeline,” Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh sees the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea as a collaboration between Norway and the United States. Based on the testimony of a whistleblower, Hersh situates the planting of C4 explosive devices by U.S. Navy Divers under the cover of the BALTOPS 22 international naval exercise in June; according to Hersh, the explosive devices were triggered by a Norwegian Navy P8, which dropped sonar buoys for this purpose on September 26...

In last week's news : National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced Thursday that President Joe Biden would name Penny Pritzker, a billionaire heiress and former commerce secretary, to manage Ukraine’s economic recovery from the ongoing war. Sullivan, a major proponent of the “Russia collusion” hoax against President Donald Trump, told reporters that Biden, meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky at the White House for the sixth time on Thursday, would “introduce a special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery, Penny Pritzker, who will focus on engaging the private sector, partner countries, and Ukrainian counterparts to generate international investment in Ukraine and work with Ukraine to make the reforms necessary to improve Ukraine’s business climate.” But I thought Joe Biden, as Obama's point man on Ukraine, had already cleaned up all the corruption there when he had Viktor Shokin fired huh? Well, I guess Penny will finish the job. At least, t...

The Menendez story has disappared from the headlines after only a day, for reasons that may be related to what I talked about in yesterdays's post -- his case is a little too similar to Joe's, and maybe even related to it, something the Justice Department maybe should have reflected on before they made the indictment public. Just about the only insightful take from anyone during the story's brief moment in the news cycle was from Jesse Watters Friday night, when he asked, "Why now?" So the question is, why was the Biden administration taking down Menendez at all, and why now? Because the FBI raided Menendez's house last year. Menendez has been walking around Washington knowing Biden's agents have the stack of his gold bars ready to drop at any minute. God, Biden must have been squeezing Bob. The photo at the top of this post shows Menendez and his trophy wife Nadine in May 2022, just before the FBI searched his house for the cash and gold bars, whi...

Only days before the Robert Menendez indictment, California Gov Newsom sought to downplay the Hunter Biden scandal by saying it was nothing new : Newsom made the remarks during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash when asked about Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry into the president. “Republicans have shown that Hunter Biden, he tried to leverage his father’s name and that the president allegedly, before he was president, joined phone calls that Hunter Biden’s business associates were on,” Bash said. “Do you see anything inappropriate there?” “I don’t know enough about the details of that. I mean, I’ve seen a little of that,” Newsom claimed. “If that’s the new criteria, there are a lot of folks in a lot of industries, not just in politics, where people have family members and relationships and they’re trying to parlay and get a little influence and benefit in that respect. That’s hardly unique. I don’t love that any more than you love it or other people I imagine love t...

Joe had several enagements in New York over the past week, all of which tend to confirm the estimates I've made here of his character all along. Let's just start with the episode where he walked off a stage where he'd appeared with Brazil's President Lula at the UN : Joe Biden has seemingly wandered off the UN stage without shaking hands with Brazil's Lula at the end of a joint speech. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, looked visibly irritated after the two leaders shared a stage to speak about their initiative to improve workers' rights in each country. Throughout the presentation by Joe, Lula, and the Director of the International Labor Organization, Joe seemed to be fidgety and impatient. By the end, his gestures and body language indicated that whether or not all the ceremonial niceties had been fully observed, Joe was done. He gave a flippant farewell salute to the audience -- and not to either of his fellow speakers on the stage -- turned, and purpos...

I'm intrigued by the controversy surrounding Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, most recently characterized as a 46-year-old man from Florida named Mike , because it raises several questions about our involvement in Ukraine. Sen J D Vance raised the right issues over how Ashton-Cirillo wound up in the news: Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance wrote this week to top Biden administration officials demanding information on the American citizen after Ashton-Cirillo posted a video on social media declaring that Ukraine was planning to “hunt down” alleged Russian propagandists. The letter itself reads in part , I’ve seen claims this individual is an American, a former intelligence operative in the United States, and an employee of the Ukrainian government. Others have argued Ashton-Cirillo is pulling an elaborate prank. . . . Is this individual an American citizen? Did they ever serve, in any capacity, in American intelligence services? Sen Vance's questions open the door to what I t...

The idea of running Michelle Obama for president isn't new, but Ted Cruz gave it a different twist as a solution to the Joe-and-Kamala conundrum : “Here’s the scenario that I think is perhaps the most likely and most dangerous,” Cruz said on his “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast. “In August of 2024, the Democrat kingmakers jettison Joe Biden and parachute in Michelle Obama.” Cruz explained that by running Michelle Obama as the party’s candidate, the Democrats could “avoid the problems” of having to choose a candidate among political figures like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Vice President Kamala Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Sen Cruz sees this as effectively a dropping of the charade and an acknmowledgement that Barack has been pulling the strings all along: “Barack Obama is already running the Biden administration,” Cruz said. “I think he is already the puppet master, behind this Biden White House, I don’t think ...

The biological male in the photo above is Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, according to Wikipedia , an American former journalist serving as a spokesperson for Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, in which she is a junior sergeant. . . . She arrived in Ukraine in March 2022, shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion, and has variously served as a war correspondent, a representative in aid negotiations, a civilian analyst with the Ministry of Defense, and a combat medic. . . . Starting in March 2022, Ashton-Cirillo reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Kharkiv, Ukraine, primarily for LGBTQ Nation , often writing about the war's effect on LGBTQ people. A trans woman, she is thought to have been the first openly transgender war correspondent. The Wikipedia entry lists various official and quasi-official positions she's held in Ukraine: In Kharkiv, she worked closely with the Ukrainian military and police, and was appointed by the mayor of Zolochiv, Kharkiv Obl...