In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A Breitbart story gives an account of two Biden experts from Conservative Inc trading scuttlebutt: Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said that his new New York Times bestselling book Breaking Biden includes a number of forgotten biographical details about Joe Biden, including the fact that he was tapped as former President Barack Obama’s running mate “specifically for being bad with money.” Marlow recounted this detail during an interview about Breaking Biden on the Drill Down Podcast with seven-time New York Times bestselling investigative author Peter Schweizer. . . . “One of the reasons why Barack Obama picked Joe Biden was specifically because he was poor,” Marlow continued. “[Obama] actually liked the optics of having one of the poorest guys in the Senate. And this is so crazy to me because we were just in an era recently where if someone made money and someone made it in America, we pointed to those people as the example—like, ‘Wow, that person really has what it ...

Yesterday I suggested Trump is following a Chicago Seven strategy of baiting his trial judges into overreacting, committing reversible errors, and allowing themselves to be characterized as political hacks in the public narrative. This strategy is succeeding. A federal judge on Sunday reinstated a gag order she imposed on Donald Trump in the Washington case accusing him of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, denying his bid for a stay pending appeal. The order prohibited Trump from targeting the special counsel prosecuting his case or witnesses who might be called to testify about his efforts to upend his election loss. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed the gag order at the Justice Department’s request. She temporarily lifted it on Oct. 20 after Trump’s lawyers appealed. And she reversed that decision on Sunday evening, according to the court’s docket. A member of the former Obama administration outlined the thinking that likely drove Judge Chutkan's cha...

I've already mentioned the 1969 Chicago Seven trial here in the context of some of the January 6 defendants. Looking back at that post, I think the comparison is mild, especially in contrast to what's beginning to look like Trump's strategy in at least two of his cases, where judges are beginning to impose gag orders on Trump's speech outside the courtroom. On one hand, Trump's strategy is to play the legal issues straight, appealing the orders through established channels. On the other, as opportunties present themselves, he's using public statements to bait the judges into overreacting, turning them into villains in the public eye and forcing them into committing reversible errors. For instance, All this will do is enrage Judge Engoron, who has already fined Trump twice for violating a gag order that bars him from commenting about court staff: Justice Arthur Engoron fined Trump for the second time on Wednesday after he again appeared t...

I'm having a hard time getting my head around this exercise : Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) announced Thursday he is running for president against President Biden. The congressman confirmed he would be running against Biden in the Democratic primary, after previously signaling he would not do so. . . . The Minnesota Democrat has repeatedly called for a competitive primary instead of Biden running unopposed for the nomination. “I think President Biden has done a spectacular job for our country. But it’s not about the past,” Phillips said. “This is an election about the future.” According to Red State , [W]hat makes this especially interesting is who is reportedly behind the campaign. According to another report, The Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, infamous for his late-night online meltdowns, is advising Phillips. . . . If Schmidt is the driving force behind Phillips' campaign, that's not a good sign for anyone involved. I wouldn...

Tolerance of anti-Semitic and even pro-genocide demonstrations on campuses in particular since October 7 has provoked a certain amount of recalibration among Jews over where their political alliances should lie. Some of it goes directly to the established Democrat party alignment that's persisted in many ways since Reconstruction. The playwright David Mamet wrote this past Monday , We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats, as their policies appealed to the immigrants and the first generation (my parents). A Fair Shake, a safety net, and unionism were manna to the newly arrived — in spite of (in both their and my lifetime) quotas and antisemitic discrimination. The immigrant Jews did well here, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And we are voting for him still. His Advisor on Jewish Affairs (jude-suss, or “house-Jew”) was Rabbi Stephen Wise, the “dean” of the American Rabbinate. He referred to FDR as “Boss”, and brought home to his community Roosevelt’s...

Over the past week, Gavin Newsom has been on a trip to Israel and China : Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) joked about his presidential ambitions following a wartime trip to Israel, explaining the limits of his visit. “I wish I was president of the United States,” he told reporters when asked about meeting with Israeli leaders, particularly to discuss a potential ceasefire with Hamas. He added afterward that he was joking. “I could start doing all those things." According to Newsom, the brief and impromptu trip to Israel was “limited in scope.” . . . Newsom is the second governor to travel to Israel amid the war with Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas, following Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). New York has the largest population of Jewish people in America, as well as the largest population outside of Israel itself. California has the second-largest population in the U.S. The California governor has answered as to whether he supports a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, something g...

This is an intersectional story, because it links pilots who shouldn't be flying, magic mushrooms, and Oregon. According to KRON4, Joseph David Emerson, 44, of Pleasant Hill [CA], was off-duty and sitting in the cockpit Sunday evening when he suddenly tried to cut off the jet’s engines, according to on-duty pilots who flew Horizon Air Flight AS 2059. The pilots said they wrestled with Emerson for control of the aircraft, he pulled on emergency controls to cut the engines’ fuel, and the jet was “seconds away” from becoming a glider, prosecutors wrote in court documents. The quick-thinking captain, co-pilot, and flight crew were able to throw Emerson out of the cockpit, handcuff him, and make an emergency landing at a Portland airport. On Tuesday, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office filed 84 charges against Emerson, including 83 counts of felony second-degree attempted murder, and one count of endangering an aircraft. The flight had 11 passengers who were ch...

This post on Xwitter sums up the questions many Republicans have been posing in recent weeks: Maher Bitar, a Palestinian activist, Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian with deep ties in Iran are heading up our intelligence and defense. Robert Malley, who hired Tabatabai, had his security clearance removed. @MTG can oversight get answers? pic.twitter.com/L0Zk83cx5S — #ProblemSolved (@ProblemSolved57) October 21, 2023 In other words, are Bitar, Tabatabai, and certain other figures like Reema Dodin currently working in sensitive jobs in the US government, actually agents of one sort or another for Iran or the Palestinians? If they are, while I acknowledge I'm a total outsider to that business, there are things that don't fit. Let's just compare Bitar and Tabatabai to one of the most successful spies in recent history, Robert Hanssen, whose photo is at the top of this post. According to Wikipedia, Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Fed...

One thing I've come to notice about the recent questionable diplomatic and intelligence appointments in the administration like Robert Malley and Ariane Tabatabai is how quickly their careers have taken off, although Malley's is currently on hold. As I noted with some puzzlement in this post , by the time she was about 30 as a PhD student, Tabatabai was writing in prestigious foreign policy journals and then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation. Her main qualification appears to have been that she is the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran who is close to the mullahs in the government there. Over the weekend i saw mention of a similar figure, Maher Bitar, who we're told is of Palestinian heritage, but about whom we otherwise know little besides a precocious career rise much like Tabatabai's. His profile as a member of Georgetown Law School's class of 201...

Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot https://t.co/H1D9Yb3eYV — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 20, 2023 The post on Xwitter above raises an interestimg question: right now, we're at the start of the 2024 college application season. Early decision deadlines begin on November 1, while regular decisions start early next year. The current brouhaha over pro-Palestine demonstrations at elite schools ought to affect applications over the coming 2024 admissions season, right? For instance, here's Bill Maher : As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of wha...

Yesterday the Comer committee released a copy of a $200,000 personal check from Joe's younger brother Jim to Joe himself, characteied as a "loan repayment". Per the committee, In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator. According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.” On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account. And then on the very same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden. There's less to this than meets the eye. There's no specific quid pro quo involved, at least from what we can see now, and Joe was out of office at the time....

I began following Glenn Reynolds as Instapundit not long after 9/11. His pitch at the time, as outlined in An Army of Davids (2006) was libertarian, and I was never quite comfortable with the title -- anyone who studies the Old Testament in any depth won't be comfortable with the prospect of a Sorcerer's Apprentice calling up legions of Davids. One was plenty -- ask Uriah the Hittite. But this is just one illustration of the shallowness of Reynolds's thought processes. His intellectual mentors include Ayn Rand, Robert A Heinlein, and Philip K Dick. His predictions have fallen short. In the link, Reynolds titles a chapter 'Small Is the New Big'. He discusses the rise of "armchair workers" (through companies such as eBay), doing work at home—as well as specialty-based cottage industries such as Coffin's Shoes in Knoxville, TN. He argues that future trends will create a mosaic of co-existing big box retailers, local firms, and busines...

There's been very little this morning about Joe's presser aboard Air Force One following his departure from Israel. The most pointed was at Gateway Pundit , which posted stills of John Kirby's expressions as Joe spoke. A full video -- about 13 minutes -- of the presentation is available on C-Span . As in the stills, the most important feature is the body language and expressions of the handlers. From the start to about 2:30, Karine Jean-Pierre is visible in the lower right quadrant looking glum. Beginning about 1:45, John Kirby appears between Joe and Ms Jean-Pierre looking volcanic. At 2:27, Joe says to the press, "You guys are such a pain in the neck," and Kirby and Jean-Pierre adopt the expressions of middle school administrators contemplating a riot in the stairwells. At 2:35, Kirby and Jean-Pierre withdraw beyond camera view to consult. This seems to have been a message to Joe to go to questions from the press. When these begin, Kirby adopts a pain...