In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The big thing that struck me yesterday about Jack Smith's petition to the Supreme Court for a near-immediate ruling on Trump's presidential immunity was its apparent urgency, and I posited that there must be someone in the background (for convenience, a lizard person) who's able to prod Mr Smith into that level of haste. As I said, this plays into the Trump team's Chicago Seven strategy of forcing hasty actions on the judge and prosecution that play out badly in front of the public and eventually result in appellate reversals. Oddly enough, Larry Johnson at the Gateway Pundit may have an explanation. But keeping him in context, he's the same Larry Johnson who, as a PBS News Hour talking head a generation ago, discounted Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden as terrorist threats, something that's hurt his credibility ever since, although more recently, he's been an important contrarian voice on the Ukraine war who's proven correct on that issue so far. Here...

All I can conclude is some very serious lizard people have told Jack Smith that Trump's DC trial must start on March 4, or else . Alan Dershowitz hasn't commented on Smith's move to take Trump's appeal based on presidential immunity directly to the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz has already noted that Trump's strategy is essentially the same as the Chicago Seven defense: force the judge and prosecutors into errors the defense can get reversed on appeal. The stakes are high: The outcome of this fight may determine whether Trump faces any of his four pending criminal trials in 2024. His other three remain in flux or unscheduled. And if the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court consider the former president’s immunity claims on their typical timelines, that may force Chutkan to slow down her own. While lawyers from special counsel Jack Smith’s team pleaded with Chutkan not to alter the March 4 date, they appeared to concede that Trump’s defense wo...

It dawned on me in the middle of last night that normally, for the person indicted, a federal indictment is never a surprise. I did a quick search and discovered that pre-indictment is a legal specialty. For instance, at the Hedding Law Firm , which specializes in federal criminal defense, If you feel that you are under investigation by the feds, you definitely want to get an attorney involved with your case immediately. Never a good idea to try to handle it yourself. Now's not the time to pinch pennies and not hire an attorney immediately. Basically, pre-indictment intervention has to do with before the feds indict you, which is their filing document where they're filing criminal federal charges against you. You can intervene and you can use an attorney to either investigate the case to show that you're innocent or to investigate the case to try to get information on your behalf to either mitigate or reduce the charges. We must assume that Hunter hired Abbe Lowe...

I'm headinbg into a period over coming weeks where, due to personal issues, posting will have to be sporadic, which is just as well, since all we can say about current developments over Hunter and Joe is that much more is likely to come out. Jonathan Turley is one of the few asking the right questions : The steps taken by Hunter to evade taxes are impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the efforts of the Justice Department to evade any direct implications for his father, President Biden. In that sense, the indictment itself is a marvel of evasion. . . . [T]his recent indictment keeps the focus squarely on taxes not paid, not how the money was “earned” in the first place. Also missing in the indictment is any charge against Hunter Biden as an unregistered foreign agent. . . . The problem with charging Hunter with FARA is obvious. It opens up questions about the millions of dollars going to the Biden family from foreign sources, a topic that Attorney General Merrick G...

This would not be allowed , even from Alex Jones, even from Tucker Carlson, if the lizard people weren't on board: Jones told Carlson that he believed Joe Biden was 'completely out of his mind.' . . . Jones said: 'He wanders around for the entire two and a half years naked in the White House. In the middle of the night, doesn't know who he is. 'They have to give him a bunch of drugs - a bunch of amphetamines in the morning, and they have to drug him at night. 'Sometimes he'll be out for the morning, for a while, then come back at night for a ball. That's when there's a real problem.' Carlson nodded, looking grave. 'He is on drugs. I have established that,' said Carlson. As of 2014, there were leaks to that effect about Joe when he was vice president: According to a new book, Joe Biden's Secret Service detail is leaking information about where the vice president is most vulnerable to being assassinated, as well engag...

Little signs are beginning to emerge that Joe is at least aware of his potential electoral plight. According to the New York Post , President Biden said Tuesday that he might have retired after a single term of office if former President Donald Trump wasn’t running in next year’s election. “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the 81-year-old president told a group of Democratic donors in Boston. “But we cannot let him win.” Well, certain kinds of people, if you suggest they've screwed something up in an unhelpful way, will try to turn things around and insist that "I'm actually doing you a big favor!" by, say, suggesting you didn't want that person as a friend anyhow. In the vignette above, I think Joe's subtext is that you may think he's screwing things up by insisting on running in 2024, but he's actually doing the country a big favor by keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, which by implication nobody else can do. If Joe is ...

In a nutshell , Newly disclosed bank records, released on Monday as part of the House Republicans' ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden, indicate that Hunter Biden arranged direct, monthly payments to his father. The records show that at least one payment of $1,380 was sent from Hunter Biden’s Owasco PC to Joe Biden in September 17, 2018. On one hand, this is just the drip-drip-drip pattern of classic Washington scandals, ranging from the White House insistence in March 1973 that nobody had prior knowledge of the Watergate burglary, to Bill Clinton's insistence that he never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky, whereby presidential denials that such-and-such ever happened are gradually refuted as evidence surfaces that indeed they did. Ms Jean-Pierre's comment after being asked about the bank record was simply part of the pattern: “So, I have to be clear with you. I have not seen that report, so I would have to refer you to my colleagues over at the W...

From the UK Daily Mail: Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed. And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November. It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans. The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so. The Daily Mail title starts with "How the college degree lost its value", and the story implies this is a new trend. My own experience in the job market as a refugee from academia suggests the trend isn't quite so novel. Reflecting on my career path, after I left graduate work and low-level teaching, I went almost exclusively into jobs that simply hadn't existed before the computer age in the...

I've put up another post on he Michael Voris controversy at the Cold Case File blog .

According to Wikipedia, Felicity Huffman is best known for her role as Lynette Scavo in the ABC comedy-drama Desperate Housewives (2004–2012. But more recently, she's been better known for her role in the Varsity Blues scandal. At the link, Huffman was among dozens charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office on March 12, 2019, in a nationwide college entrance exam cheating scandal. Prosecutors alleged that Huffman's $15,000 donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation, ostensibly a charitable contribution, was in fact payment to someone who posed as Huffman's daughter Sophia to take the SAT, receiving a score that showed significant improvement over Sophia's score on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT). Huffman was arrested at her California home on March 12 by FBI agents and IRS agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. According to Breitbart News , Actress Felicity Huffman, who spent 11 days in jail after bribing college officia...

Right now, the US is fighting two hot proxy wars, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza, but at the moment, it's running out of money : The military, like the rest of the federal government, is operating under a temporary funding measure that freezes spending at the previous year’s levels. And because the Middle East troop movements weren’t planned, the Pentagon has had to pull money from existing operations and maintenance accounts, DOD spokesperson Chris Sherwood said. President Joe Biden signed the stopgap measure this month to keep the government open until lawmakers can agree on a full-year spending bill. . . . “Current events have revised some of the operational assumptions used to develop the FY 2024 President’s Budget request. Specifically, neither the base budget request nor the FY 2024 supplemental request included funding for U.S. operations related to Israel,” he said. “We’re taking it out of hide,” Sherwood added. This may bear some relation to reports of reduced ...

While researching Wednesday's post on foreign students, I ran into this essay from last July at Forbes by Michael Nietzel, President Emeritus of Missouri State University, How The Admission Practices Of Elite Colleges Perpetuate The Advantages Of The Wealthy . Again, received opinion by writers like David Brooks of the New York Times and The Atlantic has been that the elite colleges are meritocratic, admissions are driven by SATs, grades, and extracurriculars. Nietzel's argument is that the numbers simply don't point in that direction. While only 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college, 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution do so. . . . The authors [of a recent Brown University study] estimate that this higher admissions rate leads to 103 extra students being admitted from the top 1% in a typical Ivy-Plus class (of 1,650 student...

I've put up a post with more information from a former insider at Church Militant on the Cold Case File blog.

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit: At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country. The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT. Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen , universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other ...

Looking for the current outlook on the Russia-Ukraine War, I found this article at Responsible Statecraft : George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at [Quincy Institute], highlighted the perils of extrapolating a “stalemate” from the current lack of significant battlefield movements in Ukraine. “Those who believe this war has settled into a long-term stalemate make the mistake of measuring the relative progress of each side with maps. They see that the frontlines have not moved significantly over the last year and conclude that the sides are stalemated,” Beebe told me. “But other metrics, though, paint a different picture. Ukraine is using up its quite limited supplies of men, weapons, and ammunition, and the West cannot provide what Ukraine needs. That is not a formula for stalemate; it's a formula for Ukraine's eventual collapse or capitulation,” he continued. . . . “Despite everything that’s happened, despite all the stuff we have given, the Bradley’s, the M1 [Abrams]...

From the UK Telegraph via Yahoo Neews : Germany and the US will put pressure on Ukraine to negotiate with Russia by scaling back weapons deliveries in what would be a major blow to Kyiv’s hopes of victory, German media reported on Friday. Bild, a German tabloid, reported what it described as a “secret” German-American plan to force Ukraine’s hand on opening peace talks, citing sources in the German government. Under the plan, Washington and Berlin would supply Ukraine with sufficient weapons and armour to hold the current front line, but not enough to retake occupied territory. . . . “Zelensky should realise that it can’t go on like this,” a German government source told Bild, referring to Ukraine’s stalled counter-offensive against Russian in the east. “He needs to, of his own free will, turn to face his nation and explain that there is a need to negotiate.” German government sources also told Bild that the White House shared Germany’s view on the need to shift the focus from...

Is Biden drunk? pic.twitter.com/ex6IjBoZ0J — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 24, 2023 Nick Arama responded to the post at Red State : After the press conference, some on the X platform began asking questions about Biden's condition and how he came into the press conference. Some of those questions didn't hold back and were blunt. Unfortunately, farther down, he unintentionally reveals something about the condition of journalism at Conservative Inc: He has gait problems, in addition to his incoherence and deterioration. I'm not sure that it matters what name you put on it at this point--except to say that he has continuing problems. If it were just that he was drunk, that might be beer, because at least that would goes [sic] away. "That might be beer"? Wha? What on earth is he trying to say? Maybe he meant to type, "that might be bad enough, but at least that would go away". But then he followed it up "that would goes ...