In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This is the part of the 1953 sci-fi movie where the scientists realize the high voltage lines & atom bombs only make the monster bigger — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 2, 2017 I saw the post just above on Instapundit this morning, thinking it was a reaction to yesterday's verdict, but I suddenly realized it's dated July 2, 2017. You can say things about Trump one time, and they turn out to be just as applicable to other situations. Greg Gutfeld made a similar reference to pop-culture paradigms in last night's monologue : The good news is that as this trial descended into an absurdity of corruption, Trump's numbers have been going up, while Joe Biden's keep falling, like Joe Biden himself. Turns out Americans love it when one man fights against a corrupt system with his back up against the wall, just as much as they detest a dementia-ridden dirtbag who's spent half a century padding his life with your money. . . . It ain't over til the fat ...

Yesterday I posted on how uncomfortable I've become with the RealClearPolitics model of the election, whereby Trump leads Biden by a small aggregate anount in battleground states, and this situation hasn't changed in six months. Yet issues like inflation and illegal immigration haven't been fixed. while Biden's deteriorating physical and mental condition have become increasingly visible. On top of that, the enthusiasm levels of the Trump and Biden campaigns are increasingly in contrast. I pointed to little-reported trends in states outside the conventional-wisdom battlegrounds like Minnesota, Oregon, and Virginia, and by coincidence, I noticed a new Roanoke College poll that says Trump is tied with Biden in Virginia. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied (42%-42%) in a head-to-head matchup in Virginia, while Biden holds a two-point lead (40%-38%) when other candidates are included, according to the Roanoke College Poll. The Institute ...

Sean Trende, the Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics, is the keeper of the conventional wisdom on Trump's outlook for the election. The odd thing is that the Democrats, other than Biden himself, are the ones who've signed on to it. For instance, Clinton pollster Mark Penn takes the conventional line just this morning at RCP : Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the Harvard-CAPS/Harris polls by about 5 points and in the FoxNews polls by 3 points as of May 24. It is closer in the Real Clear Politics average that shows a gap of only 1.1%, but swing state polls across the media show Trump routs in almost all of them. What bothers me is that none of this has changed in six months. Public perceptions of the New York hush money trial have been, if anything, favorable toward Trump. Rallies and campaign events like those in New Jersey and the Bronx have been surprisingly well-attended. In contrast, Biden's public performance has been consistently embarrassing...

The big news this morning is the headline in Politico, Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden . “You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely. But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said. Except just this past weekend, Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville slammed his own party Saturday in a rant in which he called its messaging “full of s–t” — and accused the Biden campaign of worrying too much about the war in Gaza. Carville, who helped run Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 White House campaign, ripped into national Democrats as polls continue to show President Biden struggling in his likely rematch with former President Donald Trump. As early as February, Ezra Klein, a prominent liberal columni...

The one thing I've noticed throughout this election cycle is how early everything has been taking place vis-a-vis all the other presidential election cycles I've lived through. I've mentioned here several times that previous leaks from insiders that a losing campsign isn't going well tend to happen in late summer and early fall; this time, we saw calls from influential Democrats for Joe to withdraw as early as February. Just this past week, the Biden campaign issued the ad linked above, which is a last-ditch play to win back African-American voters by taking out-of-context remarks from Trump as long ago as 1989 to prove he's a racist. This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's failing campaign in 1980 and his desperate attempt to brand Ronald Reagan as a racist -- except this took place that September , not in May, which Biden is doing this year: It was a mistake, tactically, to call Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign racist. Reagan’s opponent, Jimmy ...

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise. Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration : When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].” “They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words. The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot wo...

I've long thought the whole public narrative about Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's "sugar bro" who is generally reported to have "loaned" Hunter upwards of $6.5 million to settle his tax case and pay his rent and legal expenses, just doesn't fit. For starters, I'm not his accountant, but he and his wife have eight-figure homes in both New York and Malibu, he has a private jet, and their living expenses have to be through the roof. Morris himself is a failed writer and doesn't seem to have worked as an attorney for years. Nobody like that has $6.5 million in mad money. I posted last week that sources close to Morris had told Politico that he could no longer afford to pay Hunter's legal bills. My suspicion was that Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell, who is reported to bill as much as $1500 an hour, had secured liens on Morris's New York and Malibu properties to be sure he gets paid, and Morris's wife, the Hollywood agent Gaby Morgerman, ...

Let's face it, the whole New York hush money trial has been a distraction. Each day has new breathless headlines: will there be a hung jury? will Trump testify? what if Trump is convicted? what will Judge Merchan do next? None of this matters. If there's a hung jury, Trump's progress will continue. If he's convicted, the pattern up to now has been the one since last fall: every time he's lost in a New York courtroom, his poll numbers go up. If he's jailed, I suspect his sons and other surrogates will campaign on his behalf, and his poll numbers will go up even more -- except I think even his opponents recognize this would be a disastrous outcome for them. T his view from the far left actually outlines the real issue with surprising insight: [A] sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could...

It's been a long time since I've seen anyone in church, in a store, or even on the street, wearing a mask; it was a long, slow process -- but it's also irreversible. In fact, LA County tried to reinstate masks in health care environments just this past January, at a time when I was having to go to Kaiser pretty frequently. So starting then, I put a mask in my pocket just to be sure -- and Kaiser had in fact put up masks-required posters here and there. But when I got to the waiting room, I asked the assistants if masks were mandatory, and they said no -- in fact, they weren't wearing them, and most of the people in the waiting room weren't, either. Even Kaiser, specifically ordered by the health department to reinstate masks, tacitly ignored the order. The county dropped it again a month later . We've actually entered a belated period of official, or at least semi-official, never-mind acknowledgement of a COVID moral panic. For instance , Testifying...

Via the Huffington Post : Chaos enveloped Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan Monday afternoon after a defense witness verbally tangled with Judge Juan Merchan, causing the courtroom to be cleared ― and earning a severe rebuke in return. The drama began when the witness, an attorney and longtime Rudy Giuliani associate named Robert Costello, appeared to be upset at Judge Merchan for sustaining a series of objections from the prosecution about his answers. . . . [T]he judge asked the jury to leave the room while instructing Costello to remain seated. “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” Merchan told Costello. “I’m the only one that can strike testimony in this court,” he said. “You don’t give me side-eye, and you don’t roll your eyes. You understand that?” Wait a moment. I'm not an attorney, but I'm a big true crime fan, I've watched lots of trials on TV from Perry Mason onward, and I've seen several trials in person as a juror and in the ...

The RealClearPolitics headlines are usually tepid, cautiously juxtaposing a slightly right-of-center piece with a rabid left winger under the pretense that they're somehow bipartisan, reflecting someone's wish dream of conventional wisdom. But for some reason, this morning's titles are oddly unanimous: 7 Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (And What He Should Do) by Ezra Klein at the New York Times, Alarmed Dems Run From Biden in Battleground States by Alexander Bolton at The Hill, Biden Can Save America From Trump by Dropping Out by Jeremy Mayer at USA Today, and How Lawfare Turned Trump Into a Superhero Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics. None of them mentions the national popular-vote poll aggregate, which always tops RCP's list. Some of them mention the battleground-state aggregates, but even then with some skepticism. As Ezra Klein puts it in the lead piece, Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden didn’t just win Michigan, Pennsylva...

At RedState: Trump spoke at the Minnesota GOP’s annual Lincoln Reagan fundraising dinner on Friday. . . . “Although he has agreed to debate, so I don’t know, maybe they know something. He’s going to be so jacked up for those debates, you watch. "I'm going to demand a drug test," he declared. "I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union,” Trump said. “He was high as a kite.” By the end of the evening, Trump said, Biden was “exhausted.” “We’re going to demand a drug test.” Even on the right, there's been a certain amout of pearl-clutching about this, from pretty much the same people who worried that he thought Hannibal Lecter is a real person. For instance, Jazz Shaw at Hot Air seems to think this was a serious proposal: If Biden refuses to do this, there isn't much that Trump could do about it. Nobody, including elected officials or candidates, can be forced to release their private medical records, although they are free to do ...

Fr Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year podcast in recent weeks has been moving through First and Second Samuel, with its dysfunctional story arc of King Saul and King David. It's hard not to see Biblical reverberations in King Saul, a failed ruler intensely jealous of his eventual successor, David, but there's now the additional parallel that US Catholic bishops, beginning with Cardinal Gregory. are criticizing Joe for being a "cafeteria Catholic", which faintly echoes Samuel's mesaage that God has rejected Saul as king. But an even closer parallel is the story of David and his strange, almost codependent, relatonship with his entitled son Absalom . He was a great favorite of his father and of the people. His charming manners, personal beauty, insinuating ways, love of pomp, and royal pretensions captivated the hearts of the people from the beginning. He lived in great style, drove in a magnificent chariot, and had fifty men run before him. Absalom ha...

Things haven't been going well for Team Biden in recent days, not least because Hunter's "sugar bro", Kevin Morris, has told associates he is tapped out . According to Politico, Kevin Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who has long supported the president’s son, has told associates that he has run out of resources to help fund Biden’s legal defense, according to a person close to Morris who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Whoa, let's parse this one out. First, I live in Hollywood, and I know something about the place. Tinsel Town is built on hype, and Kevin Morris is nothing if not a creature of hype. Here's the standard line as printed in the New York Post as of 2022: Morris is a successful lawyer and big-money Democratic Party supporter who has become Hunter Biden’s newest fixer and “sugar brother,” allegedly loaning the president’s son $2 million to help pay off his overdue federal taxes. . . . The lawyer, who counts C...