In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm trying to get my head around this whole Thom Tillis retirement business. After Tillis annmounced that he couldn't support Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, putatively due to Medicaid cuts, Trump posted, Numerous people have come forward wanting to run in the Primary against ‘Senator Thom’ Tillis,” Trump wrote in another post. “I will be meeting with them over the coming weeks, looking for someone who will properly represent the Great People of North Carolina and, so importantly, the United States of America. Tillis immediately folded, saying near the end of a rambling statement , As many of my colleagues have noticed over the last year, and at times even joked about, I haven't exactly been excited about running for another term. That is true since the choice is between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with the love of my life Susan, our two children, three beauti...

Hunter Biden is now being sued for unpaid legal fees by Winston & Strawn. https://t.co/FCb4qAnZB3 With his father out of power and influence peddling no longer an option, bills are coming due for Hunter ... — Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 27, 2025 The most recent news from the Bidens is that the white-shoe firm Winston & Strawn is suing Hunter to recover $50,000 in unpaid bills . For a firm like that, $50,000 is de minimis , so I'm a little puzzled, except that it probably shows the firm no longer sees any benefit at all to writing the money off as a lagniappe for the Bidens. This comes on the heels of Kevin Morris's family cutting him off after he "loaned" Hunter $6.5 million to cover legal fees . I think this is also directly related to Joe's last-minute pardons for his brothers and sister, their spouses, and not least, Hunter , saying "he wanted to prevent them from being targeted by 'baseless and politically motivated invest...

Via Real Clear Politics, a highly reliable organ of the conventional wisdom, I found a link to this piece at the WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan plugging Walter Russell Mead's weekly column there, Global View. Oddly, the Varadarajan piece isn't behind the WDJ paywall, but Global View is. In fact, Real Clear Politics often links to WSJ pieces that you must subscribe to read, an annoying practice that most aggregators don't follow. What that says to me is that the WSJ is worried that Walter Russell Mead by himself isn't pulling enough paying readers in, and actually, considering his career arc, I think I can see why. According to the piece, Mr Mead has come to the conclusion that Trump is a Jacksonian: Jacksonians believe the most important priority of the U.S. government in both foreign and domestic policy is the security and well-being of the American people. A Jacksonian holds that the U.S. “should not seek out foreign quarrels, but when the U.S. or ...

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse raises an obvious question that nobody else has brought up : How can a group within America openly threaten police, use violence against police, throw Molotov cocktails, bricks and explosive fireworks at police. Use batons, shields, bats and physical violence against police and federal law enforcement; destroy vehicles, set cars on fire, destroy property, trash and block the streets and create chaos…. Completely without being stopped? . . . How does any individual or group get to do this without being arrested? Although he's speaking in the context of Antifa and the BLM riots, I think the approach has changed under Trump 47. Beyond that, the argument has been made that federal arrests were in fact made after the 2020 riots : The Justice Department targeted more than 300 protesters by charging them with federal crimes for their roles during the civil unrest last summer after the murder of George Floyd, according to a new r...

Full disclosure: the image above is a satirical manipulatiion, not an actual photo of CNN's Dana Bash. But this just makes my point stronger: every time I see her, I get the inescapable impression that she's everyman's ex-wife. Other headline figures are just as bad: Kaitlan Collins has such a permanent self-satisfied smirk that I keep wondering if her mother used to tell her, "If you keep making that face, one day it's going to stick that way", and that finally happened. No problem, CNN put her in front of the camera anyhow. So I think Axios is being really, really polite in this story: Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company to cable channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT and the streaming service HBO Max, announced Monday that it plans split into two publicly traded companies, parting its television networks from its streaming business. . . . WBD Streaming & Studios will include HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios, while WBD Glob...

I've looked at two commentators who've tried to apply just war theory to the 12-day war just finished, Bp Joseph Strickland ( here ) and the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser ( here and here ). Both have since responded to the US bombing of Iran's nuclear sites and the cease fire. I think both have the same problem, Trump's strategy was simply not what they anticipated, and he achieved his ends before anyone could say much of anything. In this YouTube , Bp Strickland acknowledges the bombing, but while he says it's a consequence of sin (isn't the Catholic Church as well?), he has little else to say beyond noting that Pope Leo XIV hasn't yet reversed any of Francis's policies or appointments. This strikes me as wanting just to change the subject and move on. Edwared Feser goes on at greater length in a post, Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran . His original argument, like Strickland's, anticipated things that Trump didn't do. La...

In a peculiar op-ed at The Wall Street Journal , Gerard Baker decides Trump is no big deal, he just did what any president would have done: No country, let alone a superpower, can approach national security with a rigid dogma about the use of force, and for all the binary nature of the contentions we have had on the subject in the past few decades, I suspect no American president ever has. . . . Seen in this light President Trump’s decision to order a U.S. military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities isn’t a “win” for the interventionists against the noninterventionists in the president’s coalition, a decisive departure in Trumpian foreign policy. It looks instead like a classic and—as far as we can tell—effective piece of operational expediency born of tactical opportunism to advance legitimate strategic objectives. As far as I can see, the sort of any-president Mr Baker has in mind must be Josiah Bartlet, the one played by Martin Sheen in The West Wing . The problem Trump...

I've been intriged by Trump's Bedminster, NJ golf facility ever since it surfaced in the "wiretap" kerfuffle during the 2016 transition, which I discussed here in a 2024 post (the full links are at that post). The original story, which appears to have been assiduously scrubbed, was that National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers met with Trump after the election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, and as a consequence, Trump moved his transition headquarters to his Bedminster, NJ golf club. The record does reflect that a meeting between Trump and Rogers did take place in mid November, 2016. . . . And Trump did in fact move his transition headquarters from Trump Tower to Bedminster on November 16. . . . There was no mention in any of the reports about what Rogers discussed with Trump in the meeting, nor why the move to Bedminster took place. Exactly what kind of surveillance was involved, on whom, and who ordered it has never been clear[.] Not...

Michael Scherer outlines the basic issue in Trump's Iran attack in this piece at The Atlantic : Precisely what convinced Trump that Iran was close to making a weapon remains mysterious. For years, including when Trump was last in office, the U.S. intelligence community has publicly stated that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated that bottom-line conclusion during congressional testimony in March. But Trump dismissed her statement and the information behind it. “She’s wrong,” Trump told reporters on Friday, days after he had already made the decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran had gathered “a tremendous amount of material,” he continued, apparently referring to the enriched uranium necessary to create a bomb. Earlier in the week, Trump had said that he thought Iran was “very close to having” weapons. The U.S. intelligence community had also said that Iran was enriching uranium that could poten...

In a 2000 article at Catholic Herald arguing for the immorality of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Edward Feser cites Gaudium et Spes 80 : Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation. But the Almighty approved of Joshua taking this same action after the walls of Jericho came down (Joshua 6:20-27): 20 As the horns blew, the people began to shout. When they heard the sound of the horn, they raised a tremendous shout. The wall collapsed, and the people attacked the city straight ahead and took it. 21 They observed the ban by putting to the sword all living creaturese in the city: men and women, young and old, as well as oxen, sheep and donkeys. . . . 24 The city itself they burned with all that was in it; but the silver, gold, and articles of bronze and iron they placed in the treasury of the...

I ran into an interesting take on Trump at the G7 : A G7 assembly with a final day invitation list that brought Australia, Mexico, Ukraine, South Korea, South Africa, India, the United Nations and the World Bank into it. Why? Because President Trump, that’s why. U.S. President Donald Trump smartly exited the G7 assembly a day early, he departed just before the crowd of interests arrived. If we drop the pretending we all know why Canada invited them and these nations came running – Tariff$! He was supposed to have sideline meetings with Ukraine's Zelensky and Mexico's Sheinbaum. We know he was able to avoid meeting Zelensky by leaving early; whether he met with Sheinbaum is uncertain, but he would have had little to say to her in any case -- the Mexicans who are leaving the US voluntarily far outnumber those formally deported, and this will diminish remittances to folks back in Mexico no matter what. This all says to me that Trump is playing a bigger game than the news...

In the YouTube embedded above, Bp Joseph Strickland uses just war doctrine, as partly outlined in CCC 2309, to, question the moralty of Israel's attacks on Iran. He cites it at 2:10: "The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration." That's from the Catechsm of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309. But then he departs from the Catechism and never quite comes back to it: A preemptive war, a war launched not in defense but in anticipation, is not a just war. As Pope St John Paul II said before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, "War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity," from his address to the dioplomatic corps, January 13, 2003. And Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, with clarity warned that the concept of a preemptive war does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. . . . A nation does not have the moral right to wage war simply because it suspercts it might be at...