In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I can't ask for a better illustration of my thesis on the problem that's beset US inner cities since the 1960s than Trump's latest chioice of opponents : President Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Truth Social, citing Chicago’s violent crime numbers and vowing that federal support could be on the way. “Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME. He is CRAZY!!! He better straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming! MAGA. President DJT,” Trump wrote. I asked the web, "What is the Pritzker family's net worth?" and "AI" replied, The total net worth of the Pritzker family is not a single reported figure, but rather a collection of individual fortunes held by numerous family members, with individual net worths often in the billions. For example, in May 2025,...

How did Cook afford to take out three mortgages in a matter of a few months? Most lenders would throw a big red flag at this in general—raises more questions: https://t.co/N4E8F4N9qd — Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 29, 2025 On Thurssay, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte issued a second criminal referral to the Justice Department for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook: As Director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency," Pulte wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Edward Martin, "I reiterate the referral on August 15, 2025, and provide new information concerning a 3rd property for Lisa D. Cook ('Cook') and what appears to be multiple false representations to the United States Government by Cook while she was a Governor of the Federal Reserve." In response, Cook's attorney Abbe Lowell said , This is an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook by a polit...

In a trip to Minnesota, J D Vance asked a question : Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets? Other remarks are reported elsewhere : We were having lunch yesterday and the president said, ‘JD, I don’t know how I did it? I have actually gotten the Democrats to come out in defense of crime.’ If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said he really likes puppies, you would have AOC come out and say ‘Puppies are terrible.’ Actually, I think there's an answer. Let's recall that at least since Dukakis ran against Poppy Bush, the Democrats have represented an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat , Marx's urban criminal underclass (Clinton made himself a deliberate exception). Marx had the instinct to recognize that the criminal underclass was not a reliable ally of the working class, ...

"If you don't give trans people hormones, they'll shoot themselves!" Well, if you do give them hormones, they'll shoot young Christian children — Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 27, 2025 Most of the reaction to Robert/Robin Westman's attack on Annunciation Church in Minneapolis yesterday either focuses or refuses to focus on Westman's self-identification as transsexual. A few writers have noted, as I have earlier this year , that trans people turn up remarkably often in incidents of high-profile violence. A few have noted that Audrey/Aiden Hale, who killed three nine‑year‑old children and three adults at a Presbyterian school in Nashville in 2023, was trans as well. Even fewer have made the point, as Alex Marlow did , that we need to "start diagnosing the trans stuff as a mental disorder as fast as humanly possible.” But oddly, nobody is taking much of a look at the Christian stuff. Think about it for a moment. FBI Director Patel wa...

As I commented the other day, one big circumstance in which ordinary police agencies encounter illegals is on traffic patrol, where on one hand, the illegals don't obey traffic laws, while on the other, they either don't speak English or refuse to speak it when pulled over, and they frequently turn out not to have drivers licenses, registration, or insurance. What some agencies see as a problem has turned out to be an opportunity in other situations. For instance , Florida officials announced that under a new immigration enforcement program, truck weigh stations in the state will be used as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checkpoints. Truckers without valid licenses or who don't speak English are referred to immigration enforcement. The recent accident involving Harjinder Singh highlighted how frequently illegals cause traffic accidents, especially when they aren't properly licensed or don't follow traffic laws. This has turned out to be a...

Here's a question nobody's asked: the accepted narrative of the illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike has Harjinder Singh wandering expressionlessly around the scene after the accident and then, apparently free to leave, flying back to California, where the US Marshals tracked him down and arrested him several days later. But here's the rub : Passed by Congress in 2005, the REAL ID Act enacted the 9/11 Commission's recommendation that the Federal Government “set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver's licenses.” The Act established minimum security standards for state-issued driver's licenses and identification cards and prohibits certain federal agencies from accepting for official purposes licenses and identification cards from states that do not meet these standards. The official purposes for which a REAL ID is required include boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. As it happens, my California Drivers Li...

UPDATE: Harjinder Singh, an illegal alien from India who killed three innocent people, FAILED an English Language Proficiency assessment. Singh provided correct responses to just 2 of 12 verbal questions and only accurately identifying 1 of 4 highway traffic signs. And yet,… pic.twitter.com/AwndMrW9Vm — Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 20, 2025 The level of non-feasance that led to Harjinder Singh's illegal U-turn that killed three people on the Florida Turnpike is astonishing. The twisted path via which he received a California commercial driver's license is coming to light only slowly : Washington authorities said Friday they continue to investigate the licensing history of a commercial truck driver involved in a fatal crash this month in Florida that has drawn national attention. . . . Federal authorities say the state of Washington issued Singh a commercial driver’s license on July 15, 2023. On Friday, a spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Licens...

Via Fox News: The Rhode Island assistant attorney general whose arrest went viral earlier this week after she seemingly tried to use her position to evade arrest, telling officers they'd "regret" putting her behind bars, will be placed on unpaid leave. Special Assistant Attorney General Devon Flanagan, who was arrested for trespassing, was placed on paid leave after the incident while the Rhode Island Attorney General's office reviewed the matter. Starting Monday, Flanagan will go on unpaid leave, the office told Fox News Digital. It is unclear how long Flanagan will remain on unpaid leave until a final determination is made on her employment. The attorney general's office did not respond to additional questions about its ongoing review of the matter or when it might make a final decision. The orignal video from last weekend \went viral as a paradigmatic exemplar of entitlement, with more than a little whif of DEI. I worked for a utility where each ca...

I've mentioned here that for part of my adolescence, I lived with my family in Bethesda, which is one of the wealthiest places in the US, with a median household income in recent years about $190,000. In comparison, the median household income for Beverly Hills is about $127,000; the median household income for Greenwich, CT is about $136,000. The news photos of yesterday morning's FBI raid on John Bolton's home in Bethesda really took me back: that could have been my street and my neighborhood. I went to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, whose team is the Barons. (This wasn't the monogram when I went there; at that time, it was more like the mustachioed Monopoly man, but the point is the same.) Bethesda has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary : Person from Bethesda: Hi, I'm from Bethesda. Person Not from Bethesda: Hi, you must be a rich snobby [redacted]. PFB: Well yeah kind of, but at least I'm not from Potomac where it's illegal t...

With Wednesday's news of President Trump calling on Federal Reserve Bank Governor Lisa Cook to resign following a criminal referral to the Justice Department for mortgage fraud, there are now three high-level figures accused of the same crime, declaring two separate homes their primary residence to get favorable interest, tax, and insurance rates. On Fox News, Kennedy interviewed legal commentator Horace Cooper specifically on Sen Schiff's predicament, but his comments in the clip embedded above apply just as much to the other two: This type of fraud is fairly common, and it is frequently prosecuted. In fact, the real challenge here is how will the senator find an easy way out. 18 US 1001 says that you can't lie, in writing or in your application, and 1014 says that you can't lie on your application. Once you've actually done that, and there's a five-year statute of limitations, unless that is extended by ongoing carrying-out activities to promote the...

Bishop Robert Barron posted yesterday on something I've noticed for a while on YouTube: phony videos that represent themselves as being on a particular topic, putatively generated by AI. I spent a career in tech, mostly before the "AI" quasi-phenomenon, but I've always been skeptical of what's now being represented as AI. Certainly it's the case that there are YouTube videos that represent themselves as being about Bp Barron, C S Lewis, and Abp Fulton Sheen, which quickly turn out to be vapid fakes -- but are they in fact AI-generated? In the video above, Bp Barron notes, One that just came out recently had me giving recommendations about how to remove demons from your toilet. So my point, everybody, is this is all ridiculous. And I think if you spend just a moment, you can tell the difference between an authentic video from me and one of these fakes. This is exactly right. What I see in the news over and over is that "they" are gonn...

It turns out that James Comey's strange video on Taylor Swift is just the tip of an iceberg. Julie Kelly has looked at all his Substack posts . These began in May. Clad in business attire and wearing some sort of white make up to conceal a persistent puffy-eye problem, Comey gives scripted performances in a cloying uptalk cadence to answer his critics in a carefree way to sound like he isn’t worried about potential legal consequences for what he did. He talks a lot about “love” and “laughter” and finding “peace” in the second era of Trump—quickly leading the viewer to believe Comey actually has very little love, laughter, or peace in his life. (A well-earned miserable existence if that’s indeed the case.) One big question is how he has the time to do this stuff -- making videos is actually time-consuming work. Keep in mind that he started as an associate at a white-shoe law firm and went on to climb the ranks as an associate US Attorney, a US Attorney, Deputy Attorney G...

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5 — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025 A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true. My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's...