In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I don't know if this is any sort of stunning insight, but ruminating on the latest "illegal orders" kerfuffle, it occurred to me yet again that Trump's whole political career can be understood as an extended Road Runner cartoon. In the 2016 election alone, a number of issues arose, including allegations of Russian collusion and hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, that would resurface in repeated attempts to bring him down in two impeachments and several criminal cases, but to no effect. The Access Hollywood tape was an October surprise that just about everyone was convinced would destroy his 2016 candidacy. Repeated attemnpts to tie him to the January 6 Capitol incursion have been just as ineffective. The Schumer Shutdown, ditto. Now it turns out that even before the shutdown, the idea of creating some sort of "illegal orders" scandal was a glimmer in certain eyes : A left-wing group is putting up billboards in high-crime cities where Pre...

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C. : The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering ...

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago , I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5. The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result. But be...

A headline in the normally pro-Trump New York Post: Michael Goodwin: Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms : As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted. This is my first big puzzle, the "slumping poll numbers". These are the same polls that were wildly off just a few weeks ago, claiming the New Jersey governor's race was a tossup, and Republicans even had a chance in Virginia. But the outcome was dog bites man; blue states voted blue. Nobody's asking what happened to put expectations so far out of whack. But let's proceed: Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome. This comes af...

BREAKING: The Department of War is reportedly considering recalling Sen. Mark Kelly (D) to active duty for possible court-martial after he urged U.S. troops to defy orders from Trump and Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/W8q2a3iMlL — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 24, 2025 The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee , goes like this: Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitt...

A typical event in the On Patrol: Live TV show involves a cop pulling a driver over for suspected DUI. The cop walks up to the driver's window and requests that the driver step out. All of a sudden, the driver notices there's a guy with a big camera filming the scene and realizes what this could mean: their face will be on national TV with a show that leads its time slot in the 25-54 demographic, which is another way of saying that by the next day, their DUI arrest will be all over town. "I don't want to be filmed!" the driver protests. "I demand that you stop filming!" "It's just a documentary," the officer usually replies. "They're just filming a documentary." The other night, a driver protested more than usual, which had no impact. "Anyone can film out in public," the officer continued. "They can film you, you can film us. That's the law." Which is another way of saying cameras are everywher...

Q: “Are you willing to forgive Congresswoman Taylor Greene?” TRUMP: “Forgive for what? I just disagreed with her philosophy … I think she's a nice person.” pic.twitter.com/SWBYdjn4LV — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 22, 2025 It's worth linking yet again to the very insightful business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating strategy to get a clearer idea of what's going on regarding Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation announcement. Trump also uses generosity, particularly compliments, to enhance his leverage. “I know that no matter how tough somebody is, he or she will always remember support you’ve given or a favor you might have done in the past,” he wrote in one of his books. From the X post above, we can see that Trump is being unexpectedly generous with Rep Greene, having called her a "traitor" only a few days earlier. Why? It looks like she's going to give him exactly what he wants, her resignation from Congress. Now he doesn...

As Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem. I was drawn to Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene's announcement of her resignation , in particular that she mentions Epstein prominently: I never changed or went back on my campaign promises and only disagreed in a few areas like. . . demanding the release of the Epstein files. Just last Sunday, she said the growing animosity between her and Donald Trump “has all come down to the Epstein files.” “I have no idea what’s in the files. I can’t even guess,” Greene added. “But that is the question everyone is asking is why fight this so hard?” Greene, a former close ally of Trump, has come under fire from the president in recent weeks over her push to release federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein files, a trove of documents presumably detailing the disgraced financier’s crimes, including who may have known about or been involved in those crimes. It appears th...

On Tuesday, Pope Leo made a statement that endorsed the "Special Message" the USCCB issued the week prior. According to the USCCB , Pope Leo told reporters in Castel Gandolfo that the pastoral message is "a very important statement. I would invite especially all Catholics, but people of goodwill, to listen carefully to what they said." "No one has said that the United States should have open borders," the pope said. "I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter." However, he said, in enforcing immigration policy "we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have." "If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that," he said. "There are courts. There's a system of justice," but the system has "a lot of problems" that should be addressed. The video I saw strongly suggested Leo...

On November 12, the USCCB issued a "Special Message" from its Baltimore Plenary Assembly "addressing their concern for the evolving situation impacting immigrants in the United States." The video embedded above contains one reaction from Fr Robert McTeigue, SJ to an Instagram post featuring some of the bishops drawing attention to the Special Message. CatholicVote also issued a response to the bishops' message stressing that "properly speaking, there is no such thing as an official ‘Catholic position’ on the practical details of immigration policy." Instead, it frames individual Catholics’ stances on immigration enforcement as "a matter of prudential political judgment," which it says is "an area of responsibility that belongs properly to Catholic laypersons rather than the bishops." CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt told Fox News Digital the group "wants to foster a more complete conversation on immigration...

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse makes a worthwhile, though not a stunnningly insightful, point: [W]hen AI was launched on the various platforms being used by the larger public, the inputs which frame the AI results are controlled by the same people who built the AI systems. When you engage with AI, you are engaging with a system that only has “approved information” behind it to deliver the outputs. In other words, if you ask any public AI platform a question about any current topic, you're going to get an answer based on a pre-digested body of conventional wisdom, pretty much the same thing you'd get going to Real Clear Politics. I use Chrome AI mode, which I don't have to pay for, and the answers are worth what I pay for them. ChatGPT and Grok are overpriced and ought to charge nothing. But given public AI's limitations, you can at least get a good take on conventional wisdom. I asked Chrome AI mode, "What was last week's conventional wisdom about Tr...