In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Within hours of last evening's announcement that Sidney Powell was no longer on the Trump legal team, Robert Barnes appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel to provide his insights into what happened. I've already said here that Barnes has proven one of the best analysts available in the current election cycle. He's the best of some very bad choices, but I'll go into that below. To summarize Barnes's account, his view of Powell's professional background is that she has no experience in election law and no experience in civil law, both of which are key in the Trump effort. She does specialize in criminal appeals, which made her the best possible attorney for General Flynn, and this made her reputation. But she's completely over her head in the current cases. He also thinks stress and fame have affected her judgment. But also, she seems to have swallowed QAnon conspiracy theories, one of which would be that Venezuela controlled the election count via the...

Info here . I'll be following up.

A spokesman for Dominion Voting Systems appeared on Fox News today to repeat, pretty much verbatim, the claims Dominion has made on its website about its role in the election. The spokesman on Fox, Michael Steel, is identified as a principal with Hamilton Place Strategies. Hamilton Place's website says, "We understand complex topics, explain issues to target audiences, and persuade critical stakeholders." In other words, it's a PR firm. I'd suggest Dominion needs a crisis management firm instead, but that's just me. What's interesting here is that Dominion's own executives backed out of testifying at a Pennsylvania House hearing on Friday, but today, they've delegated to a PR flack to make statements that we may reasonably assume Dominion's attorneys advised its executives not to make, as they could either be taken as admissions against interest or statements that could be used to challenge them on cross-examination. I suspect as well that D...

I don't believe I've ever watched more than the briefest excerpts from Tucker Carlson's Fox show. Now and then I watched O'Reilly, and before that, Greta Van Susteren a little more frequently, and I probably liked her best because she wasn't a glamour queen, and she dressed appropriately. Tucker, I'm sure, is headed on that same journey from which news readers do not return. I checked the web, and the jury is out on whether his hair is natural, although the question I would have is why, if it's natural, he wears it like a toupee. Why go out of your way to look phony? Checking Wikipeida , he's the son of Richard Warner Carlson, an even better-connected media maven, so my guess is he's always had an easy ride, and he wouldn't know authentic if it walked up and shook his hand. I listened to outtakes from his show on YouTube with his challenges to Sidney Powell to show him "evidence". One thing I noticed is that, although he's 51 ye...

One thing i'm doing to work my way though the current uncharted territory is to rely on my own life experience. I've never been in politics, and I've never canvassed an election. I spent most of my career in the corporate world, and due to the unstable tech environment of the 1980s and 90s, I worked for several companies that went belly-up. Corporate sinking ships are something I'm familiar with. So what can I apply to situations like Fox News, Dominion Voting, or Smartmatic that can give me clues to what's going on, irrespective of the election? One thing I learned in that corporate environment was the need to maintain situational awareness and, as contingency planners might put it, always have an updated backup copy of your resume offsite. Inevitably I began to learn the signs that my employer was going south, just to know it was time to polish the resume again. A big sign was corporate whistling-past-the-graveyard in PR statements, or in worst cases, outright...

It looks like Fox's prime time hosts are under pressure. Overnight, it seems a kerfuffle has arisen over whether, by Tucker Carlson's account, Sidney Powell "got angry and refused to provide evidence for voting software flipping votes" when he requested it. Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox, interviewed Powell on the phone this morning, and Powell replied I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. . . But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms. It looks like Maria Bartiromo is getting off the reservation, and she and Fox will almost certainly come to a parting of the ways. Bartiromo has a serious journalistic career behind her, and I assume she has fallbacks if this happens. Tucker, on the other hand, is a pretty boy,...

Regardless of the election's outcome, some corporations are going to be joining Enron in the industrial Great Beyond. Fox had been hurting its reputation for weeks prior to the election, especially with Chris Wallace's moderation of the first debate, but since calling the Arizona election on November 3, it's fallen behind CNN and MSNBC. Here's a sign of the times: I would guess that Ingraham is beginning to feel quite insecure in her position and is taking things out on whatever target she can find. I noted the other day that both Dominion Voting and Smartmatic are likely to have their brands irreparably damaged in the current controversy and show signs that they're beginning to recognize that. Dominion's home page is now devoted entirely to denying allegations that have come up in recent days. It's dated most recentlyh November 17, which was Tuesday, and it contains, aomng other denials: DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS CATEGORICALLY DENIES FALSE ASSERTIO...