In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This is being widely covered, for instance here , so I'm not going to go into specifics. On one hand, this is something that should have been done last May, when the court refused to hear similar California cases, at least psrtly on the basis that Gov Newsom loosened the restrictions once the suits were brought. But that didn't deal with the reality that all such restrictions are subject to the governor's whim,. and six weeks later, Newsom simply reimposed the restrictions he'd lifted. Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent from the new ruling said that Cuomo had lifted the strictest restrictions as soon as the suit was filed, but the majority recognized that Cuomo, like Newsom, could pull the same ploy and issued an injunction against enforcing them, whether he'd temporarily lifted them or not. For the court to deal with this has been overdue, since such extreme restrictions are in force elsewhee. The court''s decision noted inconsistencies in capacity ...

The web has been pretty much empty of intelligent commentary since the Trump legal team's disavowal of Sidney Powell. There's a consensus among a few people like Rush Limbaugh and Robert Barnes that the November 19 news conference, in which Giuliani effectively endorsed Powell's unsubstantiated theory that Dominion voting machines switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden, only to fire her days later, was a disaster. But other questions need to be asked. Trump won a close election with a popular vote minority in 2016. In 2020, he ran almost exactly the same strategy, which the Democrats anticipated, and lost a close election trying to win exactly the same states. Both years, he ran against weak, out-of-touch, sick Democrat candidates who campaigned far less than he did. The evidence we're starting to get, and the opinions of commentators like Alan Dershowitz, is that although there was vote fraud in 2020, it was what we've always expected from big-ci...

We've entered a season in which governors and local health authorites are reimposing COVID controls, with Michigan in near-complete lockdown, while most other states are falling into line with curfews, typically stay-at-home orders with the usual exceptions between 10 PM and 5 AM or whenever. I haven't heard any clear explanation for why people should not move around after 10, with a lot of questions about whether the authorities think if people just don't go out to bars, the cases will drop. The problem is that public health authorities don't actually know how COVID is transmitted, and when it's transmitted, why so many cases are asymptomatic. An article in the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has an excerpt : "Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus. . . . Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health...

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...