In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

When the story about Ashley Biden's diary broke last weekend, I had a feeling it wasn't going away, notwithstanding its contents, the incoherent, vaguely allusive jottings of a deeply troubled drug addict, are of no probative value for much of anything. But that the FBI would be involved in harassing Project Veritas over something or other in connection with it is effective acknowledgement of its authenticity. In fact, I think if nothing else, it's also confirmation that the big guy is dumb as a rock -- nobody would touch the story during last fall's campaign, and if the FBI hadn't been sicced on James O'Keefe last week, the whole thing would have stayed forgotten. Now, with the matter in court , it's an ongoing narrative. Dumb as a rock. The most-referenced passages have the author ruminating over being sexually active and hypersexualized at an early age, with one clear factor being "possibly inappropriate" showers with her father. This...

I've just had new confirmation for my view that journalists across the spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders. This piece by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, which I take to be part of the never-Trump right, New Dem mission: Dump Harris? , makes this assertion: Actually, party leadership has no real way to “engineer the removal of a vice-president,” not unless the VP wants to leave. Vice presidents are elected to their positions, so they cannot be fired. The 25th Amendment only applies to presidents, not vice-presidents, so there is no mechanism to remove a VP for incompetence or any other reason. Except Spiro Agnew didn't want to leave, but he left. I did a find on "Agnew" in that piece, and Morrissey doesn't mention him at all, which suggests to me that he's furrowed his brow with great effort and completely forgotten about, or maybe never even knew about, the one historical case where party leadership engineered the removal of a vi...

It appears that on the local, state, and congressional levels, the results of last week's elections effectively ended the fantasy that there could be a rapid enactment of a Great Reset that would make the 2022 midterms irrelevant -- or if indeed the voters did exact revenge at the ballot box, it would be something past the end of the world and also irrelevant. I've been calling this the Götterdämmerung strategy, and naturally, it isn't adult thinking, And the November 2 elections did focus the minds of many adults. According to the Washington Post, Progressives gave up a lot of ground when they agreed to vote for the $1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation's infrastructure in exchange for a later vote on their top priorities. Now, some of them are pretty pessimistic about the chances of getting their top priorities included in the larger, roughly $2 trillion social spending bill the leadership and moderates promised would follow. House Speake...

On Sunday, I linked to a story in the UK Daily Mail that reported on the Duchess of Cornwall's apparent bewilderment at President Biden's flatulence at a soiree following the Cop26 conference in Glasgow. Something kept bothering me about that story that hasn't gone away. Consider this. The Duchess of Cornwall, who had been Prince Charles's mistress of long standing prior to their 2005 marriage, has kept a low public profile despite her formal status as Princess of Wales. However, given the state of the queen's health and her age, it's become inevitable that sooner rather than later, the duchess will be the royal consort, with a standing equivalent to Prince Philip. In other words, she'll be a national figure of high dignity and prestige, and I assume she's preparing to ease into that role as we speak. I've got to think that under those circumstances, even remarks attributed to her by unnamed sources but carried in the UK press must have some...

The coverage of the Fifth Circuit's ruling to stay temporarily the Biden OSHA rule mandating vaccinations for employees of firms with over 100 workers has been remarkably shallow. The basic outline is this: An appeals court ruled on Saturday to temporarily halt President Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 employees or more. The ruling came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a challenge to the mandate requiring employers with over 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing directly with the court. The challenge included the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah and South Carolina. . . . OSHA’s rule includes sending agents to inspect businesses to determine if they are abiding by the mandate. If a business is found to not be in compliance, a company could be fined $136,532. Paxton argued in the announcement of Texas’s challenge that the mandate goes ...

I ran into three vignettes over the weekend that I think provide some insight into the big guy's mental state. The first, via Drudge, is from the UK Daily Mail: Camilla 'hasn't stopped talking about' hearing the President 'break wind' during chat at Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow An informed source has told The Mail on Sunday that Camilla was taken aback to hear Biden break wind as they made polite small talk at the global climate change gathering in Glasgow last week. 'It was long and loud and impossible to ignore,' the source said. 'Camilla hasn't stopped talking about it.' The photo above from the story is at least confirmation that this could have taken place. Indeed, the expression on the duchess's face, not to mention the big guy's, suggests it might even have occurred as the shutter snapped. Curious, I did a web search on flatulence and discovered it isn't normally indicative of an underlying medical co...

It seems to me that the key takeaway from last night's legislative maneuvering is that the winner was Sen Manchin, who succeedced in using Tuesday's election outcomes to nudge Speaker Pelosi off the position she articulated on Wednesday that the outcome would not change her legislative agenda, which was presumably to link the BIF with the BBB and pass both at the same time. By Friday, it had become plain that this would be impossible, and the House leadetship was forced to cobble up a last-minute Plan B, which amounted to passing the BIF first with Republican support -- a Manchin prescription -- while deferring action on the BBB, eventually to go to the Senate, where Manchin's agenda will also prevail. Speaker Pelosi used up a great deal of time, energy, and political capital allowing the House progressives to wag the dog on the legislative agenda, but accomplished nothing. As Matt Lewis put it on Yahoo News, After a long on-again, off-again back-and-forth st...