In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

According to Politico yesterday, Fresh off a high-profile speech in which he warned that a dagger had been placed at the throat of American democracy, President Joe Biden will travel to the state that White House officials view as “ground zero” for Republican-led election suppression efforts. Biden will speak in Georgia on Tuesday. In his remarks, he is expected to not only echo the themes of his address on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection but to expand on his endorsement of a filibuster carveout to pass voting rights legislation in the Senate. . . . “We are doubling down, kicking it into another gear, we are going right to the belly of the beast, or ground zero, for voter suppression, voter subversion and obstruction,” said Cedric Richmond, White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement. Politico makes the point that the real issue isn't Georgia, it's Sen Manchin, though Manchin himself isn't named: “It's really about the...

Two recent stories provide what I think is an insight into high-level thought processes in Washington. The first is from Friday in Politico: The White House is looking to Sen. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) to help thaw out its frosty relationship with Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) in hopes of resurrecting President JOE BIDEN’s Build Back Better plan. Two senior Senate sources said that Warner, one of Manchin’s closest friends and his former housemate, will be involved in any future BBB talks. Manchin has said publicly that he’s not negotiating with the White House. Privately, he has been even more pessimistic. . . . Spokespeople for both Warner and Biden demurred about the specifics of the Virginia senator’s exact role in the effort to win over Manchin. “Sen. Warner and Sen. Manchin are good friends,” a Warner spokesperson told Playbook. “They talk regularly, sometimes about policy and sometimes just shooting the breeze. I wouldn’t call those conversations ‘negotiations.’” But yester...

Even the legacy media is acknowledging, as Newsweek did, that Donald Trump was the true winner of the January 6 commemorations. After the storming of the U.S. Capitol, GOP insiders told The Intelligencer they had lost patience with Trump, whom they predicted would face waning influence within the party. Trump's closest allies also feared that his role as the riot's catalyst would hurt his legacy and the party. However, Civiqs' daily tracking polls have shown that following the tumultuous 12 months since the riots, Trump's standing among Republicans is largely unchanged. Just before the insurrection, 83 percent of registered Republican voters surveyed said they had a "favorable" opinion of Trump. That rating stayed above 80 percent every month until August 2021, and was still as high as 76 percent by the end of December. CNN went a little farther and acknowledged that the problem isn't just with Republicans. It was only a little more than a month ...

As a non-lawyer who nevertheless got a lot of experience covering lawsuits in the former blog, I'm particularly interested in developments with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown's efforts to find a sponsor in the face of corporate NASCAR's wish to make him just go away. No lawsuits have been filed yet, but they're plainly just offstage, yet the usual independent media legal commentators have so far had nothing to say. They're still preoccupied with Ghislaine Maxwell, which has turned out to be a bore, or January 6, ditto. There are three parties to this matter. The first is Brandon Brown himself, who had been developing a promising career as a driver, and who had just celebrated his first major win as Talladega, AL spectators chanted "[redacted] Joe Biden!" in the stands. An interviewer attempted to sanitize this by saying they were actually chanting "Let's go Brandon!", but perversely, this immediately became a meme for the other expression in ...

Just before Christmas I said, This is the looming problem with the received narrative. It's putting out Ponzi scheme numbers on how fast things are gonna get worse, such that if they don't get a whole lot worse in a matter of weeks, they'll start to lose any remaining credibility. Remember that they're claiming cases will double at a rate ranging from every 1.5 to 3 days, such that by sometime next month, everyone in the world will be sick, and there'll be nobody left to infect but the space aliens. But if things do get a whole lot worse, they look just as bad, because after more than two years, they've proven themselves utterly feckless to deal with the problem and lose any remaining credibility anyhow. The day before that, I said , But "if it's true" that the variant's doubling time is two to three days, with eight days to Christmas as of yesterday and thus up to four doublings, we're actually talking about roughly 300,000 new c...

I mentioned Fermi's Paradox the other day , the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for its existence. I was watching a new TV series, Expedition Deep Ocean , which covers what seems to be in some measure a vanity project by hedge fund guy Victor Vescovo to dive to the deepest points of the world's oceans. (The internet gives him a net worth of $1-5 million, which is your normal bourgeois couple these days, but the show claims he funded a $50-million dive vehicle from his own resources. Guy seems just a little hinky to me, but let that go.) The big thing that struck me about the first two episodes of the show was images like the one above from the bottom of the deep-sea trenches from "landers" with cameras and bait that are sent to the bottom at the same time as the main sub. At depths of over 25,000 feet, in water with sub-freezing temperature and completely dark under extreme pressure, lit...

Among the first headlines of the new year is this one in the Washington Post : House Democrats begin preparing for the post-Pelosi era . The story says, After almost 19 years as House Democratic leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) is expected to step down at the close of this Congress, ending a historic career. . . The key phrase is "expected to step down", which is new. As of just last December 15, the headline on CNN was Pelosi will stay around to lead House Democrats through the next election -- and perhaps beyond . Speaker Nancy Pelosi will stay until at least after the midterm elections, extending her nearly 20-year run as the House's top Democrat after she turns 82 and, perhaps, beyond. She is planning to file and run for reelection in her San Francisco district next year -- at least for now -- in keeping with her pattern of deciding about staying in Congress after the elections, when she likely will have won an 18th full term. And sources familiar wit...