In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A headkine on Politico yesterday: Why Schumer picked a filibuster fight he couldn't win . Chuck Schumer doesn’t typically lead his caucus into losing votes that divide Democrats. He made an exception for election reform. The Senate majority leader has run a 50-50 Senate for a year now, longer than anyone else. The whole time, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have consistently communicated to Schumer that he wouldn’t get their votes to weaken the filibuster, no matter the underlying issue. But his decision to force the vote on the caucus anyway — and get 48 Democrats on the record for a unilateral rules change dubbed "the nuclear option" — will go down as one of Schumer’s riskiest moves as leader. Politico does all it can to spin it as a some sort of secretlly brilliant move for Schumer, but it keeps trying to answer that pesky question -- why. Schumer usually touts his caucus' unity, declining to engage in extended debates over issues that divide his 50 m...

I dipped in and out of Biden's press conference yesterday. As of this morning, there are many takes on it, but what struck me in particular was this sequence , in response to a question from (I think) Peter Doocy: Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left? THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m not. I don’t know what you consider to be too far to the left if, in fact, we’re talking about making sure that we had the money for COVID, making sure we had the money to put together the Bipartisan Infrastructure, and making sure we were able to provide for those things that, in fact, would significantly reduce the burden on the working-class people but make them — they have to continue to work hard. I don’t know how that is pointed to the left. If you may recall, I — you guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders. I’m not. I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat, and I have been...

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists. The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize : Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping compani...

The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates y et again how useful it is. The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec. Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.” The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions”...

I think we can safely say that Hillary Clinton is eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024. Dick Morris, a sometime Clinton intimate, is making the case: Morris said Sunday that if Democrats lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be toast — paving the way for a second Hillary bid, with husband Bill playing an architect to her strategy. “There’s a good chance of it,” said Morris, referring to a Hillary-Trump rematch, to John Catsimatidis on the radio host’s WABC show. “Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill. . . . ​”She has set up a zero-sum game where the worse [Biden] does, the better she does, because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden. Not just to Biden, but to the extreme left in the Democratic Pa...

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign . Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is. “I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back." . . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to ...

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here . My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism? I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum . Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. I...