In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I was originally going to title this post, "Why Is William Barr So Angry?" but after Thursday's Dark Brandon speech, I realized everyone's angry, not just William Barr. Still, just before I changed my title, I was searching the web for images of an angry William Barr, and I discovered there are a lot of them. A lot of them. Barr is basically a professional angry guy. Let's look at his background. According to Wikipedia, William Pelham Barr (born May 23, 1950) is an American attorney who served as the 77th and 85th United States attorney general in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. Born and raised in New York City, Barr was educated at the Horace Mann School, Columbia University, and George Washington University Law School. From 1971 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. He then served as a law clerk to judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia C...

Here's Biden's problem, and I think it's clear enough that even he recognizes it. The slimmest of Democrat majorities in Congress have shielded him from investigations over the past two years. If he loses either house in the November elections, Republicans will control key oversight committees with subpoena power, which will at best threaten his prospects in 2024 -- but there are potential avenues of investigation that could reach a "Nixon standard". This phrase has come up in connection with potential Trump offenses that could have been uncovered in the Mar-a-Lago raid (but so far have not) -- but I'm not the only one who's seen parallels between Nixon and Biden as well. A quick web search suggests that there's never been a clear definition of a "Nixon standard" for impeachment, but of course, Nixon was never impeached, so his case can't be a precedent anyhow. Nevertheless, legal scholars in the Clinton impeachment came up with this ...

Just the other day I had a post on the revival of the former A&E Live PD show , now on a new channel, Reelz, as On Patrol: Live . Just a day later, it was an item on regular news : A&E filed a lawsuit seeking to block rival network Reelz from airing “On Patrol: Live,” which it claims is a blatant ripoff of its own show, “Live PD.” Both shows feature live footage from police ride-alongs, both are hosted by Dan Abrams, and both are produced by the same company. A&E canceled “Live PD” — one of its top-rated shows — in June 2020, at the height of protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Reelz debuted its version of the show last month. In the lawsuit, A&E argues that “On Patrol: Live” copies nearly every aspect of its own show’s format, down to specific catchphrases. The Reelz show even occupies “Live PD’s” old time slot. My wife and I resumed watching whatever you want to call the show as soon as we heard about it. The accounts are completely corre...

I didn't intend to spend any time on Mikhail Gorbachev's passing, but the dog days of summer being what they are, and the whole range of opinion on any subject being as obtuse as it's been, Gorbachev is one of the most interesting subjects around -- which I guess says something. The first observation to make is that the Ukraine invasion has proven to be a last, desperate, feckless gesture of Soviet revanchism. The tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February carried Soviet flags in addition to their Zs for victory, neither of which has worn well. This was the system Gorbachev intended to preserve and reinvigorate. The conventional obituaries have missed the point. Here's The Guardian : Mikhail Gorbachev, who has died aged 91, was the most important world figure of the last quarter of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly he brought an end to 40 years of east-west confrontation in Europe and liberated the world from the danger of nuclear conflagration. So...

FBI agent Timothy Thibault was reported late Monday to have been escorted out of his FBI office in Washington Friday afternoon and to have "abruptly resigned". Thibault had been a public target of allegations by Iowa Sen Charles Grassley that FBI agents have shown political bias in their investigations. "The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI's receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI's false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation," GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland on July 25. "The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter." . . . In October 2020, one month before the election, "an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed" by a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office. An earlier letter ...

Victor Davis Hanson published an essay Friday in the New York Post, Elites’ divide & conquer failure: How middle class now view their rulers with rightly earned disdain . Hanson emerged with a new set of commentators like the late Angelo Codevilla around the time of 9/11. From the start, I always thought there was more he could have done with any of his themes than he ever actually delivered, but in recent times, I think the problem has grown. In this piece, he's specifically addressing class, which means he really needs at least to nod his head to Marx, but he doesn't. He writes either as if Marx didn't exist, or Marx is completely irrelevant to the subject, or (possibly more likely), he thinks he underatands Marx and expects the reader to assume he does, so he won't mention him. However, he doesn't understand Marx. We have to back up and see how this matters. It's important to recognize that Marx had a point, and his basic taxonomy of class and class ...

On Friday, I looked at what seems to be the best case for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, that there was ample evidence of highly classified material stored there willy-nilly in rooms that, while they were under locks with video surveillance and controlled by the US Secret Service, had not been formally designated facilities eligible to receive classified material. This is a violation of bop-de-bop. Both Andrew McCarthy and Alan Dershowitz argue that this meets the probable cause standard for both an indictment and a search warrant. On Saturday, I pointed out that in well-publicized prior cases, Hillary Clinton received no penalty for an equivalent violation under the "no reasonable prosecutor" standard, while John Deutch. having run afoul of the Clintons as CIA Director and being eased out of that job, went though several years of investigation in which neither the Justice Department nor the CIA would prosecute for similar violations. His case, clearly a political grudge by...