In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've been tempted to post on the rental form in which Hunter, in 2018, claimed to have spent $49,910 in monthly rent, but I've held off several times on a hunch that more information would come out. This was a background security request for a rental in a luxury Los Angeles apartment building. The fact checkers were quick to dismiss this as a conspiracy theory : Days after it was reported that classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s office at a Washington, D.C., think tank and at his Delaware home, conservative commentators launched new allegations about him and his son, Hunter Biden. "Hunter Biden paid his dad $50,000 a MONTH in rent for the home that housed classified documents… During the same time, Joe Biden only claimed less than $20,000 in rent payments PER YEAR!!!" read a Jan 17 Instagram post by Newsmax host Carl Higbie. . . . These posts are inaccurate and were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinforma...

I found a typo in Sunday's post with the problematic image of a hotdogging W Mark Felt, and even though it had been flagged as sensitive, I decided to fix the typo for the record. When I went in to edit it, I found a new button saying REQUEST REVIEW, although in my research I'd found no reference to any ability to appeal such decisions, and there was wording in the guidelines that suggested this couldn't be done. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I clicked on REQUEST REVIEW, and when I visited my account this morning, the flag and message for that post had been removed, though I've received no other message. This confirms my view that Blogger's algorithm had somehow been triggered by the image of a G-Man doing his thing, when at least for now, bien pensant opinion actually favors the FBI, which protects us by raiding Area 51 bloggers and former presidents. But just to be on the safe side, I'm going to stick with non-controversial titles and cute pet phot...

Yesterday's post got flagged by Blogger for "sensitive content", and visitors got the following notice if they tried to view it (click on the image for a larger copy): I also got a notification that "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." I've been blogging on one thing or another for almost 20 years, often on sensitive topics, but this is the first such notice I've received. I'm assuming the problem was the photo of W Mark Felt posing as an FBI hotdogger in the act of drawing his firearm, and the algorithm deemed it potentially triggering, so to speak. I'm assuming for now that this was a one-off, and I'm going to proceed as usual. I may try using photos of kittens and ducklings as a header for a while to make it clear to the algorithm that I have no intention of triggering anyone, at least no more than I have in the past, although back in the...

The image above is W Mark Felt, the Watergate Deep Throat, from his glory days as FBI Director wannabe. As I said yesterday, it sounds like we have a new Deep Throat, apparently just as highly placed, who's beginning to leak about Biden's classified documents. So far, nobody seems to be getting the point. The news yesterday evening was that another half-dozen classified documents had been run down in a new search of the Wilmington home, this one conducted by people from the Justice Department, not Biden's personal attorneys, after those attorneys had insisted everything had been found. Biden’s lawyers immediately tried to get out in front of the revelation, releasing a statement claiming cooperation with the DOJ. But while the administration continues to talk about transparency, one bombshell detail from the search has left the president’s lies fully exposed. Namely, the fact that documents were found that were taken during Biden’s years in the Senate. I just don...

A lot has come out over the Biden classified docs over the past few days, but nobody seems to be making much sense of it. I think the key is here : White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and Justice Department officials knew about the violation. The plot to hide the scandal, initially designed by eight of Biden’s closest confidants with apparent approval from the Justice Department, was suddenly leaked to CBS News 68 days after Biden’s personal attorney unearthed the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations. There's the whole thing in a nutshell, at least so far. The discovery of the classified docs was a byproduct of some other project that we don't know much about, except that well before an...

Over the past few days, there have been questions about classified documents found in at least two places at the Biden Wilmington home, apparently dating from the big guy's tenure as vice president. Nobody seems to know what they were doing there, but the little bit we've glimpsed looks like it's just the tip of the iceberg. One big unresolved question is Hunter's role in the Biden family businesses during the interregnum between his dad's departure as vice president in 2017 and his inauguration as president in 2021. As I noted in this post , Hunter was involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center as early as 2016, which as described in e-mails on his laptop was meant to be a "wealth creation" effort for the family, but discussions about which were meant to be highly confidential. During this same period, he was divorcing his first wife , Kathleen Buhle: [S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated the...

When I was racking up free flights on Southwest traveling for work in the 1990s, it was still the old Southwest with "party seating", peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. I was drawn to that sort of culture, and I followed stories about it in the Wall Street Journal, which I got for free at my door every morning at my hotel. I learned at the time that its relations with its unions were unique. The airline was succeeding as a discount carrier, and its workers were willing to work for a little less to have secure jobs. Its unions were less adversarial and more inclined to look at win-win opportunities. If Southest prospered, so did its workers. The last time I flew Southwest, maybe 15 years ago, things had changed greatly; they'd gone corporate, the peanut snacks, party seating, and singing flight attendants were long gone, while the company style had turned to talking down to the public like children. As far as I could tell, though, the unions h...