In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Here's another case of professional reporters, even on the right-wing Hunter Biden beat, who don't seem to have the initiative to do minimal followup when stories break. Earlier this week, I've been relying on a New York Post story from June 2021 covering the efforts of two former Secret Service agents to roust Hunter from his Hollywood hotel room and straighten out his charges for Russian escorts in May of 2018. The reporter, Miranda Devine, lists their names and some details of their Secret Service careers, but it looks like her Google skills, at least at the time, were perfunctory. She notes that one of the former agents, Dale Pupillo, was "a retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, who used to guard his father." That's a little like calling Osama bin Laden a distant member of the Saudi royal family who used to be in the construction business. Dale Pupillo, it turns out, was probably the key member of Secret Service management who was ...

This is the question Paul Kengor asked in an essay this past Monday in The American Spectator . Pondering this question, he says, So, I ventured to the website of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement. Alas, I remain even more in the dark. I found a few articles and what seem like press releases. I found no reports or policy papers, which is odd because such is the main product of a think tank. I did, however, find Joe Biden — everywhere. Biden’s grinning mug is splashed all over the thing. When you first open the website, you see Biden. When you click the first heading, labeled, “We’re Focused On,” you’re assaulted with some mindless mishmash about “Advancing the Dialogue of Internationalism.” The viewer is greeted by — surprise — two photos, both of Joe Biden. The first is a photo of, quite appropriately, old Scranton Joe and China’s Xi taking a friendly stroll together at some bridge near Beijing. His conclusion is fairly simple, it doesn't really do...

I mentioned the other day that I've had a project of interleaving all the links I've run across to Hunter Biden stories by date, which has grown quite large. So far, it starts about 2006, when he began to set up businesses that would benefit from Joe's campaigns aimed at the 2008 election, first for president and then as Obama's nominee for vice president. Prior to that, he'd prospered mainly as the son of a US senator and influential Delaware politician, attending Georgetown University and then Yale Law on the same basis as the offspring of others in that class. Once he got his Yale degree, he went on to work for a bank, no different from people like San Bankman-Fried or Caroline Ellison, just garden-variety Ivy League gentry. But once his father finally reached the prospect of national office, the stories began to balloon. The names of his companies and cronies immediately proliferated, and just to follow up on all the references in the various stories, especi...

The policies Donald Trump has articulated over Ukraine have been consistent, and he restated them over the weekend : Former President Donald Trump said he could solve the Russia-Ukraine war "in 24 hours," while speaking at his presidential campaign kickoff in New Hampshire on Saturday. . . . "My personality kept us out of war," the former president continued. "And I told you before, [it] would have never happened with Russia. Putin would have never ever gone in. And even now I could solve that in 24 hours. It's so horrible what happened. Those cities are demolished now." Trump concluded by saying that if he was president, there would have been "zero chance that war would have happened." The problem for Ukraine is that following the September 2022 Russian rout in Donbas and the November Russian withdrawal from northern Kherson, their counteroffensive has stalled, and they've resumed calls for more effective Western weapons, at this p...

I've been following up on the question of Biden's personal attorneys for a while, and the most I can say is we don't know very much. CBS News has done some good research on this, and I linked to a January 12 story earlier here that gives the most comprehensive list so far: Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday. Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned. . . . Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice D...

I found this photo in a Newseek article from January 20 that's labeled as being an aerial view of the Biden property on 1209 Barley Mill Road, Wilmington, Delaware 19807. This is consistent with other published views of the house on the left, but the photo here includes another house. The Newsweek piece puts things in the context of the background check form Hunter submitted for his niece, wherein he apparently claims to own this property while also paying $49,910 in rent there. Newsweek, as have other sources, traces the $49,910 amount to what was actually a security deposit on quarterly rent paid to House of Sweden by Hunter's firm Rosement Seneca Partners for office space there. Newsweek fills out additional details in the link: A 2021 report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter , which examined a trove of communications between the National Property Board and Hunter Biden's representatives, stated that in February 2017: "Hunter Biden and his companies" ...

Visitors know I'm something of a conoisseur of corporate crises, especially ones that are clumsily mishandled and stem from dysfunctional corporate culture, although that last may be a redundancy. Pfizer has already been suffering from bad publicity in the release of Twitter files and Wednesday's Babylon Bee story : NEW YORK, NY — Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has unveiled their new mascot, an adorable glob of platelets who goes by the name "Clotty". "See? Blood clots aren't scary!" said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as a smiling Clotty danced onto the stage. "Welcome to Pfizer, Clotty! Let's get one of these little guys into every home in America!" While Pfizer initially pushed back against evidence tying the vaccine to blood clots, the company has decided to instead embrace it. "We are so excited for Clotty to help us put a friendly face on heart attacks and strokes," said Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. "Every new COVID booster w...