In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm old enough to remember 1972 (I was young enough to support McGovern, but apparently, though of age, I didn't bother to vote for him, because I think my first vote in a presidential election was for Gerald Ford). I also remember the orchestrated media sob session when the newly elected Sen Biden from Delaware lost his wife and daughter in an auto accident that December. This was the start of the Biden creation myth, but more of that later. A visitor kindly sent me a link to a story at Life Site News that renewed my overall sense of Biden skepticism, Was Joe and Jill Biden’s 1977 wedding at the United Nations done according to Canon Law? This, of course, is the second phase of the Biden creation myth, the marriage to Dr Jill signifying his recovery from setback and tragedy. A typical version is this cloying tribute in Politico : There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but b...

Recent Biden legal news confirms what I've been learning about Bidenworld. I found several recent data items to update my Hunter timeline: On December 5, 2022, Joe and Jill Biden took out a $250,000 line of credit secured by the equity on their Rehoboth Beach, DE home. Fox News says, "The financial move came as Hunter Biden is embroiled in a federal investigation and the discovery of President Biden's classified documents from his time as vice president was underway." On December 21, 2022, Hunter Biden hired Abbe Lowell, of the firm Winston and Strawn, "to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” said Kevin Morris, a Hunter confidant and Hollywood attorney who has also been funding his Malibu residence and paid off his 2020 tax bill. Lowell has been successful in obtaining acquittals or mistrials for prominent politicians, including Sen. Bob Menendez, former Sen. John Edwards, and Bill Clinton,...

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...