In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

From CTInsider: President Joe Biden ended his keystone speech Friday at the National Safer Communities Summit at the University of Hartford with a line that has drawn confusion and criticism. "God save the queen, man," Biden said. The site gave the White House explanation for the line: The comment puzzled some people because Queen Elizabeth II died last September, but White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Olivia Alair Dalton said Biden's remark was directed at someone in the audience. Dalton said Biden was unable to do a full rope line, where he usually interacts with audience members in close spaces, because he needed to leave as a storm approached. The certainly leaves open the interpretation that Joe is completely out of touch, recognizing neither that the queen of the UK isn't sovereign over the US, but beyond that, she's deceased, and there's now a king. But I simply think it's another indication of the Dunning-Kruger Effect ...

On of the big questions I've had throughout this saga has been that the sums of moneyjust don't seem right. The Vice President of the United States is alleged to have sold out for a measly $5 million. The Biden family overall, nine or 12 mwmbers, is alleged to have taken in $10 million over a period of years, when this amount wouldn't cover just the cocaine habits, shopping sprees, and luxury rehab stays of Hunter, Hallie, Caroline, or Ashley, leaving all the others and their extravagant lifestyles aside. Either there's a lot more to this story, or it's all bunk, because the numbers we've been seeing just don't fit. However, via the New York Post, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Thursday teased that new bank records his panel expects to obtain will reveal that the Biden family has accepted as much as $30 million from foreign nationals. “We have more bank records coming in, we’re going to exceed $10 million this week. And I think ...

The problem I keep seeing about the Biden boodle that won't go away for me is precisely the question Joe asked a week ago : where's the money? What we've seen, at least since 2019, is the appearance of multimillion-dollar expenditures on Hunter's debts and legal problems, followed since last year by other multimillion-dollar legal expenditures for Joe's own classified document issues, yet I'm about the only one out there asking where all this money comes from. High-power, partner-level lawyers don't work for free, and being lawyers, they know how to get paid. This story came out on Breitbart yesterday, but it was buried almost immediately: Exclusive: GOP Lawmakers Question Who Gave Joe Biden’s Corporation Nearly $10M in 2017 . Republican lawmakers are demanding transparency from President Joe Biden regarding his 2017 tax returns in which his entity, “CelticCapri Corp,” listed nearly $10 million without specifying revenue line items, raising c...

The photo above is of Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma owner who is now alleged to have passed a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and kept tapes of the discussion. Before I finished yestereday's post , I went to Wikipeida to see what I might be able to glean. In my post yesterday, I credited Wikipedia and summarized the key points of the entry. So this morning at Breitbart News, fully a day later, I found the headline on Breitbart Meet the Ukrainian Oligarch Who Allegedly Paid Joe Biden $5 Million by some guy named Wendell Husebø. Without crediting Wikipedia at all, he gives the same dates and details you can find there, as well as an April 2017 article at the Guardian, which he presumably found the same way I did, via a five-minute web search. That's fine, of course, except that Mr Husebø is a Professional Journalist, while I'm an old guy on a 401(k) with a desktop, and I beat him to precisely the same story by 24 hours. This is what Conservati...

By late last week, I was beginning to get the impression that Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer were acting like homicide detectives. In particular, they were asking FBI Director Wray questions to which they already knew the answers, to wit, what was on the FD-1023 form that Wray was so coy about revealing to the Republicans. By Thursday, clearly coordinating with Chairman Comer, Sen Grassley announced that he'd already seen the FD-1023 in question, and it contained a highly credible allegation that Joe Biden had taken a $5 million bribe while he was vice president. This was likely a major factor that overcame Wray's unwillingness to cooperate, and it illustrates the effectiveness of pretending you don't have information when you're interrogating a suspect. It gives suspects the latitude to lie, and then you can catch them when they do, which throws them off balance. In addition, and probably more important, it leaves the suspect unsure about what else the detect...

It seems to me that we're back to a situation where Donald Trump understands media dynamics a lot better than the media professionals who think they run the planet. His response to the latest indictment has been to call it, among other things, just another hoax in a series of hoaxes. According to the BBC, Mr Trump, who is running for the White House again in 2024, called the indictment a "hoax" by the "corrupt political establishment", also describing it as a "joke" and a "travesty of justice". On one hand, you can hurt yourself by claiming something that clearly isn't a hoax a hoax. The idea that a bunch of Islamist terrorists didn't bring down the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 is a hoax, and if you claim it isn't, you damage your credibility on anything else you claim. On the other hand, the problem for never Trumpers of any persuasion has become that there's now a series of factoids put forth as truth that hav...

I was going to write about David Brooks's latest pronouncement that he made on last Friday's PBS News Hour, and I'll get to that, but in searching for an image to put at the top of this post, I ran into the one above. You might think somebody had photoshopped a photo of Hunter off the notorious laptop onto the great man's visage, but on fact, the photo is from 2015, when Hunter's own crack-addled capers were hardly a glimmer in his own eye. The title of the oddly sibylline piece where it appeared was I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys , and it was written by Albert Bourneko. It's strangely prophetic in more than one way, because it mirrors the impression I've begun to have that there's a connection between David Brooks's world view and that of another sage observer of our time, the powerful new novelist Kevin Morris. A few weeks ago, I noticed that both Brooks and Morris focus on the creature Brooks calls Patio Man , the prosperou...