In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm having a hard time getting my head around this exercise : Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) announced Thursday he is running for president against President Biden. The congressman confirmed he would be running against Biden in the Democratic primary, after previously signaling he would not do so. . . . The Minnesota Democrat has repeatedly called for a competitive primary instead of Biden running unopposed for the nomination. “I think President Biden has done a spectacular job for our country. But it’s not about the past,” Phillips said. “This is an election about the future.” According to Red State , [W]hat makes this especially interesting is who is reportedly behind the campaign. According to another report, The Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, infamous for his late-night online meltdowns, is advising Phillips. . . . If Schmidt is the driving force behind Phillips' campaign, that's not a good sign for anyone involved. I wouldn...

Tolerance of anti-Semitic and even pro-genocide demonstrations on campuses in particular since October 7 has provoked a certain amount of recalibration among Jews over where their political alliances should lie. Some of it goes directly to the established Democrat party alignment that's persisted in many ways since Reconstruction. The playwright David Mamet wrote this past Monday , We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats, as their policies appealed to the immigrants and the first generation (my parents). A Fair Shake, a safety net, and unionism were manna to the newly arrived — in spite of (in both their and my lifetime) quotas and antisemitic discrimination. The immigrant Jews did well here, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And we are voting for him still. His Advisor on Jewish Affairs (jude-suss, or “house-Jew”) was Rabbi Stephen Wise, the “dean” of the American Rabbinate. He referred to FDR as “Boss”, and brought home to his community Roosevelt’s...

Over the past week, Gavin Newsom has been on a trip to Israel and China : Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) joked about his presidential ambitions following a wartime trip to Israel, explaining the limits of his visit. “I wish I was president of the United States,” he told reporters when asked about meeting with Israeli leaders, particularly to discuss a potential ceasefire with Hamas. He added afterward that he was joking. “I could start doing all those things." According to Newsom, the brief and impromptu trip to Israel was “limited in scope.” . . . Newsom is the second governor to travel to Israel amid the war with Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas, following Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). New York has the largest population of Jewish people in America, as well as the largest population outside of Israel itself. California has the second-largest population in the U.S. The California governor has answered as to whether he supports a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, something g...

This is an intersectional story, because it links pilots who shouldn't be flying, magic mushrooms, and Oregon. According to KRON4, Joseph David Emerson, 44, of Pleasant Hill [CA], was off-duty and sitting in the cockpit Sunday evening when he suddenly tried to cut off the jet’s engines, according to on-duty pilots who flew Horizon Air Flight AS 2059. The pilots said they wrestled with Emerson for control of the aircraft, he pulled on emergency controls to cut the engines’ fuel, and the jet was “seconds away” from becoming a glider, prosecutors wrote in court documents. The quick-thinking captain, co-pilot, and flight crew were able to throw Emerson out of the cockpit, handcuff him, and make an emergency landing at a Portland airport. On Tuesday, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office filed 84 charges against Emerson, including 83 counts of felony second-degree attempted murder, and one count of endangering an aircraft. The flight had 11 passengers who were ch...

This post on Xwitter sums up the questions many Republicans have been posing in recent weeks: Maher Bitar, a Palestinian activist, Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian with deep ties in Iran are heading up our intelligence and defense. Robert Malley, who hired Tabatabai, had his security clearance removed. @MTG can oversight get answers? pic.twitter.com/L0Zk83cx5S — #ProblemSolved (@ProblemSolved57) October 21, 2023 In other words, are Bitar, Tabatabai, and certain other figures like Reema Dodin currently working in sensitive jobs in the US government, actually agents of one sort or another for Iran or the Palestinians? If they are, while I acknowledge I'm a total outsider to that business, there are things that don't fit. Let's just compare Bitar and Tabatabai to one of the most successful spies in recent history, Robert Hanssen, whose photo is at the top of this post. According to Wikipedia, Robert Philip Hanssen (April 18, 1944 – June 5, 2023) was an American Fed...

One thing I've come to notice about the recent questionable diplomatic and intelligence appointments in the administration like Robert Malley and Ariane Tabatabai is how quickly their careers have taken off, although Malley's is currently on hold. As I noted with some puzzlement in this post , by the time she was about 30 as a PhD student, Tabatabai was writing in prestigious foreign policy journals and then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation. Her main qualification appears to have been that she is the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran who is close to the mullahs in the government there. Over the weekend i saw mention of a similar figure, Maher Bitar, who we're told is of Palestinian heritage, but about whom we otherwise know little besides a precocious career rise much like Tabatabai's. His profile as a member of Georgetown Law School's class of 201...

Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot https://t.co/H1D9Yb3eYV — David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 20, 2023 The post on Xwitter above raises an interestimg question: right now, we're at the start of the 2024 college application season. Early decision deadlines begin on November 1, while regular decisions start early next year. The current brouhaha over pro-Palestine demonstrations at elite schools ought to affect applications over the coming 2024 admissions season, right? For instance, here's Bill Maher : As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of wha...