In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I don't know which way Judge Engoron swings, and it isn't my business, but it seems like he's setting himself up as a bizarre foil for Trump's Chicago Seven strategy. BREAKING: The judge presiding over Trump's NYC trial appears to have a peculiar hobby of posting half-naked photos of himself on a high school alumni newsletter he controls as reported on by @MarcoPolo501c3 . The 74-year-old judge Arthur Engoron appeared to even post a… pic.twitter.com/JW2ArmxzzN — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 7, 2023 Alan Dershowitz, before the latest revelation of the judge's bathroom selfies, came to the same conclusion in this YouTube post: At 3:42, he begins, . . . back at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s before most of you were born, there was a famous trial in America, it was called the trial of the Chicago Seven. It tas during the 1968 presidential conventions in Chicago that a group of radicals headed by people like Abby Hoffman, left-wi...

I've followed Alan Dershowitz for much of my life, and I would have to say I've frequently agreed with him, even at times where he's been, in his own characterization, a traditional 1960s-style liberal. More recently, I find myself agreeing with him even more. Over the weekend, he published an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail, ALAN DERSHOWITZ says vile Leftist anti-Israeli hate will turn millions of American Jews from Blue to Red - and he's one . The Democratic Party now faces a choice. The Hamas atrocities of October 7th have forever fractured any political alliance between centrist and liberal Jews and woke, anti-Israel progressives. It's either them or us. The coalition is at civil war. This is a point similar to the one I've been making, that the highly successful New Deal alliance of the 1930s and 1940s, which included labor; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; northern philanthropic wealth; and southern segregationists, contained contradictions that b...

There's another big takeaway from rhe story I linked in yesterday's post about the schism within the United Methodist Church: Pope Benedict's 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus was initially directed not just to disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, but to members of other, Anglican-derived denominations, such as Methodists or African Methodist Episcopal members. However, this has almost entirely been removed from odrdinariate documentation, with only this vestigial reference on the US ordinariate web site: Former Anglicans and Methodists who have already become Catholic and wish to join the Ordinariate may submit an application form to the Ordinariate. However, Wikipedia has kept the earlier intent : A personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, shortened as personal ordinariate or Anglican ordinariate, is an ordinariate, a canonical structure within the Catholic Church established in order to enable "groups of Anglicans" and Method...

As a relatively new Catholic convert, I've been reluctant to say anything about the synod recently completed in Rome, except to note what Fr James Martin himself has concludeed about it : One of these issues was L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, particularly since this community was explicitly mentioned in the Instrumentum Laboris twice. It was also mentioned in half of the reports submitted by episcopal conferences from around the world. Many hoped that the synod would find ways to speak explicitly about reaching out to this community in new ways. Also there were unreasonably high expectations that the synod would, for example, somehow ratify the blessings of same-sex unions. But that second option was never going to happen on that or any other issue; the synod is consultative, not deliberative. The synod does not have the power to change any church practice; it can only suggest. Still, the lack of any mention of the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” in the final synthesis, called “A Synodal Church ...

\ As I've been pointing out, Trump's strategy in at least two of his trials, the Washington January 6 case under Judge Chutkan and the New York civil fraud case under Judge Engoron, has been to irritate and bait the judges into overreacting, imposing gag orders and making reversible errors. As of yesterday, A three-judge appeals court panel paused the federal gag order that partially limited former president Donald Trump's speech ahead of his federal 2020 election interference trial in Washington, D.C., according to a court ruling filed Friday. The ruling administratively and temporarily stays Judge Tanya Chutkan's decision to bar Trump from publicly targeting court staff, potential witnesses and members of special counsel Jack Smith's prosecutorial team, a ruling Trump asked the higher court to put on hold. Friday's order is not a decision on the merits of the gag order Chutkan issued last month, but is meant to give the appeals court more time ...

Why did Hunter Biden take this video? it screams drug-induced paranoia. pic.twitter.com/Fk6ejyqWcd — Evan Mahoney (@EvanMahoney_) October 31, 2023 Hunter Biden resurfaced twice in the news this week, first in a video that was posted on X Tuesday, linked above, and then in a USA Today op-ed yesterday, where he claims that he is in recovery and sober, but his enemies keep dredging up old videos to make fun of him. But as far as anyone can tell, this is a new video that appears to have been taken as a selfie from his own phone, the release of which would have been entirely under his control. Somehow it got from his phone to X. On the other hand, I suspect the USA Today piece was written for him, or was at best heavily revised from notes he provided, probably by his Hollywood lawyer friend Kevin Morris, who likely placed it via his or his wife's media network. The video could possibly support his claim that The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven fact...

Jim Biden has operated under the radar, as I commented yesterday, largely because no trove of documents equivalent to Hunter's laptop has surfaced over his own business dealings. Instead, so far, the best we've had is a series of anecdotes. The earliest was covered in 2019 by Politico as Joe's initial 2020 campaign began to falter -- once he gained momentum, though, corporate media dropped these stories. But before then, they covered Jim's and Hunter's acquisition of Paradigm Global Advisers: In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present. After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision f...