In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Something's missing from the media coverage of the incident Sunday night when Secret Service agents protecting Naomi Biden "opened fire" on three people trying to break into an unoccupied fedmobile they were using to ferry her around Georgetown. The UK Daily Mail's account seems to be the mopst complete: Secret Service agents protecting President Joe Biden's granddaughter Naomi opened fire after three suspects tried to break into an unmarked Secret Service vehicle. The agents, assigned to protect Naomi Biden, 29 and the daughter of Hunter Biden, were out with her in the Georgetown neighborhood late Sunday night when they saw the three people breaking a window of the parked and unoccupied SUV, the Secret Service said in a statement. Around 11:58 pm ET, one of the agents opened fire, but no one was struck by the gunfire. The incident took place near Naomi Biden's Georgetown home, NBC News reported. . . . 'During this encounter, a federal agent disc...

Some years ago, I got to know a guy who had two daughters that were approaching high school age. His lifestyle was a little too bourgeois-rat-race for me to think of him as an actual friend, but it was fun to catch up with him now and then at hobby-related events. Everything changed as his daughters grew old enough for him and his wife to chart their college admissions strategies. As far as I can tell, they went to an Ivy admissions consultant who recommended that their best chance was to aim for a Title IX recruited athlete basket via women's basketball. So this became the program, except that women's basketball, unlike men's basketball and nearly every other sport, doesdn't have a season, it goes all year, which meant that other than this guy's regular job, he was going to have to spend almost every waking hour taking his daughters to their games, coaching them, monitoring their workouts, and so forth -- and it wasn't going to be just a burst of activity fo...

This came up in the news after I made yesterday's post (click on the image for a larger copy): Pro-Hamas protestors on the campus of MIT were warned that if they didn’t disperse -- they were violating campus policies that prohibited interfering with academic activities and the free movement of students and staff --they would be suspended. The protestors were warned several times and failed to disperse. Jewish students were prevented from entering the campus through the main entrance and were rerouted. Once the protestors finally dispersed the administration decided to not follow through on their threats to punish the students for violating the policies of the school. It was a bit of a surprise because MIT President Kornbluth seemed ready to follow through on her threat. So why didn’t she? The piece cites a subsequent letter from President Kornbluth : After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must le...

John Hinderaker asks good questions in a brief post at the Power Line blog : Where do these people come from? How did thy get into MIT, Penn, etc.? . . . I don’t think these educational institutions have any idea how terrible they look to the general public. And I don’t think we can begin to calculate the long-range consequences of the utter moral failure of higher education that we are now witnessing. But let's keep in mind that before the Hamas issue put the Ivies in the forefront, they'd already drawn public attention in recent months for bringing us a series of con artists, crooks, and incompetents like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid. Jeffrey Epstein, who never graduatrd from any four-year institution, nevertheless hitchhiked on Harvard's and MIT's prestige by involving them in his philanthropic hustle. And I've talked about the Ivy admissions problem, for instance here . where I noted that the most recent cro...

I found this today : During the third debate, Vivek Ramaswamy called for RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to resign, citing the party's "culture of losing." Now, Ron DeSantis is throwing more gasoline on the fire, announcing that he is going to defy a threat from McDaniel to disqualify any candidate who attends an upcoming forum in Iowa. According to an October 28th letter, the RNC has deemed the Family Leader Thanksgiving Forum, hosted by Bob Vander Plaats, to be a "debate." That would supposedly violate the pledge the candidates signed in order to participate in the RNC debates, though there's a good case to be made they are stretching the definition of term to absurd lengths. But I went to Real Clear Politics for the latest Republican polling average and found this: Trump 58.5 DeSantis 14.4 Haley 9.0 Ramaswamy 4.7 Then I found this at The Hill : Fewer than 7 million people watched Wednesday night’s third Republican presi...

Dialogue that's beginning to emerge from recent days in Trump's New York trial is giving me the impression that Judge Engoron has already backed himself into reversible territory, and he knows it. Via Forbes from last week: Engoron’s law clerk has been a source of contention throughout the trial, after Trump made a disparaging post in the trial’s first week sharing a false rumor about the clerk and suggesting she was politically biased against him, prompting the judge to impose a gag order barring parties in the case from speaking about court staff. The "false rumor" was news that a complaint had been filed with the New York State Bar Association against Judge Engoron's chief clerk, Allison Greenfield, for violating judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations. [I]n 2022 alone, Greenfield gave $3,335 in political donations to Democrat candidates and causes in New York—more than six times the maximum allowed...

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...