In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The biggest issue that's struck me about the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ICU kerfuffle is that he didn't show up for work for almost two weeks, and nobody noticed. I simply don't know how you get around that. This normally doesn't happen at lower levels, at least when I was working, although COVID's lasting effect may have changed some things -- but even there, the current consensus seems to be that "working from home" hasn't worked out, and employers have reimposed some level of required attendance. And of course, there were and are some jobs for which you simply have to show up. You can't drive a bus and work from home. This might even apply to a job like US Secretary of Defense, who is in the military chain of command. Even in the December holiday period, issues like Ukraine, Gaza, and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping didn't go away. But the Secretary was gone, nobody noticed, and nobody knew why. Beyond that, his deputy, who would ...

The big thing that struck me yesterday about Jack Smith's petition to the Supreme Court for a near-immediate ruling on Trump's presidential immunity was its apparent urgency, and I posited that there must be someone in the background (for convenience, a lizard person) who's able to prod Mr Smith into that level of haste. As I said, this plays into the Trump team's Chicago Seven strategy of forcing hasty actions on the judge and prosecution that play out badly in front of the public and eventually result in appellate reversals. Oddly enough, Larry Johnson at the Gateway Pundit may have an explanation. But keeping him in context, he's the same Larry Johnson who, as a PBS News Hour talking head a generation ago, discounted Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden as terrorist threats, something that's hurt his credibility ever since, although more recently, he's been an important contrarian voice on the Ukraine war who's proven correct on that issue so far. Here...

All I can conclude is some very serious lizard people have told Jack Smith that Trump's DC trial must start on March 4, or else . Alan Dershowitz hasn't commented on Smith's move to take Trump's appeal based on presidential immunity directly to the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz has already noted that Trump's strategy is essentially the same as the Chicago Seven defense: force the judge and prosecutors into errors the defense can get reversed on appeal. The stakes are high: The outcome of this fight may determine whether Trump faces any of his four pending criminal trials in 2024. His other three remain in flux or unscheduled. And if the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court consider the former president’s immunity claims on their typical timelines, that may force Chutkan to slow down her own. While lawyers from special counsel Jack Smith’s team pleaded with Chutkan not to alter the March 4 date, they appeared to concede that Trump’s defense wo...

It dawned on me in the middle of last night that normally, for the person indicted, a federal indictment is never a surprise. I did a quick search and discovered that pre-indictment is a legal specialty. For instance, at the Hedding Law Firm , which specializes in federal criminal defense, If you feel that you are under investigation by the feds, you definitely want to get an attorney involved with your case immediately. Never a good idea to try to handle it yourself. Now's not the time to pinch pennies and not hire an attorney immediately. Basically, pre-indictment intervention has to do with before the feds indict you, which is their filing document where they're filing criminal federal charges against you. You can intervene and you can use an attorney to either investigate the case to show that you're innocent or to investigate the case to try to get information on your behalf to either mitigate or reduce the charges. We must assume that Hunter hired Abbe Lowe...

I'm headinbg into a period over coming weeks where, due to personal issues, posting will have to be sporadic, which is just as well, since all we can say about current developments over Hunter and Joe is that much more is likely to come out. Jonathan Turley is one of the few asking the right questions : The steps taken by Hunter to evade taxes are impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the efforts of the Justice Department to evade any direct implications for his father, President Biden. In that sense, the indictment itself is a marvel of evasion. . . . [T]his recent indictment keeps the focus squarely on taxes not paid, not how the money was “earned” in the first place. Also missing in the indictment is any charge against Hunter Biden as an unregistered foreign agent. . . . The problem with charging Hunter with FARA is obvious. It opens up questions about the millions of dollars going to the Biden family from foreign sources, a topic that Attorney General Merrick G...

This would not be allowed , even from Alex Jones, even from Tucker Carlson, if the lizard people weren't on board: Jones told Carlson that he believed Joe Biden was 'completely out of his mind.' . . . Jones said: 'He wanders around for the entire two and a half years naked in the White House. In the middle of the night, doesn't know who he is. 'They have to give him a bunch of drugs - a bunch of amphetamines in the morning, and they have to drug him at night. 'Sometimes he'll be out for the morning, for a while, then come back at night for a ball. That's when there's a real problem.' Carlson nodded, looking grave. 'He is on drugs. I have established that,' said Carlson. As of 2014, there were leaks to that effect about Joe when he was vice president: According to a new book, Joe Biden's Secret Service detail is leaking information about where the vice president is most vulnerable to being assassinated, as well engag...

Little signs are beginning to emerge that Joe is at least aware of his potential electoral plight. According to the New York Post , President Biden said Tuesday that he might have retired after a single term of office if former President Donald Trump wasn’t running in next year’s election. “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the 81-year-old president told a group of Democratic donors in Boston. “But we cannot let him win.” Well, certain kinds of people, if you suggest they've screwed something up in an unhelpful way, will try to turn things around and insist that "I'm actually doing you a big favor!" by, say, suggesting you didn't want that person as a friend anyhow. In the vignette above, I think Joe's subtext is that you may think he's screwing things up by insisting on running in 2024, but he's actually doing the country a big favor by keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, which by implication nobody else can do. If Joe is ...