In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

It quietly got into the news yesterday that, although Judge McAfee had spoken vaguely last Friday about having closing arguments in the evidentiary hearing on DA Willis's disqualification possibly today, this has been postponed: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office has confirmed no closing summations will be held this week in her disqualification hearing regarding her historic prosecution of the nation’s 45th president. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee is currently deciding whether Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, should be disqualified from further participating in their indictment of former President Donald Trump. While many observers would like to see Willis get her comeuppance, the best we can say is this will take a while. In the video just above, Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law & Justice says, starting at 2:14, [Judge McAfee]'s going to admit closing arguments. This is not normal. Something that we...

A piece by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect argues The Drumbeat for Biden to Step Aside Will Only Grow Louder . If Biden were to announce that he is stepping aside, the effort to influence the nomination would take the form of organizing to select who is to be chosen as the delegates. Biden will have won most if not all primaries, but the individuals selected to serve as actual delegates will not be chosen for several more weeks or months, and the role of delegate will be up for grabs. . . . In other words, the immediate consequence would be a series of late quasi-primaries in all states. At the convention itself, with multiple hats in the ring, it is very unlikely that the nominee would be chosen on the first ballot. That’s where the smoke-filled room part comes in. As in the old days, there would be a lot of deliberation and horse trading between ballots to come up with a ticket that can win. . . . What about the tricky issue of Kamala Harris? In stepping aside, ...

It's generally recognized that Trump played a large part in killing the border security deal, with the AP calling it a "sudden, stunning collapse publicly engineered by Trump". It looks like more is in the works : Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was uncertain if he could work with former ally turned political foe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell if he were to be re-elected as president. “He’ll probably end up endorsing me. I don’t know that I can work with him,” Trump said during a town hall on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday. “He gave away trillions of dollars that he didn’t have to, trillions of dollars. He made it very easy for the Democrats.” Clearly Trump is on the side of senators who already oppose McConnell : Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and pro-Ukraine hawks within his conference gave away their leverage by voting to send billions more in aid to Ukraine despite not reaching a border security ...

In a remarkably long and insightful essay, Nate Silver writes It's time for the White House to put up or shut up. [E]ven the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s. Biden...

Michael Lebron, a YouTube commentator who goes by the name Lionel, brought into focus a key question that hadn't been fully formed at the back of my mind. I kept returning to the puzzle that Winston Churchill and British intelligence pondered during World War II: was it worth going in to assassinate Hitler? Apparently they concluded not, because there was a chance that if they succeeded, the Germans might replace him with a comptent general and change the whole calculation. Lionel raises this question over the Trump strategy, which so far has endorsed his co-defendant Michael Roman's motion via his counsel Ashleigh Merchant to disqualify Fulton County DA Fani Willis for conflict of interest. Lionel raises this assassinate-Hitler coundrum at 16:52: Let's say you represent Donald Trump. And you're saying, let's assume, that Fani Willis is involved in some kind of behavior. How does this affect, negatively, Donald Trump? Well, the first question y...

This utter'd, straining all his nerves he bow'd, As with the force of winds and waters pent, When Mountains tremble, those two massie Pillars With horrible convulsion to and fro, He tugg'd, he shook, till down thy came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sate beneath, I haven't thought about Milton's Samson Agonistes in quite a while. This is a poetic drama based on the story in the book of Judges that culminates in Samson, a great warrior captured, enslaved, and blinded by the Philistines, gaining revenge on them by pulling down their temple around them. What reminded me of this was the YouTuber Viva Frei's commentary on yesterday's continuing testimony at the evidentiary hearing on Fani Willis's conflicts of interest in the Fulton County Trump RICO case, especially in regard to their bringing an accusation of sexual assault against Terrence Bradley, a witness who was trying to invoke attor...

The evidentiary hearing on the ethical conflicts between Fulton County DA Fani Willis and her lead prosecutor is turning out to be the best TV since Watergate. Fani Willis is comparable to combative figures like John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, or Jeb Stuart Magruder. Nathan Wade, whose habitual expressions all involve something sheepish, is a clown equivalent to G Gordon Liddy. A lot of Fox commentators have focused on Judge McAfee indulging Willis, but some YouTubers like Robert Gouveia and Viva Frei think Ashleigh Merchant has deliberately been setting Ms Willis up to go on embarrassing, rambling, often hysterical rants. And if this is deliberate, the judge is effectively enabling it. So far, the case reinforces my impression of the astonishing incompetence of the people behind the White House lawfare stratagy. One of the obvious questions to come out of yestefday's testimony was how Willis and Wade could manage trial preparations if they took five vacations in six months. ...